No doubt in response to relentless pestering by us that he was too polite to identify as such, Bill Tiller has used the A Vampyre Story Facebook page to deliver a status update on the A Vampyre Story series. Let's read the whole thing, won't we?
Hi All,
Got a request for an update on all things AVS.
AVS2- on Hold. Waiting for funding. There is some progress in this area, but nothing final nor confirmed. That is all I can say without violating any NDAs. Crimson Cow owns the development and distribution rights for AVS2. So it out of AME’s hands.
AVS Year 1: When Mona Met Froderick- On tentative hold. The idea was to do this game back a year ago when I was free to focus on it, but in order to pay my bills I have started working on a really fun first person shooter for the iPhone and iPad with Munky Fun, the old Force Unleashed team who worked on AME’s game engine. So the project isn’t abandoned, it just not getting 100% of our time. But much progress has been made on it. We just need to script it, animate it, paint the backgrounds, and model the props. The game is designed, written, all backgrounds are drawn, and all character models are all built. There is some interest by Munky Fun in possibly developing it with me, but discussion on that won’t conclude till after the current game I am working on is complete. The game will get done regardless of whether MF doe it or not, but it will get done a lot faster and better with MF involvement.
AVS1 on Steam- Steam wants some major bugs to be fixed before they will put it on. Crimson Cow nor AME has enough money to go in and rewrite major sections of the engine to make Valve happy. So this will most likely never happen.
AVS1 on iOS- Crimson Cow and AME would like to see this happen, but we can’t agree on major aspects of the conversion process, so we are at an impasse. My guess this will happen eventually.
All these problems would be solved with venture capital money, but with the very sluggish economy and adventure games have a small profit margin, it’s hard to find a potential investor. So things progress slowly. Sorry, I am sure if I were a better businessman things would work out a lot better, but that is not where my talents lie, obviously. I hope you will forgive this shortcoming of mine, and I do very much appreciate you interest and patience.
Sincerely,
Bill TillerSo, not a wealth of information we didn't know or couldn't glean, but it's still nice to get the straight dope from Bill, and hopefully there are happy endings in the destiny of all these various AVS related efforts.
The Steam hurdle they've experienced surprises and fascinates me. I know AVS had a showstopping bug that got corrected in a patch, but what else could be causing it to fail Valve's screening process that is predicated on "rewriting major sections of the engine?" Is the same thing keeping Ghost Pirates off the service as well? Paging that guy who funded Costume Quest PC...
Update: Bill shortly followed up with a brief Ghost Pirates status report as well:
All things Ghost Pirates- No interest from DTP (I think it was a break even game for them) in the sequel but AME owns the IP and distribution rights to Ghost Pirates and the Galley of Doom, so this may well get made if I find an interested publisher or investor.
Source: A Vampyre Story Facebook page
Jayel
I wonder what kind of bugs Valve was talking about
I think there was a memory leak or something. There was a point for me when the game just kept slowing down after a longish play session. I had to restart it to get everything working smoothly again.
I don't remember any other bugs as nasty as that (except for the dead end, but that got patched).