Hero6 Forums

(http://taleoftwokingdoms.com/images/shot1.png)

The ancient kingdom of Theylinn is beset by enemies both from within and without. Within the castle walls, nobles vie for the old King's favor, and not everybody is happy with the sole heir to the throne, princess Rhiannon.
Meanwhile, danger approaches, in the form of an invading army, a hostile giant, and a mercenary troop who are ancient enemies of the Theylann king.
And there is mystery yet. For hidden within the borders of Theylinn lies a second kingdom, named Thierna na Oge, where the faeries reign. Little is known about this shrouded, exotic realm.

(http://taleoftwokingdoms.com/images/shot4.png)

A Tale of Two Kingdoms is a full-length graphical adventure with a mood of fairy tales, magic, and intrigue, written with AGS, the Adventure Game Studio, by a team of dedicated adventure game fans. We cannot officially guarantee a release date, but it should be soon and will definitely be this year.

We have a website (http://taleoftwokingdoms.com), and you can download our trailer here (http://www.atotk.homecall.co.uk/ATOTKtrailer.WMV). This is a 14-meg WMV movie of our intro sequence, with lovely graphics and stunning music. I encourage everybody to take a look at it!

Finally, we are holding auditions (http://www.taleoftwokingdoms.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=4) for voice actors. Interested parties are welcome to drop by.
 

Woohoo! Sure is good to know you guys are making progress. It's a shame you went so long without updating your website though.

You say 'Nearing Completion'. What does that mean? You're not gold yet, obviously. Do you have an ETA? A deadline, perhaps?

Well, it means that the game is mostly done :P. All background art and music has been completed, most of the sprite art, and a lot of programming, to be more specific.

We don't have deadlines, because it's hard to estimate when exactly we'll be finished, even though we intend to have it done asap (and bug free). Though it is possible to estimate by looking at rate of current progress and extrapolate to a certain date of completion, things like real life sometimes gets in the way. Which, hopefully, won't happen at any time soon.

The project definitely won't be dying though :) Too much has already been done to drop it.

(And download the trailer if you haven't already! If only for the music)

You say that at the current rate you could extrapolate the estimated time the game will be released. Please, do so, it'll at least give us a 'Around this time' time.

A date is really difficult to give, as all of us are doing this in our free time. You can never know what will come in the future.

I think though that more than 90% of every aspect of the game is complete.

If you are to wait a little longer, is for the game to get better.

Sorry, working out a date would be a headache for me :P

The reason why we won't give an approximate date is in the event that if we do go over that date, people would be seriously disappointed. So it will be done when it is done.

As Nikolas said, if you wait a bit longer... rest assured though, it will be released before 2014  :angel:  

Unexpected things sure can happen! KQ9 would of had it's first part released by december, then bam! Disaster strikes.

Anyone here remember Destiny?  (Destiny)  (http://www.bbe-online.com) That project seemed to be doing great a couple years back, the first half of the game was nearing completion then all progress grinds to a halt and not a peep is heard again.

So fear the unexpected! Even ATOK could run into trouble if it's members have RL issues and replacements can't be found. Let's hope that doesn't happen. :)

If memory serves me right, Destiny had about two artists and over a dozen plotwriters. For ATOTK, it's more like the other way around :)  (which, needless to say, is somewhat more workable)

Our official date? Try the month of Smarch.
 

Lol! Indeed a swarm of artists is better than a swarm of writers.  I disagree with you about Destiny, checking the member roster for Destiny I see 9 artists and 3 plot members. So even having a swarm of artists can't gurantee survival. :)

But I'm being too hard on you, it's pretty rare for a project to come along and say they're very close to release. If I can still have faith in Hero6 after all these years, there is no reason I can't have faith in ATOK. ^_^  

The month of Smarch is awfully similar to March. Though I doubt you'll be able to crank it out in less than a fortnight.

The month of Smarch doesn't exist!  :devil:

(I never agreed to any date though! So Smarch it is!)  

Okay, someone here is unfamiliar with inside jokes :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarch)
 

I never click on anything Wikipedia.

I don't watch the Simpsons religiously. There are better things to do. The nuclear silo in my chimney won't buld itself, you know.

Infidel :)

(or, should I say, Calvinist?)
 

Hey, looking pretty good Radiant.  I look forward to playing the game.


The project lead of Destiny (Roman Zaenom, or RZ) used to be hero6's old plot admin.  Destiny was appealing at first because it broke out of the outdated resolution and style hero6 uses.  Plus, RZ managed to recruit some excellent tallent (mostly veteran hero6 members).  This tallent was in ALL departments too-- excellent musicians, programmers, and definately excellent artists)

RZ purposely made sure that he was the sole person in charge of plot.  He pretty much wrote the whole thing by himself before the project even came together.  He had some pretty clever things in it, but in the end it was my opinion (and perhaps the opinion of the other team members), that the game design was heavily flawed.

I think RZ could write a decent novel, but a game designer he isn't.  I started to think the game would be a complete bore to play.  He talked about only having 5 forest screens, and 4 town scenes.  Not exactly emmersive.  I was also a little perturbed that RZ released almost all of destiny's material on the visitors section of the website.  It was like we had shown off everything already.

I think it'd be pretty cool (and I might talk to some of the project leaders about this) to take all the material from all of the failed projects, and combine them to make one single game.  I know SFLAH has some art that went unused.  I bet we could piece something together pretty quickly with all of it.  The styles might conflict slightly, but there are some tricks to pulling it off....



 

Interesting to hear another opinion on Destiny. The story summary seemed very intriguing to me, which is why I was quite interested in Destiny, not so much the art and class system.


Only 5 forest screens and 4 town scenes?! Destiny was going to be bigger than that right? I mean there is what looks to be a map of the first part of Destiny on that site, and it looks alot bigger than 9 screens.


There is just SFLAH and Destiny to draw from right? Would that be enough art to make one game?

Yeah, we already did that, it was called Hero of Infamous Adventures, and it did not look good. Though, for an April Fools Day joke, it was good.

I would be interested in reading that Destiny story you mention, where do I find it? Obviously the word doesn't google much :)

There are quite a number of cancelled game projects that have had art, animation and music drawn for them (see here (http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=25597.0)). It would be cool if people would release that for public usage, and there's definitely enough to create a game from that (I'd estimate it'd be low in the sprite department, though). Sure, the styles would clash a bit, but most people enjoyed QFG4.5 in spite of that.

I guess the trick would be in finding all those old artists, and maybe convincing the people in charge that their project really is cancelled, because some projects drag on for years without making any progress. But it would be nice for the artists to know their art actually goes some place visible.

Last year's Hero of Infamous Kingdoms wasn't like that, of course, it used art from ongoing game projects to promote them, and not all of that art was complete yet. And it was a joke, after all.
 

Whatever. Kingdoms, Adventures, it's all the same, really.

Uh... Corsair, the dictionary would disagree with you on that one.

http://bbe-online.com/diary.htm (http://bbe-online.com/diary.htm)

Of course no fangame will fully explain their story before completion of their game(Destiny is no exception), what was posted about Destiny's plot seemed interesting to me.


Good point, QFG 4.5 was fun(for some of us) even with all that ripped art and clashing styles.



Some of the games you mentioned in that AGS thread may not be dead, just extremely tardy with site updates. That being said, most of them are cause for concern. Some of those projects I haven't even heard of!

[Content edited by Ianfe]

Corsair, you'd best find a way to rephrase this comment or change it altogether. What you originally wrote was NOT Kosher

Does anyone know what happened to the site?

At first I thought the site had run out of bandwidth, but looking at it again I realise that it says the domain name expired March 20. But the site should be back before long. :)

I just wanted to correct myself regarding destiny and RZs skills as a designer.  I logged into the project site yesterday.  (I think I was the first person to login in almost 3 years!)  All the content is still intact, so I decided to look through the material.  There are two maps for destiny, with a total of 82 screens.

I believe that RZ cut that down considerably.  I think he knew the project was about to crash, so he wanted to release a demo/first installment with only a dozen backgrounds or so.  Turns out the team made about 16 backgrounds, 11 dialogue portraits, and a bunch of sprites.  It actually progressed very nicely for a bit, and then we ran out of sprite artists (Gronagor was the lead for sprites, but he resigned), so RZ put the project on hold until he could find more.   3 years later, and I'm guessing he still hasn't found any.

Hosting for destiny expires:  31-Oct-2006.  I am tempted to do a backup..  Some of those backgrounds really are pretty good-- especially in comparison to any of the fan projects in development right now.

Guess it's a good thing I jogged your memory eh? Can't have that art being lost.

I guess Destiny truly is dead, RIP Destiny. :(  

*Begins funeral dirge*

You might want to try and reach the original artists, and see if they object to their work being made available to the public (e.g. to use in other games, or failing that, for use as wallpapers). That way, their (assumedly great) art won't go to waste.
 

Here is a copy of the e-mail I received in Jan 2006 from SFLAH.


Date:    Fri, 20 Jan 2006 15:27:22 -0200
From:   "Igorrr" <contact@sflah.com>
Subject:   Re: SFLAH

sorry if this dissapoints you, but basically, yes the last update on the page was also around the last active stroke in the project. I am the only one working on it and sometimes when I find time I play around, but there is no serious progress.

SFLAH had 3 different teams restarting and stopping. It is still there and it would really hurt me to accept that it's practically dead, but in some way I am still hoping that I find the time and people to finally work it and finish SFLAH.

I believe my first approach would be to actively join up in Project Katrina again and if successful there ask team members to move on to SFLAH. I am happy to hear that there are people still interested in SFLAH and if there is anyone who would like to pick up the pieces and continue on it is free to do so ;-)

best regards

Andreas "Igorrr"


>Hi,
>
>Just wondering if the development for SFLAH is still
>going on, since the website http://sflah.com (http://sflah.com) has not
>been updated since 2004. So, is this game project
>still active?
>
>Looking forward to hearing any news about this game.
>
>
>Best regards

Well, that's to be expected. Fangames are dropping like flies ever since Sierra fired off it's little missile at KQIX, then pulled it back before impact.

The only fangames that have anything to worry about are the ones that are creating a continuation of a commerical series(such as IA's KQ3 remake or SQ7). Anything that has died and is not a continuation of a commerical series, has died for some other reason besides fear of cease and desist.

I know SFLAH was having problems well before Sierra started hassling KQ9.

Exactly. To my knowledge, no game has ever been cease-and-desisted except shortly before a release (KQ9) or some time after they released. Of course, given the fact that 90% of fangames never reach the point of release, it's not worth the effort to send legal people after them.

Closed down, to my knowledge, are QfG4.5 and Quest for Orgy (both for "inappropriate" humor and adult situations), Garfield Mutant Lasagna (don't mess with Hollywood), Hugo Remake (author request) and one or two Monkey Island clones. Interestingly, KQ2 1/4 has not been shut down, nor has Zak McKracken II, Maniac Mansion Deluxe, and several other Monkey Island clones. I suppose law is a fickle mistress.
 

All law is subjective, to put it in clearer terms.

That's because LucasArts, unlike Sierra, has money. It has to do with being able to crank out bad games and still have people eat them up because they're Star Wars.

Kinda like anime games.

Nor has Space Quest 0 or Space Quest 3.5, even though both have been finished for quite awhile!

Damn you mean Attack of the Mutant Lasgana was shut down? When was this? I still managed to easily get a copy(but eh I thought it was 100% legal at the time ;)).

SQ3.5? You mean TLC, right? I believe a reasonable premise would be that Vivendi is not going after any AGI games. After all, in this age, it's hard to claim that a fangame in blocky 160x200 with 16-color graphics would cause a significant loss of sales. Similarly, it appears to be the case that Lucas only goes after people using their "active" trademarks (MI, Indy, Star Wars), not Maniac or Zak. It's quite possible that most people working at Lucas don't even know who Zak is any more.

Btw Vivendi owns Sierra and they have money too, it's not just Lucas; both appear to have an employee who occasionally reads adventure-related message boards.

Garfield AOTML was shut down about a month after its release. That's because its author made the mistake of contacting United Pictures Syndicate (if that's their name) and asking them what they thought of the game. The game is still easily found, but this has made distributing the patch rather difficult. Shame, too; that game captured the feel of the comics far better than the movie did.
 

Yes I do mean TLC. Well I doubt it's about loss of sales it's about copyright infringement. I've heard before that if a company doesn't defend it's copyright it weakens it's ownership of it. Now it would be nice if these companies could simply give permission to any fangames deserving of it(doesn't make the brand look bad), but they are too arrogant, apathetic or lazy to do so. Yet they aren't so lazy or apathetic when their copyright is being infringed. :rolleyes:

Ok but eh Vivendi did give permission to KQ9(only after a fan uproar) and Tierra, so I can't quite condemn them.



Damn you mean theres a patch for Mutant Lasanga?! Any serious showstopping bugs I must worry about?

So let me get this straight. If I tried to sell a QFG sequel right now, I would probably get sued for less because of QFG4.5 and stuff?

Yep, if you don't defend a copyright or trademark it gets weakened. I'm not really sure how that translates into court, the simple fact is that a billion-dollar company can out-court you no matter what. That said, I'm not really sure what they could actually do about a fangame that refuses to stop, other than ask your webhost to kick you out. They can't sue you to claim your profits, because there aren't any. They can't sue you for loss of their profits since they're not selling anything (and unless you're doing a straight remake, it may be argued that you're advertising). And there's the parody clause, for some fangames (such as, arguably, QfG4.5). If you don't live in the US it gets even more confusing as to what kind of law might apply.

Oh and yes, there is a patch for GAOTML which fixes a number of crashes and hangs that can occur halfway through the game. I have been unable to complete the game without it (and unable to obtain the patch).
 

Ya'll always talk about sierra/VU and lucasarts as if it was a bad thing they are protecting their copyright.  I personally don't blame them one bit.

If you were Porsche Inc, and some fanboy in Kansas decided he wanted to make his 2.5 cyl '67 stationwagon look like an authentic porsche, wouldn't you want to stop him?   I mean, everyone will see his crappy-ass stationwagon and think porsche is responsible.  To put it into context: If people could somehow clone this stationwagon for free, eventually there'd be enough crappy-ass faux porsche's on the streets, that porsche's reputation as a high-end auto manufacturer would be tarnished.

Besides, many of the game writers refuse to play these fan remakes as they don't like people messing with their story.  

Bottom line is, ya'll complain about it because you want a crappy-ass* station wagon that reminds you of a porsche.  And you only want it because it's free.  For shame!

*subjective term used loosely

Actually, that's not against copyright law at all.  The Porsche thing would be a patent issue in that light, and patents protect against making profit with or beginning commercial production of intellectual properties by anyone other than its creator or whomever the creator has signed a contract with to allow such.  Anyone who wants to design a car that looks identical to another would be well within their rights to do so in a patent sense so long as they never sold it.  However, it IS against the law to design or alter a car to change it's make, model or engine type in certain ways which elude me because I have never studied word-one about cars.

However, if you wanted to make your own Segway from scratch, you could do so without legal reprocussion.  In fact, someone did, and it works fine.

:)  I wasn't writing in literal terms, I was simply trying to come to these poor game maker's defense.  Perhaps comparing automobiles is a bad analogly in this context.

But I know that if I were to make a game that I was pretty proud of, and I saw people making unauthorized sequel/prequels on it, I'd be a little perturbed.  Sure, it's flattering that someone else is imitating my work, but that's my brainchild they're messing with!  People always screw it up.  It's like these Starwars spinoff's that try to depict Hans Solo as gay and he ends up marrying the wookie.  Obsurd!  Don't modify the story if it ain't yours to modify, I say!  I mean, I'm sitting here watching star wars, and all I can think of is that Hans Solo character turning pansy in a few years and eventually settling down with the wookie and opening a clothing store on tatooine!

If I was George, I'd be furious.

Then again, it's fanfiction.  People interested in Hans being a fruit cake is going to love it.  I suppose there's not much wrong with that.  But what if it came out in movie format, and people were watching it as if it was the official sequel?  And, what if George wanted to write a similiar movie in the future (knowing George's "improved" story writing skills, he just might)?  There'd be no point anymore!  And thus, George looses out on potential business from a creation HE OWNS.  The humanity!

Anyway, I like the fangames too.  I just understand the position of these companies.  And I think that I would be equally satisfied if these fangames were unique and told their own story, similar as they might be to a sierra/lucas game.

That's actually a very bad analogy, and as a matter of fact several former Sierra staff members have complimented both AGDI and KQ9 on their sequels, so your claim that game writers don't like people messing with their story rings false.

Do you know TSR, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons? They had the same vision of copyright about ten years ago, and stamped down hard on anyone on the internet who dared create their own modules or add-ons for D&D. Hence they became known as T$R, and widely disliked, and eventually went bankrupt and got taken over by WOTC, who has the opposite philosophy and created the "open game" license. There's probably a moral in that story.
 

HA!  shows what you know.  

The creators of Space Quest are so disturbed about it, they refuse to play any space quest fan makings.

Lori and Corey Cole have also publicly said they don't like the idea of other people doing anything with their story.

As for kings quest:  Why would they care?  Afterall, KQ8 certainly showed that the creator's interest were elsewhere...

And I don't think the Porsche analogy was bad if you understood what I was getting at.  But then, not everyone has basic cognitive skills... It seems it is easier for some to over-anaylze things rather than to take it as it's meant.

Besides, my analogy is better than yours.  TSR went bankrupt because of exceptionally poor management decisions in general.  Yeh, they alienating fans. Yeh they were anal with their trademarks.  But what about the many religious groups who called for boycots/burned their material?  Lax stock control? Declining quality of product? etc, etc, etc? With these new factors, the "moral" of your story changes quite a bit, I think.

Anyway, I can argue that intellectual property NEEDS to be protected until I am blue in the face.  The fact that we all like fan games make it hard for most people to accept it.  

Well this is news to me. Would you be able to provide any links to interviews where they state this? It's not that I don't believe you, I'm just kind of shocked that the SQ and QFG creators aren't interested in their stories living on. Actually the idea of the SQ creators being disgusted at the SQ fangames disgusts me. They should at least try out the SQ fan games, then decide.


I don't know why it was made the way it was. I'm guessing that Roberta Williams wanted to make KQ8 like a normal Kings Quest, but was afraid traditional adventures were dying, so she made a 3d action/adventure game.


I see the point of the analogy, but the analogy is still flawed. The companies that own the rights to these adventures show no interest in continuing them. They aren't even interested in traditional adventures anymore. Heck alot of people don't even care about these old adventure game series. Whereas Porsches are still being produced and are still very popular.



There is nothing wrong with a company protecting it's intellectual property. I just wish they'd only go after the very serious cases.




What if the fans actually made a decent sequel/prequel, would you still be perturbed?
What if your didn't own the rights to your story and knew that you'd probably never get a chance to continue it?


Let's take the analogy one step further and say that the crappy stationwagon that looks like a Porsche has big writing on it that says "DISCLAIMER: This is not a real porsche". That's how fangames are, it's blatantly obvious that they are not official games.  So how reputation gets damaged is beyond me. Besides, if they think a released fangame is a shoddy piece of crap, they're free to take it out before reputation gets damaged. They shouldn't assume that every fangame will make the brand look bad. In fact fangames could increase interest in the series(if they're made right).

Well anyways... For music and cover tracks (tracks that are made, not from the orinigal artist but other most usually worst bands), there is a good reason for that. And mainly that amatuer music productions are simply...bad... comparing to the multi million dollar industry tracks. And so any attempt to redo for example 'Creep' by Radiohead, would probably be a negative advertisment for the original.

It's not that hard to understand.

I have to copyrights and I don't want you to do anything about it. Period! It does make sense really.

WHBT WHL WSHAND.
 

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I thought Lori and Corey became aware of Hero6 a looooong way back and made no negative comment about it.

True, but Hero6 is not a QFG sequel, it's QFG inspired.

Lori and Corey cole encouraged the Hero 6 team.

Interesting...

Mark Crowe Interview (http://www.adventuregamers.com/print.php?id=182)


Mark Crowe doesn't sound very distrubed to me...

ARggh!!  I can't find the quote anymore regarding Space Quest fangames...  I searched *forever* for it too!

I thought it was on a fangame site.  Like, I remember everyone wondering what Mark/Scott thought about the game... and they got a reponse saying how they (Scott?) never played fangames because he prefered to see Roger depicted properly...

I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.  If someone can find this quote, I'd be most impressed.  Given Lazygamers find, it might have been Scott Murphy who said it.

I also wish I had the quote from Lori about it.  I rember her saying that she was glad hero6 decided to make their game unique, as she had her own plans for quest for glory.

also, what does "WHBT WHL WSHAND" mean?  It sounds like some sort of voodoo curse or something!  *gulp*  I didn't mean anything, I swear!!

Well that's a weird thing to say anywayz, the canon Roger isn't very consistent himself. One game he's all laser-blasting and space piloting and the next he's  bumbling but strangely competent when the player takes control.