Just wanted to share one of the last graphics Karen sent to me.
It is a Poster for the game.
Enjoy.
King’s Quest IV Poster
Our heart was taken
Today I am the bearer of very sad news.
Our most beloved graphic designer had some health problems which took her to the hospital, and after several days she was taken from us permanently.
Actually, to call Karen only “our graphic designer” is to really belittle her part in our project.
Karen was the heart of this project, she began the project and all of the team just joined her.
Karen began by joining Magic Mirror Games which is the company which wanted to create “The perils of Rosella” in 2d graphics, after creating most of the 2d graphics for the Magic Mirror company she left them to continue the game without her (Unfortunately, they have stopped developing the game several months ago).
Karen’s love for “The Perils of Rosella” didn’t stop there though, so she continued on her own, this time by developing 3d graphics for the game – just to see how the game will look in 3d.
I saw her graphics and was amazed by the beauty of her graphics – I knew that to leave those graphics in forum posts without giving them a chance to bloom as a full blown game will be really unjust.
So we created our team, while our heart and dreamer was Karen.
She was everywhere, working many hours a day, creating backgrounds, walkovers, sprites, site graphics – for every need – Karen was there.
This is her project, she started it, was the heart of it and pushed it forward, but above all this was her dream and she literally gave her life essence to it.
While talking to her she thought about the name of our team UnicornTales – She was everywhere, she still is everywhere, her essence is all over our game and site.
But more than just the game heart, Karen was a very dear friend of mine and of other team members, I talked to her regularly, we shared a special bond created by a joined vision, and shared creation of this game.
Karen was a gentle person, she knew what she wanted and guided the project with a gentle touch, I cared a lot for her, and her passing is a very big loss to the community, to the team and to me (and other team members) personally.
Some of Karen’s work:
Lots of graphics at Magic Mirror Games Studio for the 2d remake of King’s Quest 4
All of our main 3d graphics which a part of them can be found at our Image galleries
Actually she created 3d graphics for several King’s quest games – I put some of it in our galleries too:
King’s Quest V
She helped with creating King’s Quest IX – the Silver Lining by Phoenix online Studios, and her print is visible there too.
Karen also helped create the graphics for The Heroine Quest by Crystal Shard
Karen, your absence makes my heart yonder.
Love,
Avi & Team
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!
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
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 (35410 downloads)
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)
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…
King’s Quest IV Remakes
In a previous post I wrote about the King Quests Remakes which were released by different parties.
In this post i want to write about the remakes to the fourth game: The perils of Rosella.
King’s Quests 1 and 2 were remade by AGDI, King’s Quest 3 was remade twice!
by infamous adventures and by AGDI.
King’s Quest IV is being remade by three different parties!
First of all – by us – Unicorn Tales, we are remaking the game in 3D graphics, the development is steady and we are going to release a fully playable demo “mini” game which will include a real scenario from the game with all of its elements like video parts, music, soundfx, inventory, puzzles and even an easter egg or two.
The second party creating kq4 is Magic Mirror Games which were actually the first party to attempt the remake.
Although their forums aren’t so responsive, and no new news appear in their site, they claim to not abandon the project, but to keep a consistent development although a slow one, they claim to remake kq4 in two flavors, the first remake will be true to the original while their next release will be king’s quest IV Plus which will add more to the game.
The third party is Nightfable and Westend studios which wrote on their site that they want to create an extended version to King’s Quest IV containing new locations and more.
I personally follow all of the projects and will love to play them all, so I wish our “competitors” – good luck.
I can’t say anything yet about the other games, but as I have seen the graphics and the gameplay of our version i can testify that the wait will be well justified, our 3D graphics are stunning, and the gameplay is really enhanced, we intent to remove all dead ends and make the game more enjoyable.
Stay tuned and you will be well rewarded.
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.
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.