Do you know, that the game The Adventurous Four is notable by the fact that, unlike our other games, it was almost completely written by our translator and graphical designer Sergey?
Olya and I were at that time busy with the publication of Return of Red Riding Hood Enhanced Edition, and Sergey had some free time. I asked him to write a short article about the creation of this game, which you can read below.

The idea to make a sequel for the “Wild Island Quest” came to me a few years ago, when I was working at “The Barbarian and the subterranean caves”. It’s one of our visual novels. The main plot for “Wild Island Quest” was written by another member of NLB project, but I thought: “Why don’t I make a worthy sequel?” I had plenty of free time, and we needed to make something at a higher graphical level. I wanted to create something breathtaking in terms of adventures of young people on an unexplored flying island. I wanted to write a narration with more sophisticated plot which had a lot in common with events from the first part, when heroes, while communicating would recollect their old adventures; someone with excitement, someone with anxiety.
So I made a major plot, made up additional characters, which were about to be created in 3d, rather than main characters, who we already had from the first part. I just made new clothes and gear for them.

It was quite easy to do, because I use Blender 3D. But making new, unique characters was much more challenging task. Making a dragon, whose sketch a found in the internet was especially time consuming. First a made a blank mesh, from which I created a full-fledged character in sculpting mode, which later needed retopology, texturing and rigging.

I don’t remember exactly how much time I spent on it, but approximately 10 days. Other characters were made in a similar way (a troll, a bat, an unknown bird). But Yeti was much easier to create. By using MakeHuman 3d software, I simply created a humanoid character and exported it into blender. Then making hair and changing face was an easy job to do.

In general, I did the job to my satisfaction, because all new characters in the game look much more natural and fair, thanks to new methods of texturing I used. Both for characters and the surrounding. NLB project always tries to raise its professional level in different aspects.

As far as our budget is too tiny to hire freelancers, everything is being done by NLB members, who are few in number. It includes making soundtracks.

I wanted our game to have unique soundtracks, written especially for “The Adventurous Four”. I have no musical education, but I had some experience in writing simple soundtracks for our previous games. It’s quite easy to do, especially when you have very useful free software for creating instrumental music like MuseScore at your disposal, which I eventually used. The quality of my tracks is far from ideal, but I think it’s better than taking something from the Public Domain.

When the text of the narration was written and approved, I translated it into English and we sent it to a proofreader, who was a native speaker. This is a must, because English speaking customers expect high standards of text quality.

I’d like to say a few words about the gameplay and features of the game. Upon reaching a certain point of the game, gamer will be able to choose one of two available traits for each companion of the main character. Those traits will determine future twists of the nonlinear plot. The gamer will also have to make choices of how to follow the plot, because there will be available options to choose from, and characters’ traits picked earlier will affect how characters behave under certain circumstances.

By summing up I’d like to say that it took me 9 months of painstaking labor to create “The Adventurous Four”.

Have a nice day! Game on with high spirits!