So we wanted to make the game accessible to the casual audience, but we didn’t want to disenfranchise the point-and-click adventure game fans who love this kind of thing. The point-and-click adventure game has existed since the 80s, but it is a genre that the casual audience had never seen before. How would you describe the development process overall? Smooth? Difficult? If I knew how much fun I would have writing for Anzel, I would have put him in the game more! Actually, my favorite character in the game is one I made up especially for the series. I really enjoyed writing lines for Dee (Dorothy), since she’s so delightfully nasty and self-absorbed. I still laugh at some of the lines I gave him. I had *great* fun with Jack Pumpkinhead, who’s philosophy to answering questions is to just deny everything. What were some of your favorite characters to "make over" from their Frank L. Also, as a female she could wear that awesome pillbox hat.Ī lot of familiar characters have been given new roles and personalities in ECC. You don’t often see a female in that role, and the mere act of gender swapping made the character much more unique and interesting. Just by making the lead character female, I was able to break away from the “hard boiled, toughguy P.I.” cliché we’ve all seen so many times. One of the first suggestions from PlayFirst was “Hey, you should make the detective a woman.” I balked at first, but then I thought about it and realized it actually worked better. Tell us about the character of Petra and how she evolved.įunny enough, she originally started off as a man! When I pitched the project to PlayFirst, I had a male gumshoe as the lead character. We had to adjust the first dialog tree to let the players know that it was OK to choose anything they wanted to and it wouldn’t be wrong. They were worried that they were going to make the wrong choice. When presented with a dialog choice screen, a lot of the testers took a LONG time to choose. It seems a bit backwards, but when you think about it the logic makes perfect sense.Īnother stumbling block was dialog trees. They were giving Petra the crowbar so she could use it on the door! They got very frustrated that Petra wouldn’t take it.
But instead of clicking the crowbar on the door, a lot of the testers clicked the crowbar on Petra. During the first scene of the game, you need to use a crowbar on a door. One interesting thing we learned was that the testers didn’t think of Petra as their avatar, but rather a prop on the screen to interact with. Some of the things we discovered blew my mind! They rounded up some testers and put them in front of the game and set up cameras which recorded their every reaction to the game, so we could see when they were enjoying themselves and when they got frustrated. One aspect that I found fascinating was the usability test. They also had an entire QA department working on the game, which is something I never had before.
I could get advice from their art director, or their lead designer, or their marketing department. It was very different! With Blackwell it’s mostly blind guessing to determine what works or what doesn’t work, but PlayFirst has been doing this for years and can instantly look at a feature and go “yeah, that’s not going to do the trick” or “Hm, that will leave the players totally confused.” There were also a lot more resources at my disposal. What was it like to work with PlayFirst? How was it different to working alone on the Blackwell series? I hear that’s rare, so perhaps they spoiled me! They did make one or two changes at the beginning (more on that later) but for the most part they trusted me to do my thing and gave me a lot of freedom. How much input did PlayFirst have in fleshing out the concept? It helped that the creative director at PlayFirst (Kenny Dinkin) was reading the Oz books to his son at the time, so he especially liked the idea. When PlayFirst approached me later on and asked me to pitch a game, I knew right away what I wanted to do.
It started out as pure fun, but after awhile I thought “Hey this is kinda cool.” I started assigning other Oz characters to classic film actors. I laughed, of course, but the idea took shape from there. Then one day I was watching “The Maltese Falcon” and, for some bizarre reason, I imagined what the Scarecrow would be like if he were played by Peter Lorre. It was always a dream of mine to make game based on the Oz books ever since I got into game development, but I could never think of a really good concept for one.