A Vampyre Story – Preview

Finally, a game we can predict will ‘suck’ without receiving nasty emails from the developer.

A Vampyre Story – which was exclusively announced in an excellent in-depth preview in the JA sponsored The Inventory #16 – is being developed by a talented team of ex-Lucas Arts employees now known as Autumn Moon Entertainment. Everyone – except for the music composer and sound engineer – is from Lucas Arts.

It seems ‘cartoony’ games may be making a comeback what with The Westerner about to announce a North American publisher, Runaway 2 in production, a soon-to-be announced (by JA next week!) Polish adventure and now A Vampyre Story (we also know of at least 3 other ‘cartoony’ games that have yet to be announced publicly).

The team has just recently finished up a playable ‘proof of concept-which is a short mini game that shows the style and functionality of the final game. It is a tool to help potential publisher visualize what the final product will be like. Autumn Moon is currently shopping their game around and hopes to announce a publisher soon.

A Vampyre Story is a traditional point-and-click game that currently is in 2D, but for the final product the animation will be in 3D. The reason for this is the animations will look smoother and more consistent. The developers plan to use a 2D cel-shader on the animation to help the characters blend in with the 2D, hand painted backgrounds.

The game play and interface will be very much like The Curse of Monkey Island. The humor will be in the same vein as movies like Young Frankenstein and Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein and previous adventure games such as The Quivering and Hollywood Monsters.

The main character is Mona who – according to The Inventory – is an up-and-coming opera star who catches the attention of a nefarious vampire – Baron Shrowdy Von Kiefer. He was so taken with Mona he kidnapped her, turned her into a vampire and spirited her away to his island castle in Draxsylvania, a small eerie mountain country deep in the wilds of Eastern Europe. Froderick was one of the many bats that inhabited the castle belfry.

Over the many years of Mona.s captivity, Froderick became her closest friend and companion. He likes to joke around a lot and h is humor was the only thing that kept Mona.s spirits up during that dark time. He likes to hang out with her, literally ,because he simply has nothing better to do. Hanging out with a leggy ingénue sounds better than another night of guano fights in the belfry.

Mona is a bit naive about what has happened to her so she has little command over her unusual abilities. As the player progresses through the game, Mona will learn how to turn into a bat, hypnotize people, turn into a gaseous form, and of course, bite people on the neck and drain them o f blood, but not too much blood. After all, Mona is a stage performer and she needs to watch her figure. Other powers may be added as well, like the ability to summon wolves, bats and rats, and to control the weather.

The interface will employ a hint system and Mona’s journal. The journal will list Mona’s progress and what puzzles she is currently attempting to solve. This will allow players who haven’t played in a while (though I can’t imagine anyone taking an extended break from this game!) to easily pick-up where they left off. The inventory will feature an icon of Froderick the Bat and can be used to help solve puzzles. The graphic engine used will be Virtools Engine Technology that was used for Syberia.

We’ll have a lot more features and exclusives on A Vampyre Story as the game progresses, but keep in mind that more than a few publishers are adverse to publish any game with cartoon graphics (thanks in a large part to twitch gamers who have the industry convinced that all games must feature cutting-edge 3D graphics). To those publishers who are hedging on their commitment, I would ask them to consider the pedigree of the Autumn Moon Entertainment team:

Monkey Island 2
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle
Sam N Max Hit The Road
Full Throttle
The Dig
Rebel Assault
Outlaws
Curse of Monkey Island
Grim Fandango
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine
Escape from Monkey Island

If this group has problems finding a publisher, then the adventure genre truly has no future.