Messages

I just played the demo and I liked it. I wanted to give some feedback, because as a passive-only social media user (I read, but don't have accounts), I can't comment on Twitter. (Why don't game developers use good old e-mail these days?) I wanted to ask to include a windowed mode option. It's OK anyway because alt-enter works in this game (in many games it doesn't), but it would be simpler to have the option in the settings menu.
And second - are you considering more language options? Because I thought that I'd like to translate it to Polish... You can send me a PM if you are interested.

I decided to give some feedback too. I really loved "Long in the Tooth", I'm waiting for a full version, and since I learned that you made more games... I liked "Off the Clock", it was really funny, but particularly since I discovered that you're also making this game... Are you still working on it? Anyway, I think that "Long in the Tooth" should have priority, but if "Truth Be Trolled" sees the light of day, it would be great too.

Beautiful sceneries, but I have also seen one very bloody scene in another screenshot collection.

Thanks a lot for the update. It's beautiful, although I must admit that I found the swan pond a little disappointing (should have expected that the flowers will look brown at night...). But particularly th facade of Genesta's palace looks amazing.
Will you be updating the message in the bottle?

DrSlash - could you perhaps tell when, approximately, can the patch be expected?
And I thought... I'm no artist, I lack a steady hand, a good mouse (it tends to perform double clicks when my finger does a single click and I often somehow can't hold the button - it too seems to be murine* fault, not mine) and visual imagination... but a model already exists in form of the AGI version. Maybe I'd try drawing a SCI version of the "Beam Me room"? In fact, I even have an item-related idea: the golden ball remains on the ground after Rosella lures the frog with it and the turns it back into a prince, and can be picked up again. Maybe it could be used somewhere in Lolotte's castle in the morning to be sent to that room?
I remember when I wrote to the developer of "Betrayed Alliance" and complained that the arcade game in the cave is too hard (and it's needed to get an item! By the way, it has a lot of Sierra cameos, such as 'Enry the 'Ermit, Rosella, Erasmus, Roger Wilco, Aziza, Larry Laffer, Laura Bow...  ) and I had an idea about how to improve it for the double-left-handed. In "Space Quest 1" you can attach a little magnetic device to a gambling machine in Ulence Flats and win every time until the machine overheats. And the developer included my idea.

*"Mus" is "mouse" in Latin and "murinus" is the adjective from this noun. Actually used in scientific texts, one can find phrases such as "murine DNA fragment". So why not use it here?

When running in ScummVM is it possible for the character to max out his skills? When I tried with the old dos version my save games all got corrupted.

I don't know. At some point ScummVM didn't support QfG4, so I had to stick with DOSBox and I'm not sure if I tried running it in ScummVM.
There is one more problem with ScummVM, at least to double-left-handed users such as myself: it's harder to get it to "see" the character save. When I was doing it (QfG2 VGA remake ---> QfG3 ScummVM), I had to change ScummVM's save paths and I messed up my default settings for saving stuff in ScummVM. Since then, I have no idea where do my screenshots end up when I play a game which has a ScummVM profile in D-Fend Reloaded (earlier it was Alt-S and all neatly ended in D-Fend Reloaded\Capture\game title) and I need to use Irfan View for screenshots from ScummVM games instead.

A postscript not about games. The captcha is ridiculous. Now I got a new question: "Are you not a robot?". I wanted to humbly point out that, as far as I know, English (and also Polish) lacks something for example German has: a positive answer to a negative question (in German: doch).

However, hypothetically speaking, I would love to see someone remake Quest for Glory III more than anything else. QfG3 doesn't need any significant updates to its visuals or gameplay mechanics, but its story could definitely be fleshed out a bit more and there just isn't that much stuff to do in the game (especially for the Thief class).

QfG3 is buggy, first of all. I have tested running it in ScummVM a few years ago and it helps a lot, but is not perfectly smooth either.
1. When playing through DOSBox, I never get any extra dialogue topics when I meet Harami again. Always the same ones as on the first evening.
2. There is one major bug with ScummVM: day/night cycle not working visually. That is, all nighttime events happen as they should, but visually, it doesn't get dark.
3. There will probably always be some bugs in the currently existing version, regardless of the emulator. I often don't get new responses at the bazaar (the same ones as on the first day), the last time I played it, if I remember well, I couldn't "catch" Janna telling the hero that Khatib died. And randomly placed events in this game (finding the honeybird, the blue orchid, meeting Johari and Manu...) can take a lot of time, which is very frustrating.
Altogether, these bugs prevented me from getting a perfect score regardless of whether I used DOSBox or ScummVM. But the latter seems to allow bypassing more bugs.

QfG4 is less buggy, but has a famous bug at the very end:

Spoiler

Ad Avis respawns after having been defeated. In my experience, possible to bypass only by simultaneously slowing the game down a lot in-game (the menu game speed option) and using Ctrl-F11 in D-Fend Reloaded to further slow the emulation down.

[close]

King's Quest IV was (...) the first adventure game to feature a female protagonist

And this is scary: that for so long men have considered us Uninteresting People.

OK, now I'll move on to what I came here for. I wanted to comment because I have just played the game. Some of my loose thoughts about it:
1. I have discovered it quite accidentally! Why isn't it promoted everywhere where there are game developers who "admit" to retro inspiration?
2. When I first discovered "King's Quest 4", I greatly enjoyed checking how do places change after nightfall... and was very disappointed to see that, apparently, at night you just can't return to Genesta's island. Rosella would just get tired and drown. (At some point I complained about it somewhere and someone commented, something like: typical Sierra - don't want to do extra graphics? Block a whole area off in an implausible way! ) Thanks a lot for fixing that flaw.
3. Obviously, also thanks for reworking the cave section. In the original, the fragment with crossing the chasm was unfair to the point of being just ridiculous. Now it's much better.
4. Although, the "readme" file seems to indicate that there is some way of getting rid of the troll, or having him let you pass. I haven't discovered it - any hint?
5. Therefore (?), I also had "only" 228 points, unlike in the original.
6. Improvement idea. I actually liked the new text on the note found in the whale's mouth, but I was a little disappointed that there's nothing more. Perhaps it could promote other retro games, particularly EGA/EGA-ish ones - you'd of couse need to talk to their developers. "The Crimson Diamond", "Betrayed Alliance", "Snail Trek", "Cascadia Quest", and just now a guy from Powerhoof is making some little EGA game for Adventure Jam, I hope that it will be available... (Actually, I checked out the Adventure Jam site, but haven't seen any information about this game - and I can't contact omost game developers directly because I only use social media "passively"- (that is, I read some profiles without having any accounts.)
7. As most players probably know, the SCI version didn't have the "Beam Me" room. I wondered if you had nevertheless recreated it for this version. And if yes - how to get there without a text parser?
8. I love good-quality EGA, although I still prefer VGA (if I had to choose a single favourite game, it would probably be "Foxtail") and I still hope that a VGA version of "King's Quest 4" will be made some day. I regret that one of the people who attempted a remake died, but I don't regret that remake itself - I'm open about disliking 3D and I didn't like how Rosella looked too sexy in the 3D version... really, can't we have female protagonists without catering to horny men? I know we can, but I just dislike this direction of development.
Just some of my thoughts, thank you in advance for commenting and answering my questions.