Tony: "Wh-where is my dog hiding? Mhhh... Pantagrueeel? Pantagrueeeeeelll? Are you around here, somewhere?! Pantagruel?! [pause]
Mhhh... Thinking about it, it's been a while since I've last seen my puppy.
Yeah! And weirdly enough this sentence keeps making sense even if I substitute the word puppy with the words "naked lady" and the verb "to see" with... [longer pause and then gesture]
Ah, whatever!"

How
very
sad...

Slowly proceeding towards the Beta-demo version.
Almost all of the characters have been modeled and are being animated while scenes and text are being assembled, reviewed and integrated each and every day.
The main portion of the in-game music will be handed in by next week, I've personally written the lyrics for all of them while Simone brilliantly arranged them according to what we've been researching, studying and collecting about the musical taste in New Mexico during the fifties.

Will all the care and endeavour eventually add up to a consistent and charming experience? Will all the hard work pay off in the end?
If I didn't think so I would probably be a reckless check-out boy in some grocery store with my name gruesomely pinned to my shirt...
Which is what I am most probably going to be when Tony will be over anyway...
Hrm...

We finally release the first series of six screenshots taken from the "alpha 2" demo version of the game dated March the 15th.
The environment is indeed barren and empty.
This is partly due to a precise design choice (the rather hypocritical part)
and to the lack of the characters meant to populate it (the absent part).

New screenshots of this same demo will soon be published in the screenshots page.

In less than a month time we expect to be testing the "beta" demo version, featuring environment animation, characters in the external sets, different illuminations according to the period of the day when any specific part is played, etc.

I would write a few more lines and I'd probably even try to be slightly nicer if I still weren't quite sick...
Bye bye for now and try to take a better care of yourselves than I did.

"If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe."
(Abraham Lincoln)

The third "Tony Tough Developers" rally in Belluno (Italy) @ Prograph was rather intense. We've all fixed, debated, rescheduled and eaten over our contribution to this game and, with a choral effort, we've completed the "Alpha 2" demo version of the game.
New screenshots taken from the first phases of the adventure will soon be published on www.tony-tough.com.

Both the team's overall impression and the publisher's comments are enthusastic about the work so far (despite the severe delay) and we're indeed higlhy motivated to keep the quality level constant through all the rest of the development.

We cannot show you anything from the new demo until DTP officially releases material, but we meagerly live in the hope we can try to quell your eagerness with a group picture of us.
Lamentably neither the graphic department nor the new assembler (Dante, that I welcome with these lines) were in the Prograph offices when the picture was taken.
Ahhh... Well, I guess we'll try to get us all together when we will gather again to test the "Beta" version.

Until next sign...

(Left to right: Marco, Vincenzo, Me, Valerio, Alberto and Simone.)

"If it's true that design is a process, I should start gathering proof of my innocence."
(Stefano Gualeni)

Taken from one of the in-game songs titled "Not any worse".

When that night the phone rang, - he couldn't say "hello?"
and mind that he was not deaf, - sick or anything at all...
He was gagged and tied to a chair,
they simply stole everything was there...
So when that night the phone rang, - he couldn't even say "hello?"

(A scene taken from the initial movie storyboard drawn by Valerio Massari.)

In the last couple of days both the first edition of the scripts + texts and the rendering of the outdoor sets were completed.
Don't you find it rather unsettling to talk about an "external space" which was actually shaped and built in the depth of box called computer?
And isn't it even slightly more paradoxical how those same computers are phisically located in a larger box called "room" and so on?
An "outdoor space" which eventually is not a space in the common sense of the word and, apparently, is even less outdoor... But for which I would like to publicly congratulate with Demis: the atmosphere, the precision and the care for the details he managed to pour in each single frame seem to me to definitely deserve praises.

On an unrelated note, it seems it stopped snowing.

I find it most amusing that a band called "Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark" published a record called "Architecture and Morality".
Hm, it rather discordantly reminds me of the way I approach the whole digital architecture discourse.

"Live hidden" was an epicurean motto.

Unlike the artificial space which is included in the category of "built space" and actually imposes itself onto the masses' perception, the "imaginary one" seems to be indeed rather shy.
It is expressed (and compressed) between the pages of books, in the noisy tape of a VHS cassette or on the silvery surface of disks.
One cannot be exposed to imaginary rooms, bulildings and cities unless one willingly decides to explore them, seduced by the covers or allured by some other sort of fascination (like, for example, popularity).

The same happened for you and this site.

"Videogame architecture" is framed according to principles and strategies that are a lot more akin to scenography than to functional rationality. Buildings are bereft from gravity, economy and accordance to its cultural and urban context.
Very often just two ties keep it in contact with the material production of space:

Architecture and Morality (the both aesthetical and cultural awareness of imaginary space as part of the "thesaurus" our generation will pass to the next one).

You find this boring?!
WELL, I FIND YOU BORING!

«Mh, I'd better pause for a second and reflect on what I am doing. The thing is... Well, I once again seem to be making confusion between the concepts "evade from my prison cell" and "put together a rudimentary scarecrow".»

Work work work and more work.
I am finding it hard to even update this diary.

Briefly: it's the last week of textwriting for me and I've begun with a preliminary testing on the first phases of the game.
All the "external" sets and cameras are ready and are being rendered and post-produced while Marco and the Prograph guys are finishing assembling the hospital.

I literally just cannot wait for the writing part to be over.
Not only I feel dry as Coober Pedy's welcoming sign, but also I am eagerly looking forward to getting my hands dirty on some severe playing and testing.
That's actually my favourite part!
For this reason me and Valerio are planning on soon spending some days up in the alps with the team of coders / assemblers (possibly combining our stay with the commencement of the sonorization) and try to personally supervise the most delicate phases of the montage.
I love to test and scribble-dabble-wiggle-scribble-scribble-chew on random pencils etc.

So
sleepy

<Simone> Don't apologize to me. I am the musician for the game, remember? The most miserable among the slaves.
<Simone> I even come after the testers. Treat me bad, that's what I am payed for!
<Stefano> Bah, they don't pay me enough to treat you bad...
<Simone> Ahah.

<Scott> done with work at all for the day?
<Stefano> I've basically just started.
<Stefano> When it comes to text-writing I need to only work part-time
<Stefano> or at a certain point I would start writing even more unconsequential
<Stefano> crap than I usually do.

«Dear Mr. Stefano,
I was just thinking that together with the pictures you could just say that we've completed the classroom location and are proceeding with new characters (the mailman and the various fat ladies) and the new locations. What about something like: "the guys in Prograph - after having assembled all the seemingly interminable school part - are eventually working on the external locations and the little hospital. The cameras have been repeatedly moved in order to accomplish a better visibility and gameplay, not leaving out the original direction choices, obviously. The characters on which they're dabbling are the postman and two huge sisters, which is to say: there's a whole lot going on. Soon enough we will have Tony wandering as free as a butterfly all over Washington. I think that's something to be proud of."

How do you like this as a trace?»

(Alberto Doriguzzi - TT2 Quality and testing manager, locations assembler)

Christopher Kellner: «We absolutely consider Tony as art. When I first saw the screenshots I immediately thought "Wow, this is Edward Hopper creating a pc game". I also think what you as an author do is nothing less than art. Why shouldn't the author of a game not be seen as an artist whereas book-authors, regardless how bad they are, get all the credits as artists?»

(An in-game poster of a theatrical play)

A very productive weekend for what concerns my writing.
Thousands of bug-like letters all marching together in an orderly fashion.

It's just five more weeks to go and the main body of text will be handed in, then my work will shift from creation to criticism, which is the part I like the best.

Being somehow the reflection on what is already a reflection of myself, it makes me kind of dizzy in a very ticklish way.

One of the first locations in the game (the classroom) seems to be giving a hard time still to coders and animators after having severely teased Michel during the modeling. I wonder if we'll be able to overcome all the paradoxally expectable "unexpected issues" and manage to finish the work by time. While Valerio is espected to have the new external group of cameras ready by early next week, I'll try to complete Tony's comments for the treehouse and Chucho's office.
Great new characters (my beloved mailman, Alexis and Lorraine Biddle) have moulded by Demis while Simone, our musician, started composing last Monday.

More lukewarm news soon...

We're on vacation, allright.
Being the rather pathetic person I am, I have nothing better to do than to dirtying my hands still (or the keyboard, according to the points of view) with dialogues and text integration and the review + correction of the new locations' material.
Despite risking to sound further shallow and boring, I will spew out a short and rather personal entry.

I want both my colleagues and the reades to know that I am growing verily satisfied with my work so far and even more so for its integration and that I am having quiet nights of sleep tangled in yellow bedsheets.
I want to thank the graphic compartment of our team for the brilliant quality of the material they're managing to achieve in the last period and all the press (justadventure, the inventory, adventuresplanet.it and all the others) for the interest they've shown and keep confirming since early stages of the development.

I would also like to recommend anybody Kim Ki Duk's last movie "3-Iron", probably the best movie I've seen in years.

Happy new year everybody, wishing for an at least less tragic 2005.
Stefano Gualeni.

P.S. Finally I too can hum that "I have a Tiki God"!

A short, delirant article by me and an interview on the first screenshots for "A Rake's Progress" featuring your favorite developers... Or are we?

All and more disgusting little thingies can be found on the DECEMBER 2004 issue of THE INVENTORY !

Nearly two over sixteen sub-parts of the game are now assembled.

Alberto and Valerio are collaborating for what concerns the placement of a new and enhanced set of cameras while they are respectively assembling the game (A) and sketching out the last characters and the first storyboards for the full motion videos (V).

Michel should be beginning a new interior location modeling, Demis enriching and correcting the external ones, while Daniele is busy fixing the last issues with a few details in the classroom location.

Vincenzo must be trying to have icons and icon animations ready before he'll have to take care of the realization all the game full motion videos. Brrr...

Marco and Ubik (Stefano C.) are moaning and twitching trying to put it all together.

I am proceeding with the location texts and the integration of material for puzzles and dialogues.
Feeling drained although delighted.

"Climb Mount Fuji
little slug,
but slowly."

(One of the latest renderings of Arroyo Rd., one of the least important roads in the imaginary city of Washington. Ha-ha)

Beginning take 4.

Today we will most likely have to face another team re-organisation in the hope this will lead more efficiently to our goal.
No, I am not talking about being able to instruct monekys to train more simians, but to finally reach the transparency and the timing that I retain necessary to bring this game about.

At the moment we're stuck: some delays with the graphics team not only caused malcontent but comprehensibly jammed any cog in the somehow delicate development machine.
Assemblers cannot assembre the locations, writers cannot write witty or less witty remarks and although the direction and storyboard for the full motion videos is partially ready, it cannot be taken on screen.
I am full of hope and passion, though and I am positive this family of issues will soon be nothing but a difficulty we've overcame in a recent past.

The spare time I'm granted I can dedicate to trying to be a trifle more sociable and to go back to some solid morning reading.
Until next sign...

(One of the game sub-episodes' title)

I hereby declare the charachters’ dialogues first edition complete.
Drinking tea and wishing well for the future of this game.

“... Drive home with no lessons learned.”

We’re proceeding a bit too slowly, but the delay is not what worries me the most.
I am mainly concerned about the “solubility” of the problems we’re facing more than about delays we’re not responsible for.
Like a nasty gallstone in the kidneys of... of... well, at least I hope it’s not someone I know!

Why, at least it seems the problems with real time shadows are solved for good, game icons are being modeled and I will be done with charachters dialogues in their first edition by the end of this week.

On an partially unrelated note, I am investing the spare time I am allowing myself out of the game in this last period to complete the gathering of all the papers I need to apply for a PhD in California and to steer away from a routine which got a trifle stifling and ceased to keep me stable.
I strongly believe that the dialogues for this game will be very accurate and amusing, once they will be assembled.

At the moment only I and a few other lunatics can enjoy them in dark corners or some equally spooky location, wringing our hands with a wry smile.

While the old demo we’ve prepared in September is being refined and dolled up with new charachters, fonts and pointing devices, we are blessed with the first autumnal shower.

(Stefano showing the first map disposition to Valerio in a picture which dates back to the first month of conception, March 2004).

Another hectic weekend for what concerns my personal contribution to this game!
I both manged to support Valerio with the positioning of the cameras over the main external sets of Washington, to finish writing the main body of Chucho’s dialogues (took me more or less six days so far) and to begin to structure Cornelia’s ones.
Cornelia – what a lovely name – will be a black maid in her twenties who works part time for the Toughs’. Incidentally she is a pivotal charachter for what concerns the uncoiling of the main storyline thread.
Yeah, like if you cared at all...

Although you soon will be informed about the history and architecture of the town itself (in the “BACKGROUNDS” link), someone gracefully insisted on being informed about this game’s general characteristics.
Imagining that many others would probably be more interested in something of that kind more than to listen to my petty mumbling, I guess I will try to endeavour to sum up what this game is going to be.
Hrm... “Tony Tough in a Rake’s Progress” will be a very elegant 3D point and click adventure in third person.
A more logical and mature prequel to the first crazed episode featuring a young Tony Tough which will paradoxally be the old Tony relatively to the time when the first one is set (the first which is indeed, chronologically, the second).
The old Tony, or if you prefer, the younger Tony has just turned 13 and lives a simple life in his native town with his parents and his dog.

The game is very accurately set in 1953 and allows the player to drive Tony both thru the hardness of adolescence and acne, both on the road – paved with passion for mystery and notionism – which will lead him to become the private eye we’ve cordially hated in “The Night of Roasted Moths”.

The sun shines over nothern Italy.

In the last couple of days I have personally been quite productive, moulding the personality and writing the dialogues for a most lovely character named Jesus “Chucho” Juarez. His narrative and symbolic roles in the plot were of course determined in an early conception stage, but in this specific phase I need to work on his details and malfunctions, trying to give this puppet a soul and make the next human wreakage out of him.
I would paste some quotes here, if only they were written in English...

As I write, Valerio is presumably working on refining the main set of cameras for the central square in the village of Washington (an imaginary, lonely and squalid town in New Mexico where our hero was raised and a big slice of this adventure takes place).
Alessio is starting his journey as character animator for this project, Vincenzo is busy modeling the first set of icons and pointers...
I am sure I will soon have the chance to appropriately describe the settings, my teammates’ work, some - I guess - charming aspect of the main charachters’ features, their double relationships and whatever else I may fancy revealing... Although right now I reckon it might be more interesting to introduce you “the cast”.
I have, then, asked any colleague to integrate and enrich the very schematic description of himself listed in the “TEAM” link, simply using four words.
This is what came out:

Valerio – “Total and distressing waste”
Marco – “No time for dummies”
Alberto – “Nice, tenacious and mediocrity-proof”
Stefano C. – “Generous game cube player”
Vincenzo – “Happily untidy big-boned designer”
Alessio – “Hhygienically correct long-haired rocker”
Demis – “****“
Michel – “Precise, messy and busy”
Daniele – “Fearless, tenacious: a mule”
Simone – “Long Haired Music Box”
Stefano G. – “State of melancholy madness”