Evil Night - Games History

     You might be thinking, "Eh? There were previous games of Evil Night?". There were, but none of them were finished.
                                   Read on and get the full story and see how the game of my fear evolved:

          #     Name                           created with                                                                                                        short blurb
            1. Evil Night Demo -              Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT) v1.7                                                First idea of Evil Night arouses
            2. Evil Night remake              AGT v.1.7                                                         The Middle Step between mini game to serious game
            3. Evil Night: Type A & B -    AGT Master's Edition v1.5                                                                          The first serious version
            4. Evil Nightfall -                   RPG Toolkit v2                                                                                                       An RPG version
            5. Evil Night (console ver) - nothing                                                                                                                     The big picture
            6. Evil Night -                        Adventure Game Studio (AGS)                                                The current and second serious version

1. The First Game: The Name is Born
This was more of an experiment with the toolkit. I had found AGT after searching and searching for adventure game engines to make an adventure game. I wanted to find a graphical adventure engine, but I never found one, instead I found AGT, a text adventure authoring system.
At this time I had the comic "The Living Dead" discontinued, but not forgotten.
Anyway, after fooling with AGT a little and getting used to it, I decided to make a little game. I didn't have a name for it, but it was kind of an experiment with making puzzles and stuff in a building. It starred a guy named Scott Peters.
It had a mini story at the beginning of him coming home from work on the outskirts of East Biure, gets a call on his cell phone from his wife who is watching the news about brain-eating zombies that are taking over the town. As he enters the town he sees she is not kidding, there are cars over turned, buildings burning and so on. He ends up stopping at some building, I don't know where the hell he was though.
The game only consited of two rooms. I made this puzzle where there's this bulliton board, when you examine it, you notice like a scratch on the wall beside it or something....you interact with the scratch and you discover a secret panel behind the wall with a key to open the door to the next room. In the next room was a stairwell going up and a window to the side of it. There was a dead guy on the floor and zombies scratching at the window. I think they broke in once you did something, I don't remember.
Anyway, I was so proud of this so-called "game", I copied it to a blue floppy disk, made a little tag on it that said, "Evil Night" with "demo" right under it.
That name was just a last minute thing because my friends mom had just arrived to pick up my Christmas present for him. I gave him that demo as a side gift.
Know what? To my suprise, he actually like it :)

2. Evil Night: The Middle Step
About a year after that I started again on that same game, trying to make it a serious project. I never got far with the technical part of this version, most I got done was the mapping of each room and a semi-story line.
Scott Peters was again the main character, same story as the last game, a few touch-ups and the game was almost sorted out.
It was about how Scott ended up being trapped in some place because there was too many zombies outside to escape, so he had to find a different way out and get home to rescue his wife.
The reason why I stopping this game is because I kept getting accused of getting it from Resident Evil because of the zombies. So, as a result, I swiped the whole idea and all the mapping and planning I did and started clean.

3. Evil Night: Type A and Evil Night: Type B
Introduction: After all that accusing bullshit, I started with a clean slate. I ditched the name Scott Peters and changed it to Eric Peters, which was, at that time, a pure coinsidence that it's the same name as Micheal's older brother in my comic, "The Living Dead".

By this time I had found the 'Master's Edition' of AGT on the web and downloaded it. This provided an option to use a menu-driven parser for your game, show pictures, and it's script language had more goodies.
Now this new version of EN would kick arse!

But, before I begin, remember me being accused? I changed the whole idea of zombies to.......demonic aliens. So no zombies. I hated this idea. But I had to do what I thought I had to do...
In Evil Night: Type A, Eric had gotten a job as the new East Biure YMCA sports manager (I got the idea for the sports manager because at this time my brother in-law, Jim, was sports manager of the local community center). Eric ends up living there for a while and one night, hell breaks loose and aliens infest East Biure. These aliens, in best description, looked kind of like little red gargoils with razor-sharp fangs and nails. Anyway, the whole plot of Evil Night: Type A was to escape the YMCA through the secret entrance to the subway to exit the city. Once you entered into the subway, Type A ends and it would have gave you a password to continue onto the second disk, called 'Type B'. EN:TB was never started since TA was never completed.
Evil Night: Type A was roughly 80% finished and I was actually going to complete it so naturally I was excited. At this time I was switching computers and somewhere in the process the game was lost. I could of sworn I made disks of that game, but I'll be damned if they ever washed up somewhere now. I've got a disk with a copy of it in it's early stages, but that won't do.
The original idea for Type B was to just simply make everything backwords and mix-n-match the items up. You would start at the subway entrance and have to make your way out the front door of the YMCA....but that was stupid :)
Here are some pics that I've found from that disk that were in the game.

Click here for a look at the original mapping of all the rooms in this game

4. Evil Nightfall: RPG version Idea
Yeah, lol, it sounds goofy, but I almost made this game. At this point in life I was using the RPG Toolkit v2 to create a game called, "Realm of Evil" which also had a comic to go along with it. I'd still like to make that RPG...I've been itchin'....but that's another long story with a history behind it :)
Since I was using that RPG engine and still hadn't found a graphical adventure engine (by this time I think AGS was out and about but in it's early stages) and gave up on text adventures since the last time, I figured maybe I'd make an RPG version of Evil Night, but call it Evil Nightfall.
If you ever played Evil Night: Type A, you would have noticed a poster that was about a movie called, "Evil Nightfall" and a little caption below it said, "When night falls, no one escapes the Evil...". That's where I got the "Nightfall" part for the RPG.
It would have been the same exact thing as EN: TA&B, but like a traditional RPG.
Probably would have interesting :)

5. Evil Night: The Console Dream Game
Everyone has their dreams, and this is the point where Evil Night was really ending up to be my favorite game idea of all time. Everything in the plot, storyline and whatnot was really clicking together. I drew tons of screenshots that would have been in the game (some are posted here). I believed that if this game would ever be released on a console, it would outsell every other game. I had so many ideas and things about this game graphics wise and most of all gameplay wise that would blow everybody out of the water...I would just have to wait for the perfect gaming system. This whole idea was before the 'next generation' consoles came out...only N64 and PS were out. So at that point, Evil Night was ahead of it's time.
I won't tell you my secrets for this game, because maybe someday you'll see it on the market...*snorts*, yeah, right. I think the plans I've got for this game is still like one or two steps higher than the gaming sytems out now. I'm not thinking graphics wise, I'm thinking gameplay elements.

In this version of Evil Night, things changed a lot, story wise. I decided to make Evil Night tie in with my comic. I also decided that Eric was, in fact, Micheals brother. Eric get's a new job at the East Biure YMCA and moves there with his friend Mitch. He leaves his family on the same week that they move into their new condo, which is in Hannaford Village in the midst of South Biure Nevada (so there's still boxes everywhere and such 'n such). So the house part of the story is the same as in the comic, except Eric is moving out instead of living there.
The plot of the game would be the same as the current version.
The only difference between this one and the current version, is that the current version is only zombies and other living animals turning evil, not those stupid red demons. If I was to actually make the console version, the demons would definately not be in it :)
Here are some pics:

A person being controlled by an alien through his brain.

6. Evil Night

I currently had to change the state from Nevada to Colorado because of the environment. Nevada doesn't have trees! Why the hell didn't I realize that before? Nevada just sounded good, I guess.

So, from what you've learned, the current version of Evil Night is being based on the console version, except without those stupid demons and being in Colorado. Ofcourse there will be a few changes from the console version to this one, but none of you will notice since I haven't told you jack about what goes on in the console version.

I guess this is goodbye.

Take the link down there and go back to the future, you time traveler, you!