Return of the Amazon Queen Sequel

After 27 years, Flight of the Amazon Queen is finally getting a sequel!

You can follow progress on our official page here: amazonqueengame.com

I've been wanting to make a new Amazon Queen for ages. I had a design floating around since the original was released, and even dabbled in making a tiny version for Apple Watch. 

Recent events and advances in tools have made it a possible. George Broussard had introduced me to PowerQuest through the wonderful LocoMotive demo from a year or so ago, and recently Matt Hall reminded me about PowerQuest while I was discussing making Amazon Queen as an isometric 3D game. 

PowerQuest is a Unity package that does all the heavy lifting. How I wish I had this back when we made Flight of the Amazon Queen. As it was, I had to build the game engine AND the game editor AND a dialog editor AND implement the game!!

So, I owe a big thanks to George and Matt for pushing me in the right direction of making the new Queen as a traditional point and click adventure game.

Luckily my good mate and original box cover/manual artist on Flight of the Amazon Queen, Pete Mullins, was keen to jump on board and make the new game with me.

So, we kicked off development just before Christmas 2021 and released a teaser trailer at the start of 2022. You can check it out here:

https://youtu.be/u96m1yQ8hdY

Making an adventure game takes a while, and Pete and I know we are in for a long ride. So I thought it would be nice to document the start of that journey. This blog post is going to show off the current process we have in making the game. I expect this to change over time as we re-learn how to make adventure games :-)

To kick things off, we'd like to share some art from the first location in the game - the Rio de la Meurte Cantina in Mexico.

Rio de la Muerte Cantina

Joe King has run into some trouble with the locals and it's your job to make sure he gets out of Mexico in one piece.

Pete and I are currently building the first location to a high level of polish before tackling the rest of the game. This gives us a chance to test out the art style and animation, implement a bunch of different puzzles, try out different ways to interact with the game world, and to experiment with writing styles for Joe and the rest of the cast.

As previously mentioned, the game is being built in Unity using PowerQuest - a great development tool by Dave Lloyd of Powerhoof.

Pete and I discuss the rough idea for a location and the rooms involved. I  then wire up some crude programmer art of the rooms in Unity. This helps us rapidly test the feel for the location - does it all connect together okay?

John's bad programmer art of the Cantina

Pete then does a pencil sketch of the room.

Pete's blue line art for the cantina

Next Pete produces a cleaned up version of the pencil sketch and gives it to me as a 1920x1080 image so I can drop it into the game to replace my programmer art.

Cleaned up pencil sketch at proper game resolution

During this process we get a better understanding of where the props and characters should be.

Once we're happy with the layout, Pete then builds the room in 3D using Blender. He produces a white box version of the room.

Pete uses Blender to create the rooms

Once this is done we drop the white box render into the game to replace the pencil sketch.

The 3D version built to match the 2D sketch

Then Pete starts to texture the background. He uses pencil sketches as placeholders for the characters.

Pete textures the backgrounds

I keep testing the game, adjusting the dialogs and testing out puzzles while Pete draws and animates the characters.

Here is a near final version of the room with more detail and a finished version of Rosa, the cantina proprietor.

The cantina with more detail and lighting effects

It may seem like a lot of steps, but Pete works very fast - and because it's 3D we can move stuff around easily. For example, moving Rosa from the bar to the table in the middle was a lot faster than if the background had been hand drawn.

Well, that's a sneak peek at the game. 

I'll keep posting our progress and provide some interesting insights into making an adventure game. In a later blog post I'd like to discuss the difference between making a point and click game today compared to back in the nineties. Things have definitely changed :-)

Until next time!

-Johnno