LES MISERABLES: THE GAME OF THE BOOK ... Frequently Asked Questions

What this game is about

In this game you enter the story of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Meet the peope, face their challenges, solve their problems (as far as you can!). Six to ten months after releasing this game I will re-release it with another story added, proobaly War and Peace. Six months later I will add another classic story, and so on. As time goes on, more and more stories will be added and the game will becomes larger and larger.

You play Peri Laris, a woman who finds herself with the ability to enter the worlds of classic fiction. She has her own story and her own quest, but you'll find out more about that in the game.

The reason for this game

I like stories. If I enjoy a story then I want to explore the story world, and talk to the interesting people in the book. And sometimes I want to tell the hero what to do.

So it seems to me that the obvious format for a story is not a book, but an adventure game. I am amazed that nobody has done this before. Nobody has turned great stories into adventure games. If nobody else is going to do it then I will.

I like games as well, but I maybe have unusual tastes. I like games that take you into amazing worlds, but are not too hard to play. I like games that combine fun with a serious, worthwhile side. But most games seem to be about fun and nothing more. I want to be informed while I'm entertained. So I decided to make a game that was fairly easy, fun (I hope), and covers subjects that really matter. Life is too short to not have fun, but it's also to short to have just fun and nothing deeper.

Finally, one day I want to make my living telling stories. I don't expect to make much money from this game at first, but I hope to learn from any mistakes and get better. Over the years I will expand and improve it, adding more stories and listening to feedback, and hopefully when I am old it will sell enough copies for me to do it full time. Then I can spend all my free time on my other great love, Georgist economics.

Why this game is unique

Nobody has ever done this before with a game, or at least not in this scale:

1. covered serious topics,

2. adapted great literature,

3. included all the previous games in the same game world. T

Whatever else it may be, the game is unique.

Why 'Peri Larris'?

Peri has her own story that will gradually be unfolded through the other, more famous stories. I wanted a name that suggested a journey, a wanderer, someone with links to the ancient past and other people. But I didn't want a strange name, it had to be fairly simple and ordinary. Peri is a common female name, derived from the Latin 'perigrine' meaning wanderer. Larris is the Roman name for female house spirits who provided a link with the ancestors. The name seemed to fit.

It is serendipitous that Peri Laris sounds a little like Perilous, since ths tories often involve danger (they would be very dull if they didn't). And it sounds a little like Polaris, the north star, the celestial body that provides a fixed navigation point for explorers. And Peri sounds a tiny bit like Paris, wiht the silent 's' as in French, which seemed a nice coincidence for Les Miserables. Finally, Larris is the surname of the real hero of my favorite game, Zak McKracken and the Alin Mindbenders. So it's kind of an accidental tribute.

A history of the game

The game began as a very large idea. Reality has forced me to cut it down to something ore managable for the first release. But it is designed to grow and grow until it is finally as big and amazing as originally planned.

The early days...

I always wanted to do something like this, but as a child I didn't know about computer games, so I thought it would be a series of graphic novels, or something similar. But the scale of the idea (a vast world combining classics and fun) really needs to be a computer game.

In 1997 I began to think seriously about this and started to make notes. In the year 2000 I took a college course in programming (actually two courses, one in Pascal for beginners, then one in C++) and began to build the game using Borland C++ Builder. The working title was "The Endless, Do Anything Game."

Building the universe from scratch

I designed the game so that everything was created by the computer as needed: all graphics, all objects, all stories, everything. The idea was that billions of storeis could be generated across billions of worlds. Each part of the virtual world would be created only when the user chose to look at something as needed, so the whole thing was stored in a huge database of stories and worlds, initially empty, but growing and growing as the user explored deeper and deeper. I planned it so that the virtual universe was bigger than the real universe: that is, there were more than 100 billion galaxies, each of more than 100 billion stars, each star had at least ten planets orbiting it, and so on, right down to people, and sown sot he sub-molecular level if needed.

I must emphasize that this was not 3D in the usual sense. Obviouly the universe was stored in a multi-dimensional database, but the user would see relatively simple flat images. The game is all about the story, not the graphics. I figured that if the game was successful then somebody else could add pretty graphics later.

Anyone who has ever programmed anything will see the fatal flaw in my plans. It was just too ambitious. I spent a couple of years on it, and was evry pleased with the results - there is something extremely satisfying in writing your own programs, and I was very impressed with Borland's C++ Builder. But I calculated that the project would take me about fifty years to complete. It just wasn't prctical.

The world's biggest adventure game

So in 2003 I looked around for a ready made game engine. If I could not create millions and bilions of stories, at least I would find a way to create maybe fifty or sixty. And if I couldn't have the entire universe, I would at least have a large chunk of it.

I looked for an engine that would allow for rapid game development, but was also both flexible and easy to use. I found Sludge, by Hungry Software. I worked away on the game as a hobby until 2006, but by then I needed to make some career choices. I decided that this game had the ptotential to be more thna a hobby, and made it my top priority. Game development stepped into top gear in 2006. I still have a regular day job, so "top gear" means maybe 3 hours a day on average.

By early 2007 I had the first working version of the game, ready to show a few slect people. It contained over 100 worlds, alien planets, other dimensions, locations around the world and underground, time travel into the past and future, and the beginnings of the first story, Les Miserables. I felt pretty confident in labeling it as "the world's biggest adventure game."

Something a little more modest... for now.

In order to create such a huge number of locations, I needed a rough, sketchy graphics style. I also used graphics froma number of different cources. They were filtered to cut down the file size and make them roughly consistent, but the key word is roughly. To the experienced game user they were just ugly and inconsistent. That didn't matter to me. Plenty of great artists have wortk that looks ugly to the untrained eye, and I was sure that people would come to appreciate it. And my friends and fellow adventure game fans agreed.

However, the people with the most experience, the people I had to listen to if I wanted to sell this thing, said the graphics just had to change. The fact is that first impressions count, particularly for the first game from an unknown developer. So the graphics had to improve.

Which brings us to the new graphics. And new nearly-everything-else as well. The only way I could do it (without adding several years to the release date) was to reduce the game to just the story of Les Miserables, and adopt a minimalist art style. The other worlds will wait for later releases. But in the long term this will save time, as one of the biggest time consumers is animation, and minimalist animations are quicker than other kinds. They also allow for more emotion and various other advantages.

The future (at time of writing, September 2007)

The game was originally slated for release on 15th December 2007. The new graphics will add about three months, and I don't want to release this until it's worth buying, so it will go into beta testing and polishing in February 2008 and be ready when the testers say it's ready. Then I start working on the second release, including War and Peace. I hope you like it!