It's here at last!
(https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/promos/Friday5-Promo08.png)
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 :wink: ). 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.
(https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/promos/Friday5-Promo09.png)
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.
(https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/promos/Friday5-Promo10.png)
(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 (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2714-barn-runner-5-the-forever-friday-5)
115 Mb download
583 Mb installed
Made with AGS 3.5.1**
(https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/promos/Friday5-Promo14.png)
(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.) :wink:
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! (https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/misc/Roger_Grin.gif)
(https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/promos/Friday5-Promo01.png)
EDIT: Updated to version 1.1 to fix a nasty bug that Creamy found. :embarrassed:
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* 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. :cool:
As a quick follow up, I realize that some of you may have never played a Barn Runner game (or haven't played one for a long time). I didn't want to clutter up the already too long post above with even more information, so here is what you need to know about the Barn Runner games. First off, the numbering system is broken beyond all repair by this point – doubly so after I started releasing side-stories in the series. But here are the games and the order I would recommend playing them.
Keep in mind the older games are OLD and you might need to do a little work to get them running on a modern system. (I keep an old gaming rig around just for my older games, but I know not everyone has that option).
The Armageddon Éclair (parts 1 and 2)
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/488/
The Ejection Rejection
https://www.barnrunner.com/barn2.html
Don't Jerk The Trigger of Love
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/486/
The Mayor's New Dress
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1593/
Christmas Soup
https://www.barnrunner.com/xmas0.html
The Prick Who Came In From The Cold
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/476/
Cyclone Alley
https://www.barnrunner.com/xmas1.html
The Rich Dame Who Cut The Cheese
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1662/
Fully Automatic Mojo*
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1381/
Wreck The Halls
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/967/
The Forever Friday 1
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1041/
The Forever Friday 2
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1099/
The Forever Friday 3
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/1443/
The Forever Friday 4
https://www.barnrunner.com/games/BR5_Game_4.rar
Pucker Factor*
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2459/
The Forever Friday 5
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/2714/
That's a lot of games and I certainly don't expect you to play them all, but that's the Barn Runner series, not in the order it was released, but in the order the side-stories fit into the larger story. Games marked with an * have a special "AGS Awards" upgrade patch on my website that adds a little bit of extra content to commemorate a nomination or win in years past.
Sorry for the double post!
Lol, I remember these series be among the first AGS games I played back 10+ years ago. I've always wondered how the story ended.
Quote from: Ponch on Sat 02/12/2023 23:01:54Keep in mind the older games are OLD and you might need to do a little work to get them running on a modern system.
Ah, I must intervene and mention that the contemporary 3.* engines are theoretically capable of running old games too, starting with AGS 2.5 ones. This is done by placing acwin.exe into the game's directory and running it instead of a game's exe (starting with 3.6.0 engine you also need SDL2.dll). The modern setup may be launched from command line like "acwin.exe --setup".
There may be minor graphical glitches sometimes, but I think "Armageddon Eclair" runs fine, for example.
EDIT:
Well, technically you do not have to place acwin.exe into this game dir at all, and run from command line like "acwin.exe <path-to-game>". You can even make bat files for each old game you play and put them along with acwin.exe in one folder...
Also, thanks to the people from ScummVM, you may play these games in ScummVM too, as they practically feature our ags engine (more or less same) in their system.
Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Sun 03/12/2023 07:32:39Lol, I remember these series be among the first AGS games I played back 10+ years ago. I've always wondered how the story ended.
I hope it will be worth the wait. (http://www.barnrunner.com/pics/misc/roger_3.gif)
And thanks for the tech suggestions. In the back of my mind, I was starting to think I might have to spend my declining years remastering the old games so people would be able to experience them in the future, when we'll all be plugged into the Meta pods. Now I don't have to worry about that. I can spend my golden years in Las vegas, sitting in front of the slot machines! :cool:
Woot! Finally :D
...I just realized I might need to replay the entire saga. It's been so long half of the jokes might be lost on me now!
Quote from: Kastchey on Sun 03/12/2023 18:16:48Woot! Finally :D
...I just realized I might need to replay the entire saga. It's been so long half of the jokes might be lost on me now!
Thanks! :cheesy:
Considering this is the 17th game in the series, Chapter 5 contains lots and lots of references to events and people I don't bother to explain very well in this installment... a bit like the new season of Futurama. :wink:
FANTASTIC!
It's been a long time, but I can also feel the need for a series replay coming on.
Congratulations on the release Mr Cow I greatly look forward to playing it. :-D
Quote from: Intense Degree on Mon 04/12/2023 12:03:23FANTASTIC!
It's been a long time, but I can also feel the need for a series replay coming on.
Congratulations on the release Mr Cow I greatly look forward to playing it. :-D
A series replay is a great idea! There's nothing more cozy than an adventure game on a cold winter's night. (https://www.barnrunner.com/pics/misc/Roger_Canada.png)
Congrats! Forever Friday comes to an end! Downloading now
Honestly, Ponch, I've been around here since 2005-ish and your games are what I think of when I think of AGS games. You make good stuff, and when I make mine my brain occasionally background-thinks about wanting to get on your level. Congrats on the release, I can't wait to play it!
And update: My spouse brought this home today, it's a sign!!!
(https://i.postimg.cc/0rNR25Bz/ItsASign.png) (https://postimg.cc/0rNR25Bz)
Big congrats for releasing Chapter 5, Ponch. This is a huge milestone and you should be proud!
And for your golden years, you need a limo to take you to the slot machines. :grin:
No! A wave of nostalgia! Stay back! STAY BA-...
...
Congratulations on the new release, Ponch! ;-D
And congratulations on one hell of an oeuvre!
Sweet biscuits! So many replies! :shocked:
Quote from: kconan on Thu 07/12/2023 02:50:11Congrats! Forever Friday comes to an end! Downloading now
Thanks, kbro. But in the interest of full disclosure, this is only the first half of the last part of the Forever Friday. The next final installment, tentatively though probably not titled Barn Runner 5: The Forever Friday - Chapter Five (part b) will be along in a couple of years. :=
I hope it will be worth the additional wait.
Quote from: The Great Underground Empire on Thu 07/12/2023 11:50:29Honestly, Ponch, I've been around here since 2005-ish and your games are what I think of when I think of AGS games. You make good stuff, and when I make mine my brain occasionally background-thinks about wanting to get on your level. Congrats on the release, I can't wait to play it!
And update: My spouse brought this home today, it's a sign!!!
It is indeed a sign! :cheesy: Thanks for the kind words, I really appreciate it. I'm glad old timers like you are still around. Chicken vs Road II when? :wink:
Quote from: Frodo on Fri 08/12/2023 21:49:29Big congrats for releasing Chapter 5, Ponch. This is a huge milestone and you should be proud!
And for your golden years, you need a limo to take you to the slot machines. :grin:
Thanks, Frodo. I wouldn't have made it across the finish line without your help. I'll start pestering you with beta builds of Forever Friday chapter 6 in about six months. :=
Quote from: LimpingFish on Fri 08/12/2023 23:36:32No! A wave of nostalgia! Stay back! STAY BA-...
...
Congratulations on the new release, Ponch! ;-D
And congratulations on one hell of an oeuvre!
Oeuvre! So unspeakably fancy. Merci! (https://www.vanwijst.com/games/smileys/french_cup.gif) Give in to the nostalgia! Resistance is futile!
Thanks to everybody who has commented and played so far. It warms this cranky old heart of mine to see the people still remember this ancient game series of mine.
This game is massive! I'm still playing it but I can already offer some feedback:
Good variety of puzzles. The previous entries were harder in my memory. I wasn't stuck for very long so far - except for one hacking mini game where I failed to notice a crucial element.
The sliding puzzles and hidden objects offer a nice change of pace.
The dress up games work well. There's a game breaking bug in the robot suit mini game:
Spoiler
If you put on her right shoe before the leg, she says "I need to put the leg first" and the shoe disappears.
The racing game is my least favorite one. It feels stiff and unforgiving, like in
Barn Runner 2: The Ejection Rejection.
I can only dream of a gameplay à la Last & Furious (https://github.com/ivan-mogilko/ags-lastfurious)
Risqué banter has always been part of the charm of the Barn Runner series.
This one goes even further. It can be wordy at times, with the erotic daydreams of Noriko slowing the story to a crawl.
It's easy to forget that you're in the middle of a robot revolution.
Is it a good or a bad thing? Your mileage may vary.
Although it's been a while since I played the previous entries, I haven't lost the thread of the story so far.
Nice job with Noriko's French. Pedants' corner:
Spoiler
"Rillettes" = potted meat. Not necessarily salmon. It can be made of pig, goose, duck...
Thanks, Creamy! (or "merci" if you prefer! :wink: ) I appreciate any and all feedback.
To address your points:
Did the built-in hint system make the game easier? Or were the puzzles just weaker? Noriko is supposed to be much smarter than Prick, so she's able to give herself hints, apparently. Would the puzzles have been more challenging without the hints? I ask because chapter 6 is in active development, so there's plenty of time to rethink my approach to puzzles (admittedly never a strong point of any of my games). :embarrassed:
Thanks for finding that bug, by the way. I'll get that squished and upload a new version soon.
I thought about doing a racing sequence through the transit tunnel from a perspective more like the old game OutRun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMv0Pg1AxFc). There are certainly enough resources available for modern AGS to make that possible. But my grumpy old heart loves top down stuff like Spy Hunter. :cool:
Regarding the more adult moments in the game, well, we each deal with the apocalypse in our own way. Besides, Pucker Factor revealed that Noriko is secretly a dangerously horny woman. Also, putting this more mature stuff in the story wasn't something I decided to do lightly. I promise I'm going somewhere plot relevant with it. All will become clear as the Barn Runner story winds down with This Shameless Tomorrow and finally Recycle My Heart... assuming I live long enough to actually finish this series.
I'm happy to hear the story held up well enough to follow it, despite this new chapter being so very, very late.
As for the rilletes, you're right, of course. Blame my own nostalgia, I suppose. My French-Canadian grandmother made the best salmon rillettes (always served with tasty little shallots).
Thanks for playing! :cheesy:
A new Barn Runner game? Is it Christmas already?!? Oh wait, it is!!! (laugh)
It's great to see this long-running series still continuing, can't wait to play it!
Merry Christmas, Ponch! :cheesy:
Thanks, Lorenzo. I look forward to reading your feedback, and I hope you like it!* Happy New Year! :cheesy:
- P
--------------
* p.s.
Spoiler
I hope you like the Bartolomeo cameo I put in the game. :=
Quote from: Ponch on Wed 27/12/2023 18:21:28* p.s.Spoiler
I hope you like the Bartolomeo cameo I put in the game. :=
Whaat?! Moving the game to the top of my to-play list -- oh wait, it was already there! ;)