Are you ready for more sleuthing with everyone’s favorite teenage detective? We’re excited to announce that Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand and Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake are now ready for public testing! Furthermore, it's now possible to enable the ScummVM save/load screens instead of the original ones, to take advantage of additional features when saving or loading.

In Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand, Nancy takes on the role of an intern at a Washington D.C. museum, where a mysterious theft sets off a series of clues leading deep into the secrets of ancient Maya artifacts.

In Nancy Drew: Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Nancy finds herself investigating a haunted cabin surrounded by eerie howls and ghostly canine apparitions.

The games are available for purchase through HeR Interactive’s website or Steam. Or if you already own a CD copy of the games, their English and Russian variants will also work. To play them with ScummVM, you will need a daily development build. As always, if you encounter any issues, please submit a bug report to our issue tracker.

This is yet another exciting year for the ScummVM project as we have five GSoC contributors joining the project this summer.

• Ellen Moon will be continuing work on adding Text-to-Speech to more engines. This will increase accessibility for those games that were missing voice-overs. This task will be presented on Ellen's GSoC blog.

• Aun Noman (known as Prime) will, at the same time, be adding Keymapper to the remaining engines. Only about 45% of ScummVM-supported engines have this feature. The current list can be found on our Wiki. And the relevant task blog will eventually be hosted at Aun's GSoC blog

• Malhar Badve (aka SuperLemon) is our Director contributor for this year. He has already added more improvements to QTVR, but our overall hope for this year is to add movie saving capability, which is required by many titles. You will be able to follow the progress for this task on Malhar’s GSoC blog.

• Shivang Nagta will pick up work on a system for verifying game file integrity, validating their checksums against those present in a central database. It will also let users contribute the checksums of game files not on the database. You can follow the progress for this task on Shivang’s GSoC blog.

• Alikhan Balpykov will help us with completing the qdEngine implementation this year. You can follow the progress for this task on Alikhan GSoC blog.

Please give them a warm welcome, and visit our Discord server if you want to discuss those projects. After a four week Community Bounding period, the coding period will start on June 2, and you can expect regular updates on these projects on their respective blogs. The team is very excited about the upcoming summer – and we hope you are as well.

We are excited to announce the classic Dynamix adventure games The Adventures of Willy Beamish and Heart of China are now ready for testing in ScummVM!

As the titular Willy Beamish, you play a 9-year-old troublemaker from Frumpton, USA. All you want to do is play Nintari and hang out with your friends, but your parents keep giving you so many chores... and even when you get them done, larger and more sinister forces are at work in your small town. A kid can't get a break!

In Heart of China, you start as retired WWI pilot Jake "Lucky" Masters. After a run-in with Hong Kong businessman E.A. Lomax, you feel driven by a strong sense of duty (and your massive debts!) to help him track down his kidnapped daughter. Work your way through a branching plot and the opportunity to play as three different characters to solve the puzzles and get Kate home.

Along with the previously announced Rise of the Dragon, these games complete Dynamix's short series of adventure games using the DGDS engine.

To test these games, you’ll need a DOS version of the game (both are available from GOG) and a daily development build. Be sure to check the notes on the wiki for each game, and please report any bugs on our issue tracker.

Dark Seed, a 90's point-and-click horror game from the mind of H.R. Giger, is now ready for public testing!

In the game you play the role of Mike Dawson, who just moved to a beautiful solitary mansion to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. You'll soon realise that the place harbors dark secrets, and you'll have just three days to escape a fate worse than death...

The DOS Floppy and CD versions are supported. The engine also supports a number of localised versions Spanish, French, German, Korean and Chinese.

The floppy version currently lacks sound effects but all other features from the original game should be present.

The engine also has the option of using the "arguably" better floppy music with the CD version if you have both.

To participate in the testing, ensure you have a daily development build. As always, please submit the bug reports to our issue tracker.

Good news: We've been accepted again to the Google Summer of Code program!

So, if you feel adventurous (or RPGous) and would like to spend your summer with the cool team, we look forward to your application.

Fear not—we will provide enough handholding, explanations, and support if you can dedicate time to coding on our project, are an open-minded developer ready to learn, and do not hesitate to ask any questions. We've been doing GSoC for the last 18 years (oh my gosh), so we know the drill.

A list of suggested projects can be found on this page. If you have your own idea, we will gladly evaluate it. For example, this happened in 2023 with the Crab engine. The required information for your application for our project is listed on our Wiki.

To give you a nice boost, we have put together an impressive amount of information on the Google Summer of Code miniportal. So you can learn all the ins and outs of the process. But indeed, you need to start by joining our Discord server and follow the #scummvm-gsoc channel where you can engage with our mentors and the rest of the team.

We are looking forward to your fine application and participation!