Many, many years ago an incredibly stylish point and click adventure game by John Patrick Green (of Investi-Gators fame!) called "Nearly Departed" caught my attention with its trailer:
The trailer is now 15 years old, back when point and click adventure games were still to make a resurgence and smartphones weren't infesting our lives, and Flash games were still pretty popular.
In fact, Nearly Departed was developed under the LASSIE Engine, which ran under a Flash environment and was written in ActionScript. When development stopped, the game was 90% done or so.
Sadly, it never saw the light of day: a bug in the engine sensibly slowed down the development process, and as time passed by Flash slowly faded away until it became unsupported legacy.
Now, as an avid adventure game fan since the golden years of Lucasfilm Games / LucasArts, I can't afford to let this little gem of a game die like this. Not on my watch.
Also, I was one of the programmers that had the pleasure to help bring back to life Dead Island 2, so apparently it's become my specialty to save zombie game ended up in development hell. :)
That's why this post marks the first step in the creation of what I codenamed... Nearly Departed: EXHUMED!
I want to document the development process by (possibly) regular blog posts, so consider this as the first post in the the game's dev log.
Before proceeding, though, I want to make clear some points about Nearly Departed: EXHUMED and Nearly Departed (NDE and ND from now on).
NDE is my re-implementation of a game that belongs to and is © John Patrick Green called Nearly Departed.
NDE is a weird hybrid between a remake and a porting: whilst I will be using the same exact resources and data used in the original game, I won't be porting the LASSIE code. That is, I'll be re-implementing the original gameplay as meticulously as possible from a conceptual point of view, but I won't port the source code of the LASSIE engine in any way, nor will I reverse engineer the game. It's going to be my own code that works on the original data and tries to behave exactly as the original. In programmers lingo, I'm basically writing an interpreter for the original Nearly Departed game data exported by LASSIE, based on: 1) my observations and assumptions made by actually playing an original game build 2) the information I can infer from the game data itself, which conveniently is just a simple .as (ActionScript) file that packs everything in a single JavaScript-compatible object, so it does include a lot of additional human-readable information that I can just convert to a JSON resource file 3) reading some documentation of the original LASSIE engine when beneficial, but again without ever looking at the original source code
NDE is being made on top of the Unity engine, but without the help of additional excellent tools such as Power Quest or Adventure Creator. This is passion project for me that brings me back the indie vibes that I can't have while working daily on AAA titles. Furthermore, this is supposed to be a fun learning experience for me, not a race to revive a game.
Again, ND is not my game, so while the code to NDE is, I don't own any of the IP/data/assets/resources that it works on.
Finally, many thanks to John Patrick Green for granting me permission to work on this and document it, as well as providing me with the original artwork.
In the next post I'll talk about converting the ActionScript resource file to something that I can easily read and import from Unity. This is going to be a pretty interesting and nerdy process, and would actually allow the game to finally see the light of day if the author wanted to. So stay tuned if you're interested in graphic adventures, programming, or both!
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