Crazy Mansion Adventure Project

Visit the website at http://crazy-mansion.heim.at

These facts are based on our currently game concept that can change a bit during development.

--->  Classic oldshool adventure game for the PC-System (Windows PC System, at least 1 Ghz, 128 MB graphic-card DirectX 9, Screenresolution 1280x720 / 1024x768, 512 MB System Ram, Soundcard or onboard soundchip, at least 2 GB Diskspace)

--->  DRM Free

--->  Language: English and German (maybe more)

--->  All ingame dialogs dubbed, also a dubbed storyteller during  the game

--->  Painted 2D graphics

--->  A game interface like "S.C.U.M.M. (TM)"

--->  45 screens right now...

--->  ...and it's not only playing in the mansion

--->  Around 300 objects

--->  20 characters

--->  One playable main character, but at some points in the game the possibility to play other side characters

--->  For now one intro and 3 different endings of the game

--->  2 hours of composed music

--->  Dozens of puzzles and...

--->  ... do you remember some stuff like "microwaving the hamster", just to see what will happen? There are many of those things to do in the game. Also there are plenty of what we call "Subquests" (do something, solve puzzles) to see the outcome of your doings. This is beside the main storyline.

--->  The game will be full of dialogs witg black humor, satire, sarcasm, mocking, paradox, blasphemy....

--->  There should be around 20 hours of playing time invested to solve the game

Anybody knows the story about the mysterious incident that should have happened at the old Mansion in the forest some years ago...

A Meteorite hit near the old Mansion. The genius professor who lived there with his family went instantly insane. He was driven by this extraterrestrial, who used him for his evil plan to destroy the world.
The professor even hijacked a young girl, called Sandy.
This was his big mistake. A group of some courageous children who only wanted to save their friends life then saved our world.

This is the story that is still told to all children who aren't well-behaved.
But... "Thats all fucking shit!!", thought the ten years old little kid Timmy.
Today was the first working day in his young life. He really wanted to earn some money to get this new cool Playstation 3 "Modern Warfuck" Edition. It was hard for him to persuade his mother, that he can deliver the newspapers.

After some hard working hours and ten miles on foot there was only one New York Dimes left to deliver. But this last Magazine was addressed for the Old Mansion! Timmy still remembered the words of his mother: 'Take you job seriously, boy! If you throw only one newspaper away you'll get fired! I will ask everywhere if they got a newspaper!'.

Fearfully he went down the road to the old mansion. Just before the entrance of the building he stopped. What the hell! He was totally shocked. The door opened very slowly. He didn't know what he was seeing.

There was an evil looking green monster, looking like the tentacle that he saw in a friends computer game out of the stoneage some weeks ago. This thing began to talk! 'Hey kid, do you got something to eat for me??' 'WAHHH!' Timmy cried and ran away.

He lost his last newspaper on the way, lost his job then.
His mother was frustrated cause she thought the child was using drugs, like all other boys in the neighborhood.

Only Timmy's Uncle, the self claimed "Ghost Hunter" Detlef Digger, believed the words of the boy. Sure he did! Detlef is a former police officer, and worked in the drug department.
Unfortunately he got fired because he consumed all confiscated drugs over years.

In his life he always believed anything from aliens to the illuminati. Maybe the drugs were far too much.
He was ten years without a job. Then the mid-30 though it could be a good idea
to make himself independent. So nowerdays he walks from one retirement home to another to find more mad old people who believe that they need a ghost hunter. Fore sure after a lot of persuading and maybe with the help of a friend who like fasching costumes.

One night Detlef sat in his cellar office. He though how he could expand his "customer range". Then an old woman called Detlef and cried for help.

This Old woman told him something about kidnapping, strange acting persons, a slimy creature who has bulimia, a telefonbook where she got his number in the section and she mentioned the old Mansion.

Of course she also talked about ... Adolf Hitler... the rubble women after the end of world war two... her own war imprisonment and how russian soldiers died while raping her ... her twenty cat's in the last 60 years ... and more bullshit.

To be gentle Detlef listened to her monolog until he heared a load scream and someone hang up the phone.

Detlef realized that there must be a connection in what Timmy told him and this... There must be something going on in the Old Mansion.!

So Detlef decided to visit the old Mansion. In the same Night he started his journey into the biggest Adventure of his Live.

There were two different opinions in our team.

One part of us think that this crowd-funding idea is great and offers the possibility for people like us to launch a huge project. Thats just the opinion of some of us.

The other opinion was, that it seems to some of us, that only some already known people (who got huge success in the entertainment business already) have a chance to realise a well funded project here.

One of us said : "It's entirely utopistic to even think of it. All the funded projects and people behind use all possibilities, like existing contacts in the business, an already huge set-up community or a lot of money to promote a project. The people that should profit from the crowdfunding project can't profit from it."

But we don't share the same opinion in this matter, and thats okay.
We discussed this topic for a long time. In the end we decided to give it a try.

We don't want to entertain the masses with an old school adventure game.
How could we ? This kind of game-genre is not suitable for the mass today.
So we can't rely on external sources, like publishers that want to
make money like hell and have creative control everywhere.
They urge every developer to produce another ultra-realistic 3D Shooter
that the mass of people want to play...

In this times, it would be financial suicide for us to borrow any (more) money from banks. Most of us also got a family to feed, a "normal" everday job and we were and are not able to do something of this scale alone.

So if at least one of us can quit the normal job and make this project like it should be (a year of fulltime work on it...) we need an alternative.

And there it came one day that one of us told the rest that there is this new crowdfunding website, where new projects get funded. Indiegogo with it's independent development community could be what we needed... maybe.

We are huge fans of creative independent games, and this is a chance to prove that there are still other people around that demand for an unique story and puzzle driven, crazy, old shool adventure game.

Our all time favourite is the game that started it all: Maniac Mansion (C) by
Lucas Arts.

• We want to do something "new" and create our very own Adventure Game
• We got our ready game concept with all our special ideas, dialogs and scripts in place. It's ready since we wrote on it together mid-2004. This 300 pages concept is huge and contains much of allusions to the adventure games of the past.
• We want to take the best from this classic (like the interface idea... ) and bring it up into our time, to worship the cult-game we love so much. Also we would use some things from this classic game that started an era. (those parts can easily be used without copyright violations)
• We want to relaunch our crazy-mansion project (from 2005) on a big scale with the help of this crowdfunding idea.... maybe ?!

To finance a real big old school adventure project, that should reach up to our surely high expectations, we need you !
Are there enough crazy people out there who want this
"Crazy Mansion" old school adventure ?

The team under Simon's supervision want to develop a classic point-and-click adventure game.

The development would take place in a period of one year.
Our success isn't making lot's of money, but to "sprout" during the process of creating the game we always wanted to make. At least one of us also have really would like to quit the present job to work on the project fulltime.

Thanks to the possibilities of the internet today (with high speed data transfer), we don't have to work in one place all the time. So a rented office is not urgently required. But we need at least the money to meet up with all members at least once in a week.

Also we need to hire more full time or part time graphic artist.
We want to get them paid for the work, so we could expect the results
that we want to get. They are needed to get the huge amount of artwork done.
Also one of us is looking forward to train a bit with them :)
He can and already had scetched lot's of stuff that we got in mind. He is a bit
capable of colorization. But he did his work in the past when the highest resolution was 320x240 pixel. So he can "pixelate", but we want a game in a modern high resulution.

Our main goal is to attract the gamer with highly professional voice acting.
That's something that will be expensive. We really want to hire some of the known talent to do the synchronization of the ingame speech....
So there are costs to hire this talent and the soundstudio.
Also we need english voice actors.

The game should be released in german and english language.
So some assistance with translating all texts into the english language is required... If you read our text until now you know why ;)
We also want to pay a fee for this work, because at some point we need to get the german source script translated with all dialogs and that's huge.

Furthermore we need money for a new domain and the webtraffic for a release, an appealing new website, of course the franchise articles for our supporters, licensed sounds, maybe some advertising, the license of a special game engine that we prefer to use and many other little things.

Every amount of money for this project is great!

With more funding, we can "walk faster and better" towards our goal. We think that we need at least around 10.000$. That's the money to get the game done in around 1 year, like we got it in mind (e.g. pay additional pro-staff for graphic-arts and voice overs).

Less money means less capabilities. We need more time, it's much harder to get the huge artwork done, we can't get our engine licensed and so on.

But it's great to get more funding than needed,  because this only means more improvement in many ways.

A much higher funding could mean...:

--->  Maybe we could rent an office building

--->  Some of us (or maybe all) could quit their normal daily job to work fulltime

--->  We could hire more extra staff. This means a lot more animations, artwork and a lot of cutscenes as well as even more game content

--->  We could port it to Mac Platforms, iOS and Android Platforms and Linux as well

--->  A Translation into more languages is passible: French, Spanish, Italian, Russian

--->  We can get the best possible voice-over artists for all languages

--->  We could deliver the game also as a boxed version, with a Printed Game Manual and a nice poster.

--->  We could advertise for the game on a big scale, like ads in game magazines

--->  We could think about doing another game....

         Wow, is this woman hot! ;) Beware, it's an alien! 

There is this list on the right side, please have a look.

Something that is very important for us is to ensure that every one who donate a small contribution get the game. So anyone who donate at least 5$ get the digital copy (download possibility) of the finished game.

You would get some rewards as fast as possible (like a T-Shirt, Mousepad, Poster etc.) Some other rewards need some time, like the soundtrack and something like this.

Something that we want to do is build up a private online community.

This means that we let all backers discuss the project with us.
There will be a point, when we need to hear your thoughts and feelings about the game's content and direction that we want to show you in this community.
So we plan on votings on decisions when we think it could help.
Some Backers will also have access to a tech-demo, alpha and beta version, once they are available.

We can't specify at this point that we sell a real boxed version of the game later (or send this to people who donate a special amount).

It could be, but that is something that we want to decide later,
because this depends on the project funding.
One thing is for sure, we want to focus on doing a game and we are not intrested in making big money.

No. Our game is not a remake and of course there is already a good one avaible.

It's also nothing that you can call a sequel to "Maniac Mansion" or "Day of the tentacle".

We wrote a new crazy and unique story. It's very different.We certainly play a bit with things from Maniac Mansion and many other games.
That's the way we pay tribute to this masterpieces.
We use some things fom Maniac Mansion that are necessary in our view.

We don't have any copyrights to Maniac Mansion (it's copyrighted by Lucas Art.). Because we don't want to break any copyright law we never use e.g. names or something that could lead us in trouble.

Simon Henkes ("Antimort")
– Writer, director and producer

Robert Knoof ("Black Knight")
– Co-producer

Dimitri Kurt ("Kenzor")
- Voice actor, lead tester

Timo Maler ("Neo 187")
– Website administrator, promotional work

Michael Sahle ("Micksoul")
– Lead programmer and scripter

Marcus Kästner ("Vailor")
– Art director, character and background artist

Dirk Henkes ("Avendion")
– Lead Music Composer, sound designer and editor

Our Story so far:

Since 20 years we (the team known as "Desperate Studios") are all friends with a passion. This passion is based up on our shared memories of the old days of computer gaming. As we grown up as kids we loved to play together, this started with the first Atari consoles that we owned.

As much as we loved playing, we always loved it to create games.
It's not a lie if I tell you that after a half year in shool we started pogramming our first C-64 basic-games (with 6 years).

Every one of us got his special talent. One of us liked to program, while the others deliver a story idea, made the graphics and the music.

We did so many games and programs on the early home computer systems, the C-64 and Amiga. Also some of us made music for the huge demo-scene at this time. Some of the programs, games and demos we made were released as public domain on Germany's Diskmagazine "Game On" and "Magic Disk 64".
There are projects in our memories for ever, like our first graphic-text-adventure "The Castles of Manderscheid"... based up on a fairy tale that was told kids around the "Eifel" in Germany about two castles.
I could go on for hours now...

We must admit, we were part of a cracking group for some time.
But this wasn't something "illegal" in our mind and we don't regret it.
We shared the whole cracking group "philosophy", you know "Try it... you like it then buy it". So we cracked many classic games... the last one I remember was "Ufo-Terror from the Deep". A Great game!

We always did it "for the fun".

In this former time people were able to create games on the current
technological state.... without investing a penny :) Nowerdays you would'nt even think to make a modern 3D game without millions of dollar in the back.

For a period of time we fall in love with the first MMORPG "Ultima Online"
(a milestone of in gaming history). We ran a "free to play" shard for a long time called "Lemuria". This was a funny time.

We are all grown up now, we got our "normal" every day jobs.
But we never lost our hobby and passion.

The times have changed.
One game is still present: Maniac Mansion.
This classic masterpiece was something that we all loved so much.
One time we discovered how to edit all the text in the game, that was so funny to redo all the script.

We played it together and it's for ever in our mind. The reason is
simple, because it started the new era of Point&Click Adventure games.
Many of the games that followed were amazing.
We want to worship this game(s)...

(C) of all the content of this campaign by Desperate Studios 2012

Updates:

25.06.2012 - Neo has nearly finished the Homepage. Also we discussed today what to do next and we made some cuts to stuff (some of the game characters, screens, puzzles, side quests). We think this a little bit in size reduced concept is much better to realise.... We can swap anytime if necessary.