Vohaul Strikes Back
About the game
With Space Quest 7 behind his back, Roger Wilco needs a little break, so he and his true love, ambassador Beatrice Wankmeister, decide to spend some quality time on the most romantic planet in the known universe - Romanticon 7. As they are in the middle of a lovely meal at Pie-ery, the only restaurant where every single meal is made of pie, they get interrupted by an apeman.
Using sophisticated interrogation methods involving a banana, they find out that the apeman was sent by Vohaul in order to capture Roger. But wait, isn't Vohaul dead? Only physically...Before the apeman draws his final breath, they also realize that capturing Roger was only necessary in order to prevent him from ruining a much larger evil plot by Vohaul which, if successful, would once again result in the destruction of the entire universe. Naturally, being the only one to know about it, Roger must now defeat his arch-nemesis once again. And so, his next adventure begins...
Technical details
Vohaul Strikes Back is being designed in AGS. The minimum display requirements include a resolution of 800x600. There will be optional voice, cutscene, and music downloads. Voicing will be recorded into the OGG format; video is encoded in MS MP4v3; and music will be available in MP3 and OGG formats. If necessary, compression technology will be used to keep the total size of the game (with all optional components) under 650 MB. In any case, we are currently planning to distribute the game both over the Internet as well as via CD (for a minimal fee). For those downloading VSB over a dial-up connection, text boxes will adequately explain what occurs in the absent material, and the optional components will be available for future download separate from the full game.
About the team
The whole thing started way back on the 28th of April, 2002. Olzen had just re-joined the Subspace Channel after the famous 04-11 crash. He found the idea of fanmade Space Quest installments pretty cool and soon got an idea to one himself. The game was planned to involve a cyborg Vohaul trying to get his revenge on Roger once again. Shortly after posting, olzen was contacted by a guy called Waffler. He got thrown in as lead writer and the rest of the team followed pretty quickly. The first line-up consisted of these people:
- Frederik "olzen" Olsen - teamlead
- Samuel "Waffler" Lawson - lead writer
- Benjamin "Eegah" Vigeant - assistant writer
- Martin "Marty McFly" deMontfort - backgrounds
- Michael "Norimaki" Ecke - sprites
- Tim "Turtlewax" Sisson - programming
- Robert "Shockwave" Bäckman - music
This line-up worked rather good in the beginning, but production slowed down a lot some months later. As leading a game wasn't olzen's thing, a new leader, Chris "kainenable" Meining, was found and the team got ready to move on. However, the relationship between Waffler and the rest of the team was getting pretty tense. He left and Eegah took over as lead writer. This went on for a while, and things were getting very stable under kain's leadership. The team changed again, though; Norimaki and Turtlewax both left due to time constraints. The team decided to quit using sprites and went on with kain as 3D modeller. Kainenable found some new team members and a few old ones who had become idle were dropped. After the changes, the team looked like this:
- Chris "kainenable" Meining - teamlead and character modeller
- Frederik "olzen" Olsen - co-lead and assistant writer
- Benjamin "Eegah" Vigeant - lead writer
- Alistair "Spikey" Gillett - quality control
- Andres "Justas" Kalle - click events
- Nigel "Captain Nige" Thomas - click events and songwriter
- Martin "Marty McFly" deMontfort - backgrounds
- Patrick "pcj" Johnston - programming and cutscenes
- Tucker "spider" Netzoltz (sp?) - assistant programmer
- Markel "BlueMax" Moss - music
- Brandon "MusicallyInspired" Blume - guitarist on main theme
This looked good on paper, but the team soon found that it was hard to control such a large team. Neither Spikey nor Spider ever got around to doing any work, and Captain Nige was busy with moving to London and his job. And as if all that wasn't enough, kain suddenly vanished. Figuring something needed to be done, Justas helped to revive the project and pcj was assigned as the third teamlead. Eventually kain got back and started modelling again. And so, the team was:
- Patrick "pcj" Johnston - teamlead, animator and programmer
- Frederik "olzen" Olsen - co-lead and assistant writer
- Chris "kainenable" Meining - character modeller, website designer
- Benjamin "Eegah" Vigeant - lead writer
- Andres "Justas" Kalle - assistant writer, quality control lead
- Nigel "Captain Nige" Thomas - songwriter
- Martin "Marty McFly" deMontfort - backgrounds
- Markel "BlueMax" Moss - music
- Brandon "MusicallyInspired" Blume - guitarist on main theme
Justas managed to give the team a gigantic kick in the butt and started organizing tasks. That saved the game from being cancelled and everything was back on track.
But the team was still plagued by the well-known problems. After a somewhat heated conflict, Kain decided to leave for a short period of time to cool a bit off. However, the "short period of time" quickly grew quite long, and any attempts to contact him were unsuccessful. Our patience finally grew thin, and it was decided to let Kain go. We were now dealing with the same situation as when Norimaki left. All characters needed to be re-done as only Kain had access to the models. Enter Datadog, who luckily wanted to take up the challenge. Karmot was also added to help finalize some details about the click events and plot. The team is now hoping to finish the game with this line-up:
- Patrick "pcj" Johnston - teamlead, webmaster, and programmer
- Frederik "olzen" Olsen - co-lead and assistant writer
- Andres "Justas" Kalle - co-lead and writer
- Martin "Marty McFly" deMontfort - backgrounds, GUI, logo, character design
- Chris "Datadog" Ushko - character design and animation
- Benjamin "Eegah" Vigeant - writer
- Markell "BlueMax" Moss - music
- Robert "Robertos" Piwowarczyk - music
- Robert "Raggit" Scott - music
- Karmo "karmot" Talts - puzzle design
- Nigel "Captain Nige" Thomas - songwriter
This is how it looks as of now, and the team is quite sure that they've got a line-up on our hands that can last till the game is released. Never give up! Never surrender!