If you haven’t yet joined the Slattstudio Discord, I’d love to have you out to come and chat. It could be about Betrayed Alliance, but it could also be about Space Quest or Peasant’s Quest or modern games like The Crimson Diamond. Okay, you could even talk about non-EGA-palette games (if you have to!)
Emergency notice!
For those of you who have already joined the discord in the past, I invite you also! You may or may not have noticed the old Slattstudio Discord has suddenly and unceremoniously evaporated and ceased to exist. I apologize for that inconvenience. Sadly, I did not own that server and someone hit the big red button! This server however, I do own. So come on back and join the fun around the table (but no gambling!)
Last Update I mentioned that I was moving to a new stage of development with a goal to Alpha by the end of the year. I put pencil to paper and mapped out the work and it looks feasible (at least on paper!)
February was a busy month in my life and didn’t have a particular goal. During that time I was working on some miscellaneous things, like a vendor and some bracer upgrades for our hero:
The goal for March was to get a certain puzzle area up and running. Here are a few screenshots of this new area:
Puzzle elements are being worked on as we speak and things are coming along (roughly) on schedule.
As we move into April, I’ll be working on a new area with a different aesthetic than the greens of the Verlorn forest, which will be a nice change of pace (and scenery), and May will give me a chance to work on some areas associated with the General (as Leah’s been getting a lot of development attention so far).
I’m feeling quite a lot of enthusiasm for 2025 and the game reaching a new milestone. While I know that this feeling doesn’t last and there is a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone work on the game, I’m gonna ride that wave for as long as I can!
Support
If you like what I’m working on and would like to help, you can support by buying the awesome Game Night shirt or hoodie, perfect for Spring!
You can also support on patreon and if you’re in the $3 tier or higher, you’ll get a new monthly comic. I’m starting a new continuing series where classic Sierra characters will be going on a hunt for a magical feather.
Hello! It’s been a couple of months since the last update, so let’s take a peek at what we’ve been up to!
At his point, it’s all Book 2, all the time!
I’ve started logging my daily work onto a daily work log on the Slattstudio discord. There’s a lot there that will be considered spoilery, though, so be advised!
In the past few months, I’ve worked on a handful of backgrounds, but most of my efforts have been focused on programming and making animations for backgrounds already made. That being said, here’s a few new backgrounds:
Of these three, the bottom one with the golden doors already has the logic and puzzle animations added in, but I don’t want to spoil things there.
Animations take a good amount of time to do, and I’ve gotten around to a few of cool ones. Since I can’t post videos to this site, I’ll have to post them as links to X:
Some recent animations include: Jumping across a gap animation, bridge breaking animation (mostly finished), mushrooms, tiles, doors, etc.
There’s a lot more going on, but showing programming progress isn’t nearly as easy as showing artwork.
I’m also posting comics for those who pledge in the $3 tier on my patreon, if you’re interested in helping finance this passion project in a small, but helpful and appreciated, way. Here’s one of recent ones:
Work is getting done, nevertheless, albeit slowly. But I hope to share lots more great stuff in 2025!
Hello everyone! I hope everyone has had the time to enjoy the revamped version of Betrayed Alliance: Book 1. We released it in May and spent about a month or two fixing up various bugs.
Now 100% of attention is on completing Book 2! We’ve recently picked up a new team member on the crew who has set us up using github and put together a discord server to help with team communication. This will help make testing more streamlined and production better. So let’s hear it for EvilRDennis!
The game still has a lot of baking time in the oven. This game’s scope is much larger than Book 1 and having 2 playable characters with their own areas to explore (and different ways to interact with the world) makes for a lot of work!
Here’s what I’ve been working on lately. This room opens up the a new section where some tree-like enemies find you. Below that is a new character who acts as the merchant in the forest, with his own unique currency.
I am sorry if the development feels like it’s going a bit slow (it is!) but it is getting done. This is the tortoise and the hare, and well, I’m a tortoise. But the finish line will be crossed. This summer I spent a lot of time with my kids, and not a lot on the game. They are young, so I took the opportunity to focus on my family. With school started up again, I will have more structure to spend more focused time on Book 2.
Greetings everyone! With the recent release of the huge update to Book 1 of Betrayed Alliance (now patched to 1.3.3.1 – the final patch for a LONG time!) I wanted to refocus on a few things on the creative front. Finishing Book 2 is the BIG focus moving forward, but I also wanted to reorganize some things about Patreon.
That said, I’m announcing a small patch update to BAB1 for next Thursday, May 23. I’ll tell you what we found, and also what we’re looking at for bigger patches down the road.
Perhaps the most egregious inconsistency is a “look at chest” command which tells you with absolute certainty that the chest has no lock on it, and yet when you try to open it, you get box-blocked by a “It’s locked” message. Nope, it’s not that the game has an untrustworthy narrator, it’s just that I messed up!
The quick-travel map is also slightly bugged, but not in a way that matters for gameplay. Yes, it will always take you to the right place, so no worries there, but a small bug makes it so sometimes foreground images are drawn OVER the map.
Believe it or not, I’m one of the most typo-prone prose writers in the known world. When you add to this the fact that SCI Companion (the tool I used to make the game) has no onboard spell/grammar checker, and you’ll be left with a game riddled with typos. Some of them have been uncovered and fixed – but I’m sure more are lurking in the shadows!
One other “fix” we’ve made concerns the darts minigame. Due to the difficulty of the game’s controls, we’ve made a small change – you now get the puzzle point tied to the game not for winning, but just for challenging the sailor in the first place. While winning 3 times does give you some stats boosts, it is no longer necessary to win a game of darts for puzzle points.
Bigger Things Down the Road
We also have some bigger plans for updates later, one among them is a complete overhaul of the darts minigame, which has been a common complaint about the game.
BAB1 currently supports Adlib, Soundblaster, and MT32 sound drivers, but we plan on getting it up and running with Tandy, PC Speaker, General Midi, and all other sound drivers that used to be standard for games of this type.
As we continue with Books 2 and 3, it will become more important to allow players the option to export and import their character and stats from one Book to the next, similar to the Quest for Glory series.
Show Me What You Got!
The update is coming in just a week. Tell me what you found! Are there bugs, inconsistencies, and/or misspellings that I missed? Join our Betrayed Alliance Discord and let me know!
Or at least, there’s a part of them I love and a part of them I’m really bad at and gets in the way sometimes.
The part I love is the exploration. Adventure games do exploration really well. Whether it’s the immediately open world of Quest for Glory 1 or the more confined but very interesting places you find in Space Quest 3, I really like milling about and interacting with things.
The part I don’t like? Mostly, the puzzles, honestly. I’m very bad at adventure games and I get stuck ALL THE TIME. I was recently playing Thimbleweed Park and I have to say I really had fun with the first two chapters. I loved exploring Thimbleweed and talking to the locals and the mystery. It had magic to it. I even got stuck on a few puzzles, but it wasn’t too bad. In fact, I loved the game and was excited for the next chapter.
Chapter 3, however, blew up with playable characters, complexity, and locales so much that I started to feel a bit bewildered. At the same time, the puzzles start to feel a bit…forced.
With one character, a page unrealistically flies away and out a window for no better reason than “gotta have puzzles.”
I have to do some truly convoluted stuff to get printer ink, and I really don’t want to or care to.
For some reason I have to feed popcorn to some animal, but I can’t use the *empty* swear jar as a vessel to hold the popcorn?
I get it; I’m bad at adventure game puzzles. But they frustrate me when they seem like unnecessary roadblocks just for the sake of having roadblocks. Maybe these puzzles are very intricately woven into the story that’s being told, but when I’m tackling them, I don’t feel like they add anything of value. Of course, I’m still stuck at Chapter 3…so, I could be just an ignorant dumb-dumb head, not knowing the final outcomes.
But it has gotten me wondering:
Will I finish Thimbleweed Park? My enthusiasm substantially dipped after Chapter 2.
Which is more important in adventure games: exploration or puzzles?
For people who love Thimbleweed, don’t worry, you are correct. The game is basically universally praised and highly rated anywhere there are reviews. I’m the odd man out with the bad opinion! Or, more likely, I am just the type of player who values exploration more than puzzles and got frustrated when the exploration ended and the puzzles ramped up.
That’s probably why when designing Betrayed Alliance, I wanted to have a more open feeling, similar to Quest for Glory 1 or the King’s Quest games. Here’s a puzzle box world, now go explore and have fun! Are there puzzles? Of course! Are some of them convoluted and contrived? Probably, but I’ll leave that to you to decide this May, when Book 1 is released as DOS freeware for the world to enjoy.
What’s most important to you in adventure games? Let me know!
Yup, we’re announcing a release month as we wrap up the final touches on Betrayed Alliance Book 1, thank to a stretch goal from the Book 2 Kickstarter campaign.
I had 2 hopes for this year for Betrayed Alliance. One of them was hit, the other one we’re just missing.
The first hope was the release of the Demo for Book 2 – to finally give people a taste of what I’ve been working on for many years now. In February, the Demo for Book 2 released! However, with its release something happened that precipitated my other big hope for 2023 – it wasn’t the demo for Book 2 that was getting downloaded in large numbers, it was Book 1 that was getting bigger traffic. This needed to be addressed!
The second big hope for 2023 was to complete the overhaul of Book 1 with new artwork, bug fixes, and a musical overhaul that would enable the game to play sound using the original 80’s and 90’s era drivers. I wanted people to have the best experience possible with Book 1 before really promoting the Book 2 demo. Here are a few updated backgrounds by myself and Karl Dupere-RIcher.
The big push to complete Book 1 has hit a few bumps in the road, but the game itself is finished, albeit still needing a round of testing or two more and having the final musical elements sorted.
To go along with the release of the update to Book 1, I’ve also put together a physical game manual with hint-guide and a walkthrough. I’m eager to make this and some other merchandise available upon the launch of the game (which will continue to be a free download)! More on that in 2024.
With the virtual completion of Book 1’s update, I turned my attention back to Book 2 and together with Karl Dupere-Richer and we have taken a huge chomp out of the remaining backgrounds for the game. We’re probably just about 20 or so away from a complete map.
With 2023 coming to a close and 2024 on the horizon, look forward to the updated Book 1 release and more news on Betrayed Alliance Book 2, which is deep into development now and looking better and better every day!
A huge thank you to the legendary supporters of EGA games on Patreon. Your excitement and support keeps me going and working on this project day by day. I will do my best to make the wait worth it!
Welcome to the southern realm of the Kingdom of Shelah as depicted by Karl Dupere-Richer, who reworked many of the backgrounds for this game and illustrated this map of the playable overworld area.
Karl also took the difficult step of translating this map into pixels to be used for the in-game map as well.
As for me, I’ve been working on getting this map up and running in the game so that you can actually use it, which is now possible and looks much better than how it used to:
Hint Guides and Walkthroughs
In the past I had been asked to put together a walkthrough for Betrayed Alliance, which I had done a long time ago. But with this update I wanted to take an extra step and not only redo the walkthrough (as a number of things had changed), but also put together a hint guide for those who didn’t necessarily want the answer, but welcomed an additional nudge in the right direction.
So I put together this document which took quite a lot more time than I had imagined! It includes pictures for easier navigation, guided hints, and then straight-up answers. With the pictures (and a decent amount of white space) it ended up being about 40 pages long with 6,600 words. Not a bad little document! And am I very glad it is “done,” although I haven’t proofed it yet.
Odds and Ends
While the playtesting build for Book 1 has been out in the wild, I haven’t gotten a lot of unsolicited feedback, so I will need to be a bit more direct and actually ask people to help personally (crazy thought I know!). The good thing about that is that I’ve been doing small updates in the shadows anyway. A couple of updates are the battle system artwork, UI, and coding, and the Rotating Tower scene needing a visual update:
I needed to make the player character taller to start as the proportions always felt “off” to me. Because of this I also needed to redraw the other character’s battle sprites (minus the troll here!)
I had thought about using the same battle system artwork and animation I had used for Book 2, but I think this will end up working better for the type of battle system in Book 1 where the mechanics are not the same as they are in Book 2.
I also did some work on the Rotating Tower, mostly ornamental work to the borders, but also some color changes that I think make the mood fit a bit better:
So that’s about it for the what’s been going on lately. There’s a whole lot of boring small fixes and bugs that I had to fix, but they’re not so interesting to show all the time.
Working on the game has been a slow process, especially with the ongoing ordeal that has taken my time away since January, having to do with a flooding basement. But we are now finally nearing the end of that as I’ve gotten the floors recarpeted, walls are almost finished repainting, and it won’t be long before we can move the furniture and regain a bit of breathing space in our cramped home. But I won’t complain too much; things could be much worse than that! I still have some time to work on Betrayed Alliance and that gives me a bit of respite!
Slattstudio 