If you’re going to make an adventure game in SCI Companion (or gods forbid SCI Studio) there are certain things that you might want to look out for. Missing them may make your game look somewhat lazy to those who know what to look for.
SCI0
- “Colors” setting: since the template is based on Leisure Suit Larry 3, it inherited the option to specify any combination of 16 window background and text colors.
- MT-32 patch: easily missed depending on what you’re testing with, early SCI0 fan games mightn’t have had any MT-32 testing done at all. Thus you might miss that the MT-32 patches are straight from Larry 3 (again), including the startup messages, and your background music may not sound as good as one might hope, with mismatched instruments.
- BriPro logo: instead of the Sierra mountain logo, the first character in three out of five included fonts is the letters BP, for Brian Provinciano.
- Template Guy: as I like to call him. The dude with the blue shirt and gray pants. He’s the default player character.
You might consider all that to be in the past, considering it literally is, but there’s still projects actively in development that target SCI0/01.
SCI11
- Blueish grays: since this template is based on Space Quest 5, the original version used to have SQ5’s palette as opposed to, say, the default SCI palette. The later template, before I even all but took over the project, had this replaced.
- Template Guy: he’s back, and I myself specifically made him so you wouldn’t be stuck with Roger Wilco. Same things apply as in SCI0 though.
- The font: by default, the SCI11 template comes with three common fonts and one specific to SQ5, and uses this as the default. It has no distinction between upper and lower case.
- Status line: even to this day, the template game includes SQ5’s custom-drawn status line, with the raised border.
- Inefficient polygons: a bit technical, might have to go into detail in another post, but early versions of SCI Companion used a rather hackish way to import external polygon data (where can you go, like in my pathfinder woes) which ate a lot of memory for no good reason. Later versions allow you to use the
&getpolycommand that I added, a bit of syntactic sugar that imports the polygon data in such a way you can’t tell it apart from Sierra’s code if you were to decompile it afterwards.
There’s no BriPro logo in the SCI11 template’s fonts, it’s the Sierra logo, but on the other hand only Leisure Suit Larry 6 has a menu bar despite being an SCI11 game, so you’d rarely if ever get to see it. The MT-32 patch is Sierra’s own near-GM patch, and includes a “SIERRA ON-LINE” message.