| A Man to Remember (March 29, 2008) |  Well that is it, my childhood is officially over. I held on to it as long as possible, and here's why.
Sunday was the best day of the week for me because I would start the day watching Walter Payton run over the Packers, play some D&D with my best friend Geoff, then we'd go out in the woods behind my house and re-enact our game. (Yes, I even had a cool cloak I would wear and swung a cheap plastic sword that always bent at the hilt. I know, I know but there was no Geek-a-holics Anonymous I could join to get cured.) Then Geoff and I would run in to watch WTTW PBS At The Movies with Gene Siskel, then Cosmos with Carl Sagan, and cap the day off with a half hour of the Muppet Show.
So with the passing of E. Gary Gygax, all living links to my glorious childhood Sundays have passed. I am greatly saddened.
I started playing D&D back in 1979, and haven't quit since, though I usually go about one to two years between sessions now. I was living in suburban Chicago back then. The Mecca of geekdom, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, was just an hour away and the first Sunday of each month they had a mini D&D convention. So Geoff and I would drag our parents up there once in a while and spend some quality time with Gary. I never got to play with him though. There were so many people who wanted to play with him you had to roll high on a 20 sided die in order to win the chance. I never won. But I did get to talk to him a little, and he signed my copy of The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. While he was signing, I mumbled my name and he wrote "to George Tiller, All the best – Gary Gygax." I should have named my son George so that mistake would have worked out. Darn!
While working on Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, I wrote to Gary Gygax to get some trap design tips and to tell him his modules were a major influence on that game, especially the dreaded Tomb of Horrors. He was awesome, replying to all me emails and answering all my questions. I even got advice on how to run the Temple of Elemental Evil which was the module I was running at the time. So if Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine feels a bit like the Tomb of Horrors you will know why.
In return for all his generous time, I sent him new copies of Lucas Arts games which he passed on to his son who really enjoyed them. One thing he said to me was, "You young folks get to do such amazing things now. I am really in awe of what you do." That meant a lot to me.
I learned how to design games thanks to him and his modules, and the endless hours of DM-ing. And that experience serves me well now as I design my first professional game. I have designed and run hundreds of private games and game sessions. So I want to say thanks to Gary for all the great adventures he wrote, for all the knowledge of game designing he gave me through his myriad books, and all the game design advice he gave me over email. You are awesome.
Even before his death I hid quite a few D&D references throughout A Vampyre Story, my way of acknowledging his influence on me. I am really sad I can't send him a copy of the game now. Enjoy looking for them when you play the game.
Goodbye, Gary. I can't thank you enough for being such a powerful influence on my life! |
Bill Tiller | | | | Straight from the horse's mouth (February 03, 2008) |  Hi Adventure Game Fans,
I want to give you all an update on what we are doing and give you some news. First, we are frantically working on all the bug fixes and scripting for AVS1. No firm release date yet but we are getting close and I'm thrilled with the progress.
Autumn Moon is expanding! That is exciting news. We just hired on three new team members, Mark Teal a long time industry vet who has worked for Interplay, Shiny and Midway, has come on board as VP of Business Development and Executive Producer. Publishers should contact him from now on. Mark will be freeing up my time to concentrate on all things creative.
Autumn Moon also wants to welcome aboard Zeno Gerakin who is taking over scripting chores for our departed Will Holland. Will is finishing his pursuit of an MA at the University of Massachusetts. We wish him the best of luck and thank him for all his hard work!
Jeremiah Grant, lately of Stormfront Studios, will be starting this month as Art Tech. He just finished up work on The Spiderwick Chronicles, and will be working on all of our games doing sets, rigs, scripting and anything else we can think of.
The engine work done by Randy Cully's company, Bear Technology, is coming along nicely thanks to him and Geoff Goldberg. I want to thank them for all their incredible hard work. Their company is also working on a new, next gen engine and details of that will be appearing at http://www.bear-technology.com/. All their experience from working at Interplay and THQ are really paying off for us and we are thrilled to be working with them.
Autumn Moon will also be moving to a new office this month in order to accommodate our growing team. Details of that move will be in next month's blog.
And that leads me to job openings. We have three new positions opening up at AME over the next three months: Junior Animator, Scripter/ Writer, and 2d Painter. Please check in at our Jobs section for information over the next few months about those positions. Currently, the 2d Painter position is at the top of our list. So please go here http://amegames.com/jobs.asp to read details about the position and how to contact us.
This is an exciting time at Autumn Moon and we are all working hard and eagerly looking forward to releasing our first game. |
Bill Tiller | | | | Christmas Card (December 27, 2007) |  AME is sorry we are so late posting out Christmas card, but we accidentally set our windows Outlook to the Julian calendar.
Those of you in Russia, sorry we are a bit early. |
Bill Tiller | | | | Happy Halloween! (October 30, 2007) |  Happy Halloween Everybody,
Well no long web log from me this season, but I have a few goodies for you to check out. Autumn Moon happily shares our office with teach radio talk show host, Leo Laporte, the Tech Guy. And we sent him a Halloween card which he posted right here (http://leoville.com/blog). Leo hosts This Week in Tech (TWIT) pod cast on iTunes (http://www.twit.tv) and could be heard on his syndicated radio show very Sunday (http://techguylabs.com/radio/pmwiki.php). Go have a listen, it is really good. Even if you don’t like tech talk, Leo has great voice to listen too anyway. Maybe we can find a use for that voice in A Vampyre Story. Hmmmm.
Also this week Autumn Moon artist Jean Louis Sirios did one of our two annual Halloween cards. It is great ‘movie poster’ starring two of my favorite characters form our games, Mona and The Mortus Monster. Jean Louis did a great job I think in capturing the feel of the old lobby cards and posters form the golden age of cinema. I am going to add this to our café press line up as soon as I figure out how to navigate my way through their process.
Also we have a new blog by our head writer, Dave Harris, over at http://www.vampyrestory-game.com and they will post our other Halloween card there shortly.
I entered the Double Fine pumpkin carving contest, so go check it out at the forum. My pumpkin may look familiar. By the way Tim Schaffer’s new game Brutal Legend (Does anyone know how to add the umlot? Or spell umlot?) looks really funny and fun- like Full Throttle with guitars, and blood, and mêlée combat, and long hair, and demons. Go check it out at http://www.brutallegendgame.com/splash.
And a production update for you all: We are about a month away from finishing the art for A Vampyre Story, and will start on A Vampyre Story Two this December. After the art is done we have three more months of scripting and engine programming, and our big voice recording session. Then we will be done!
And just to clear a few things up, the game started full production in July 2006, and it will be a full game, not episodic - AVS will be about the length of Full Throttle (Lucas Arts 1994). And like Lord of the Rings or the Star Wars Trilogy, the story is an odyssey that requires three ‘books’ to tell. The first two games deal with Moan and Froderick trying to escape Draxsylvania, and the third game takes place in Paris, where Mona attempts to fulfill her dream of becoming an Parisian opera star.
That is it for now. Everybody have a fun and safe Halloween! |
Bill Tiller | | | | Secrets Revealed, Sorta (June 14, 2007) | Hi All,
Bill Tiller here. Sorry I don’t write a blog everyday (or every season for that matter) but I am not only the director of the project, I am also the game designer, art director, the story board artist, FMV editor, special effects animator, business manager , texture painter, 3d lighting artist, and main background artist. So my plate is pretty full.
But I figure it was time to write something! So I will quickly take this opportunity to clear up some questions about the game. First we are shooting for a 2007 Q4 release of the game, but we can’t promise that in all markets. One should Contact Crimson Cow about that at http://www.crimsoncowgames.com. They have the world wide rights to the game and control when and where it will be released.
Second, we are starting to plan for hitting the ground running on AVS2 as soon as we are done with AVS1, because the whole A Vampyre Story plot spans multiple games. At least three but I envision four, and then after that possibly A Vampyre Story episodic games. Mona’s journey is an odyssey that, like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, needs more than one chapter to tell the whole story. So -knock on wood- we hope to be making AVS games for the next two years. I’m crossing my fingers and I hope you like AVS1.
Next I want to answer a question I get asked a lot; Did Tim Burton influence the art style for A Vampyre Story? The simple answer is no, but realistically, a little. I just wanted to clear up who my main artistic influences were: Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, NC Wyeth, Chuck Jones, and Edward Gorey. I loved the Hildebrandt’s (http://brothershildebrandt.com) when I was teenager and copied them a lot. They I started studying the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_c_wyeth). His sense of light was very inspiring to me.
Like all kids I loved Warner Bros. cartoons, especially the ones by Chuck Jones, and what I really liked was the wacky backgrounds with their impossible angles, distorted shapes, and asymmetrical designs. But as kid I never studies, but as an adult at Cal Arts when I was studying to be an animator, I really got into the so called carton style. One of my mentors, Jules Engles was even one of the inventors of the modern cartoon look while he was working at UPA studios on Gerald McBoing Boing and Mr. Magoo (http://www.upapix.com).
Edward Gorey (http://www.goreyography.com/west/west.htm) is big influence on me and Tim Burton. I loved Edward Gorey’s art in The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Beliars, and for the PBS TV show Mystery. So I think his influence, plus the similar subject matter that Tim Burton and I enjoy, and they fact we were both animators at Cal Arts, may have a lot to do with why some think Tim Burton is such an influence of mine. Tim Burton. Nightmare before Christmas was an influence on the style we came up with for Curse of Monkey Island, and that style influence A Vampyre Story’s style, so in a round about way he is an influence, but not directly.
Edward Gorey’s subject matter and writing were a huge influence on the feel and plot of A Vampyre Story, The Gilded Bat (http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~klhorowi/goreybbow.html) especially. I even originally wanted to do the game in Edward Gorey pen and ink style, but everyone I talked to about really wanted to see my color art, and I realized black and white would be great for a two hour movie, but for fifteen hour game color would be needed to keep people’s interest and keep the game from feeling too gloomy.
I, like Tim Burton, loved watching hours and hours of Creature feature monster movies on TV as kid. Tim Burton is nine years older than me, so we had similar suburban childhood. So a lot the stuff he liked as a kid, I liked as kid too, such as Batman, Planet of the Apes, Disney’s Sleepy Hollow, Hammer Films, Charlie and the Chocolate factory, the Rankin/Bass stop motion TV specials. Tim likes Halloween and Christmas a lot, and so do I. Heck I was born the day after Halloween, - Halloween is like Christmas in October for me.
The biggest difference between us artistically is I like color more than Tim Burton. He loves black- Oh! God, does he ever! But you won’t find a pixel of pure black in A Vampyre Story (navy blue maybe, but not black). I like color, bright saturated, complementary color. That comes from my love of N. C Wyeth and the Hildebrandt brothers. So if someone wanted to sum up A Vampyre Story’s style in one sentence, they could accurately say it is Edward Gorey meets the Brothers Hildebrandt. Don’t get me wrong, I love black and white a lot, but color is really my thing.
And since I am on the subject of influences on A Vampyre Story I of course have to cite the Universal Horror films of the 1930’s and 1940’s, as well as the horror films made by Hammer Studios in the 1950’s and 1960’s as tow major inspirations. In fact the hammer film Brides of Dracula and Dracula’s Daughter are probably the two biggest influences on the creation of Mona de Lafitte, our main character. I recommend anyone who likes stylistic and romantic vampire movies to rent both of these. |
Thanks,
Bill Tiller | | | | Autumn Moon's A Night Before Christmas (December 23, 2006) |  'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through AME,
Employees were painting, writing and programming as quick as could be.
The team working hard, delayed their holiday fun,
In hopes the vertical slice soon would be done.
Bill Eaken sat quietly, painting a scene,
While animated Mona danced on his screen.
I pounded out dialogue on my keyboard tray,
and was just getting ready to call it a day,
When in front of the office there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,
Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
As I peered through the window time seemed to slow,
As I tried to comprehend the object below,
Suspicions I was losing it my mind did arouse,
As I looked upon a Honda towed by eight crimson cows,
As the moonlight beamed down upon red bovine skin,
The door to the car opened, the driver emerged from within,
Who could it be, some crazed holiday killer?
Thankfully no, it was just William Tiller!
"It's Christmas everybody!" he said with a roar,
Then he bounded up the steps to the AME office door,
Stepping inside he started to yell,
"Gather round everybody I've got a story to tell!"
"As this year began, I had the lofty goal.
"To get Autumn Moon started; now we're on a roll!"
"Soon Mona and Froderick will be coming alive,"
And with that he gave his wife Amy a quick high-five.
"Thanks to Aaron, Jimmy, Mike, Craig, Jeremy and Bill,"
"And countless others, you managed to give me the thrill,"
Of breathing new life into the classic adventure game,
While other companies regretfully choose to abstain,
From producing titles focusing on humor and story."
Instead making games all too violent and gory."
"So screw those guys and their stupid plans,"
"I've got one more thing to say to our fans."
"I just wanted to say how much your support has meant,
With all of the calls you've made and the messages you've sent.
"Without your help we wouldn't be here today,
So to you a heartfelt THANKS I wanted to say."
His message delivered, Bill turned on a dime,
Dashing out the door into his car he did climb.
To his small herd of cows he gave a quick whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight,
"Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night." |
By Dave Harris
LEAD Writer
Autumn Moon Entertainment | | | | EPISODE IV: A New Blog (October 27, 2006) |  "Hey Bill, maybe we should create a blog for the AME web site." – Dave Harris
*Five Second Pause* "Okay, go for it dude." – Bill Tiller
Note to self: When Bill Tiller becomes engrossed in drawing something, he becomes highly susceptible to suggestion.
2nd Note to self: Damnit, you should have asked for something else (a more comfortable office chair or even a simple request for Bill to shower before coming into the office).
Welcome to the first edition of the Autumn Moon Entertainment blog, written by yours truly, Dave Harris - head writer for every game currently on the AME Games production slate. My intention is to use this blog as a way to provide updates about the life and times of Autumn Moon Entertainment…..and excise my personal demons. Okay, maybe not that last part, but since this is my first attempt at maintaining a blog, instead of just dry updates about the progress of A Vampyre Story, I may regale you with random thoughts and humorous anecdotes, although no promises on the humorous part – after writing action dialogue for the past couple of weeks, the humor well may have run dry. After all, you really have to stretch to come up with something amusing to say when the player decides to stretch the limits of Adventure Game reality (ex. Use Vampire Power: BITE…STAINED GLASS WINDOW). I'd let you know what Mona says if you try such a thing, but I'd hate to spoil the surprise. But I'll tell you right now, it's comedy gold.
Autumn Moon Entertainment found a permanent place to live six weeks ago – we moved into our new offices in Petaluma CA. And for clarity, "moving in" really means, "find a place to pile all of Bill's crap" (Bill may have a minor hoarding disorder – so far, it's only art books, DVDs, games, boxes of comic books and old pieces of LucasArts memorabilia such as the large Curse of Monkey Island standee that now graces the back corner of the office). "Moving in" also included the construction of the modular office furniture we ordered. For the record, Amy Tiller was able to assemble two desks in the time it took me to complete building my own desk, which to this day remains incomplete. But, I blame my lack of progress on my complete incompetence with tools. On a related note, as we approach the holiday season, I keep having a recurring nightmare – it's Christmas morning, I'm sitting in front of a large pile of loose bicycle parts. I desperately press the assembly instructions into my face in a vain attempt to absorb the information through osmosis. In the background, my son sits crying. It's a haunting image.
While I've been writing, Bill Tiller and Bill Eaken have been drawing and painting characters and location backgrounds. We've also completed the 3D models for several characters including Rufus the Gargoyle, Madame Strigoi, and Buttercup the horse. While we have yet to make the final,final edits, in terms of scope, I'll just say that the AME team believes A Vampyre Story is going to be a robust adventure game, with enough locations and puzzles to keep even the most experienced adventure gamer satisfied. The game is going to be divided into three chapters, with a succinct set of goals for each area. Chapter One takes place in the Castle Warg, Chapter Two in the fictional town of Vlad's Landing, and Chapter Three takes place in and around the castle of Dr. Riga Mortis. Chapter Three will also give you the opportunity to play the game as Froderick the Bat, Mona's smart-ass sidekick (you actually have to play as Froderick during Chapter 3 because Mona is….shall we say…indisposed).
Well, that's it for now. I know, I know, not too much game information. I'd like to share more with you but Bill just yelled at me saying, "hey, don't give too much away." Thanks again to everybody for your ongoing support of A Vampyre Story. I'll try to update the blog area every week or two. And, as time permits, I'll also jump into the Vampyre Story forum to provide additional updates and answer questions. But for now, I have t get back to dialogue writing. Hmmmm…….just what is a good line for BITE LANTERN? |
Dave Harris
LEAD Writer
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