For the last couple of years, on and off, I've been working on a fairly extensive mod to QFG1EGA. I'm touching on just about every room and every script, but in a slightly different way than the two excellent QFG3 and QFG1VGA fan-updates. It's a fairly ambitious mod for me, and I'm probably another few years away from completion at least.
There's 3 major areas of the game I'm changing (I think and hope for the better).
1) This is the hardest to explain, and probably the most controversial. Replace every Restore/Restart/Quit dialog with Retry/Restore/Quit.
2) Add a new player avatar choice. Female.
3) Add a Goblin Maze and Town Shed interior, along with a new puzzle and new characters involving them.
In order of completion, #1 I've fully finished; #2 I've finished all the coding and have only (
only) to draw 700 some-odd brand new character animations; and #3 I've only just begun. I've unlocked the town shed door, and programmed it opening/closing and ego can walk through it to a crudely drawn white room. #'s 2 and 3 will take me a very long time, because art is my weakest area of expertise (seconded only by music
).
I've actually fully programmed #2 so that up to 3 or 4 different avatars are supported. I had to rearrange the number of several of the views, and in some cases split them up into ego and stationary. To test it, I duplicated each existing ego view and inverted the colours. It's slightly bizarre to watch this inverted-color aberration wander through a regular Spielberg.
I wasn't even planning on #2,3 originally --- I wanted to do #1 as a proof of concept (the result of which I'm very proud) and figured since I finished that, I'd try and learn view and pic editing/creating.
So let me explain a bit about #1. I think we're all familiar with the major difference between the Sierra games and the LucasArt ones... Sierra games strongly encourage (require?) you to save early/save often, while LucasArts games generally have no dead-ends. I always liked the character deaths... they were humorous, and helped give the world and characters a sense of consequence -- however as a
player (especially one well past his youth, with limited time in any given day to actually
play games) I find it incredibly annoying and discouraging to be
penalized for exploring the world and trying new things. I mean I think Corey Cole summed it up pretty good way back when he first gave QFG2VGA a go. As he described it, he got killed by an unexpected brigand inside the City of Shapier; Realizing he hadn't saved his game he didn't bother restarting or redoing the lost 30 minutes or more he put into the game, he just turned it off and never went back.
To use a QFG1 example, it's one thing to try drinking the Dragon's breath. You've (possibly) been warned about it by the Sherrif... it looks very ominous when the bartender pours it... arguably, that's sufficient forewarning that maybe you should save your game before drinking it; and if you didn't, oh well, that's on you. But picking your nose, early in the game? There's absolutely no reason (especially in the EGA version, when you're not clicking the lock pick on yourself) to think that telling the hero to go "pick his nose" will cause him to kill himself. It's not fair to require your player to save the game before every single action, and to penalize them if they don't. But it is a funny message.
So, that was my personal challenge. Keep the humour of the deaths, but remove the penalty. Could it be done in the original engine... And of course, the answer is yes. I think I came up with a novel solution. I turned it from a penalty into an additional in-game challenge. Now, not only can you instantly reverse any fatal mistakes you make, but the game keeps track of each death and will show you a list, stating how many times you died. It changes deaths (and thus exploration) from something to be avoided into something actively encouraged. Can you beat the game scoring every single death?
Yeah, so that's how I've been spending some of my free time. I'm really happy with the results.
