So You Thought You Were a Hero? Development Journal

[EricOakford]

So You Thought You Were a Hero? is an adaptation of the AGS fangame Quest for Glory 4 1/2 into SCI.
As the AGS game is horribly buggy and the Windows version (which is slightly more polished than the DOS version) does not work properly on modern Windows, I got the idea to remake the game in SCI11.
There was an attempt in 2013 to update the AGS game to newer AGS engines, but as of 2016 it seems to have been abandoned.
Since we've gained more knowledge of the SCI engine, and I've reverse-engineered the official QFG games, it only seems appropriate to put this knowledge to the test.
One criticism of the game is its offensive content. This will remain, but the game will have a setting to reduce this content (set to the lowest, Clean, by default). There will also be a content advisory at the start of the game noting this.
Another criticism is the fact that most of its graphics were mostly lifted from other Sierra games (notably, Conquests of the Longbow). Although I would like to replace these graphics with original ones, I am not an artist and have limited skill in graphics. For now, the Conquests graphics are being used as placeholders.

Ideally, I would like to upgrade this game to SCI32 and have SVGA graphics made. Then it would truly be the bridge between QFG4 and 5, and have all-original graphics.

[MusicallyInspired]

Never was a QFG fan but I do remember how popular QFG4.5 was. I'll be watching this with interest regardless however as anything in SCI has my attention. I'm also down for SCI32 fangames but I wonder how possible that feat is.

[EricOakford]

Hurrah! Using a newly-built AGSUtils, I was able to extract all of the sprites from QFG4.5! They are stored in TGA format, which is supported by GIMP. This should make things significantly easier...

[Collector]

I like your solution to the questionable content. As much as I dislike some of that content, I dislike censorship more. Will you be putting this on your git?

[EricOakford]

I like your solution to the questionable content. As much as I dislike some of that content, I dislike censorship more. Will you be putting this on your git?

It is on my git, it's just private.

[MusicallyInspired]

Hurrah! Using a newly-built AGSUtils, I was able to extract all of the sprites from QFG4.5! They are stored in TGA format, which is supported by GIMP. This should make things significantly easier...

Nice! I just built it myself with cygwin. Hopefully they can extract backgrounds (and perhaps more importantly, priority masks), videos, and other content eventually.

[richruss691]

Awesome! It'll be great to play through that again.

[gumby]

Never got that far in the QFG series, I think I only made it through QFG2.  Good luck with this!

[Collector]

Never got that far in the QFG series, I think I only made it through QFG2.  Good luck with this!

You should at least give QfG4 a run through. Just be sure to play the CD version. Narration by John Rhys-Davies alone makes it worth it. It is a very fun game.

[EricOakford]

Never got that far in the QFG series, I think I only made it through QFG2.  Good luck with this!

You should at least give QfG4 a run through. Just be sure to play the CD version. Narration by John Rhys-Davies alone makes it worth it. It is a very fun game.

And the original QFG4.5 authors apparently never completed QFG4, since Bonehead (who was incorrectly identified as Bones) mentioned that you beat Baba Yaga a second time in Monrova (actually Mordavia), which never actually happens. I have since rewritten this dialog to be more accurate.

[Collector]

And the original QFG4.5 authors apparently never completed QFG4, since Bonehead (who was incorrectly identified as Bones) mentioned that you beat Baba Yaga a second time in Monrova (actually Mordavia), which never actually happens. I have since rewritten this dialog to be more accurate.

Good to hear that continuity will be better maintained.

[EricOakford]

And the original QFG4.5 authors apparently never completed QFG4, since Bonehead (who was incorrectly identified as Bones) mentioned that you beat Baba Yaga a second time in Monrova (actually Mordavia), which never actually happens. I have since rewritten this dialog to be more accurate.

Good to hear that continuity will be better maintained.

Also better maintained will be the character classes. All three hero types had the sword and shield, which made the Magic User a bit too overpowered with his Leprechaun Gold and Healing spells (at least he would have been, had spellcasting in combat actually hurt the enemy). I plan to have only the Fighter have the sword and shield, just like in the official games.

Other nerfs will be the Leprechaun Gold spell (can no longer use it to pay off the lawyer, reduces honor, etc.), the ability to mug people (reduces honor, takes away puzzle points),

I want to add more alternative solutions for each hero type. Allow the Thief to just jump over the divide that normally requires the lasso (and the Magic User to levitate across with some help); allow the Fighter to just fight his way through certain enemies; allow the Magic User to just use Flame Dart on that mutant plant; these are just some examples I can think of.

All of this could have been excused back in 2001 Now that I've done decompilations of the official games, I can make this one more accurate to them.

[EricOakford]

And now I've managed to make random encounters and combat possible! The Goblin and Elite Guard are now possible combatants. Now I just need to set the Encounter region for every room that is meant to have a possible encounter, and maybe grab some code from the QFG3 decompilation...

[MusicallyInspired]

Bonus points if you can have it import/export a QFG character profile file. 

[EricOakford]

Bonus points if you can have it import/export a QFG character profile file. 

I certainly could. That's something I was considering. Maybe late in development (like when this is ported to SCI32) this could be added, since I've already reverse-engineered the import/export scripts for QFG4.

Of course, I'll have to ensure compatibility with QFG5, so naturally the QFG4.5-exclusive spells will not be exported. There will be an in-game explanation for this, though (for example, with Leprechaun Gold, it was already mentioned that Silmaria suffers from "tremendous inflation" according to Tarna's moneychanger, so I could have Erasmus confiscate the spell for Silmaria's economic safety). Another idea is that the events are all just a dream by the Hero (which would explain the discrepancies between this and the official games).

On another note, the third and last enemy in the game, Cleo's murderer, has been added. There may be more enemies on the way, but for now, I'd like to focus on the actual rooms.