wfmag.cc \ 07InterviewAttract Mode
keen to do something else. I loved writing
Broken Sword, I will write new Broken
Swords of course, but it just felt to me like I
wanted to write something else. I got back
in touch with Dave, and he was very, very
much up for it.
So, we started coming up with some
designs. If we’d been signed by a publisher,
they’d obviously want to see the design
and exactly what they’re going to get
before they sign a contract to fund it. [But]
because we were in the very luxurious
position of being able to self-fund our
prototype, it meant that together with
Dave, we could really think about what we
wanted to deliver without this imperative
to reach milestones, and then earn
revenues to pay wages.
Have the plans changed for the sequel
over the years?
I do try to avoid the word sequel because
the game is quite different. The original
was published 25 years ago, and we feel
that we have the latitude to write a game
that very much conveys the spirit, conveys
the world, but from a game-playing
perspective, it’s absolutely not a 320×
[point-and-click] adventure.
But what we really wanted to do was
make sure there was a balance between
ensuring that fans of the series got what
they wanted, but also that we could
innovate. Our very first game back in 1992
was called Lure of the Temptress. We had a
system called Virtual Theatre, and Virtual
Theatre had characters walking around
the world. The player could alter what they
did, alter what their motivations were, talk
to them, then talk to each other, overhear
conversations. That was a very exciting
system. People got really, really excited
about how that could develop.
[For technological reasons] we actually
moved away from that Virtual Theatre,
and I’ve always felt that maybe we never
really developed it to its full potential.
One of the core ideas of Beyond a Steel Sky
was to bring back Virtual Theatre within
an adventure environment. The idea
that characters are driven by their own
motivations and they’ll walk around the
world and talk to each other, but you can
subvert their behaviour by changing things
in the world. That is one of the main pillars
of the game which we prototyped, and
I’m really excited about it. In the real-time
3D, it actually works a lot better because
of course, you can move the camera
wherever you want. Rather than the 2D
rooms that we would have in the classic
adventure, what we instead have is like
arenas; areas which are big enough for a
number of Virtual Theatre characters to
inhabit and for interesting things to evolve
and merge from the way that the player
subverts the world.“We were in the
very luxurious
position of being
able to self-fund
our prototype”
InterviewAttract Mode