A Hardy Developer's Journal – as written by indie adventure game developers

Trailer for an incredible  game coming very, very soon…

There’s also a Vimeo version at http://vimeo.com/12800581

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Sebastian “Mellotron Stew” Pfaller has worked not only with me on a number of games making music, but also provided music and testing for such popular adventure games such as The Vaccuum and Death Wore Endless Feathers Disk 1.

His quirky, colourful musical style is an ever changing kaleidoscope of ideas and experimentation and here we are offered a glimpse into the funk safari that is: Sebastian Pfaller‘s mind.

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Picture the scene: an English manor during a dark and stormy night. Four people are confined within its walls, each of whom could have committed a murder. (more…)

Of late, the monthly adventure game studio competition or ‘MAGS’ has caught my eye. Participants take part my making a game with Chris Jones’s Adventure Game Studio engine in just one month – restricted by a specific theme set by the previous month’s winner. (more…)

PROLOGUE. On this fateful Towel Day we witness the release of the long-awaited Point&click remake of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by James Spanos (aka Dualnames).
What follows are abridged transcripts of the philosophical dialogs conducted with Spanos that took place during the last week before the release (Which means they’re really HOT right now! – almost like the game itself).  So read them! (more…)

Puzzle games are hot. Professor Layton, Scribblenauts, World of Goo, even Bejeweled, they’re all making headlines, and rightly so. Puzzle games offer a way to escape from the normal world, where bosses, spouses, parents and others make life miserable, to a world where diabolical puzzles make your life miserable instead. But that’s about the only entertainment they offer. A puzzle book by Sam Loyd, no matter how entertaining, just isn’t the same as a novel by Jules Verne. Similarly, a puzzle game can’t replace the profound entertainment that’s offered by a traditional adventure game… or can it?

Enter Puzzle Bots. Puzzle Bots is an ambitious venture, in that it tries to marry two genres that, although related, at first glance appear not to have very much in common: (more…)

Hey folks! The guys from HardyDev invited me to write a remembrance from series of adventure game development tutorials that I have organized over the last few years at the Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. In these workshops I used Chris Jones’ AGS (Adventure Game Studio), which is a popular and powerful tool for creating your own adventure games.

Learning the ropes of AGS normally means working through heaps of online tutorials, endless browsing of special-interest forums or getting used to the good old trial-and-error principle. With this steep learning curve in mind it’s no wonder that hobby adventure developers are an exceedingly rare breed. So what if you could learn the basics of adventure game development together with peers in a hands-on workshop? (more…)