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

Mark (in the center) at PAX with Ryan Jones and Dave Grossman on his flanks

So here we are today talking this time to a truly accomplished adventure game designer who has gone from small, but great indie productions (Nick Bounty!!!) to become one of the lead creative forces at Telltale Games. Mark Darin after leading the design on the Strong Bad games is co-creating all the big titles currently in progress, including Tales of Monkey Island and the future Sam & Max episodes. As always we started the interview with the most difficult question. Next we started to differentiate between indie games and Telltale games which may be not entirely fair as Telltale is all independent as far as I know, just maybe a bit bigger than Mark’s own company Pinhead Games. Oh, and Pinhead‘s games are freeware. (more…)

Well I was a sucker. I pre-ordered Tales of Monkey Island. I mean, how could you not when Steve Purcell himself promised us an awesome DVD cover, and one at this level of coolness! Once again I answered the call of duty from Igor to review another complete masterpiece – The Siege of Spinner Cay. A game that starts epic and ends epic will full promise of an amazing 3rd episode to come! It is highly recommended that you finish playing the first episode before reading ahead! Thar be spoilers on the Horizon!

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Right off yet another adventure of gargantuan proportions, not paying attention to the storm clouds gathering above him, Guybrush “mighty pirate” Threepwood sets once again to fight the evil zombie demon pirate LeChuck off the shores of some odd Caribbean isle. They will fight ship to ship, wit against voodoo,  over Guybrush’s lovely wife – an adventuress in her own right – Governor Elaine Marlay. Yet in truth, the only way Guybrush can get in one piece out of this confrontation is by combining several strange objects he keeps handy in his pants… OK, this time he keeps them under his coat as well. (more…)

There is progress to report. Lots of it. And I can back up my words with all kinds of progress bars, progress gauges and recorded line counts (currently at 15.06%) that are now available to see at the official website here and here. The important news is that from dozens of applicants we have now finally chosen an actor to play Bob (the guy dancing on the right). The lucky person gave a performance completely different to what we discussed for the character’s traits, but still somehow won us over. The second important news is that we have publicly released a sort of WIP or demo of a patch that gets your copy of Secret of Monkey Island 100% voiced (but you’ll be grateful only for the aforementioned 15%)! (more…)

Two months have gone by as the revamped and refocused Monkey Island Speech Project started its course. The project was originally launched in October 2008 by Joe Davison and was dedicated to providing voices for the characters of Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge (as the first part of the series didn’t seem to be technically viable for such a feat at the time). Amused by the sheer arrogance of the idea, mixnmojo has granted it with a nice home address. (more…)