Announcing EgoVenture

The past

I’ve always been a big fan of the Carol Reed series of adventure games by MDNA games.

In case you don’t know them: Carol’s a private detective solving cases in and around the Swedish town of Norrköping. The game mainly consists of a lot of professional-grade photographs that you wander through in perfect point and click manner while collecting items and solving puzzles. The stories are compelling, gripping and fun and walking around in run-down factories is just the right amount of creepiness I need.

The games are made using the Wintermute engine, which saw its last release over ten years ago at the time of this writing. Wintermute can only create games for the windows operating system.

Being a macOS aficionado I contacted developer Mikael Nyqvist some years ago because I could run his games using Wine on macOS. This was the beginning of a nice partnership where I would recompile his games for macOS and also take some voice parts in the games.

With Apple dropping support for 32 bit software and Wine only slowly catching up with Catalina two years ago and now dropping the i386 platform, this became a burden.

Meanwhile in Sweden, Mikael also was looking for better scalability and broader platform support.

When I sparked a discussion about moving his games to a new engine after getting more intimate with the Godot game engine, things just clicked.

Together we worked down a list of features he needed for his games – which honestly was much more than I expected. However, one feature at a time, we could cross out all things on his list and create a framework for Godot, that would allow easy creation of things just like the Carol Reed series.

The Present

Thankfully, Mikael was always aboard to release the source code and even the sample game with his art under open licenses (MIT and CC-BY-SA).

So today, Deep Entertainment together with MDNA Games would like to announce:

EgoVenture – First person point and click adventure framework for Godot

EgoVenture is a base framework, that takes care of the most basic tasks each game needs, namely:

• Main menu
• Game options
• State and savegame handling
• Scene management
• Inventory handling
• Mouse and touch screen support

and more.

Additionally, its accompanying Godot addons Parrot and Speedy Gonzales complete the games with dialog handling and custom mouse cursors.

Starting a game with EgoVenture is easy using the EgoVenture game template. Check out the getting started guide

If you’d like to see all the features that are possible using EgoVenture, please check out the EgoVenture Example Game made by MDNA games. Up to date releases for Windows, macOS and Linux are available on its own itch.io page

Of course, all addons, the example game and the game template, are available in the Godot asset library.

The future

Mikael has already started creating the new game for 2021 and will be using the EgoVenture engine, so we can expect something awesome in the near future.

Additionally, with EgoVenture and all accompanying addons being released under an open source license, we encourage other game developers to use the framework and if anything happens or questions arise, please don’t hesitate open an issue in the respective issue tracker.

Originally published to dev.to