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[Canute]

Inspired by Bennett's comment on a game dealing with dysentery in the Water Safety on The Oregon Trail tread, here is:

TRANS CONTINENTAL TIN CAN TRAVELLER
Misadventures on the Moscow-Beijing Line

DO YOU DARE TO TRAVEL ACROSS THE VAST RUSSIAN CONTINENT WITH THE CHANCE OF GETTING BOTULISM?

You are a poor and tight fisted young backpacker who is travelling on the Trans Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Beijing in the absolutely cheapest class. Before you boarded the train, you were lucky enough to stumble over an incredibly good supply on somewhat expired and/or misshapen tin cans with various content, which you plan to eat on the seven day trip, since your cheep ticket doesn't include any train food whatsoever.
   But what you didn't know when you made this fine deal was the questionable quality on the food, and that some of it is infested with botulism!
   What will you do? If you eat it, you might be sprouting some mighty fine rigor mortis in your hard-as-rock bunk bed, after painful hours losing various body fluids - or you might attempt to make it across mother Russia on an empty stomach. And since you blew your last rubles on the cans, there's no use trying to buy something onboard...
   Unless you can come up with a cunning plan and be quick about it, you will die, in a more or less humiliating way.

---

So the concept is to make an old school adventure game with 80's Sierra-esque graphics, with some "arcade-ish" features (health meters, brawling, day-timer etc.). But after poking around a bit in MMF I found that Lucasarts style point and click and verbs will be a whole lot easier to code than a text input, so it'll be a mixture of both.
   The educational bit will be going towards the now half-famous Calvin & Hobbes strip: grown-up issues like that you shouldn't eat badly tinned foods and never travel across Russia on your own etc. etc. The adult features would not primarily be sex and nudity, (haven’t decided yet) but to get drunk, acting unmorally, start fights, kill and steal. And of course you will be able to die and/or get thrown of the train in a multiple ways.

But basically it’s just a sophisticated "eat strange foods and eventually get botulism"-simulator...


Here is some mockups of the work so far:



Walk around the beautifully coloured train cars, trying not to starve, avoiding (?) fellow travellers.


You do have a choice, you know.



Graphics will be kept simple in order to get the right feeling (a nice way of saying that it'll help me to concentrate on programming)

And oh, since I'm not very familiar with AGS (which probably would be the natural choice for a game like this) I'm sticking with MMF2.


As for now:
Programming the main game features and events.

Done:
The player movement is almost done and I hope to start on the interaction next week.

[haroldoop]

Interesting concept, but it would be still better if you could get other kinds of sickness, besides botulism. 

[Paint by Numbers]

Reminds me a bit of roguelikes, and the apparent assurance of b-b-botulism reminds me a bit of Real Lives.

Not that that's a bad thing. This looks cool and I want to play it.

[Canute]

So, after a busy week, I managed to squeeze in some time for the game, and now the movement and interaction engine is practically done (although far from perfect, but at least working). I’ve got the different events on the train and the many deaths left to program, but with the much of the basic engine done, I hope that it’ll go on smoothly.

Also, thanks for the encouragement so far guys. I’ve been thinking of having many different ways of dying in order to make things a little more interesting. For diseases, pneumonia, aggressive flu and some STD (Leisure Suit Larry 1 – style) is what I have considered so far. Suggestions on that and how to introduce some more adult themes are welcome.