Search for Sanity

Search for Sanity was an AGS game planned to be released by Funky Duck Productions. Its development began in 2003, and later it was abandoned due to lack of planning and plot design.

Doug having a conversation with Scotty, the bartender

Plot

"Vast array of items just waiting to be manipulated with"

The game's protagonist, an unlucky guy known as Doug Gimbrone, once overhears a conversation between two people in his local pub "Snotty Weasel". One of the speakers, an asylum worker who has won the lottery, tells the other one about a patient who would inexplicably mumble a series of numbers in his sleep that always match the winning numbers at the week's lottery draw. The first part of the game has Doug walking around the town and collecting items needed to infiltrate the asylum. In the second part of the game Doug gets into the asylum, but he is caught and deemed a mental case. Then he needs to solve the mystery of the lottery lunatic and escape the asylum, whose inhabitants are styled as caricatures of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" characters. Gimbrone was going to have an antagonist, and that would be Friz, another character sitting in the bar, who has also overheard the conversation and is racing Doug for money.

Specifics

A possible example of NPC AI in the game: as soon as Doug enters and exits his house, an ice cream truck appears outside. When he goes away, the truck disappears again.

The interface was styled like the old Sierra games
The game's music includes funk and jazz
There was going to be a Moose Wars-styled action sequence, since Ghormak was once a member of the team
The characters were to behave with "some kind of fuzzy logic algorithm similar to fjeronimo's Finite State machine plugin", probably NPC AI.

Demo

In 2003, the team released a short demo which had three screens (outside the bar, inside the bar and park), one inventory object, some dialogues and no puzzles. Later, after the closure of the project, one of the members put up an extended demo version that contained five new screens (all inside Doug's house, that was closed in the first demo), some other inventory items and other things. However, there was still no intro and no puzzles.

Team

Mikko «Kosm» Salmi
Paavo «Tarantula» Härkönen
Sanna «LadyInBlack» Korpela
Iikka «Y`golonac» Meriläinen

Trivia

One of Chicky’s games, “Reaper”, was going to have characters drawn in a style similar to “Search for Sanity”

Links