Development of the game, Jolly Rover

Andrew of Brawsome talks about their game, Jolly Rover

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/jolly-rover-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]UCMQW4iT684[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Andrew: Hi. My name is Andrew Goulding, and I run a small indie studio called Brawsome which is based in Melbourne, Australia.

Interviewer: What game are you working on now?

Andrew: I’m working on a title called Jolly Rover which is a 2D point-and-click adventure set in a pirate world and all the characters are dogs, scurvy dogs.

Interviewer: What inspired you to do a point-and-click adventure? You know, those aren’t really the most hyped up thing nowadays.

Andrew: Yeah. Well, point-and-click adventure certainly is niche, but it has a special place in my heart. I loved the point-and-click adventures from Sierra and LucasArts in the early ’90s, and I really feel that people like me are being under served as far as adventure is concerned. I think Telltale is doing a brilliant job, but the games have really captured that nostalgia. I can’t find any offerings like that, so I just wanted to make a game that I wanted to play and my friends wanted to play.

Interviewer: How did you go about developing and designing this game then?

Andrew: I wanted to take out all the things of adventure games that I really didn’t like and keep all the things I really did. The things I really like about adventure games are the characters, the puzzles and the story. The things I really didn’t like was being able to die and having to replay huge sections or forgetting what I was doing, or not having hints when I really needed them.

So, I’ve tried to make the game more accessible to today’s audience, and to be honest the traditional adventure game audience, if they went back and played the adventure game of the early ’90s now, would probably find out that they were actually really hot back then. As kids they had plenty of time to figure these things out, but as adults they just don’t have that kind of time any more.

Interviewer: How did you go about then testing to make sure that your game is going to be easy and accessible and stuff like that?

Andrew: Well, my wife may or may not hear this, but I like to do the wife test. I sit my wife down who’s played a few games, but she’s really not a gamer and just watch how she plays, how she interacts where her mouse goes, where her eyes go and I get so much feedback from that. And then, I go and implement that feedback. Yeah, that’s kind of my litmus test. I put it in front of hard core gamers, and they get through fairly easy, but they still do get stuck and so I’m trying to achieve that balance of challenging puzzles but really accessible game play.

Interviewer: You talked about some innovations that you’re trying to add to these adventure games before. Can you mention some of them?

Andrew: Yeah. One of the main things is I used to get frustrated when I was stuck on a problem, just going around and clicking on everything, because I forgot what I had interacted with. And so, I tried to address that by having blue text for anything new that you can interact with and white text-this is floating text over the item-for anything that you have already interacted with. So, you can quickly gauge what’s worth doing.

In addition, I didn’t want the adventure game to be a pixel hunt, so you can press one button, then you can highlight all the objects in the world. In addition to that, there’s a quest bar and there’s what I like to call the organic hint system which I call the hint parrot who’s a companion that stays with you throughout the entire game and normally gives you cricket clues unless you give him a cracker. And then he’ll give you the solution to the problem.

Interviewer: Do you have achievements and stuff like that? Can you talk about that one?

Andrew: Oh yeah. Another criticism that has been of adventure games is that they’re not really replayable. So, I’ve got three different types of collective items in the game, and these are crackers, pieces of eight and flags. I must stress that this is not a hidden object game. These things are normally found through general play and, in some cases, using items in unique ways.

There are four pieces of pirate flag that you can find on the three islands that you go across, and there is an achievement system that allows you to get roughly 75 percent of these achievements through normal play. And then there’s a few special ones that make up the extra 25 percent.

In addition to that, the feature that we’re really excited about is the developer commentary which is when you play through the game the first time, you develop a commentary which allows you to play through the game again with me talking about design decisions that I made and my thoughts in the game in addition to the original voice actor auditions and artists talking about their motivations and their challenges throughout the game. So, I really want to connect with the players that way.

Interviewer: And, you know, you talk about adventure games and humor. How do you make sure that the humor works, and how do you test it out? And how do you make sure it will be working in other countries, too, you know? Sometimes, humor is just specific to individual countries.

Andrew: Yeah. And localization is a real concern because I’m not sure how pirates speak translates to German or French or Italian or even Japanese. That’s definitely a big hurdle and when I come to localize these games I really think it’s important that I get a proper writer onboard that really understands humor that’s essentially done this before because a story translation, I know this is going to be a real issue.

Regarding how I get things funny, that’s a really difficult question because what I find funny other people might not find funny. What I try to do is read all the dialogue out loud, and if it’s still funny on the third go, then I think I’m on a winner. But I don’t try to make the whole game a laugh riot the whole time. What I do like to do is surprise the player with something out of the ordinary that they’ll find funny. And there’s also a few visual gags there because the art company that we’re using is very familiar with children’s cartoons, and so there’s humor to be found all over.

Interviewer: Were there any other surprises or challenges or changes you had to make to make sure that this game was going to work with the current audience?

Andrew: I suppose one of the things that was really important was to get the opening scene really accessible because that’s where you’re introduced to the game in the tutorial scene. In the opening scene all you have to do is find all the items in the room and click on them and examine them to try to escape the brig where you’re locked. But many people just couldn’t find all the items, so I had to add in one, the pushing a button to show the items up and then two, I just had to highlight the items with explicit flashing animations just to get people to view them and click on them.

One thing I think, you know, it’s easy for me; it’s difficult for another person. And coming from a casual games development background, usability is a really important issue for me.

Interviewer: So, aside from having your wife test it, do you have constant play testing, or how do you go about making sure that what you’re doing is clear and people can progress?

Andrew: Well, I ran the game through a few friends, but to be honest, we haven’t really done any public testing, and this is something I really wanted to quite a lot moving forward.

Interviewer: So, once this game is done–this game is going to come out in a few weeks?

Andrew: Well, it’s Alpha this week and it goes Beta in May which is content complete. And then, we’re going for a release in June. I’ve been having discussions with various digital distribution platforms, such as Steam and Direct Drive and Greenhouse. Hopefully, it’ll get to come out on most of them. In fact, it’s critical to its success that it comes out on [?].

Interviewer: Where do you see adventure games going because there’s always this talk about people want to do adventure games and then the business people are, like, no adventure games don’t work. Do you think there just has to be some innovation in the mechanic, some MMO principles that are persistent mechanics that actually make the adventure worthwhile? I mean, the thing about adventure games is–I know you consume the content once but you look at these MMOs. It is almost the same way. But the thing is they have a way to add new content every week. I don’t know if that’s something that needs to change. Maybe, that’s what makes the adventure game work.

Andrew: Well, it’s a hard sell and, to be honest, if the adventure games start including these features of MMO or something like platforming or action puzzle mechanics, you’re going to go a long way to alienating your core audience. So, they’re a very specific breed of game that people like and they are niche. I don’t think there’s a lot wrong with that. I certainly would like to see more people playing adventure games, but if it doesn’t hit the mainstream it’s really no big issue with me. As long as I can sell enough copies to make the next game, I’ll be very happy.

Interviewer: Where do you see adventure games going in the future?

Andrew: Well, I don’t know if we’ll see a return to the mainstream that they once were. I hope that they keep going in a capacity that makes them commercially viable for developers to continue with. But on saying that, I think that anyone making an adventure game I think it’s really important that the teams are small or, at least, the creative team is small because that’s where you get a real sense of the developers. You’re not watering down or diluting the story in creative control.

When I play an adventure game, I really want to be playing the idea of one person or, maybe, two people. That’s really important to me, and maybe that’s where adventure games went wrong when the team’s license started getting too large. So, my philosophy of moving forward is if I can be successful with this I really need to keep the team’s license quite small.

Interviewer: Cool. Where can people find out more information about your game and your site?

Andrew: They can find all the information for my site which is www.brawsome.com.au/jollyrover.

Interviewer: How do you spell that?

Andrew: Brawsome is spelled B-R-A-W-S-O-M-E and Jollyrover, one word.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.