Rahul

I love the idea of a sarien.net meetup :-D
 
You could even make it a collaborative, multiplayer playthrough of SQ1 since that game is completely available. It could be crazy hectic and chaotic, but a lot of fun and definitely something that could be recorded for posterity.

Just something ridiculous that struck me last night...
 

https://p.twimg.com/Au_T2EBCQAMlvvw.gif:large
 

https://p.twimg.com/AvB7yKZCIAAuGEu.gif:large
Search for Fester Blatz on Google Images and create your own!
 
Jess

No. HTML validation is irrelevant and overrated. :-)

You know, I was thinking about this HTML5 thing the other day. It reminds me a bit about the late 80s/early 90s with Sierra.
 
What made Sierra's games great (apart from the actual quality of the stories, the graphics, the gameplay, etc.) was that they were pushing the boundaries of the systems they coded. The graphics they managed to get out of SQ1 and SQ2 were truly remarkable given the quality of monitors and the processing power of the machines at that time.
 
People say that HTML5 is limiting, cannot do this, cannot do that. But I wonder whether people have a) lost that pioneering spirit and B) forgotten the point of coding.
 
In the late 90s we, for the first time, had hardware that outpaced software. Rather than trying to tidy things up and make it efficient on machines, coders just got something that "worked" and slapped it into the games. No need to save space when you're writing 30MB games on a disk that holds 700MB. No need to optimise code when it will run on a 500MHz machine and a large section of the target audience has 1.2GHz processors. No need to optimise memory usage if the game is using 500MB of RAM when most machines hold 2GB.
 
Games companies had to make games quickly and get them to market without really sitting down and making the machine do something beyond the ordinary. Current games makers aren't constrained by their hardware (at least not to the same extent) and the limits of games really are the imaginations of the conglomerates which fund them.
 
I have no doubt that with a pioneering spirit (which we know the games makers of the 80s had), they can do some wonderful things with HTML5, pushing it places even the designers didn't know it could go to. Assuming, of course, that they use it.

When one ports a game to a new platform, tweaks are made, features added, sacrifices made. This does not necessarily mean that design compromises always have to be made; simply that differences exist between ports. For example; the tablet version of the prototypes use a touch-and-wait interface to present the action icons. I doubt that the desktop versions would need such a feature.
 
Likewise, the tablet versions of SpaceVenture may eschew parts of the parser; perhaps they will have slightly different hotspots to accomplish the same puzzles, etc. The point is that if there is a way to export the game assets and some large aspects of game logic to multiple platforms (such as engines that can export to Flash, etc), then the possibility of a playable HTML5 target could be a reality. It has been my experience with code generation tools that such an exercise is invariably coupled with hand-massaging on each port. But, this is fine, and ought to be expected. The higher quality the output tool, the more flexible the game assets, and the more skilled and funded the development team, the easier this process is.
 
I'm extremely excited at the prospect of playing this game (and, with luck, its many successors) natively on my Linux desktop, and then later working a puzzle on my Android mobile while waiting in line, having a friend help me with a difficult part that he demonstrates on his Mac laptop, watching Let's Play's on YouTube posted by Windows gamers, etc. I see no reason that HTML5 can't play a part in that, and be a vehicle to sell the game commercially on the Chrome App Market, the upcoming Mozilla HTML5 App Market, and of course iOS.
 
I hope that this vision of an open web utilizing open standards can be realized alongside the traditional desktop paradigm (the one on which I rely more than anything else).

I'm in! Especially the 42 part is great.

I put together a page of copy calling HTML5 and adventure gaming fans to arms:
 
http://helpthetwoguys.handcraft.com/
 
Please spread this amongst any web developers, software engineers, Googlers, design geeks, etc that you can find - it may help get some more pledges by people who want to see a great HTML5 project happen on top of people who just want to see the game. It may be a viable angle that I'd like to try out.
 
Try not to post this in the Kickstarter comments, though - that isn't the right crowd, as we've seen ;-)
 
Thanks!
 
 
 
 
PS. This is not a confirmation of HTML5 being the final tech used in the game, or even any comment by us on the matter. Like you guys, I don't know what the Two Guys will end up deciding - I can just hold out hope, like any good fan of both HTML5 and Space Quest, that they decide to combine the two. :-) Just FYI so you don't get any strange ideas ;-)

I put together a page of copy calling HTML5 and adventure gaming fans to arms:
 
http://helpthetwoguys.handcraft.com/
 
Please spread this amongst any web developers, software engineers, Googlers, design geeks, etc that you can find - it may help get some more pledges by people who want to see a great HTML5 project happen on top of people who just want to see the game. It may be a viable angle that I'd like to try out.
 
Try not to post this in the Kickstarter comments, though - that isn't the right crowd, as we've seen ;-)
 
Thanks!
 
 
 
 
PS. This is not a confirmation of HTML5 being the final tech used in the game, or even any comment by us on the matter. Like you guys, I don't know what the Two Guys will end up deciding - I can just hold out hope, like any good fan of both HTML5 and Space Quest, that they decide to combine the two. :-) Just FYI so you don't get any strange ideas ;-)

I put together a page of copy calling HTML5 and adventure gaming fans to arms:
 
http://helpthetwoguys.handcraft.com/
 
Please spread this amongst any web developers, software engineers, Googlers, design geeks, etc that you can find - it may help get some more pledges by people who want to see a great HTML5 project happen on top of people who just want to see the game. It may be a viable angle that I'd like to try out.
 
Try not to post this in the Kickstarter comments, though - that isn't the right crowd, as we've seen ;-)
 
Thanks!
 
 
 
 
PS. This is not a confirmation of HTML5 being the final tech used in the game, or even any comment by us on the matter. Like you guys, I don't know what the Two Guys will end up deciding - I can just hold out hope, like any good fan of both HTML5 and Space Quest, that they decide to combine the two. :-) Just FYI so you don't get any strange ideas ;-)

Chrome is far from a minority browser - last week, it overtook IE as the #1 browser worldwide. And even if it isn't #1, it's definitely one of the three major browsers. We had to choose one, and the one we chose is also the one that uses the Webkit rendering engine, which is the best engine right now to develop HTML5 games for.

Chrome is far from a minority browser - last week, it overtook IE as the #1 browser worldwide. And even if it isn't #1, it's definitely one of the three major browsers. We had to choose one, and the one we chose is also the one that uses the Webkit rendering engine, which is the best engine right now to develop HTML5 games for.

Chrome is far from a minority browser - last week, it overtook IE as the #1 browser worldwide. And even if it isn't #1, it's definitely one of the three major browsers. We had to choose one, and the one we chose is also the one that uses the Webkit rendering engine, which is the best engine right now to develop HTML5 games for.

I love the idea of a sarien.net meetup :-D
 
You could even make it a collaborative, multiplayer playthrough of SQ1 since that game is completely available. It could be crazy hectic and chaotic, but a lot of fun and definitely something that could be recorded for posterity.

I love the idea of a sarien.net meetup :-D
 
You could even make it a collaborative, multiplayer playthrough of SQ1 since that game is completely available. It could be crazy hectic and chaotic, but a lot of fun and definitely something that could be recorded for posterity.

One thing that sets this Kickstarter apart from the others, and can really be used to form a different compelling narrative, is that the prototypes show something actually being made. As Penny Arcade and others illustrated, it can be hard to trust your money to some guys whose last major product was released in the early 90s. It's been 20 years - how do we know they still have what it takes? A series of prototypes that shows the Two Guys working on a game is a great way to make clear early on - before the money has been committed - that they're focused on actual game development, not just talking about it.
 
If you guys can help form that narrative towards the media, I think we might be able to create an interesting additional angle. "Hey! These guys ARE the only ones putting out something before the Kickstarter is over! What about the others? What have they got to show for it? A bunch of videos?" There's an interesting conversation there waiting to happen.

One thing that sets this Kickstarter apart from the others, and can really be used to form a different compelling narrative, is that the prototypes show something actually being made. As Penny Arcade and others illustrated, it can be hard to trust your money to some guys whose last major product was released in the early 90s. It's been 20 years - how do we know they still have what it takes? A series of prototypes that shows the Two Guys working on a game is a great way to make clear early on - before the money has been committed - that they're focused on actual game development, not just talking about it.
 
If you guys can help form that narrative towards the media, I think we might be able to create an interesting additional angle. "Hey! These guys ARE the only ones putting out something before the Kickstarter is over! What about the others? What have they got to show for it? A bunch of videos?" There's an interesting conversation there waiting to happen.

One thing that sets this Kickstarter apart from the others, and can really be used to form a different compelling narrative, is that the prototypes show something actually being made. As Penny Arcade and others illustrated, it can be hard to trust your money to some guys whose last major product was released in the early 90s. It's been 20 years - how do we know they still have what it takes? A series of prototypes that shows the Two Guys working on a game is a great way to make clear early on - before the money has been committed - that they're focused on actual game development, not just talking about it.
 
If you guys can help form that narrative towards the media, I think we might be able to create an interesting additional angle. "Hey! These guys ARE the only ones putting out something before the Kickstarter is over! What about the others? What have they got to show for it? A bunch of videos?" There's an interesting conversation there waiting to happen.

Hey guys, glad to see everyone trying it out! I'm one of the two guys from Q42 building this thing with the Two Guys. It's been a lot of fun so far, but we still have a long way to go. e1ven seems to have a good idea of how HTML can be used for a game engine and what kind of features we still need to work on.
 
We're really looking for your thoughts on where you'd like to see this going next. Is inventory important? Death sequences? Music and sound effects? More things to do? Text parser?

Hey guys, glad to see everyone trying it out! I'm one of the two guys from Q42 building this thing with the Two Guys. It's been a lot of fun so far, but we still have a long way to go. e1ven seems to have a good idea of how HTML can be used for a game engine and what kind of features we still need to work on.
 
We're really looking for your thoughts on where you'd like to see this going next. Is inventory important? Death sequences? Music and sound effects? More things to do? Text parser?