Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu - Redux

[Gal Shemesh]

*** PROJECT DISCONTINUED - See latest update at the end of this post ***



Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu is a point-and-click adventure game based on Robert Ripley, the creator of Ripley's Believe It or Not!, which was developed and published by Sanctuary Woods in 1995. -Wikipedia.

I really liked this game back in the day, the same as I like it today, and found myself keep returning to playing it every few years from beginning to end. Though, the one thing that bothered me most is the fact that it lacks of any text captions; making it unplayable for players who cannot hear. The second thing that bothered me is that there is no way to skip scenes or dialogues; which makes it quite bothersome.

The main issue made me want to try and add captions to the game, however this task was found impossible, giving the fact that there is no access to the source-code of the game nor to the engine it was built upon. And as hard as I found, I wasn't managed (so far) to reach any of the original game developers or owners of the out-of-business Sanctuary Woods - which I'm still trying.

That is when I came up with an idea to actually re-create the game in AGS. I began the process to first test how it looks, and after days and nights of tedious work and completing its long introduction scenes, I can say that it turns out really good and truly looks and feels as if it was developed by the out-of-business Sanctuary Woods themselves! And at this point I think that it deserves a thread in the AGS Games in Production forum. So here it is!

* Please note that I'm still trying to reach and get approval to releasing this game – hopefully that it will be allowed to be shared for free, or at least that GOG could add it to their library and so I could offer them this captions version when its ready as a free-extra download for whomever purchase the game from them.

I currently work on re-creating the 'shareware' version of the game – as this can be shared for free like the original shareware is – and will update here once I have more to update. So keep tuned on this thread if this project interests you.

How does the Redux version is built?
I used some ripping tools that someone once wrote for ripping the game's assets, and also purchased Game Extractor which in the background use some of the mentioned ripping tools. The ripped assets include many BMP index files, which I converted into PNGs to save space, though many of them (especially animations) were not ripped correctly and have 'pixel-holes' in them. So whatever's not good enough I basically capture while playing the game in an emulator (without any compression). Then I crop the areas of action and make them GIF animation files. And finally, I import these GIFs into AGS and arrange them in Views.

The thing that did ripped correctly is the locations background (index BMPs) and the RAW audio (which is basically a WAV format) that I converted into OGGs to save space as well.

I've arranged all the audio files in an Excel sheet, and then listen and categorize them on-the-fly with filters, while also typing the caption of everything that is said in them; this process involves the listening feature of google translate for listening to the spoken audio – as not everything is cleared – and of course my own judgment checking if whatever was translated is actually correct, where if not I use other online dictionaries for checking and comparison, and then fix the necessary things that google translate got wrong. At the same time, I'm also translating the game to Hebrew (my mother tongue) as it would be a waste not doing so if I'm already going over 4K+ audio files.

All these 'pieces' become into a 'puzzle' of over 50,500 graphic files, and an addition 4,247 audio files. And I build this puzzle together in AGS and make all the necessary scripting from a complete scratch to make the game look and feel as close as possible to the original – only with the addition of text captions and skipping cut-scenes/dialogues possibility, which are the main reasons of why I've began working on this project in the first place.

Any comments and suggestions would be most welcome! And if someone has any relation or way to communicate with the original owners of the game and its intellectual proprietary, I'd very appreciate to know so I could begin working with them to get the necessary approval to releasing this re-release in the end.

* A side note – I'm not doing this for money and make this project voluntarily and completely for free, to bringing this masterpiece first for those who couldn't play it because they can't hear, and for returning adventurers who'd appreciate to re-play this game with captions – while making the captions, I myself now get many things that I didn't hear or understand correctly when I originally played it . So I suppose others would too.

Attached some screenshots from the process.





And here's a short video demonstrating how I prepare the animations for AGS:

10/09/2023 UPDATE:
Dealing with a huge amount of sprites can be a tedious task - but it can be a breeze with the help of some automatic scripting. I've made a short video demonstrating a recent discovery of mine about the ImageMagicK tool, and how I use it to prepare the sprites for importing into AGS. This tool includes so many features that I really got lost and it took me quite some time to find the appropriate functions that I needed to make it work for my needs.

12/09/2023 UPDATE:
A package from over seas has just arrived - it's the official player's guide of the game; read in some FAQ walkthrough that someone wrote that back in the day - before the commonly internet access in every house - you had to buy one of these if you got stuck in games. When I found this one on eBay right afterwards I immediately grabbed it. I expect that it would probably be a good reference book when re-creating this game.


In addition, I've capture today the full introduction from the re-built game which shows how the English captions look like. You may find it here (game resolution is 640x480 - it was sharply upscaled x3 for best viewing experience on YouTube):

For those of you who speak Hebrew, this is the same intro with Hebrew subtitles (Hebrew font by me):

14/09/2023 UPDATE:
In this video I describe the making process of the captions along with translating them - this is a technique I developed myself which helped me a lot when translating other games:

02/10/2023 UPDATE:
It appears that my good will to reproduce this game had encountered with some problems that I thought I could overcome, though eventually found they're just too much to handle. And so instead of having a good time re-producing this game, it turned into something un-pleasant and very exahusting - the good thing is that I'm only at the very beginning on the game. There are 2 main problems:

1. The ripped sprites have an index color 0 (pure black) as the background, while the same color is used in the actual sprites of the characters and objects - meaning that when the sprites are imported and this index color is considered as transparency, it also makes 'pixel-holes' within the actual sprites, which requires manually painting them over.

2. Each of the animation sprites has its own dimentional size, which requires manually aligning each and every sprite when re-building the animations.

These two main issues might not have been a problem on a regular 2D game where there are only a few sprites to handle. Though in this particular game there are dozens and hundreds of sprites in almost every animation sequence, which makes it a tedious process to re-create.

Sorry if this last update is such a disappointment - I'm disappointed by this as well. However, there is a bright side for everything. The first one is that I learned new scripting methods in AGS, which I'm surely going to use when working on my
next project. The second thing is that during the re-creation of what I did so far, I found and reported about bugs and new feature requests for the AGS editor, which mostly (if not all) were fixed and implemented in the coming 3.6.1 update by @Crimson Wizard. In addition, I managed to reproduce and release a nice grayscale pause module - very similar to the one that exists in 'The Riddle of Master Lu' when taking / viewing inventory items! This couldn't be done without the help of @Nahuel and @Crimson Wizard too. You can find it here.

[artium]

Never played the original but what you attempt to do is quite impressive 

[Snarky]

Nice! I haven't played it in twenty years, but I remember The Riddle of Master Lu very fondly... and with some frustration.

It had some really cool ideas (I've often cited the gameplay element where you can collect curios for your museum as a neat gimmick that other games could use for inspiration; it's similar in a way to modern game trophies and achievements, but more closely tied to the in-game world), and had great production values. (I'm almost tempted to suggest you try upscaling the graphics for an HD remake.)

Fixing the lack of captions will be a huge improvement. I would have thought the best way to achieve that would be through a ScummVM port (as they did for KQ7), but it looks like attempts to add the engine to ScummVM were abandoned, so for a non-engine-coder I guess a remake is the last resort. Good luck!

[Gal Shemesh]

Thanks, @Snarky.

(I'm almost tempted to suggest you try upscaling the graphics for an HD remake.)

In general that's a great idea. Though, due to some visual problems with the graphics that you can rip for the original game files, apart from the 'walk' and maybe 'talk' animations I base most of what's going on upon captured cropped moments from while playing the game in an emulator. So if I'll try to upscale the background for example and then to upscale a cropped area of it with some animations, it might not look right. It's a very neat process that requires positioning of every object at the exact pixel spot it should be.

I would have thought the best way to achieve that would be through a ScummVM port (as they did for KQ7), but it looks like attempts to add the engine to ScummVM were abandoned, so for a non-engine-coder I guess a remake is the last resort. Good luck!

Exactly - our local Hebrew Adventure group in which I'm one of the admins mostly use ScummVM when we translate games, as it gives more freedome and flexibility to add captions and to translate games that the original engine of the game could ever have. But yes, 'Master Lu' isn't supported to run in it, and even if it could I don't think that adding captions to it could be done, giving the fact that it doesn't have any code of captions to relay on.

[splat44]

I never played that game and seem looking good.
In terms of locating original developers of "Sanctuary Woods", did you tried contacting "MicroProse"

MicroProse still in business, according to sources, Sanctuary Woods got aquired in 1994 by them.
Perhaps, they may still have some contacts.

By the way, well done with "Going home" game and I enjoy it!

[Monsieur OUXX]

That seems like a great idea, because there's a lot of old FMV games which could have achieved greatness but were carrying some obnoxious/obsolete game mechanics, broken puzzles and unclear hints.
They all need a good "repair". Not just this one, but Phantasmagoria and the others too!

[Gal Shemesh]

That seems like a great idea, because there's a lot of old FMV games which could have achieved greatness but were carrying some obnoxious/obsolete game mechanics, broken puzzles and unclear hints.
They all need a good "repair". Not just this one, but Phantasmagoria and the others too!

Thanks. While this kind of thing is great to kind of fixing problems in old games, only a minor group of people would probably do that as it's time consuming, which others may prefer to spend on an original game of their own. I encountered with only a few old games that fans had taken and improved, such as King's Quest 1 through 3 by AGDI, another KQ3 by Infamous Adventures (once called TIERRA) and KQ4 Retold by DrSlash.

As for Phantasmagoria - in the local group I'm running with some friends in my country we've fully translated it to Hebrew; I was responsible on translating the visual graphics. Same on Syberia 1 & 2. They all look great, though I don't think that we would have taken the road of rebuilding neither of them like I'm doing here with Master Lu.

[Crimson Wizard]

For properly remaking FMV games in AGS, things may be easier if its video playback support was upgraded
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/engine-development/feature-request-videos-non-blocking-playback-with-guis/

Today it's possible to use one of the existing video plugins, like this one:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/plugin-spritevideo-v0-9-3-sprite-and-video-render-based-on-direct3d-plugin/
(except it does not support audio)

[negator2vc]

Awesome!
It so nice to see all those fan recreation of old adventure games.

Just please don't mess with the original design (puzzles, texts, etc...).
It's very tempting to try to "fix" the original game.
Walking dead situations (I don't recall if the game had any) are of course an exception
but even then better give the player a choice (like the King's Quest 4 recreation did).

[Gal Shemesh]

Today it's possible to use one of the existing video plugins, like this one:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/modules-plugins-tools/plugin-spritevideo-v0-9-3-sprite-and-video-render-based-on-direct3d-plugin/
(except it does not support audio)

When we translated some games we found integrating subtitles in the FMVs that didn't have any somewhat troublesome. I don't mind having audio separated from the video in AGS. Though, the last time I tried adding a video into AGS I had trouble showing text on top of it, which led me to disregard the video altogether. Not sure if its supported by now.

Just please don't mess with the original design (puzzles, texts, etc...).

No worries. I stick to the original and do my best to re-build everything exact. The only thing I've improved so far is the ability to skip over the cut-scenes, which isn't possible in the original.