Category: KQ4 General Category

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Today is a very sad day for all King’s Quest fans

Hi everyone,

 

Today is a sad day for me and I assume for all King’s Quest fans.

Today I saw Magic Mirror’s post about stopping the development on their remake of King’s Quest IV – the perils of Rosella 2D.

 

Magic Mirror Games were the first group to go for a remake of KQ4, they planned of doing two remakes, the first one was planned to be a “True” remake which means the same good old game but with beautiful graphics, and they planned also another game – another KQ4 remake with plot and puzzles enhancements.

 

As a matter of a fact, our talented graphic designer was one of their main graphic designers till she decided to remake the game in beautiful 3D graphics – thus creating our group and game.

But their 2D game’s development stopped its development “indefinitely” since 22/07/2013.

 

It may seem to some of you that our groups are at war with each other, but the truth couldn’t be farther away, as yourselves, we also are fans of the King’s Quest series, and we want them to be revived, we created a full project for that purpose and we rejoice with any other group which holds this cause true to their hearts.

 

And so we “mourn” for the loss of this remake.

 

But this event only makes us take our work more seriously, now that one remake is down, we can’t depend on it, so we must continue our quest knowing that fans need us now more than ever.

 

 

On the bright side – they did mention in their post that if any other group wants to take over they are willing and able to pass it on, so if you are enthusiastic about The Perils of Rosella – Then take the lead, try and group yourself, use the existing resources and continue from there.

We promise to help as much as we can!

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Doing good is infecting

As you know, our project is creating a game from fans to fans.

This project is about doing good!  Our team works relentlessly on this game so it will be beautiful and fun to play.

I applaud the team and admire the team’s good will and as one of the team I look for places where I can do good.

I want to tell you about one such place.

We are using a game engine called AGS to build the game, this engine is great for building quest games but in order to show in-game video cutscenes it uses a video codec called “Theora” which compresses very large video files to small files which we can embed into the game without losing much video quality, so a 15 seconds video will take only about 700kb of disk space instead of 90 mega bytes!

The problem with this Video codec is that it doesn’t have a simple tool which will enable our graphic designer to work with it – the most decent application I found for this codec is a command line tool which works great but still is … commandline.

Not all of us are good with command line tools, so I developed a graphical wrapper around that command line application which is very simple, does the work with the best results and is a no brainer.

Of course I have released this tool to the pulic (of course for free) because…

Doing good is infectious!

By the way, click here to find the Video to Theora converter tool

Posted on

Playable Demo v1.1 Released

Hi all,

 

We have released a new version of the demo.

This new release is a bug fix release (Thank you Mike & Zora for reporting this bug), which fixes a strange bug where some of the buttons were disabled during the game at some point and Rosella couldn’t use the hand icon etc.

 

If the previous version works for you then you can stay with it.

But if you are a true fan and you want a more complete and bug free version then by all means – download this version:
Perils of Rosella 3D Remake Demo (35409 downloads)

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The Playable Demo is Here!

Hello all,

 

Yes, the demo was completed, passed alpha & beta testers and is now ready to be released to all of you fans.

 

I won’t say much, not much is needed to say – see for yourselves.

 

It is gorgeous, beautiful, 3D, fully playable, with new music, new sound effects, new easter eggs :-), new puzzles but the same good old King’s Quest IV – the Perils of Rosella.

 

So grab it, unzip, and begin playing.

 

If you find any bug or want to comment about anything we will be thrilled to hear from you in our forums.

 

Perils of Rosella 3D Remake Demo (1295 downloads)
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Demo is nearly here – what holds us back?

I get emails asking me what is holding back the demo.

 

I truly understand the anticipation, but development takes time – especially when developing the first release of the game, there are so many small touches which our team polishes, adds, removes etc.

I do want to share good news though, but i won’t post a release date because we don’t want to disappoint any fan.

 

But the demo will arrive to it’s final glory in the near future.

What are our latest setbacks?

Well, we wanted the demo to happen on the island in the middle of the sea where Rosella should find … (Sorry, no spoilers here) so, we had to have several different sprites of Rosella – Walking Rosella, swimming Rosella etc and we found a glitch because the game engine expects all of the Rosella sprites to be the same size, but swimming Rosella is not as high a sprite as walking Rosella.

 

Another problem was that we wanted to have beautiful portraits of the talking characters, but it seems that our game engine has problems with alpha masks which means that there is a problem with making the portraits somewhat transparent – so we have to change that too.

We had also some debate about the whole scoring system – should the player get points for everything he does in the game or just for the quest developing actions?

 

Will the scoring method be the same for the full game and the demo?

What do you think?

 

These are only several small problems we encountered, we had many of them, but have managed to crack the big majority of them so stay tuned…

Posted on

Demo game is almost ready

Hi Fans,

 

As you know, we plan on releasing a small section of the game as a fully playable “mini game”, it will be a sneak peak to the full game, so you will be able to see the graphics / music / puzzles which await you in the full game.

(Clarification – the game will be free for all)

 

So why isn’t the demo ready yet?

Well, it seems that when creating a fully playable section of the game you need to create the overhead for the whole game, what do I mean?

For example – in the demo there are some video sections, so we need to finalize the video format we will use in the game, the codec it will coded in and how to embed it in the code.

Another example – in the game we will have a “top bar” where one can point the mouse and the top bar pops out and lets you choose which action you want to do next (walk / talk / inventory etc), so in the demo game we need to finalize the top bar which will be used in the full game.

Another example – In the demo game Rosella walks, swims etc – so we need to create all the sprites for any action Rosella will do in the demo game – these sprites will be used in the full game also.

 

So, while creating this fully playable demo game we actually create a lot of stuff for the full game also. even if the demo game is only 5% of the game we actually work much more to create it than 5% of the overall work.

 

Anyway, the demo version was released to the Alpha testers already, returned with many bugs / features and will be soon released to the beta testers – this means that it is very close so stay tuned!

 

By the way, i am an Alpha tester so I can tell you that it looks amazing! and the demo game is a lot of fun (we have even included a nice Easter egg into it 🙂   )

 

Rosella.

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We have a dedicated Sound FX guy!

How cool is that!

 

I am extremely pleased to introduce DeuStorm which chose to join our quest as our Sound FX guy.

 

yep, no more throwing soundfx in a whim, they will be especially created by our new team member.

 

So, who is he?

I am posting several paragraphs he wrote about himself, here they are:

I’m a fan of Sierra games and participation in the remake of King’s Quest IV is for me an old dream.

Since young age, I’ve been inspired from the music compositions of the series, and I have composed several music creations based on the original partitions of KQ4, made with my own instrumentals.

I’ve made some personal creations too, I have brought them nearly to studio closure, but I never wanted to finish them, I prefer sharing them with friends or for fan remake creations like here, maybe in the future I’ll have the time and passion to finalize them.
Because the team already has a talented music composer, the team proposed me to create the sound fx, it is for me a first try (in fact, not exactly), but it is such a funny task and it gives me the possibility to express myself in a new way.

The other things I’ve done are forums, like MythOfDeus which was the most popular creation of mine (entirely personal creation, I learned to use photoshop at that time), and a lot of php/javascript/html coding.

Coding is also a talent I love, starting when I was 9-10 years old on a Sainclair ZX Spectrum, making some games or applications in basic, it gave me the possibility to create some sound applications when I got my first sound card with my PC Tandy. On it, I’ve programmed a panel where when pressing a key, it makes a single note, and in fact, maybe I can say it was sound fx because some parts was creating instruments or noises like wind or other things to feed the program.

I loved that, and I created the first music tracker (none existed at that time, but some people got the same idea), it got a lot of downloads later on I decided to use trackers that were developped by others dedicating my energy to other projects.

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I want to welcome a new member which chose to join our quest

Hi everybody,

 

Today, I have very good news, today I want to welcome our first dedicated forum moderator, till now I & our graphic designer moderated our forums, but that can’t continue, we need to focus on developing the game (and the demo which was already released to our beta testers! – but more on that on a different post), so please welcome Jack Stryker, our new Forum moderator!

 

Who is Jack Stryker?

Here is some of what he wrote about himself:

My real name is Danny. Jack Stryker is the alias I use on the internet (that or JStryker47) and the name of a character I created for a friend’s fanfiction. I was born on October 22nd, 1983. I live in a small town called Brea, in Southern California. I’m the youngest of 6, if you can believe that. 4 brothers and 1 sister.

I was introduced to the King’s Quest series, among several other Sierra franchises, by my brothers. They would often bring home new PC games, that they either bought at a store or borrowed from a friend, and I would watch them play those games. KQIV was, of course, one of those games. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to see them play through much of that one, so when I was finally old enough to have my own computer and play the games myself, I had a bit of trouble getting through KQIV for the first time. Often, I found myself asking, “How do I get across that big hole in the ground?” “How do I get out of this whale?” “Where IS Pandora’s box anyway?” But despite that, I managed to have a good time playing it.

Years later, after having played the AGD remakes of the first 3 KQ games, I was disappointed to find that they wouldn’t be making one of KQIV. Particularly since another group that was working on one seemed to abandon it. So when I stumbled across this KQIV remake project and saw the amazing screenshots, you know I couldn’t let this one die. You might say that over the years, I’ve become a bit like Joss Whedon; since I like strong independent female characters, who can get the job done and aren’t just damsels in distress. So why wouldn’t I want to see a game starring that type of character, using the kind of awesome graphics that Unicorn Tales have shown?

Here is my DeviantArt page; where I’ve posted photos, fanfictions, and renders that I’ve made using a program called DAZ Studio:

http://jackstryker.deviantart.com/

And this is my YouTube page, currently with only 2 videos since I mainly just signed up there to comment on other videos:

http://www.youtube.com/user/JStryker47?feature=mhee

Welcome JackStryker and thanks for your contribution to the quest.,

Rosella.

 

P.S. Our forums could use more fans – come and check them out

Posted on

New Forums are up!

Hello everyone,

 

Our new forums are up!

Please check them out: our new forums

Our forums are now based on professional and robust code.

Please go there, post a thread or two and participate in our quest to give birth to the Perils of Rosella in 3D.

 

Love,

Rosella

Posted on

Christmas Present

Hi All,

 

I have posted the three wallpapers in a previous post, but I have posted them as gallery pictures.

This time I zipped the files into one Zip container which you can download, view the wallpapers using your favorite image viewer (microsoft’s built in one?) and then Set them as your desktop’s wallpaper.

 

So here is the link to the zip file containing the three wallpapers:
Three beautiful wallpapers of the royal family

Enjoy these wallpapers.

Happy Christmas,

Rosella.

Perils of Rosella Remake
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