Calling Jake

When I first played The 7th Guest, it was at a friend from school’s house: he was the only person I knew with a cd-rom drive. We played it, I think, all the way through, and I have many happy memories of those times.
I have barely spoken to Jake since, and over the last year or so while I’ve been investigating the game, I’ve also been remembering those times. I thought I’d let him know what I was up to, and to remind him of those times too. But I can’t find him on tinternet at all, it has failed me! So Jake Taylor from Hale, if you’re reading this (bit of a long shot), leave a comment!

Messiness & recovery

This post is predominantly an apology. In order to get the surfaces working the same way that they do in the original, I’ve had to hack apart some of the beautifully structured code that jvprat wrote, and my coding is not as… well, good.
Anyway, the internal structure is more suited to continuing work now, but there are extra graphical glitches for your delectation. Mmmmm.

Delayed spiders…

Well, it took longer than I’d have thought (I don’t have as much time to dedicate to this project as Scott does, ok?), but I finally got the spider door puzzle working. Turns out that the engine uses two surfaces, a foreground and a background, and the front one is partially transparent. Here’s me thinking i wouldn’t have to worry about sprites and the like. Still, done now. Probably not the most efficient way, but hey it works. Cake next? Nah, telescope I think 🙂

Uncle Henry

Well, jvprat found an auction of what is probably* the last groovie game: Uncle Henry’s Playhouse. Astonishingly, the person selling had three shrinkwrapped copies (and it doesn’t look like Butterfly-ware, before anyone asks!). I had looked everywhere for this, so I was willing to pay the (quite high, but not FM-Towns high) price. There’s still one copy left, if anyone wants it:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=380019732447&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT&ih=025
ION: I have no internet at home. Which makes work on t7gre awkward (and means I have to post this from work). But I’m getting some stuff done. Hopefully I’ll get internet back start of next week, and be able to commit it.

* I say probably because we’re just assuming it’s a groovie engine game. Seems likely, as it is just a collection of puzzles from the earlier groovie engine games, but you never know till you see a file list!