(Did I Ever Tell You About the Time I was) Taken by a Vampire One Night

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(Did I Ever Tell You About the Time I was)
Taken by a Vampire One Night
VampireTitle.gif

Release type: Freeware
Release date: July 28, 1996
Levels: 10
Author: A-J Games
Registration bonus: N/A
Registration price: $20
Related games: Woman Warrior and the Outer Limits, Woman Warrior and the Attack from Below, Houses

A year earlier I had designed what I thought was my final game. I was burnt out; I was frustrated. I had other things to think of. I was out of the Game-Maker scene.

On a whim I exhumed Game-Maker from deep in my directory structure, and began to hack at some graphics. If I was going to dig up my old tools, I wanted to do something different — something more refined. I decided to forego the gradient fills, and do the art by hand as far as I could. The backgrounds would be simple, and more or less monochromatic. The highlights felt natural, and honest in a way my pixel work hadn’t in ages. A few things I did export to Deluxe Paint, to touch up with transparencies or other effects lacking in Game-Maker’s tools, but I tried to be subtle. I wanted atmosphere, and I felt I couldn’t just manufacture that.

For some reason Sheldon Chase's Muybridge sprite called to me, and I edited it to suit my design. A female protagonist — that’s what I had been missing. My only others were in abandoned and exploitative projects like Dusk Rose.

My head full of promise, I began to get ahead of myself. I wrote a long, tortuous story and began to render a few short cutscenes. I didn’t have the right tools, so I drew and exported them frame-by-frame and used a command line utility to bundle the frames together. It was a process of trial and error, and I was impatient, so I aimed low.

With an eye to some B-movie classics, this game became (Did I Ever Tell You About the Time I Was) Taken by a Vampire One Night. Yes, well.

As the title suggests I wanted to create was something in the vein of Castlevania — by which I mean the aesthetic, more than the mechanic. Granted, this was in the days before Koji Igarashi, so when I say Castlevania I mean whips, forward momentum, and deathly difficulty — and when I say aesthetic I mean that danger and energy every bit as much as the dark halls and creaky doors.

Exploring the mansion in DIETYAtTIwTbaVON?

Although I later mastered the trick, at that time I could find no way to replicate the whip animation. Melee attacks are always tricky with this engine, even if you know what you’re doing. So instead — as with The McKenna Chronicles — I looked back to the stone-throwing of Dark Castle. It seemed a natural enough leap. This time I went for playability over cleverness, and had the stones fly straight until they hit something. I made the character jump a precise height and distance, and then developed levels around her. I made the levels short, and tried to introduce one new thing in each. I produced a final confrontation, and in a early version I included a Streets of Rage style text prompt that allowed for multiple endings.

And you know… the game wasn’t half-bad. Some glitches aside, it actually played well. It might have played better than any game I had made before. The character moved predictably, and the levels were made with some actual, practical thought. On top of that, the game was fairly attractive by my standards. Granted I couldn’t write the kind of soundtrack I wanted, the game was short, and the sprite wasn’t wholly original — but this was a pretty high water mark for me.

I whipped up a new logo animation, and released the game for free, anonymously, under the “Really Weird Productions” banner. Then I promptly wiped it, and Game-Maker, from my memory. This was the end, for real.

In 2010, when I found my old games again, I took a long, hard look at Vampire. I was surprised. There was actually a good game in there. So I tweaked a couple of rough spots. And far too late, I tacked on the original A-J Games logo. It is now a part of the canon.

- [Azurelore Korrigan]

Story[edit]

Level 3-1 in DIETYAtTIwTbaVON?

Here's how it goes --

The year is 1854, and you are an eighteen-year-old girl by the name of Sally. You are an American, the daughter of a semi-rich-and-famous grain monopoliteer, and are on a tour of Europe.

Sally.gif

It has been long since you've left the glories and comforts of the West, the last few months having taken the two of you and your butler through small, backwards Eastern European towns where no one speaks a word of English.

Somewhere around the second week of November -- or was it the end of October? You've pretty much lost track of time since mid-July -- you ramble into a dusty, not-very-well preserved village in Romania.

"This is the end of our journeys for a while, Sally my dear." Your father stands in the middle of the road, cane planted in the generous clay seeping from between the untended cobblestones, taking in a deep breath of Eastern air. You unconciously do the same and begin to cough from the stench. It somehow doesn't bother him; quite the opposite actually, as he perks up and begins to trot down the street.

A week later, you are lying in your upstairs bedroom, the discomfort of the straw tick long since worn off. That or your back is so stiff you can't feel it anymore. In any event, it's dark. Unlike the bustle of of Boston street at night, with the glow of gas streetlights seeping through the windows and thirty-year-old bachelors drunk and screaming in the alleys on their way home from raucous parties, when night falls in this place it really falls. Everyone rushes inside and huddles up together, for fear of the ghouls or something. All of the windows are locked shut and the shutters closed, so not even moonlight may intrude to liven things up.

Level 1-1 in DIETYAtTIwTbaVON?

There is no one to talk to; the only ones you can speak to without getting gasps and gestures to ward off the evil eye are your father and butler each of whom has his own affairs and are uninteresting, anyhow, the former being too eccentric to even hold a conversation and the latter barely holding a pulse. You can't breathe in this place; it's so musty and unventilated at night that you feel about to implode.

You open a window above your bed, and a fresh, cool breeze wisps into the room. Aah. Yes, that's better. You crawl into your blanket and quickly fall asleep.

You awake suddenly. The moon is long-since gone now. You perk up your ears, but hear nothing. You see nothing in the room which would have wakened you. Hell, you don't see anything at all. Still, you feel uneasy. At last, you hear a slight noise from behind you, a sort of half-swallow.

You don't know whether to turn but decide it would probably make no difference anyhow other than to scare the hell out of you, so you take a deep breath and spin your hear around and look deeply into the eyes of . . .someone.

You blink. You're in a big dark hall, with huge windows and ornate draperies. What? How did . . .wait. Don't panic just yet. As you sit down on the ground, you remember something of what went on.

There was a man in the window. He bent down over you, as if to kiss you, and then drew back slowly. He didn't so much say something then as think it. You just lay in bed, watching him, as if in a trance. He bent over you again and picked you up.

The two of you just sort of floated out the window. You didn't see where you were going, but wherever it is, it looks in worse condition than the rest of the town. Granted, though, it appears the place had its glory day at one point and it sure is big. You get the feeling you are his prisoner here, and as you think that you begin to hear the wails of some other souls he kidnapped in the middle of the night.

VampireMons.gif

So. What now? Well, you can either sit here and rot or you could always find a way out of here. You decide on the latter and stand up. As you do so, however, a low-flying bat swings by and nearly misses your head. You pick up a stone from the decaying floor and sling it at it, missing wildly. Well, here we go.

Instructions[edit]

Level 2-3 in DIETYAtTIwTbaVON?

NOTE:

Use the numerical keypad, as opposed to the inverted-T formation of arrow keys. If you don't, you'll be sorry.

LEft, Right: walk left and right.

Home, PgUp: Jump left and right.

UP: Jump up, enter doors.

G,H: Attack to the left and right, respectively.

Down: Duck

Q&A[edit]

Level 2-2 in DIETYAtTIwTbaVON?

"Hey! I only start with five hitpoints! What gives?"

Well, I did that for a reason. You start of in a ridiculously easy location so with a few hitpoints you get to hone your skill a bit so as to survive later more easilly.

"Yeah, right. But how do I get more? I don't see any powerups or anything."

This is the fun part. Okay. Occasionally along the way you'll see these item machines. In a castle? In the 1850s? Yep. Hit them a few times until an item falls out -- you don't have any spare change on you. The thing which falls out is almost certainly a vial of blood, restoring ten (10) hitpoints. There are other, less common objects as well.

"Hey, I entered a door and the scene just changed."

Idiot. That's the exit.

That's about it.

Credits[edit]

Level 1-3 in DIETYAtTIwTbaVON?

Gfx, Snd, some Music:

Aderack

Music:

Stock and PD

Key Grip:

M.O.S.H.

Best Boy:

Buddha

Best Girl:

None, obviously

Some sound was taken from assorted demo libraries, along with some minimal graphics, which were then altered. The work of Eadweard Muybridge was the character basis, with much editing.

(c) 1996 A-J Games

Availability[edit]

This game was distributed on local bulletin boards (e.g., The Kobayashi Alternative), contemporary to its development.

Archive History[edit]

Vampire was retained as part of the archive from the game's inception.

Links[edit]

Interviews / Articles[edit]

Misc. Links[edit]

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