Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Point-And-Click Adventure Game

[delancie]

Greetings everyone!  I am excited to announce a new project I am working on.  Introducing...

Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Point-And-Click Adventure Game

It's a working title.

The big idea is to gather all the resources I have at my disposal to create a "living model" of the NCC-1701-D.  Essentially, a fully walkable ship.  This model includes up-to [currently] nine playable characters (Picard, Riker, Troi, Worf, LaForge, Crusher, Data, and a no-name Male/Female ensign).

From there, a storyline will either be selected from a previous episode or book, or a new storyline will be crafted.

46 backgrounds currently exist to accommodate the following rooms in the current AGS project.  Almost all backgrounds are coming from the old TNG Technical Manual CD that came out back in the stone ages:
Main Bridge x2
Captain's Ready Room
Conference Room x2
Turbolifts
Sickbay x3
Ten Forward x4
Transporter Room x3
Engineering x4
Shuttle Bay x2
Shuttlecraft Interior
Data's Quarters x3
Picard's Quarters x3
Troi's Quarters x3
Worf's Quarters x3
Holodeck
Corridors x ~10


Some screen shots:




















Development Progress:

Story: 0%
Scripting: 0%
Graphics: 50%
Sound/Music: 50%

Expected completion date: N/A *I need help!*

There is no way I can do all of this myself, so I am actively looking for any adventure-loving trekkies who like what they see and would be interested in helping with:
2D backgrounds
2D sprites & animations
Grabbing video from episodes and cropping out items/animations
Audio and image cataloging
Storyline / puzzle ideas

All ideas and input are welcome.  Looking forward to meeting some like-minded nerds.

Cheers
Ian

[Igor Hardy]

Looks good so far. Now make it so!

btw You DO know that there's an official TNG point & click adventure game that you could rip off some audio/visual stuff from, right?

http://www.mobygames.com/game/star-trek-the-next-generation-a-final-unity

[delancie]

btw You DO know that there's an official TNG point & click adventure game that you could rip off some audio/visual stuff from, right?

Indeed I am aware of STTNG:FU ... This is one of the games from which I am recycling sprites, videos, and voice acted sounds.  I recently fell into a windfall of sprites from this game (they were nearly impossible to extract) which has re-ignited the development process.

It would also seem the much panned "Star Trek Generations" game may have some resources worth grabbing.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up!

Ian

[LocutusofBored]

Hey this is great! Maybe for the ensign you could have Wesley Crusher, or Miles O Brian. If this takes place later you could probably have Ro Laren.

For a story if you do anything that includes Q, you can do just about anything random you want.

Let me know what you need help on, I'd love to help with anything! Maybe even voices?

[FrankT]

Looks like an interesting development coming up here!

[mkennedy]

btw You DO know that there's an official TNG point & click adventure game that you could rip off some audio/visual stuff from, right?

Indeed I am aware of STTNG:FU ... This is one of the games from which I am recycling sprites, videos, and voice acted sounds.  I recently fell into a windfall of sprites from this game (they were nearly impossible to extract) which has re-ignited the development process.

Looking forward to this! Where did you find the sprites though? It would be nice if they were available for others looking to make Star Trek games.

[delancie]

Looking forward to this! Where did you find the sprites though? It would be nice if they were available for others looking to make Star Trek games.
[/quote]

Heh, it only took 7 years and contracting about 12 different people to try to extract the sprite frames from the .spr files in Final Unity (nasty RLE compression for these sprites and a custom palette).  I finally found a kid-genius on IRC who was able to leverage the work the ScummVM team has done on this game, and he wrote a ripping utility.  There are still resources that I'm trying to get out of that game (like inventory sprites and other various animations) so there is more to be lifted.

In addition, there is another person who has been working on ripping and cataloging the speech files from the games "Final Unity" and "Generations."  He has been at it for a few years now and is about 50% of the way done with the job.

I have concerns utilizing AGS forums to post links to these resources (as they aren't my IP) but I DO want to get these resources out there.  I love Star Trek TNG and there aren't any fangame point/click adventures out there!  I'm all about sharing the resources but I'd like to do it in a fashion that prevents a bunch of people all reinventing the wheel, (or should I say warp drive?).  Once I have a good base model of a working enterprise I'll probably release the full AGF project source files so anyone could add new features/enhance existing aspects of the Enterprise "template."

Eventually, we should be able to form a community that develops different "episodes" that can be played.  It might be fun to pick a real TNG episode and try to recreate it in-game.

Also, having a holodeck on-board pretty much means you can import other rooms & characters from other games to utilize as resources in simulation.

Lots and lots of possibilities with this.

Having said all of that, PM me if you want the 9 character sprites, as these are completely ripped.

Ian

[delancie]

Hey this is great! Maybe for the ensign you could have Wesley Crusher, or Miles O Brian. If this takes place later you could probably have Ro Laren.

For a story if you do anything that includes Q, you can do just about anything random you want.

Let me know what you need help on, I'd love to help with anything! Maybe even voices?

If you want to help grab "heads" of those ensigns (ideally one from each of the 8 walking directions), I could probably fuse them onto the existing TNG-uniformed "bodies" to create new characters for Wesley, Ro, O'Brien and others.

I also would be interested in custom storyline if you would like to take a crack at that.

The possibilities are endless provided we can get similar-looking sprites of Q and various other characters.  For this, I may need the help of a 2D sprite artist or two to actually create these, as I don't think there are any "character-ready" sprite sets of classic TNG aliens at my disposal that would match the sprites I grabbed from Final Unity.

As for speech, we are not nearly ready for custom voice-acting, but I'll bet we will eventually need talent to do voices for Romulans, Klingons, Borg, Starfleet Admirals, etc...

Ideally, some millionaire who lurks on these boards will find this message and gift me with enough stipend money to live so I can quit my dumb job and work on this full time.  Barring that, I'm going to need a lot of help from a lot of different people.

Ian

[Ghost]

Hey this is great! Maybe for the ensign you could have Wesley Crusher

ONLY if I am also given a phaser set to "kill most painfully"! (the forums need an evil grin smiley!)
Ahem.

This looks like a lot of fun. I'm really no trekkie but I like the idea of getting a walkable model of the ship. And different storylines- always cool! As for getting resources, I hear there are several people with a soft spot for the series, even having their own forums somewhere- I bet there are ways to get some juicy bits!

[Trapezoid]

If you need ideas for stories, this is a great resource: https://twitter.com/#!/tng_s8

[Igor Hardy]

I have one brilliant episode idea!

Riker commands the holodeck to browse the Internet for more wild scenarios and settings. Unfortunately during a cosmic storm its entire system gets merged with the AGS database. Now Pickard, Data, LaForge and Troi are trapped in a loop teleporting them from one AGS game to another every 15 minutes. At the same time Riker has been possessed by the angry Chzo gods and threatens the fates of the rest of the Enterprise crew and - in the near future - of the whole dimension.

[delancie]

Hahaha yes!  I think it would be fun to have little easter eggs in the holodeck that could send you to scenes from Space Quest and other various adventure games

[delancie]

Update -- I added a few more screenshots to the main post.

The turbolift system is now working!  Right now you access the various decks via an LCARS style interface.

Also finished the base components of deck 1 (Main Bridge, Conference Room & Ready Room).  Rolling out the other decks as listed on the panel.

I NEED HELP!  All kinds!  Looking for trekkies who would like to get involved in this fun project.  Message me if you're interested and what kinda skills you got!

Best,
Ian

[MMMorshew]

This looks amazing so far. It`s very impressive to see how much of this huge load of work you already finished.
If you need someone to make some midi tracks for the game, I`d be more than happy to help you with that. 

[8BitFreak]

If I could offer some critical advice, I don't think Picard's head is quite shiny enough.  You really need to do a little more justice to Stewart's trademarked dome.

[delancie]

Greetings everyone!  Progress is slow, but existent!

I'm looking for help with one specific item at the moment:

As the guts of the Enterprise D continue to get mapped out, I'm noticing that some background screens are very ugly compared to the rest.  This is because I ripped them from old Quicktime movies in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual" CD-ROM (1995).  Certainly not the best quality, especially when you can see big, chunky Quicktime compression all over the place.  See below for a good example of one of these bad backgrounds.  Mostly, these are in the corridor shots.

I'd be looking for someone who could help touch up these screens so they don't look quite as messed up.





Please reply if you're interested and I can get you the backgrounds.

I am also always accepting help with storyline, background images, background animations, additional PC sprites/animations, NPC sprites/animations, etc...

Cheers,
Ian

[CaptainD]

Firstly, I'm so glad that this is still in production!! 

Secondly, if you need a hand with the storyline, PM me any time and I'd be very glad to help.

[Miglioshin]

I also offer my help with storyline/puzzles, I have the complete (Italian) dvd collection so I can actually rip-off the entire series plot/scripts if you want to replicate the best episodes.

There is a wide pool of possibilities... like... choose an episode and choose to be one of the main characters involved in the plot and see the same episode from different point of views (Picard role or Troy role or Data...) i.e.

Just PM or email me