Sherman Toothrot
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One of the few games which take their place in the world of Monkey Island is "Sherman Toothrot". We've collected all the facts you have to know about that adventure game (which is developed by Treasure Tales) interviewing Brush, one of the team members.

AC: What's "Sherman Toothrot" about?
Brush: We've created a new character who doesn't exist in the original Monkey Island for our game. He's Sherman Toothrot, the brother of the well-known Herman Toothrot. An unforeseen event puts his usually boring life upside down. Walking along Pinty Island's beach one night, he suddenly finds a bottle which is transporting a strange plant and a message from his brother Herman. His dear brother's asking for help in it since he has stranded on an unknown island. Sherman instantly intends to save his brother Herman and begins to see through his life's biggest adventure.

AC: Why have you chosen the subject matter of Monkey Island?
Brush: The original decision to create a Monkey Island-like game has been done very early. In the beginning of the long development process we even planned to create a Monkey Island sequel. According to this fact, we wanted to copy every scene's atmosphere and every character's apparel and name from the Monkey Island series. But during the years it appeared more and more uncomfortable, so we have cut most of the direct relations to Monkey Island. Although the subject matters are still the life of pirates, the Caribbean and of course monkeys, we created our own locations and persons so that our game has nothing or just very few to do with LucasArts productions.

AC: Is there a profound message in your game?
Brush: We don't want such a message. Sherman won't tell you one of life's secret in the end of the game. There are certainly better ways to tell profound messages than to do it in a fan-made adventure. It's our goal to make the player forgetting his usual life and to make him discovering another world for a couple of hours. It's comparable with LucasArts' "The Secret Of Monkey Island" which you can't find the real secret of Monkey Island in. What's the secret of Monkey Island? Almost every player has found his own secret during the course of the game.

AC: How many locations will there be and how many characters will exist?
Brush: There are about 50 locations and 40 characters in our game. But we don't want to fix a certain number because we continuously invent new things during our graphical works and because we will certainly devise and discuss about new locations and characters.

AC: How long do you think will the whole game be?
Brush: At the moment we're looking for alpha testers who might help us to give a more accurate answer. Developers can't really guess how long a player needs to solve all the quests and how much time he'll spend at all. Especially adventures are often longer or shorter than the developers thought they are, well, our game won't take a lot of more or less time than Monkey Island 1 did.

AC: What program is used to create your game and why did you choose it?
Brush: We're using "Visionaire" which is already quite well-known in the circle of fan adventure developers for programming. It seemed most comfortable because of its easy handling, its clear forming and the fact that some of our team members are developers of Visionaire, too. This makes a lot of interesting things possible.

AC: What other developing tools do you use?
Brush: Sketches are often created by using a pen and an eraser on a desk. After scanning graphic tools like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro are utilized. Our musicians use Cakewalk Home Studio.

AC: How many persons are currently working for the game? How is it all organized?
Brush: So far 15 people are working in the Treasure Tales team - and it's growing and growing. Every member has one special job, but everyone's allowed and pleased to discuss and to produce all kinds of other useful stuff. We try to keep working on an uncomplicated and sorted basis by having detailed and well-organzied brainstormings and by using a managing system which is always up to date on our server. Our open source project has turned to a half open source project since, after a lot of confused working, we decided this would have negative effects only - people who visit our board would know too much about the whole game because everything was open to everyone. That was probably the reason why we set up areas which are attainable by using a password only. But there's still a public board which interested visitors can use for writing an application or for asking questions. Although we're always happy about new members, we can't accept everyone since we want to produce a game of high quality; so we had to give negative replies, too. That's truly sad, but there are a lot of alternative projects which are also searching for new members.

AC: And how much content is developed yet?
Brush: Around 20 percent of the whole game have been done so far. But we are quite sure we will have a lot of more ideas so that the percentage of content we've already created will be much lower in the end.

AC: Will there be a playable demo? If there will be one, when will you publish it?
Brush: Yes, there will be a playable demo. We're currently working very hard to finish it and it's quite sure it will be published in this year's winter months.

AC: Thank you for that interview!