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, 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. 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. 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.