Welcome to the Official Dave's Quest Home Page. Here you will find current information about the game, its progress, as well as screen shots, and some of the back story.
The Premise
Dave's love life has gone the
way of the dodo...
Dave's grades have gone the way of the dodo...
And if
he doesn't pay the two thugs the money he owes them, he will go the way of the
dodo!
College was supposed to be the best experience of his life.
He was supposed to party, get women, watch tv and play video games. But
things didn't turn out exactly the way he intended. In this game, you are Dave,
a college student whose life begins to fall apart as several different issues
begin to creep up on him all at once. After nearly four years, you are unable to
find a girlfriend. This difficultly has led to a drop in grades... which could
lead to a dismissel from school. To top it all off, you owe two thugs
twenty thousand dollars. Kind of ironic that your grades suck so bad since it
was the money you now owe that you used to pay your tuition. Now, time is
running out and all the situations must be resolved, or life could get really
nasty...
The Backstory
Dave's Quest began simply as a kind of test to see how well I could program AGI. I'd loved AGI for years (since 1985), and now I was very excited to find the AGI community back in January 1998. So, I began by drawing the apartment I currently lived in. Eventually, I started making more and more of my life around me. Eventually, I decided, why not make a game out of it. I took pieces of my life to help construct a story. (No, my grades don't suck that bad, and I don't owe two thugs money, unless you consider my parents thugs. Do I need a girlfriend? Maybe). The game then all started falling in to place.
As I made the game, I knew that making the game as non-linear as possible was important to me. Although I really liked AGI games, I found that most of them really required a very set path that couldn't be deviated from. SQ1 and 2 are really guilty of this. I tended more towards games like KQ1 and QFG1 where different missions could be solved in different orders, and on top of that, make as many solutions to each puzzle as possible, consequently leading to different endings. Choice became very important. So, Dave's Quest will have different possibilities for each quest, with different consequences. That's kind of how my real life is! Of course, there must ultimately be a certain flow to the game, which will become apparant.
Current Game Progress
Update, March 19, 2002 - I have decided to release version .17 of Dave's
Quest to the population. I didn't really want to do this because I felt I would
ultimately ruin the scope of the game. However, since it will be such a long
time until I finish, I didn't want interest to diminish. This includes my
interest as well as the AGI community's. So, here it is. A work in progress much
closer to the final product than was originally out there. Please, enjoy! As I
play this version, I get real excited about it and want to work on it more.
Please comment on it!
Update, January
16, 2001 - I'm currenty working on version .17 of Dave's Quest. It hasn't been
leaps and bounds for the last couple of months since I've been at school, but
the game slowly gets closer to being completed. Be assured that I have not
abandoned this game and it will be completed. I just counted and there are 75
scenes pretty much complete and another 10 or so in the works. That is a lot of
scenes. It is more than a couple of Sierra's AGI games had. I ultimately
designed the game a little bit bigger than I should have but it will still get
completed and when it does I think it will be a fine game. I expect it to be
around 115 scenes or so when complete.
Update, June 4, 2000 - I
am well into version .16 of Dave's Quest. I am happy to say that it currently
has about the same number of scenes as Space Quest 1 and 2! Which is not to say
it is as big as either of these Space Quest games because not all of these
scenes are fully programmed, or detailed yet, but it is an accomplishment I am
quite happy with. The whole game is probably a little over 2/3 done, at least as
far as the number of drawn screens go. I will keep plugging away. Since writing
the whole story and planning out all the scenes was finished long ago, now it's
just a matter of going through the motions. Making a game is a lot harder
than I originally suspected it would be. But it really is rewarding!
Update, May 24, 1999 - I've just finished version .14 of Dave's Quest, and I
am now working on version .15 In order to compare what that means, the
work-in-progress which I released was .07 That means the game is now over
twice as big as then. The game is divided up, mainly into three parts, the
apartment building, downtown and the school. The apartment is nearly complete,
the downtown is nearly complete, and the school is about 1/3 done. Well, I'd say
the whole game is about 2/3 done. I'm trying to finish as soon as possible, but
it could still be awhile yet.
Screenshots
Check out these screenshots!


Here are some screenshots not in version .07 and previously unseen. Enjoy!



Download the work in progress version .17 of Dave's Quest now!!!
Or, take a look at the old version for comparison , work in progress version .07 of Dave's Quest.
Come back for more news as I get closer to completing this stunning and
exciting game!