It's here at last!
Barn Runner: The Forever Friday - Chapter 5
"An Unexpected Meanwhile"
More than FIFTEEN YEARS in development*, this game is the latest piece of the Forever Friday saga. Chapter 1 was released in 2008, if you can believe that. The most recent AGS-made installment, Chapter 3, was released way back in 2011. (Chapter 4 was released the following year, in 2012, but it was made with Game Maker, so we don't talk about that one around here
). In all that time, I have been working on this thing on and off, through a tremendous amount of personal ups and downs: The death of a parent, the loss of a job I'd held for years, a pretty nasty motorcycle wreck, the crashes of two different hard drives, the sudden end of the longest long-term relationship I'd ever had, a new career, numerous night classes, an exciting smidge of identity theft, the rise and fall of The AGS Podcast, and a move across the country from the dry, dusty hell of a beautiful desert to a lush, green, sticky land of sock-dampening humidity that I'm still struggling to enjoy. Goodness! What an adventure! But here it is at last! And just in time for not only Christmas, but also the 20th anniversary of the Barn Runner game series.
I released the first prototype Barn Runner game (The Case of the Runaway Robot) on my personal website all the way back in December of 2003. I created my AGS forum account (and blessed the world with my adorable dancing cow) about a month later. During this time, I created something I considered to be a "proper game" and eventually uploaded Barn Runner 1: The Armageddon Eclair to the AGS database in January of 2005.
Good gravy, how time flies.
In the years since chapters three and four of The Forever Friday were released, I've made several other Barn Runner games as side stories in the larger Barn Runner world, but I never stopped working on this impractical boulder of a game. I reworked it and reworked it over and over, trying to make it into a big exclamation point at the end of the great big long sentence that is the Forever Friday. In an unexpected moment of clarity, sometime last year I finally realized that unless I made some serious changes to it, I was never going to be able to release the thing. It had grown into something too unmanageably large and unwieldy for me to shape into a single, workable entity. I didn't want this, the biggest part of the biggest Barn Runner story, to be left untold (or worse yet, released half finished, like Duke Nukem Forever), so I set about tearing it down and breaking it in half. Untangling a game as complicated and interconnected as this one was quite the undertaking. It created so many bugs that I almost gave up in frustration several times, wondering it wouldn't be easier to just keep telling side stories in this world and never get around to actually trying to finish the main story. But I'm dumb (dumb enough to keep making freeware games in a world that makes it easier than ever to monetize your passion), so I kept untangling and patching, until I had finally carved this beast into two separate pieces.
You see, originally chapter five was supposed to be the final part of The Forever Friday. But it was a bit too much game for a one-man "studio" to tackle. So I've broken it in half. Chapter six will be out in about two years, I estimate (with some confidence. It's already somewhere in the neighborhood of one-half completed). In the meantime, let's take a look at the game I'm posting about today.
I know there are other AGS games that are larger and more impressive than this one, but I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the single biggest game I've ever made (or will ever make). There are at least a few hours of gameplay here, and an additional hour or two if you unlock all the hidden sub-plots. It tells the story of what Noriko was up to while Prick and Harry were off doing their part to save the city of Arcology 19 during chapter three (the one released in 2011). Let's talk about some specific details. This thing has...
4,374 sprites
763 rooms
125 inventory items
67 dialog trees (I didn't count how many actual dialog options there are)
3 top-down driving / flying arcade sequences,
4 platformer levels
1 optional maze
2 QTEs (gosh, I hope those are still in fashion!)
8 hidden object puzzles
3 kisekae dolls (terribly retro, but quite fun to make, as it turns out)
16 miscellaneous mini-games (sliding tiles, spot the difference, etc.)
Numerous animated cutscenes
Excessive flashbacks
Two dozen unlockable storylets (a term I stole from Fallen London)
A "Director's Cut" toggle that enables even more dialog and cutscenes
Importable campaign codes that allow you to carry on sub-plots from previous chapters
And a complete, deeply hidden bonus adventure game, "The Case of the Classy Chassis," (if you can figure out to unlock it) packed with its own puzzles, inventory, NPCs, and all the stuff you expect from a Barn Runner game, starring Prick Peckard himself as the playable character.
(And some risqué content too. Appropriate because Noriko is French!)
Gosh! So much content you'd think it took me years and years to make!
Why not download it and validate my efforts just a little bit?
DOWNLOAD THE GAME HERE
115 Mb download
583 Mb installed
Made with AGS 3.5.1**
(As always, all the arcade and maze bits are optional. You are under no obligation to appreciate the hours and hours and hours I spent crafting them.)
And a big "thank you" to Frodo, for patiently testing one release candidate after another for the past year or so. Real life was coming at her fast too, but she always found time to look for bugs. I appreciate it! And also my deepest thanks to all the AGSers here who helped me out with technical questions or just general encouragement over these past twenty years. Some of them are still with us. Some of them are gone. I'm still grateful to them, and to each and every one of you. This place is still the best little community on the internet!
EDIT: Updated to version 1.1 to fix a nasty bug that Creamy found.
---------------------
* On and off, of course. Not fifteen years of non-stop development.
** The oldest parts of this game's code go all the way back to my early days using AGS 2.56d. This thing has been upconverted to newer versions of Adventure Game Studio so many times that I'm not entirely sure it wouldn't qualify as some sort of undead creature by this point. Keep it away from holy water just in case.
Barn Runner: The Forever Friday - Chapter 5
"An Unexpected Meanwhile"
More than FIFTEEN YEARS in development*, this game is the latest piece of the Forever Friday saga. Chapter 1 was released in 2008, if you can believe that. The most recent AGS-made installment, Chapter 3, was released way back in 2011. (Chapter 4 was released the following year, in 2012, but it was made with Game Maker, so we don't talk about that one around here
). In all that time, I have been working on this thing on and off, through a tremendous amount of personal ups and downs: The death of a parent, the loss of a job I'd held for years, a pretty nasty motorcycle wreck, the crashes of two different hard drives, the sudden end of the longest long-term relationship I'd ever had, a new career, numerous night classes, an exciting smidge of identity theft, the rise and fall of The AGS Podcast, and a move across the country from the dry, dusty hell of a beautiful desert to a lush, green, sticky land of sock-dampening humidity that I'm still struggling to enjoy. Goodness! What an adventure! But here it is at last! And just in time for not only Christmas, but also the 20th anniversary of the Barn Runner game series.I released the first prototype Barn Runner game (The Case of the Runaway Robot) on my personal website all the way back in December of 2003. I created my AGS forum account (and blessed the world with my adorable dancing cow) about a month later. During this time, I created something I considered to be a "proper game" and eventually uploaded Barn Runner 1: The Armageddon Eclair to the AGS database in January of 2005.
Good gravy, how time flies.
In the years since chapters three and four of The Forever Friday were released, I've made several other Barn Runner games as side stories in the larger Barn Runner world, but I never stopped working on this impractical boulder of a game. I reworked it and reworked it over and over, trying to make it into a big exclamation point at the end of the great big long sentence that is the Forever Friday. In an unexpected moment of clarity, sometime last year I finally realized that unless I made some serious changes to it, I was never going to be able to release the thing. It had grown into something too unmanageably large and unwieldy for me to shape into a single, workable entity. I didn't want this, the biggest part of the biggest Barn Runner story, to be left untold (or worse yet, released half finished, like Duke Nukem Forever), so I set about tearing it down and breaking it in half. Untangling a game as complicated and interconnected as this one was quite the undertaking. It created so many bugs that I almost gave up in frustration several times, wondering it wouldn't be easier to just keep telling side stories in this world and never get around to actually trying to finish the main story. But I'm dumb (dumb enough to keep making freeware games in a world that makes it easier than ever to monetize your passion), so I kept untangling and patching, until I had finally carved this beast into two separate pieces.
You see, originally chapter five was supposed to be the final part of The Forever Friday. But it was a bit too much game for a one-man "studio" to tackle. So I've broken it in half. Chapter six will be out in about two years, I estimate (with some confidence. It's already somewhere in the neighborhood of one-half completed). In the meantime, let's take a look at the game I'm posting about today.
I know there are other AGS games that are larger and more impressive than this one, but I'm not exaggerating when I say this is the single biggest game I've ever made (or will ever make). There are at least a few hours of gameplay here, and an additional hour or two if you unlock all the hidden sub-plots. It tells the story of what Noriko was up to while Prick and Harry were off doing their part to save the city of Arcology 19 during chapter three (the one released in 2011). Let's talk about some specific details. This thing has...
4,374 sprites
763 rooms
125 inventory items
67 dialog trees (I didn't count how many actual dialog options there are)
3 top-down driving / flying arcade sequences,
4 platformer levels
1 optional maze
2 QTEs (gosh, I hope those are still in fashion!)
8 hidden object puzzles
3 kisekae dolls (terribly retro, but quite fun to make, as it turns out)
16 miscellaneous mini-games (sliding tiles, spot the difference, etc.)
Numerous animated cutscenes
Excessive flashbacks
Two dozen unlockable storylets (a term I stole from Fallen London)
A "Director's Cut" toggle that enables even more dialog and cutscenes
Importable campaign codes that allow you to carry on sub-plots from previous chapters
And a complete, deeply hidden bonus adventure game, "The Case of the Classy Chassis," (if you can figure out to unlock it) packed with its own puzzles, inventory, NPCs, and all the stuff you expect from a Barn Runner game, starring Prick Peckard himself as the playable character.
(And some risqué content too. Appropriate because Noriko is French!)
Gosh! So much content you'd think it took me years and years to make!
Why not download it and validate my efforts just a little bit?
DOWNLOAD THE GAME HERE
115 Mb download
583 Mb installed
Made with AGS 3.5.1**
(As always, all the arcade and maze bits are optional. You are under no obligation to appreciate the hours and hours and hours I spent crafting them.)
And a big "thank you" to Frodo, for patiently testing one release candidate after another for the past year or so. Real life was coming at her fast too, but she always found time to look for bugs. I appreciate it! And also my deepest thanks to all the AGSers here who helped me out with technical questions or just general encouragement over these past twenty years. Some of them are still with us. Some of them are gone. I'm still grateful to them, and to each and every one of you. This place is still the best little community on the internet!
EDIT: Updated to version 1.1 to fix a nasty bug that Creamy found.
---------------------
* On and off, of course. Not fifteen years of non-stop development.
** The oldest parts of this game's code go all the way back to my early days using AGS 2.56d. This thing has been upconverted to newer versions of Adventure Game Studio so many times that I'm not entirely sure it wouldn't qualify as some sort of undead creature by this point. Keep it away from holy water just in case.
). Just so long as your story has a nice, seasonal feel to it, it can be anything you like. Comedy, drama, horror, BDSM instructional manual, recipe book, etcetera. Just make it winter-y and holiday-y, and have it in before I put out the milk and cookies (beer and pizza) for Santa the night before Christmas.
