About Dark Visions the Online Adventure Game

About Dark Visions

What were your influences?

Dark Visions was influenced by the old Sierra adventure games, most notably Colonel's Bequest. To a lesser extent it was influenced by Myst and Seventh Guest.

The plot was also inspired by the old Alfred Hitchcock TV shows and stories. It starts in a novel situation then the tension builds as you discover and understand more pieces of the mystery.

Have you previously made games like this?

Dark Visions is actually a remake of a freeware adventure game we originally created in 1992, and was distributed on AOL for a brief time. The original had 4 color CGA graphics, a somewhat clunky interface, and a smaller house and simpler plot. We feel the new one is greatly improved all around.

Why make Dark Visions?

We always wanted to remake some of our old adventure games. They contained some good ideas at their core, but we were young and inexperienced when we made them. Part of the reason for the remake was we felt we could do a much better job today, and I wanted to at least try once to make an adventure game of similar quality to the ones I played when I was younger.

Another reason is I always felt that there should be a Flash game that recreates the experience of classic adventure games. I have found some that are a bit similar, probably there are some that I missed. But it was still a fun project to create such a game.

Did it take a long time?

Dark Visions took a very long time to make, at least by the standards of a free time project. It was in development over the course of two and a half years with two people working on it. However we didn't work constantly and did take some long breaks. If it was a full-time job I think it would have been about 6 months with two people.

What part of the game was the most work?

Creating the art took the longest for sure, but that doesn't mean the other parts were simple. Design/Gameplay/Text took the second longest. The last significant portion of time was in programming the engine. Various other stuff added up just because there's a lot of stuff to do to release a game. For example sound, testing, instructions/walkthrough...

Why have a female lead?

We didn't want players to feel like their character should solve problems with brute force or be able to physically overpower other characters. Also the situation just seems scarier with a young girl as the lead rather than a middle-aged man.