Making of

The beginning

As you can read about in the "History" section, the first version was made for MS-DOS and the graphics was made using ASCII characters. I was programming it in Turbo Pascal 7.0 and it looked like this:

The "engine" was nothing revolutionary, completely chaotic from the today's perspective, but everyone has somehow to start.

Help as much as possible, 2nd generation

The next version, also ASCII, was more sophisticated, it was able to play video, sounds, and music in background, it changed color palette (time simulation), it was sometimes raining... And I've even created tools for editing text-mode graphics (application Draw!) and a program for creating in-game dialogs with characters (called Messager). Here is a screenshot from Draw! with a view on the castle re-created in the new version.

Several times mentioned ASCII video player is also worth showing:

The new game

After the definite cancellation of all text version and moving to Windows, it was the true fun! I've decided the whole game to be drawn by hand, pixel by pixel, in the best graphics editor of all times - MS Paint (on Windows). A great amount of screens (mainly around the cottage) were just re-drawn from the ASCII graphics into the new. The biggest problem was the main character and his animations. To look it natural, I was forced to do what big game studios do too, to record myself (or other actors) and then re-draw it by hand in the game. No matter what you may think, the main character looks a bit like me :)

The game screens

Some more complicated screens were required to be first drawn on paper and then draw it in the game. Here is an illustration of before and after:

The map of the village drew my mom, so she has also contributed.

The final engine

Moving to Adventure Game Studio solved all problems with the making of a custom engine in Borland Delphi 7, where I had planned to create it. The development of the game in AGS looks like this: