WILINESS III

Atari ST - 1988/1992 - released to the public in 2004
The Wiliness series



Wiliness : Quest for the Holy Water

I spent parts of my youth writing stories and pen-and-paper role playing adventures. Creating an adventure game on a computer was one of my first dreams. Back in 1984, I was eleven years old and I clearly remember writing my first simple text based adventure games for the IBM PC we had at the house. I wrote my first "real" adventure game for the Atari ST back in 1988, probably end of 1987. It was Wiliness. The idea came up after playing Ultima III - I literally fell in love with the interface and the game. Another major inspiration was the now classic Rogue.



The story of Wiliness was very simple (thinking about it... I was 14 years old). Your are the King's son and your father has been poisoned. Your only hope is to find the Holy Water before your evil brother steals the throne. Your dad first tells you to talk to a Bohemian located at the east of the castle, this is where your adventure begins. All in all, the game proposed many monsters (around 35 different types) and three huge worlds and many dungeons. It is still all in French at the moment and I may translate and release it one day as it is completely finished! However, the difficulty is badly balanced and the leveling-up system really flawed. Again, I was 14 years old when I wrote this game...



Wiliness 2

Wiliness 2 was a hugely enhanced version of Wiliness, with a non linear and longer story. I also refined the World of Wiliness and especially the Spheres in this game, Wiliness 2 was supposed to happen during the War of the Spheres (see The origins of the Mantacores ). This game is far from being finished and many of the files are sadly corrupted. I will try one day to put something together again...Interestingly, I reused some of the monsters from Wiliness 2 to populate the dungeons for the last version of Wiliness 3.








Wiliness 3 : The Beheaded peak

The first version of Wiliness 3 was probably from around 1988. Once again, I always wanted to create a game where you could experience your adventure through the eyes of your character. Really early, I tried several techniques without much success... Again I was very young and it was way before the rise of the Internet - technical support was rather thin. I was initially inspired by Questron's vector graphics or the mouse-based controls from the French game Le Manoir de Mortevielle. But, in 1988, Dungeon Master was a revelation - the design I always dreamed of was there, this game was pure genius. I am not ashamed to say that FTL's classic showed me the way to go for Wiliness 3...

The original graphics were far from looking like the ones you can see in the final version. Here is, for instance, how some of the monsters evolved (and how my drawing skills improved too):





I think that from all the games I wrote during my youth, Wiliness 3 is easily my favorite and my best personal accomplishment. It is a shame that I have never had time to complete it...


WILINESS III is ©1988,2004 - Laurent KERMEL