IAmA για το "Norse Noir - Loki's Exile"

Οι δημιουργοί του Norse Noir - Loki's Exile στήνονται στον τοίχο και απαντάνε σε όλες τις ερωτήσεις μας στο Ask me Anything που ξεκίνησαν στο Reddit.

Οι adventur-ικού ενδιαφέροντος ερωταπαντήσεις είναι (έως τώρα) οι ακόλουθες:

1. Why did you decide to develop an adventure game instead of any other (more popular) genres, especially a "love letter to the classic point-and-click adventure games most of us on the team grew up playing"? Was this a "budget" decision?
2. Do you still play any adventure games, or do you only long for the classic ones?
3. Who is designing the puzzles? Do they have any previous puzzle-designing experience? Should we expect any fresh ideas gameplay-wise?
4. Hey, i would just like to know what other norse gods we can expect to see throughout this game?


(απαντάει ο Brad - συγγραφέας και σχεδιαστής του παιχνιδιού)
1: To say first off, Norse Noir isn't the only project we're working on at the moment - We have one previously-released title (Halatafl) that we're working on releasing an upgraded version of and we have another, much more 'unique' title in development that we think will end up attracting the attention of people interested in those "more popular genres" you mention.

I can only speak for myself on this, but honestly this is just something I've always wanted to make. I've played text games since I was seven, got my first "real" adventure game around ten (Secret of Monkey Island) and overdosed on Carmen Sandiego games all the years in-between. Played through Full Throttle a good six or seven times. Hell, I had one of those stereotypically nerdy notebooks as a teenager filled with sketches of Ben, Maureen, Indy and Guybrush (also a bunch of random characters from The Far Side - I was a weird kid); this is just something I've always kinda dreamed about. The answers to #2 and #3 kinda tie in here, so I'll head on to those next.

2: I've played some of Telltale's titles (really looking forward to checking out the Borderlands games) and am very thankful they helped give the genre the shot in the arm it needed to get back into the general public's consciousness; anyone who says "adventure games died before Telltale" is completely wrong, but to say that they'd faded from the public eye would be a fair assessment. In truth, though, I haven't had many opportunities to sit down and really engross myself in playing games over the last two or three years - Hazard of doing what you love, you often find yourself with very little time to enjoy it anymore. My Steam backlog is massive, not the least helped by not having steady internet access for the last couple of years, up until a few months ago.

And though it may be a little non-standard I want to say I was a massive fan of the Phoenix Wright games; they may not be your traditional point-and-clicks but I still say they count. ;P

3: Puzzle design is being done mostly by me, with help and assistance from the rest of the team - With an indie outfit you usually don't stick to just one discipline, and the team tends to help each other out in whatever ways we can. This is my first point-and-click adventure title, though I did craft a few small (long lost) text adventures when I was young; otherwise I have experience running pen-and-paper RPGs and was the senior designer on the MMORPG Anarchy Online for seven years, where I often attempted to insert puzzle-like elements into encounters as best we could (the tech was somewhat limiting, unfortunately).
For "fresh ideas" in Norse Noir, though... nope. Not a thing. We are not pushing any envelopes, and gladly not doing so. I think back to some of the last "classic" adventure games I played, the ones where they all decided they needed to start adding in combat sequences and quick time events and... no. I don't want that. That's not an adventure game to me, particularly when it's implemented as clunkily as it tends to be in the vast majority of titles. As mentioned above I will lavish love and praise on Full Throttle all day long but holy crap did those fight sequences annoy the hell out of me. Combat and pixel hunts, two things that I'm not particularly interested in touching, ever.

We want to tell a story based around Norwegian mythology, and we think we have some great artwork to go with that - No real need to clutter it up with stuff that just isn't what we're trying to make. That said we aim to have our in-game puzzles be both challenging and logical, with no giant leaps of logic required to solve; after a certain point in the game the lead character will gain the ability to utilize magic of a fashion, but with the limitation of nobody actually witnessing it, and a good portion of our puzzle elements past this point will deal with this mechanic.

4. As the title implies heavily implies you'll be getting the chance to meet Loki at the least, but we have a good number of the general Norse pantheon available as characters in the game. Without giving too much away you can definitely expect appearances from Thor, Freyja, Aegir, Tyr and many more, though maybe not always in the forms you might be expecting.