Issue 40: Feb 2004
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Eerievale
- | How Does MiNT Work?
- | Duranik: Interviewed
- | Handy Atari Accessories
- | GenEdit 2.02
- | HTML-Viewer: MyAtari In Glorious 8-bit
Review
- | Papyrus X
M@ilbox
News
| Eerievale Lars Hannig reveals all about his second Jaguar game project Somewhere in 2003 after building a mouse adaptor that let me use an Atari ST mouse on the Jaguar (Matthias Domin originally did this, a few years ago) and using it in my own program, an idea that I thought about often in the past appeared again. I thought about doing an adventure game for the Jaguar. In the past there were always reasons to drop it again, but now it was different. CD bypass was there, mouse support was there and I actually had a very clear idea how an adventure game could be done on the Jag. So I gave it a try and started writing a graphic adventure game engine for the Jaguar. At the same time I started writing an editor for the PC that let me create the data files for the adventure engine on the PC to make it much easier to create adventure games for the Jag. The editor is very flexible and makes it possible for both people with little coding knowledge of the Jaguar and also people who are experienced Jaguar developers to create adventure games quickly and as easily as possible. Of course, experienced coders always have advantages. The engine allows experienced coders to actually write their own code for certain events. Like when you perform a certain action with an item on-screen. That way any kind of adventure game could be done with the engine. All kinds of puzzles that come to your mind are possible. Myst-like puzzles, The 7th Guest-like puzzles, Monkey Island-like puzzles and whatever else. When I wrote the engine and editor I had no real project yet, but then I got an idea. The whole story behind Eerievale actually started a few years ago. Back then I started writing a little story, which grew bigger and bigger as time passed. The whole story is already very long, but is not finished yet, by far. To sum it up very shortly, Eerievale is the story of a small village in the USA, founded in the very beginning of the 20th century. This village is what gave the name to the story, it's called Eerievale. It appeared almost out of nowhere and grew very fast into a very lively town. Many people moved there because of its good reputation, to live a happy life in the wealth that this new town offered. But beneath the shiny surface, dark secrets are hidden. In September 2003 I remembered the Eerievale story, which I started writing years ago, and decided that I wanted to try to make an adventure game out of it. So I started thinking about what part of the story could be suitable for an adventure game. The whole story would be much too long for a single game. So I decided to use the "early times" of the Eerievale story in the adventure game. STOP PRESS! Euro JagFest CD This new CD is fully encrypted and runs on any normal Jaguar CD unit. It works on both PAL and NTSC. The Cinepak player on the CD is a custom written one that I did. It allows you to adjust the screen position properly and allows saving it on the Memory Track card. The CD has over 30 minutes of video including early Star Alliance footage, Caves of Fear footage, lots of festival footage and lots more. It also features an exclusive trailer of Eerievale. The CD is limited to only 40 copies and can be ordered on the Starcat Developments page in the products section.
Useful link
Starcat Developments http://www.starcat-dev.de
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