The St. Chris School Lockdown - kickstarter

[criezy]

There have been big names turning to kickstarter to found adventure games in the past year or so, but the great thing about kickstarter is that it also allows new indy developers to try to found their games. The St. Christopher School Lockdown is one of those games. And since I like the premises and would like to see this game done, I wanted to post about it here, where fellow adventure game fans might see it, and hopefully convince more people to back it.

The game will be an episodic 2D point&click adventure game, with seven episodes. You will play a different character in each of the first six episodes (as for the seventh, we will have to wait to know more). The story is about a political protest in a British private school following new financial rulings by the Ministry of Education. It might remind you of events that happened in 2010 in the UK, although the idea for the game apparently came following similar events that happened in Chile in 2011. Anyhow, there is a serious political aspect to the story which I have not seen in many projects and provides the main appeal to me for this game.

The game will include (this is taken from the kickstarter page):

• -- A plot inspired by very current and ongoing political events!
  -- Hand-drawn characters and moody environments in a comic book art style!
  -- Build relationships between characters! Forge and break alliances! Find love! Spread gossip!
  -- Puzzles! Dialogue puzzles! Mini-game puzzles! Gadget puzzles! Computer hacking puzzles! Even a puzzle where you have to play drunken charades in the dark! Yes, really!
  -- Teenage hijinx!
  -- Optional side quests and achievements!
  -- An in-world collectible voodoo doll trading game, featuring a stat-based battle system!
  -- Roleplaying elements, including stats, reputation and a morality gauge!
  -- Puppies!
  -- Hours upon hours of gameplay-- we're shooting for something in the realm of 40+ hours! (Although not PER episode, of course; come on, we're not THAT crazy.)

The game also has a website.

And if you are not convinced yet, there is a great interview at Adventure Gamers.

[secreto]

This sounds more like RPG than a Graphic Adventure...

[Nitrus]

-- Roleplaying elements, including stats, reputation and a morality gauge!

Well, that's not necessarily bad, it suggests that different situations might have different outcomes, or even different endings, which adds to the gameplay. I suspect elements such as those might have been inspired from Japanese sim games.

I tend to dislike games which are based on political events (events drawn from real life, no less), but this looks cool. The art looks pretty, puzzles look unique (which I see as a big plus, today's games tend to rip off the classics puzzle-wise), and the Development Team seems to have a versatile line-up of people with different and interesting skill-sets.

Any more info about voice acting? It seems that they'd only go for voice acting for the cinematics, if they manage to reach a specific monetary goal (see Stretch Goals).

[lazylazyjoe]

Check out kickstartadventure.com. It has a list of all the upcoming adventure games thru kickstarter with videos about each one and posts news and other info about them.

[criezy]

Any more info about voice acting? It seems that they'd only go for voice acting for the cinematics, if they manage to reach a specific monetary goal (see Stretch Goals).

Somebody asked about voice acting in the comments on the kickstarter page and the answer was:

Basically, if we can afford to implement them-- in other words, if we make MORE than our initial goal-- then we definitely would like to have voice acting. However, it is an issue of time and money, and we don't think it would be affordable with our current asking goal-- we'd want a very high quality, which would involve a fairly intensive casting process, acting direction, high quality audio editing software... It's not something we could do on the cheap, and we want to deliver the best product we can!

[LaneyBerry]

Wow, hi there!

I only found this because I randomly Googled our game (yes, I like to keep up on what people are saying about us!). Hi everybody!

In any case-- I just want to point out that while there might be roleplaying elements, this is certainly not an RPG. For one, there will be no combat. Second, all of my inspiration for the design and gameplay comes from traditional Sierra and LucasArts games, and there will be NO fail states. I'm an adventure gamer at heart, and those are the kinds of games I'm interested in making.

So, well, I just wanted to drop in and say hello. As for voice acting, to expand a little bit-- it's definitely something we would like to do. Depending on the result of our Kickstarter within the next three days, it still might be possible, but even if we don't hit the stretch goal, I'd always be more than happy to eventually release a "deluxe" version with voices once we could afford to do so. I already am in touch with some wonderfully talented people; it's just a matter of being able to pay them for their efforts!

By the way, I'm going to state that I've been using ScummVM to run old LucasArts (and sometimes Sierra) titles for the last few years now-- love this emulator.

[CaptainJei]

Thanks for stopping by, Laney. I just went and pledged. The game looks quite intriguing. This is the first time I've been moved to pledge a Kickstarter by an unknown author.