Hand-crafted games! I think this qualifies! Let me tell you about the one I am working on, friends.
I started really programming games after moving to Colorado in the summer of 1998. I could have gone either way when it came to making a certain style of character role playing games, or text adventures. The community around text adventures was much, much more vibrant than anything I could find with CRPG creation. Plus, I don’t think the tools were quite there for CRPGs. Text adventures had wonderful Usenet groups and programming manuals and even some tutorials, so I went that way.
I started thinking about what it would take to make a CRPG in the style of Wizardry, the Bard’s Tale or Might & Magic when I finished Cryptozookeeper. Cryptozookeeper already had combat that was very similar to those RPGs. I started to really think about what pieces were missing and if it would be possible to make a classic RPG in Hugo.
The first hurdle was going to be naming, saving and restoring specific characters. Hugo, like all the other text adventure languages, pretty much starts you with a single entity that makes up the “player.” I wanted to be able to support six adventurers, let the player name these characters whatever they liked, and then let the player refer to characters with syntax like the following:
**>**Trundle, trade scimitar to Mac
**>**Brittany, inventory
**>**look at Jonathan
Since the player could name their characters whatever they liked, I either needed to put every single possible combination of English words in Hugo’s dictionary (so it would understand who the characters named above were) or add these words to the dictionary. Which, with Roody Yogurt’s help, I did.
… With some limitations. I have a routine that lets you give two names to a character. The first is a (longer-ish) “full name.” This full name can have spaces and it’s what is displayed in the character status window. Like “Rick Deckard.” The game then asks for a nickname which has no spaces or special characters, like “Rick.” It makes the game’s text look a lot better when it’s displaying just one word instead of two or more. It’s a compromise. The way to get around this is to either not have the game let the player refer to their characters by name at all, but I was happy with this being a sort of text adventure/CRPG hybrid.
With naming characters comes depicting them. Of the things I can do in a computer game, 3D modeling is not one of them. I decided I was going to use actors and actresses to represent characters. With Cyberganked, though, I wanted to give the player loads of choices. Instead of casting talent to play individual characters, the player picks a portrait during creation.
This meant, rather than having (for instance) four main characters like I did in Necrotic Drift, than I would have a upper limit that was more defined by choice. If you roll a character, how many portraits give you a wide range of possibilities? 10? 10 didn’t seem enough. 20? Well, the thing is, it’s not just getting people to play these characters, but photographing them in a setting as well. This is where the local Haunted House comes into play.
A very good friend of mine named Randy operates the best haunted house in Colorado during the last couple of weeks in September and all through October. He supports his passion with his day job in IT. (Though he has put together a real business with employees and customers and – the critical part of knowing you’ve “made it” – unreasonable customers.) He agreed to let me use his haunted house as a backdrop to Cyberganked. It made the game possible – since I don’t know what actors a player will pick, I need all actors to be in the same locations doing the same things. I can “green screen” some of them (and have) but it’s far more manageable to have real people react to the real things that they see. Unless you’re George Lucas, but that’s just an amazing director getting world-class performances with no nouns in the room.
I realized fairly quickly that I was out of my experiences hiring people to be in this game. I made friends through the haunted house and they were up for being in the game. I used craigslist to drum up interested people. It’s an odd thing to “sell” – it’s a modeling job, with pay, in a haunted house. But the pictures are going to be manipulated and used for a computer game. It’s a computer game with thousands of static photos and any given player may or may not choose you to represent someone. Or, hell, they may pick you six times.
So far, the development is going pretty well. I’ll be at three years in July. I bought a fixer-upper house with my girlfriend recently, so Cyberganked is gonna be delayed by a little bit, since we’re over there every night making the house a home. In my next message I’ll try to talk about why I picked four colors and four colors only for the game. 
