When we were working on Shadowgate, I was talking with a friend who owns a recording studio here in town about my need for a female voice over artist. He suggested a woman named Betsy Brantley, who lived close by. She came in and did a great job as the lieutenant and while she looked familiar, I didn’t think anything of it. When we were talking about having Argonus use a narrator throughout the game (as if creating an epic Greek poem/story), I immediately thought of Betsy. Not only is she one of the nicest people I have ever met but she can read a phone book and make it sound compelling! I had finished the dialogue and brought her in and asked for a voice that sounded a bit like Cate Blanchet from LoTR. Sure enough she nailed it! It was then that I realized where I had seen her before – she was in Princess Bride. We talked a bit about it and how she was the acting model for Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I can’t say enough about what Betsy has meant to me and our game. I’ve played many a title where the voice over distracted from the game but Betsy’s voice simply enhances it!

I also wanted a voice that would represent the player – Argonus. We would bring this voice in when the player is recording major events in the game in their journal. For this, I found a great V.O. talent in Aris Gerontakis… as in Aristotle lol. Perfect. He does, in fact, live in Greece and was very excited about the project. Aris gave me quite the range of Greek accents and we settled on something that was in the middle of the road and perfect for our character. He ended up doing the voices for all of the gods in the game as well. Super sweet guy and just a joy to work with!

Even though Argonus and the Gods of Stone is a 3D game, I have a huge soft spot in my heart for 2D art. I spent a TON of time talking with artists online about working on the project. Most of these fine folks can be found in a great FB group called Daily Spitpaint where artists are given a topic and 30 minutes to complete a speed paint or sketch. Brilliant – you should check it out! Anyway, I met an artist named Nabetse Zitro on the site and asked if he would create illustrations for the same journal entries that Aris was doing the voice over for. He said yes and has really exceeded my expectations for the game. His understanding of human (and non-human lol) anatomy is just amazing. After he had finished all the art for the game, I asked if we could include his character sketches as a separate DLC and he was open to that as well. I’m excited to make that available to players!

Lastly, I wanted to take a few of these sketches and bring them to life for marketing materials. On the same Spit Paint group, I met Steve Hamilton and loved his broad-brushed painting style. Nabetse agreed that Steve’s style would be perfect for painting over his pencils. The Argonus image on the main Towerlu page is the culmination of Nabetse and Steve’s work and I couldn’t be happier! Steve just finished another overpaint of Athena saving Argonus from drowning and I’ll be showing that off soon. Lastly, Steve is working on some new loading screen paintings and they, of course, are wonderful.

I don’t think there is anything I enjoy more than finding and hiring talent. Whether it is an artist, animator, programmer, intern rigger, it doesn’t matter. Giving folks a chance (and paying them) to get involved in a project I’m passionate about and seeing that same passion is the best feeling. Now if I can just find that artist who can turn our characters into a great Jack Kirby-esqe comic illustration, my life would be complete!

Next post will be talking a bit about the beta process. Thanks for reading!

Dave

For an indie title, Shadowgate had done fine on Steam. It was published by ReverbXP and they did a nice job of getting it out there. I decided that I would publish Argonus but we needed to decide what platform we were going to focus on. I have a friend who was doing quite well with adventure games on tablets and I was leaning toward them right when we started the project. That also happened to be when Shadowgate was released on iOS. So for a little while we were building the game so that it worked well on tablets. This primarily came in two forms: art and movement.

We were already committed to making the game in 3D so Adam began creating the environments and models and optimizing them to work on tablets. I was a bit worried about movement on the tablets so I designed an elaborate ‘rail’ system that the player would move on. Basically moving from key locations on the map (nodes) via a predetermined rail system.

Well, both of these things went by the wayside rather quickly. Shadowgate was selling just okay on iOS and that kind of put a damper on things. I mean, unless you have a AAA title, sell the game for $1 or have in game transactions, it’s a hard space to compete in. So, we did a bit of a 180 (not quite) and Adam juiced up the polys on the models and we nixed this rails idea and went full first-person character movement. Oh, and we would concentrate completely on PC.

The next hiccup came in the animation phase of the project. This is where Lou, Joel and Hieu came in. Rigging and animating our initial characters. I asked them to animate the characters as if they were stop motion animation. I was trying to get that great Harryhausen vibe. So they did just that, animating it completely and then dropping frames as they went to give it a bit of a jerky look to them. Then I showed it to people and these were their responses… 1) What’s wrong with your PC? Can’t it keep up with the frame rate? 2) Maybe you should get some different animators. 3) Is that intentional? So, we scrapped the idea of emulating stop motion pretty soon after that. It was a great test but ultimately didn’t work out. We decided instead to go with more of a dream-like quality to the animations.

That was pretty much the last of the early pivots. We were now heading into the project with full steam. As Sarah and I worked on the design, we also developed the technical and gameplay requirements for Thayne. Adam was able to start to build the areas in the game and Rich would begin to figure out the tone of the music. After a few months, I would be writing dialogue for voice over. After all, this was an interactive Greek epic poem. It needed a narrator and a good dose of Greek tragedy. That’s where Betsy Brantley would come in. And I’ll talk more about Betsy in the next post

Dave

The thing I love most though is looking for and working with people that share the same passion for creating indie games that I have. This worked out wonderfully for Shadowgate and I found out it would work out equally as wonderful for Argonus. I want to give a shout out to the main Argonus team in this post!

It was late 2014, when I started noodling with the idea of creating another adventure but one in 3D and primarily for tablets (No, it’s not for tablets now and, yes, I’ll get into that in another post). Anyway, I had always loved the Greek god movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Movies like Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, Jason and the Argonauts and, later, Clash of the Titans. But, as I mentioned in the last post, I needed a new team to work on this adventure. Because of Shadowgate, I had two folks that were on board immediately – Rich Douglas and Sarah Watson.

The thing about Rich is… I’ve never met him yet he’s one of my best friends. In 2012 (when I was thinking about doing a Shadowgate Kickstarter) I was sitting on a beach in VA with my family and looking on YouTube to see if anyone had done any remixes of Hiroyuki Masuno’s original Shadowgate NES chip tunes. Bam. Rich had done one and it was unreal. I immediately sent him an email and within two hours we were on the phone hashing out a contract. Rich is the real deal, folks. He is an amazing composer and an equally proficient sound designer. I couldn’t have made Shadowgate without him and the same goes for Argonus. BTW, if you haven’t heard Rich’s music, you are missing out, my friend. Go here now!

Sarah came on board in a different way. She started as a paid intern on Shadowgate, primarily testing and helping to edit text. Before long she was doing XML puzzle scripting. The thing is, over the last 7 years, there is simply nothing I can throw at her that she can’t do. So when we started working on Argonus and I found out she was a Greek god expert, it was obviously that she should be the lead designer. She not only has a great sense of puzzles but she can spot bad tropes and inconsistencies a mile away. PLUS she can code in Unity AND edit my dialogue like no one’s business. I don’t know what I would do without her – she’s simply the best. 

I still had a few needs though. Art and programming. No small tasks there lol. For art, I had a chance encounter at the Origin’s game show in Ohio with an artist named Adam Meixner. I had driven from VA with my son to find someone who sold game pieces for one of the Kickstarter rewards. I happened to go by a booth that was working on a dragon-themed board game. That’s where I met Adam. He was a miniature 3D model maker. I happened to have my Shadowgate t-shirt on and he commented that he was a fan. We spent a good hour talking about possibilities before I left to head back to VA. A few days later, Adam sent me jpgs of 3D models he constructed of some of the Shadowgate characters. I was blown away. We kept talking over the coming months until the design for Argonus was far enough for him to start. Like Sarah, Adam taught himself Unity to make sure he could implement not only his art but any scripting changes we needed. He is an amazing artist, works harder than anyone I know and also happens to be one of the nicest people I have ever met.

Programming started a little slow. My friend Jason Frostick (who did a ton of awesome animation programming work on Shadowgate) started on the project and since we were going to work in Unity again, he helped get us set up the proper adventure game shell we would eventually use. However, Jason got really busy and suggested we recruit his fellow GMU (George Mason University) grad Thayne Bohman. Thayne is soft spoken and insanely smart – not just programming smart (which he obviously is) but he has great game discernment. I can’t tell you how many times he has been the voice of reason when it comes to user experience and game play issues. I haven’t come up with a programming task that he hasn’t been able to handle or an IT issue that he hasn’t been able to solve. He’s just freakishly good and I’m so glad he has stuck with me for these last 5 years!

I’d be remiss not to mention three interns that I found at GMU as well: Lou LePore, Joel Ryan and Hieu Ly. I worked out a deal with them to help with their Game Design degree and all three guys came through with flying colors. Lou and Joel primarily worked with Adam on character animation and Hieu did a ton of rigging for the models. The guys then decided to stay on as testers to help get the game to beta (and beyond!) I can’t imagine what the game would be like without them.

There are other folks that come into play on Argonus and I’ll get into that in future posts.

Thanks for reading as I begin to delve into Argonus and the challenges we faced.

Dave

UI: Here was an example of where we made a late decision that we could not absorb into the Beta schedule. The goal of Shadowgate 2014 all along was to develop a look that bridged the gap between nostalgia and modern gaming. To achieve that, we kept the 2D rooms but used particle effects to give it a bit of dimension. We wanted folks who played the original game (on whatever platform) to feel comfortable with the game but updated a ton of puzzles, graphics, audio, etc. The decision to only have the original command system on the top was decided early on. At some point in beta, we decided to add the command wheel. Since both Towerlu and Reverb (our publisher) had set and communicated the date, we decided to ship with the original UI and do a quick followup with the command wheel. We got slapped by a few press sites for the UI but I think because we followed up on a more modern system, we ended up being okay. Lessons learned? Get the game before more folks before we get to beta.

Dread Pumpkin Quest: So, as I mentioned in my post on Steam, as soon as our team finished the PC game (and the UI update), we were off to finish the iOS and Android versions of the game. Since a few of the guys on the team were not needed for the ports, we decided to do a small, quest that was tied to Halloween, completely outside the main plot and a homage to the Great Pumpkin. Even though a few of the puzzles are lighter in tone than the rest of the game, it was very fun to do and much needed after a brutal beta/release march. Note that the sack of rocks at the end and putting together Lucy’s mask were my favorite things.

Mobile: Yes, when you develop in Unity you can port that code to other platforms like iOS and Android. No, it wasn’t as straightforward as you might think. Or perhaps we were a bit naive. Ah, maybe just inexperienced at the time. We had brought a few titles to mobile devices but not from Unity and we ran into some snags when dealing with the constraints of the devices. iOS wasn’t as bad as Android as there were only a limited number of tablets (or phones) that the game would run on and they all had the same operating system. We weren’t quite so lucky with Android-based tablets. I think I own like 15 of them still. Different versions of the operating systems still haunt my dreams. But we completed them, fulfilling the promise of a second device for our Kickstarter folks. Would we make games for the mobile devices again? I’ll get into that when I discuss Argonus in another post.

Consoles: While we were working on the tablets, I started talking with the good folks at Abstraction games about porting the game to consoles. They were pretty excited about doing the work. The problem was that the game was still in Unity 4x and we needed to get it to Unity 5 if we were going to have the ports done. They did an outstanding job of getting it to 5 and then had the arduous task of porting to all three consoles and testing the game in all four modes. It was just a lot of work. Plus, during the middle of the work, we asked them to do the ports of the original 8bit games (something I had been working with KEMCO on securing the rights to). That is why it took a bit longer to get Shadowgate out onto consoles a little longer than we both wanted. I will say, playing the game on the Switch was especially satisfying and it might have brought a tear to my eye if I hadn’t just lived Shadowgate for 7 years lol.

More stuff next week, folks. I need to get back to testing some animation changes in Argonus.

Dave

In 2012 I was amazed (as many folks were) how Double Fine and Tim Schafer had raised money on Kickstarter to fund Broken Age. I found the idea of crowdfunding to be quite exciting – not the money part, per se, but the idea that games that I had worked on decades earlier might find a new life and a new audience. I was no stranger to ports – heck, Shadowgate has been ported from the 512ke Mac to PC CGA, PC EGA, PC SVGA, Apple IIgs, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Palm, Pocket PC and, of course, the NES. But the idea of re-imaging the rooms, having a complete score and sound design and illustrating it without restriction was too much to ignore.

So in Feb of 2012, I contacted Eugene Evans, a friend of mine who I helped secure the rights of some of my games back in the ’90s. Eugene and I had worked on a number of titles together over the years and I had helped keep Shadowgate alive in the form of Shadowgate 64, Shadowgate GBC and a few canceled projects (Shadowgate Rising, Shadowgate II (nes) and Lands of Shadowgate.) Eugene was running Mythic Studios (Dark Age of Camelot) at the time I contacted him and I worked out a deal to regain the rights to all the MacVentures (Shadowgate, Deja Vu, Deja Vu II, and The Uninvited) as well as the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective mysteries. I came up with the name Towerlu by using a company name generator. I basically wanted to get a short URL and I liked how it looked. After a failed Sherlock kickstarter, my friend Karl Roelofs and I formed a small team (friends we knew who were excited about the idea), found an epic composer on YouTube (Rich Douglas) and a few phenomenal artists – speed painter Chris Cold and all-around-genius Aaron Milligan. We then spent about four months putting together the kickstarter for the re-imagined Shadowgate and ran it in the fall of 2012.

While we raised enough to get the art, audio and rewards done, we had to be very creative money-wise from a design and programming perspective. Since we were all just thrilled to be working on the property again, we quickly worked out a royalty deal and got to work developing the game in Unity. Brandon Booker, Rob De LaTorre and Nathan Harbour became our crack programming team and we brought on board a few awesome interns from George Mason University to round out the art (Jason Frostick and Daniel Cloth.) Last, but not least, the wonderful Sarah Watson came in to help Karl with design and scripting. Oh, and I would be remiss not to mention working with Masaomi Kurokawa at Kemco. He was kind enough to allow me to include the old 8bit Shadowgate chip tunes in the game.

I won’t bore you with all the details but we found a great publisher in Reverb XP, worked insane hours and finished the game (albeit a bit late) in August of 2014. We followed up the launch with a second UI (command wheel) and a Halloween side quest. During this time, I attended a game convention in Ohio and met a 3D artist named Adam Meixner. We instantly hit it off and while Karl was working on the design for Beyond Shadowgate, Adam, Sarah and I started talking about this idea of a separate team working on a new 3D game called Argonus and the Gods of Stone. If you want to know what happened with Beyond Shadowgate and that team, I posted about this on the Shadowgate Steam Forum last year. It’s an honest take on what happened and worth the read if you have the time. Will we make Beyond Shadowgate one day? Surely. I just don’t know when.

I think that’s a good start and I will try and post at least once a week with the next post covering working on getting Shadowgate to the new consoles as well as the 8bit adventures and then into Argonus.

Thanks again!

Dave Marsh