My original plan was to release the game by the end of March, but I have to postpone that date again.
The last few weeks (since the end of January) have been marked by bad news in my private life and even several bereavements in the family, which has thrown me off track. 2024 has been a dark year so far and the stream of bad news doesn't seem to stop.
Most things have been sorted out so far and I feel able to go back to work. I am confident of releasing the game in the 2nd quarter of the year even though I decided to enter a date in the third quarter in consultation with the Steam support team. I apologize and hope for your understanding.

What is the current status?
- The final translations into English have to be done (I saved the "best" for last), then a beta version can actually be put together for English-speaking testers.
- The German dubbing is not yet complete. A few smaller roles still need to be casted and recorded.
- After that there should only be some bug fixes, maybe I'll swap out one or two pieces of music again or add additional sound effects, just little things.

The live streams from the Steam Next Fest where I play the demo version of the game in both English and German are now available on YouTube. Of course I recommend to play the demo yourself, but if you want to watch me playing it you're welcome.

German (with voice overs and subtitles):
[previewyoutube=OviMx32pO9I;full][/previewyoutube]

English (with subtitles):
[previewyoutube=9SLh-xXwreQ;full][/previewyoutube]

The Demo was updated to version 1.0.1 which fixes some minor problems:

- Added missing English translations
- Fixed some English translations
- Fixed missing version number in the main menu when switched to English
- Fixed Bob Wormley falling off his cushion
- Fixed moving and popping subtitles while the camera moves

Watch me play the German demo version of my classic 3d point and click adventure from start to finish. I chose to play the German version because it features full voice overs, but of course it has English subtitles if you play it yourself.

Watch me play the Demo version of my own classic 3D cartoon point and click adventure "Wormventures - Barrier 51".

Will I remember what to do even though I grew old while developing it for the last eight years? Stay tuned...

I just released the long anticipated Demo version of the game for Windows and Linux. It features German voice overs and subtitles as well as subtitles in English. The playtime should be around one hour. Have fun!

As a game developer, you obviously want as many people as possible to be able to play your creation, but sometimes you have to be sensible...

After some time of testing on MacOS, I decided with a heavy heart to no longer release the game for this system. There are too many different problems that have arisen there. For one player the installation via Steam doesn't work, for another it works but it won't start. For someone else, both installation and startup work, but there are countless graphical errors that make it impossible to play.

Since I don't have an Apple system myself, it's difficult for me to isolate the errors myself and I have to rely on other people. These are not good conditions for being able to offer support for an application or game. My motto is: Better not to offer the game on a system at all than to disappoint the players and not even be able to help them when they encounter technical problems.

In my childish naivety, I assumed that if the Unity Engine offered the ability to create a build for MacOS, there would be no problems with this, but I was proven wrong.

Maybe in the future I will find a way to make the game playable on MacOS and also be able to offer decent support. In this case, I would of course publish a MacOS port, but under the current circumstances, publishing it would be irresponsible.

Since I'm solo developing my 3D cartoon point&click adventure "Wormventures - Barrier 51" in my free time, I won't be able to get it translated into more languages than German (voice overs and subtitles) and English (subtitles only).
But at least I managed to get the Steam Store page localized into french, spanish and portuguese, which I am very happy about.
Of course I am not able to evaluate the quality of those translations. So if you are a native french, spanish or portuguese speaker feel free to stop by at the Steam page of the game and maybe give me a hint if something seems to be off translation-wise. Thank you!

First playthrough
I just reached another milestone in the development of the game. I finished the first real playthough of the the game. For every chapter I collected things that have to be polished and bugs as well. I even implemented some quality of life improvements like the language selection and load / save screens. For example it is possible now to name your savegame instead of only having a time and date as the savegame name.

The game features seven chapters and five of them are already polished and called final by me. Chapter 6 still has some bugs and things to improve. Chapter 7 only needs a little bit of polishing (tweaking some camera angles and directions of where characters look at).

Playtime
While doing the first playthough I recorded the playtime of each chapter to be able to give some values when asked. I recorded the times under the following conditions / constraints:

• Played using an optimized walkthrough (perfect order of doing things)
  
• Not really solving any puzzles, but always using the right answers / codes / ingredients initially
  
• No optional actions (not looked at a single hotspot in any scene, not picked a single optional dialogue option)
  
• Always using the shortest walk paths and the perfect scene order while running all the time
  
• Not skipping any mandatory cutscenes or dialogues
  

Hey yall,

I just released a new Trailer for the game in English and German.

I lately thought about what all the great classic adventure games that I grew up with had in common. What is the essence of a classic point and click adventure? What was it those games taught us adolescents that made us nice, respectful and responsible grown ups?

Basically three things came to my mind: Vandalism, theft and fraud.

Of course "Wormventures - Barrier 51" is a pure classic in that regard and this is what the new Trailer is all about.

Have fun!

Marcus

English:
[previewyoutube=bNzCx5r85QY;full][/previewyoutube]

German:
[previewyoutube=2IB93JwixRM;full][/previewyoutube]

Hi,

I'm quite excited, because today my one-month Sabbatical started, in which I will try to finish my solo developed 3D cartoon point&click adventure game "Wormventures - Barrier 51" in full time instead of just working on it every now and then in the evenings.

I'm working on it for seven years now and if all goes well I plan to have the full game ready (at least for starting a beta testing round) at the end of October. For that time I'll post my progress regulary on my Devlog at http://www.wormventures.com, so I want to invite you to follow me along.

Wish me luck!

With best regards
Marcus

I uploaded a new video today that shows a bit of gameplay like movement, hotspot snoop function, inventory and hotspot interactions, dialogs and so on. It's in german and also features the german voice overs, therefore it is only available on the german Steam store front page right now.

I will wrap up a similar video in english language without the voice overs in the next days to have a gameplay video on the english/international store front page, too.

Voice Overs
I thought about implementing voice overs in the game for a long time and it seemed to be something that I could not afford financially and also time-wise. Then I made this terrible mistake at the end of 2022 by recording some test voice overs for one scene of the game. What can I say: It sounds and feels so good and adds so much quality to the game that there is no way around this anymore:

[h2]The game will have full german voice overs![/h2]

I am currently casting german voice over artists to record all the voice over files for the demo version of the game and a bit more for the characters, that are featured in the demo and have appearances later in the game. At the moment I cannot say anything about english voice overs in the future, but for now they are not planned and I'm not working on them.

Demo Version
After having a demo version ready mid 2022 I found it to be a bit short. It featured the interactive intro to the game (Chapter 0.5) and had a playing time of something like 20 to 30 minutes. So I decided to include the whole first chapter (of seven) into the demo version which will result in a playing time of 1 to 2 hours I guess which I think is better to get a real impression of what the game will have to offer.

Hi there, Marcus here. This time I like to re-post an article from my development blog from December 2020 to show some of the characters from the game:

The last 10 or so days I was busy creating characters for the game. Until then there were only 9 out of a total of around 50 characters ready. In most scenes there were dummy objects, mostly cylinders, that you could talk to. Now, the total worm count in the game is at 23, which means that almost half of the characters are done. And even though some of them are not final it is very motivating to have real characters in the game now that look, smile and laugh at you.



If I had to animate and create blend shapes for facial expressions for every single worm I wouldnt be able to do it, but all animations I create for Looky are useable by any other character. A list of facial blend shapes like phonemes (for lip synching) and expressions are also available for all new characters. I only have to create those that are unique for a character.

In addition I recently bought a new asset pack from the Unity Asset Store that has 100 hats available game ready. I already used some of them for the new characters like the police officer and the Cannibal Chef and I tried to let Looky wear a christmas hat which makes him look quite festive:

Hi there, Marcus here. This is a devlog from November 2020 when Looky's run animation was created:

From time to time I come back to my worm models to add some animations like last weekend. I added a nice looking run animation to Looky so that when you double click somewhere on the screen and that point is far enough away from Looky, he will run (or better said jump) to that point. To have points of interest in a scene that are quite far from each other by design is one thing, but not to have an option to get there fast is another. Or more precisely: Its best to keep the routes very short by design, but occasionaly you want the player to be aware of distances between things and you have to make sure as a game designer to not let that frustrate him or her.



Im quite happy with how the run animation turned out and I made some other animations too, to make dialogs a lot more lively. For example I added a dismissive gesture when Looky said Aw, dont worry! and a shake animation when he holds his breath, while trying to buy some chili powder from Aunt Emma.
The very cool thing about this is the fact that those animations are not only recycable across several dialogs, but also across all worms in the game. Since all characters use the same Animator Controller (maybe I explain the animation engine in more detail in a future blog post), all animations that I add to Looky are automatically usable by all other worms.

For example these are some moments in the game, where I could use the Point animation:


But dont worry: Wormventures Barrier 51 wont be a Point-On-Everything game.

Hi there, Marcus here. Since Steam's news system seems to be quite nice to work with, I decided to post future development updates and logs here and remove the devlog from the Wormventures - Barrier 51 homepage. At first I will move my older devlogs to Steam to have them all at one place.

This time I want to tell more about my approach to create this game, beginning with implenting the raw game logic and then detailing each scene.

Creation philosophy
First thing I did was creating each scene with just simple geometry like boxes and cylinders that represent the very rough scene layout and the things, the player can interact with. This was completely done with Blender, a free 3D modeling software and meanwhile a beast of an application. I work with Blender for many years now and since it was a little bit quirky in the past (selecting with right mouse button and so on, which can be really confusing when switching back and forth between Unity and Blender) it is now completely industry compatible in terms of controls (common mouse and keyboard layout).

This is an example of a super-rough greyboxing scene layout in Blender:


After designing the scene in Blender it was opened in Unity, the game engine I'm using to create this game. In Unity all logic elements of a scene were added like hotspots, markers to move the characters from point to point and triggers to make things happen if the player moves into a certain area. Camera and a rough lighting was implemented as well at this point of time.

This is the same scene in Unity with the hotspots and markers in place:


This process was done for all scenes. Basic dialogs were implemented, some of them as simple as "Give me item" for the player to say. Just there to connect the whole game logic underneath. By doing this I had a completely playable game in a relatively short period of time ... which was unbelievably ugly. Since then all the graphics, sounds, music, lighting, animations, dialogs and of course the story are being added. Some rooms with local puzzles are unfinished and are currently skipped when playing the game. They can be included into the game very quickly and get in, when they are done.

This is the same scene in a more detailed state:

Hi there, Marcus here. For those of you, who like some background information about Wormventures - Barrier 51, I made a video a while back that shows the game in 1999, 2007 and 2020.

The 1999 Version was made with Blitz3D, a programming language with the focus on creating games, that was popular back then. I coded some nice systems for camera movement, dialogues, inventory and so on, but the workflow for getting a 3d model moddeled, rigged (supplying bones to the character, so he can move) and imported into Blitz3D was ... let me try to find some adaquate words ... complicated. It never got far in production in this 3D version.

2007 Looky - The Adventure was released as a freeware title which was basically the first half of Wormventures - Barrier 51 in 2D made with the Wintermute Engine, a point&click adventure focused game engine. I updated the game in 2012 with complete english translation, better video quality and no need to install a special video codec anymore. It can still be downloaded at Bullshit Softworx itch.io page.

The 2020 version of the game you can see in the video is the current game. Meanwhile some changes were made to the lighting and it has an entirely new UI (mouse cursors, buttons, etc.), but apart from that this is Wormventures - Barrier 51.

Can't wait to show a demo to you. I'm currently working on it.

[previewyoutube=4rI9xPAjfUE;full][/previewyoutube]