Adventure Gamers - Forums

Adventure Game Page: https://adventuregamers.com/games/view/15733
Remake Page: https://soapbubble.online (play free online!  Desktop Firefox/IE Edge/Chrome only)

I am the son of the sole developer of the game Morpheus by Soap Bubble Productions.  I have been working on porting the game to run in a web browser as a platform for re-release of the game for mobile and modern desktop.  The game engine is mostly complete and I am currently working on bugs and adding a wrapper for the game (menu, pause, load, save, options, etc…).  Also the game does not run well on stock mobile browsers due to limitations in mobile browsers on playing video and audio assets, however when packaged as an app will work correctly.

Morpheus was the last title released by Piranha Interactive before shutting down.  Soap Bubble Productions (the company which produced the game) was never paid for the sold copies and only 50,000 copies were printed.  An international release was in the works and Tiburon Interactive (which was made up of ex-Piranha employees) licensed the game for an international release where it was localized for German, French and Spanish.  Soap Bubble Production was not able to find another publisher and was disbanded shortly afterwards.

Fast forward 15 years later I was annoyed that I was not able to play Morpheus on a 64bit machine so I started rewriting it.  I actually got a semi-working version in C++.  Then my wife was diagnosed with Stage III Cancer and I put away that work for a couple of years.  She was eventually treated and after 18 months of chemo, radiation and surgeries I picked up the project again.  However for many reasons I abandoned the C++ port and started over with a remake as a web game which can be seen at https://soapbubble.online.

I am currently using the original assets from the released CD which are really bad by today’s standards due to being over compressed in order to fit on 3 CDs.  I do have all of the original unmastered assets that I plan on remastering them once I am finished with the game.

You can follow me on https://twitter.com/dev_morpheus or https://www.facebook.com/MorpheusGame/ for every little update and I will update this thread with any big announcements.  I also sometime stream development and play-throughs of the game at https://www.twitch.tv/morpheusdev

I enjoyed playing Morpheus and I’m sorry to hear the developers didn’t get any income from it.
Morpheus can be played on 64-bit Windows, but not without emulation and some degree of technical ability to set it up.

I always appreciated that the original Morpheus game could use any CD drive and not just the drive the game was installed from. Playing on a computer with two CD drives, it cut down a lot on disc swapping to have a different Morpheus CD in each drive. With a virtual CD program and images of all three CD’s mounted, no disc swapping.

I would like to see an updated version of Morpheus offered on GOG (or Fireflower). Games like Timelapse and the Journeyman Project games are being sold at GOG. I’m not really interested in playing Morpheus online myself (the online interface kills the immersion for me) but maybe others will enjoy it. I hope you’ll eventually consider selling an updated offline version.

crabapple - 05 October 2017 03:05 PM

I enjoyed playing Morpheus and I’m sorry to hear the developers didn’t get any income from it.
Morpheus can be played on 64-bit Windows, but not without emulation and some degree of technical ability to set it up.

Quite correct, but QT3 when emulated exhibits distracting audio artifacts.

I always appreciated that the original Morpheus game could use any CD drive and not just the drive the game was installed from. Playing on a computer with two CD drives, it cut down a lot on disc swapping to have a different Morpheus CD in each drive. With a virtual CD program and images of all three CD’s mounted, no disc swapping.

You can also copy the contents of all CDs to the installed folder and you will no longer need to disc swap.

I would like to see an updated version of Morpheus offered on GOG (or Fireflower). Games like Timelapse and the Journeyman Project games are being sold at GOG. I’m not really interested in playing Morpheus online myself (the online interface kills the immersion for me) but maybe others will enjoy it. I hope you’ll eventually consider selling an updated offline version.

That is the eventual plan The webpage is really just a development platform.  Eventually I will wrap the game up in an HTML5 application framework to make it feel like a native application.  There are a variety of options for desktop, iOS, Android, etc…  It just so happens that my professional career lead me towards learning several of them and I am well situated to finish this quest

I loved Morpheus, so this sounds fantastic. And looking at the site, do I understand correctly that by the end of the project you’ll have a shiny new open-source adventure game engine (or most of one) too?

An updated version of Morpheus would be fantastic! One of my all time favourites.

Phlebas - 06 October 2017 05:00 AM

I loved Morpheus, so this sounds fantastic. And looking at the site, do I understand correctly that by the end of the project you’ll have a shiny new open-source adventure game engine (or most of one) too?

The engine is most certainly tailored to Morpheus.  The original Morpheus game engine was designed to be re-used from the beginning.  There is very very little Morpheus specific logic in the game engine.  The game itself is defined by the assets and the map which links everything together.The only thing I am not open sourcing is the code I wrote to convert the original Morpheus.Map file that shipped on the CDs (which is a binary stream) to the JSON text format consumed by the engine.  That being said, if someone wanted to make a game in the style of Morpheus (panoramas + backgrounds + img and movie overlays + UI/control logic) then everything is there to do it. 

Some tooling would be nice to help make new data maps, but certainly giving new assets and a new game map a new game could be made using the same engine.

Morpheus is one of the hidden gems imo. Played the original game not too long ago and finished it. The only problem i had with it was the oversensitive mouse control. Definitely a game worth playing and a sad thing is to hear that the devs did not earn any money from making it, such a shame.

I feel I should clarify that Piranha did did pay a signing bonus of sorts to Soap Bubble Productions to secure the licensing rights.  However the printed copies were released to the distributor to sell due to money owed by Piranha and Soap Bubble did not get any money from that.  The boxed copies of Morpheus were used to settle debts owed by Piranha.

Also I created an itch.io account and made a page for the game (https://soapbubble.itch.io/morpheus).  Right now it’s a simple iframe pointing back to https://morpheus.soapbubble.online but in the future I would like to make custom builds and upload the assets to their servers as well.

Posted another developer update on YT:

Summary:
- Press esc to open prototype game menu
- Login / logout / save / load
- Settings page, but they don’t work yet
- Twitter highlights of new platform builds (desktop and mobile)
- Itch.io launch