The 13th Doll: A Fan Game of The 7th Guest

[the13thdoll]

Hey All,

I'm a member of the Attic Door Productions team behind The 13th Doll. The 13th Doll has been in production on and off for 10 years! The goal has been to give fans of The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour the re-visit to the Stauf mansion that they always wanted. There have been a couple of attempts at an official 3rd game in the series known as The Collector but, those plans never really panned out.

So, the original License holder reached out to us, and gave us permission to not only produce our game, but also to be able to run a Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64161490/the-13th-doll-a-fan-game-of-the-7th-guest), allowing us the resources to work FULL TIME on the game and to get it done by the end of the year! Did I mention that this is a FAN game, by and for Fans of The 7th Guest series? How cool is that!?

So what does our game have that Adventure Gamers will love?

26 Puzzles
Over 50 original musical pieces
5 possible endings
2 player paths
Oh BTW, we can get the ORIGINAL Stauf if we are successful!


We built the latest version of the game in Unity, which means it is the first-ever free-move 1st person access to the Stauf mansion! So yes, we had to put this in the "Modern Gaming" category. However, rest assured that the music, the house, and the gameplay are almost EXACTLY the same as the original game!

Thank you for the great forums here! I will be around to answer any questions you might have about the project and its history!

[Jorpho]

Jinkies, ten years! I would be excited to finally put something like that behind me.

Are you still using FMV of real actors?

[the13thdoll]

Are you still using FMV of real actors?

Yes! In fact, if the Kickstarter goes well we are hoping to get the actor from the original game back!

[Tanooki]

Good luck on the campaign, says a lot the company who invented the franchise gave you that much backing and leeway to go for it. I killed the 7th Guest back in the day on the CDi of all things, and dabbled with the 11th Hour somewhere else too before.

[the13thdoll]

Good luck on the campaign, says a lot the company who invented the franchise gave you that much backing and leeway to go for it. I killed the 7th Guest back in the day on the CDi of all things, and dabbled with the 11th Hour somewhere else too before.

Thanks for the well-wishes!

I personally never played the CDi release but, it was my father who bought the original game. I still have the CDs for T7G and T11H, plus I have bought the Android 20th Anniversary edition and the older iOS version from when I had an iPod touch.

Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine both knew about our project many years ago. When Rob re-formed Trilobyte, we pretty quickly reached out to him regarding our project and got a loose agreement written up as a non-profit game. THEY actually came to US later asking if we'd like to change the license to allow for a Kickstarter and such! So yes, very cool team there.

[Gameguy]

So this is a project that has been worked on for 10 years, had to be scrapped and now restarted from the beginning? This doesn't give me a lot of confidence to start giving money towards this project. Plus it's for a series that has aged pretty horribly IMO. I have the original game complete in box with the strategy guide and I just can't stand playing it. It's FMV close to it's worst.



says a lot the company who invented the franchise gave you that much backing and leeway to go for it.
Probably because they somewhat recently tried to make a sequel themselves through kickstarter and failed, and made another attempt on Crowdtilt which also failed. They know the property is essentially worthless now so there's no loss to letting someone else make use of it. There's a small chance this will increase the value of their property so they could only benefit from it.

Personally I don't understand how it's still described on kickstarter as not an official game in the series when it's actually licensed by Trilobyte. Being licensed means it's considered official, they're letting the game actually be sold. It's not even a spinoff game loosely connected to the others, it features the same main character returning to the same location as the original game, continuing the story. Maybe it's a marketing failure?

From the FAQ on current kickstarter;

Is 40,000 Dollars enough of a budget to allow for a team to complete the game in an effective manner?

Not quite. We'll need 60 to properly fund the game through development. However, 40K gets us far enough that we can go into a bit of debt for the rest.
So why ask for $40000 instead of the full funds needed? Because that's all that could be funded with the previous campaign on Crowdtilt (https://trilobyte.crowdhoster.com/the-7th-guest-3-the-collector). I have little confidence that this project will be successful.

[the13thdoll]

So this is a project that has been worked on for 10 years, had to be scrapped and now restarted from the beginning? This doesn't give me a lot of confidence to start giving money towards this project. Plus it's for a series that has aged pretty horribly IMO. I have the original game complete in box with the strategy guide and I just can't stand playing it. It's FMV close to it's worst.

Probably because they somewhat recently tried to make a sequel themselves through kickstarter and failed, and made another attempt on Crowdtilt which also failed. They know the property is essentially worthless now so there's no loss to letting someone else make use of it. There's a small chance this will increase the value of their property so they could only benefit from it.

Personally I don't understand how it's still described on kickstarter as not an official game in the series when it's actually licensed by Trilobyte. Being licensed means it's considered official, they're letting the game actually be sold. It's not even a spinoff game loosely connected to the others, it features the same main character returning to the same location as the original game, continuing the story. Maybe it's a marketing failure?

From the FAQ on current kickstarter;

So why ask for $40000 instead of the full funds needed? Because that's all that could be funded with the previous campaign on Crowdtilt (https://trilobyte.crowdhoster.com/the-7th-guest-3-the-collector). I have little confidence that this project will be successful.

T7G was one of the first, if not the first game to ever have FMV so yeah, "at the worst" is relative.

Secondly, we scrapped the original version because so much time had passed since we started and technology had improved so much compared to the original way we coded the project. Considering half of the game is completely done, including everything in the Kickstater video and all of that in the past 6 months is pretty impressive all things considered.

Lastly, we are not directly affiliated with Trilobyte. We know the crowd-funding history they had but it was not all that much of an influence on how we set our numbers. We just want to have resources to dedicate full-time to the game. We are also not allowed to say we are an official sequel. That isn't marketing but, licensing.

[Tanooki]

Wow Gameguy, rude.

Be fair, at least let this ride out and take its course and see if it can be funded or not before getting snappy about it.

[Bojay1997]

Wow Gameguy, rude.

Be fair, at least let this ride out and take its course and see if it can be funded or not before getting snappy about it.

Be fair? Aren't you the guy that always bitches about Kickstarter being nothing more than a platform for "pan handling". In my opinion, this is exactly the kind of high risk, poorly conceived project that requires significant scrutiny from potential backers. They literally failed to release a game after years of work because they were "too ambitious". Now, they want people to give them money to start over, but somehow if they get $40K, they will go in debt for the remaining $20K and promise to deliver something by late 2015 or early 2016? There is literally no way even an experienced fully funded developer could deliver on that promise. This has huge red flags flying all over it and it's definitely not something I can get behind.

[Gameguy]

T7G was one of the first, if not the first game to ever have FMV so yeah, "at the worst" is relative.

Secondly, we scrapped the original version because so much time had passed since we started and technology had improved so much compared to the original way we coded the project. Considering half of the game is completely done, including everything in the Kickstater video and all of that in the past 6 months is pretty impressive all things considered.

Lastly, we are not directly affiliated with Trilobyte. We know the crowd-funding history they had but it was not all that much of an influence on how we set our numbers. We just want to have resources to dedicate full-time to the game. We are also not allowed to say we are an official sequel. That isn't marketing but, licensing.
FMV games have been around since the early 80's, first one I know of is Astron Belt from 1983. Followed by Dragon's Lair. If you ignore these early animated FMV games and stick to live action, Mad Dog McCree, Night Trap, and Sewer Shark all predate 7th Guest. They may not be the same genre, but as someone who likes adventure games I found The 7th Guest to be mediocre with the ways the puzzles were implemented in the game.

My point with the scrapped version was that with so much time spent on it, it should have been completed. Not being able to complete an FMV game within that much time doesn't give me confidence that you'll be able to finish this new game so quickly even with proper funding. I'm thinking of how Pier Solar was finished within the same time period all made in peoples' spare time, all without any crowdfunding.

So it's officially licensed by Trilobyte, but you're just not allowed to say it's an official game or that it's officially connected to the previous games. I'm thinking of how the Zelda Oracle games are official when they were programmed by Capcom, they were licensed games too. It sounds like they're just saying they won't sue you for making a fan game, they're letting you sell it to see if there's any value or demand in this property at all.


Wow Gameguy, rude.

Be fair, at least let this ride out and take its course and see if it can be funded or not before getting snappy about it.
I'm just annoyed by it. The sequel already failed to get funded two separate times, when being produced by the original company owning the rights to it. Now lets try again, but this time lets make it by a new different group of people without any experience in completing production of a single game, and this won't be considered an official game in the series. Usually fan games are just made by fans for free like The Silver Lining, why should they be paid for it without any examples of completed previous work?

I'm assuming he hasn't made games before, I'm trying to search for any credentials and while I can find things like old interviews from 2012 saying he has programming skills, the games they talk about are this 13th Doll one. The only other game mentioned is Dive Bomb Chomp which is a mobile game, I know nothing about this game as the website mentioned for it is dead, so I assume the game is too.

Did find his resume which he posted publically, I'll post it below.
http://www.ryanholtkamp.com/new/resume.php

So professionally he's programmed scanner software, not games. He's made some game programming related to volunteer University stuff, and this fan game since 2004 which was mostly scrapped. Not a single completed freeware game. Nothing ten minutes long like so many freeware adventure games, just nothing.

[JSoup]

Wow Gameguy, rude.

No, he was spot on. Crowdfunding topics should regularly have people poke holes, because that's how we expose flaws and get answers. Even projects you really trust you should be somewhat critical of until the product drops.

[Tanooki]

I never questioned if he was right or not, it was the approach was why I said that.

[the13thdoll]

All things considered, we aren't doing half bad! Over 27% in the first few days.

[the13thdoll]

We broke 50% funded in around 5 days! Just earlier this evening! :D

[Tanooki]

Did you do a 31 day campaign? It's 4 days in and like 51% there? That's not bad at all. Just make sure you deliver to stifle any non-believers out there whoever they may be (not just gameguy.) :)

I liked the old games, so I'd like to see where this could go.

Your kickstarter seems to ignore the 11th Guest, any reason why?

[Gameguy]

It seems the game was funded after all. With this and Shenmue 3 I should start a kickstarter.

[o.pwuaioc]

It seems the game was funded after all. With this and Shenmue 3 I should start a kickstarter.

I know, right? I can program a bit. Probably should release "Not a Kid Daedalus", the "spiritual sequel" to Kid Icarus, and see if I can get funded. Maybe if I make the soundtrack first.

That said, good luck with your project and hopefully the final product will be good and successful alike.