I have written in the past a couple of If games such as Ekphrasis (in french) or Works of Fiction.
I am in a difficult quest right now : I am looking for (good) adventure games, if possible beyond the scope of IF (such as point’n’click for instance), and not in english (nor in french).
For example : non translated russian, german or spanish adventure games.
I don’t speak Spanish (other than the small amount one learns by growing up in California), but as I understand it, there is an active and vibrant Spanish IF community. They have a website at caad.es/
Aventuras AD was the gold standard for Spanish text adventures; for German ones Weltenschmiede’s suite of Das Stundenglas, Die Kathedrale and Hexuma are highly regarded. I can’t speak for any of them personally, not speaking those languages, and don’t know anything about Russian adventures. Germany did keep a torch burning for the point’n’click adventure game after the bottom fell out of their market in English and later French-speaking areas; Poland also had its own strange strain of them. No particular recommendations, but an acknowledgement that there’s a rich vein to mine there.
Portuguese is my native language. Does it matter? IF is such a small niche that if I were to write an IF game in portuguese, pretty much no one would play it.
I agree - as things stand. BUT: write them and maybe players will appear. Maybe even make a few games especially designed to lure non-IFers.
Do you know, when I describe IF to some of my friends, they sound genuinely intrigued. Maybe it’s time the Portuguese did have a community?
I know of at leat 5 of us in the community, including Rootshell whom I actually haven’s seen around in a while (wonder if everything’s all right?). That’s actually quite enough for us to make games for ourselves - and maybe attract some outside attention. The Greek Ags Community (GAC) started like that, and for quite a while it was quite the community to watch: for the time, their games were pretty good (though they really haven’t aged well, I daresay).
I already know that the spanish IF has masterpieces I enjoyed a lot (especially one about the world of the deads…I played it some years ago !).
But my question was relative to commercial games, such as point’n’click, or even shooters.
For example the russian adventure game Pathologic was stunning even though very poorly translated in english (no french translation). I am looking for such games.
Ok, some in Swedish are Stugan (translated into English as The Cottage). Originally it ran on a mainframe, but was later ported to PC. More info at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cottag … eo_game%29
Another commercial release was Tahiti published by Hi-Tech Software. It was for the ZX Spectrum.
Then there was a bunch of homebrew releases, including 99Y I was involved in.
Hola, hay una compañía española que hace aventuras gráficas: Pendulo Studios. Son los responsables entre otras de Hollywood Monsters, la saga Runaway y Yesterday, esta última la acaban de publicar.
You can take a look at spanish company Alcachofa Soft wokrs. Their first game, Drascula is freely available in several languages (including, of course, spanish) to play through Scummvm.
For more recent stuff, you can try with Gato Salvaje studio “ARK, Sexo Mentiras Y Trabajos De Clase”, the first episode of an ongoing series of point & click adventure games released last year for buying on-line.
I think it would be a good idea to go through IFDB and tag non-english games; I’d personally love to play something in Swedish or German to help me learn or brush up on those languages.