WILINESS III

Atari ST - 1989/1992 - released to the public in 2004
The Wiliness series



Wiliness : Quest for the Holy Water

I also spent some of my youth writting stories and role playing adventures. Creating an adventure game on a computer was one of my first dream. I wrote my first "proper" adventure game in 1988, probably end of 1987. It was Wiliness. The idea came up after playing Ultima 3 - I literraly fell in love with the interface and the game. My other inspiration was the now classic Rogue.



The story of Wiliness was very simple (thinking about it... I was 14 years old). Your are the son of the king and your father has been poisoned. Your only hope is to find the Holy Water before your evil brother gets to the throne. First of all you must talk to the Bohemian located at the east of the King Castle ( East and West are flipped in the game, as I said, I was 14...). All in all, the game proposed many monsters ( around 35 different types ) and three gigantic 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 !



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 some 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 of the last version of Wiliness 3.







Wiliness 3 : The Beheaded peak

The first version of Wiliness 3 was probably from 1989. Once again, I always wanted to create a game where you could live an adventure through the eyes of your character. I tried many approaches but without much success. Some were inspired by the vector graphics of Questron or the interactivity of the french game Le Manoir de Mortevielle. But, like a lot of people, I got really inspired by Dungeon Master. The game design I always dreamed of was there, this game was pure genious.
I am not ashamed to say that they 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. Shame that I have never had time to complete it...


WILINESS III is ©1989,2004 - Laurent KERMEL