What's it all about?
Maniac Mansion Mania refers about the productions of short graphic adventures in form of episodes, in a series conformed about the world of Maniac Mansion. The remarkable thing is that anyone can participate for free. Only it's neeeded to download and play the existing episodes, to then extend Maniac Mansion Mania univers with own episodes. No matter if the protagonist of them is Bernard, Razor, or Dr. Fred. The characters and background images of episodes could be reused, resulting in a considerable saving of time in a production of a game.
To this, it must have in consideration the following golden rules in order to not destroy the eternal legend of Maniac Mansion:
| • | No main character can die. |
| • | It's forbidden to show the area above the spiral staircase in the Mansion. |
| • | No gasoline for the chainshaw. |
| • | It should have taken enough care to ensure that no contradictions arise between episodes produced. |
| • | It must have at least one original Maniac Mansion chacacter in game related situations. |
| • | The episode must be free of bugs (errors). |
If any of these rules is not kept, the episode can't appear as an official Maniac Mansion Mania episode; even if the episode is extremely buggy, it can't be formally accepted. Nonetheless, in the Special Episodes these rules are kept partially, like these of Halloween Special 2010, where the characters could die. Thes Specials, however, have an extraordinary status and are not includes in the series of regular episodes.
Maniac Mansion Mania is a free fan project and has no financial or profitable purposes. Therefore it's not allowed any commercial or profitable interest neither in the files to download and/or any material providad.
Furthermore, we will not tolerate messages with illegal or questionable political ideas in Maniac Mansion Mania.
How do I create an episode?
In the Ressourcen section are a number of Starterpacks to produce them, most of them are produced for the AGS gameengine, but also for other game engines like Visionaire or PaC-DK. In any of these Starterpacks are the main characters of Maniac Mansion, as well as various sound effects, MIDI tracks, and of course background graphics.
I'm having trouble to create my episode, or to deal with AGS Starterpacks. What do I have to do?
The Starterpacks contain a quainty of included elements (such as the complete SCUMM-GUI) and functions that could make greatly facilitate the correct working to bring an episode into life.
A fundamental introduction for this theme is presented here by Endres -> http://www.maniac-mansion-mania.de/forum/index.php?topic=15.0 (German)
Other explanations by a-v-o about the functions are found here -> http://www.adventure-treff.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7529 (German)
If you have other doubts of technical origin, if you speak German, you can enter in the German forum of AGS -> Ags-Forum (German)
or make your questions about Maniac Mansion Mania in the MMM Forum -> MMM-Forum (international Section for no german speakers)
Or the Original AGS Forum here -> http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb
I have finished my episode. Now what?
BETATESTS:
We experienced that, once finished the game, is needed a time for beta-testing. There are numerous visitors in the MMM-Forum, which will gladly check the heart and kidneys of your episode in order to discover possible bugs and suggest corrections.
Open a thread in MMM-Forum:
If you episode if bug-free and is ready to be released, open a new thread in MMM-Forum.
Put as a thread title the number of the episode with the episode title, and create a poll with a possiblity to evaluate it in a scale from 1 to five, similar to the threads of others episodes.
Please post in the thread:
An in-game screenshot of 320x200 pixels resolution
a brief description of the plot
a link to download your episode
If you want to provide new background images, characters and sounds for the project:
Send your links to download background images, characters and sounds.
Put your characters in images (if possible in the format .cha for AGS),
along a brief description about the characteristics of your character.
What's up with these Edgars and what do they mean?
The Edgar Awards are awarded afther the completion of any season. Per one of them (10 episodes) are awarded three bronze Edgars, one silver Edgar and one golden Edgar. To the winner is send an actual mousepad of Maniac Mansion Mania, what is not an incentive to create an episode. :-)
MOUSEPADS: donated and designed by MisterL
Go to the site of The Edgar Awards
If I would like to create a Maniac Mansion Comic, what should I consider?
The most important thing to consider is that the comic mustn't be wider than 600 pixels, otherwise the layout of it is 'exploded' onto a side.
About the disk space used by files is another important point to consider: A 32-bits PNG file stores 5x KB, the same as a JPG file with 80% of quality.
So we please that, before you publish them, you must reduce the file size as small as possible.
You can post it here -> http://www.maniac-mansion-mania.de/forum/index.php?topic=326.0
where we have to care that a mod will decide if it will go to the home page :-)
I would like to link to your site.
To this, please link to http://www.maniac-mansion-mania.com/ and use this banner (designed by MisterL):
