Mike Bantick
Friday, 27 February 2009 09:20
Opinion and Analysis
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All projects have ‘dumb stuff’ and ‘smart stuff’ that occurs through the time-line. Recently, Steve Fawkner, CEO of Infinite Interactive, makers of Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords and the just released Galactrix, gave an insight into the pitfalls of creating the game during a time of growth for the company.
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix has launched for PC and Nintendo DS, with the Xbox LIVE Arcade version down the track a little way. And it is sure to be successful given the Puzzle Quest branding.
At this weeks’
Dissecta event, Steve Fawkner, CEO of local developer Infinite Interactive gave the attentive audience and insight into how Galactrix came to fruition, the dumb things and the smart things the developer did over the course of twenty two months of project work.
It was not until ten months into the games development, one of the publishing staff said “why don’t you use the PuzzleQuest brand on this game?”
After a number of puzzle style iterations, involving shooting lazers at icons, collapsing row style and Zuma style games with a Sci-fi theme that the final iteration of a hex based, match three, Sci-Fi themed RPG game emerged.
Many of the early iterations just were not fun, but with the hex style requiring matches to be made in six different directions, with the gem fall direction dependent on the match direction. “This gave a whole space feel with gems falling in different directions,” Fawkner said, “just those little changes, squares to hex and the direction of the gems falling totally changed the feel of the game, the prototype was fun to play, this was the one.”
The studio grew with the development of 3.5 games at once (three PuzzleQuest games and a side project as part of the ABC program Good Game), from 10 to about 45 people. During this growth the lack of a QA department really hurt Infinite Interactive’s relationship with publishers.
Sending out buggy iterations of the work in progress did not go down well, and then there were the more humorous results of a lack of over arching quality assurance.
In the game today, there is a mission to steal food from New-Ethiopia, not an ideal or politically correct situation to be in. Nor was it intended, simply a result of multiple changes made at the one time, in name and content areas.
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