A Hardy Developer's Journal – as written by indie adventure game developers

A once cheerful land of forests, mountains and magic has succumbed to permanent winter. A permanent winter conjured up and constantly renewed by the terrible black fire attacks of a mighty ice dragon. As a result most human inhabitants have turned into ice statues and the prospects of the handful that are still able to keep their blood reasonably warm are no better. One of those is an old woodsman who lying ill in his bed has just explained the situation to his daughter in a speech very nicely stylized to archaic jargon. (more…)

There’s little doubt that travels to hidden magical dimensions often become the greatest secret desires. To kids anyway. And in a way we’re generously provided with all kinds of Narnias, Harry Potters or Simon the Sorcerers that allow to taste a bit of this sort of experience. So if you fancied at least one of the imaginary places from those pieces of fiction you’re now invited to venture into the world of troubled vampire pizza deliverers and pizza molding magicians via Pizza Morgana. (more…)

Mark (in the center) at PAX with Ryan Jones and Dave Grossman on his flanks

So here we are today talking this time to a truly accomplished adventure game designer who has gone from small, but great indie productions (Nick Bounty!!!) to become one of the lead creative forces at Telltale Games. Mark Darin after leading the design on the Strong Bad games is co-creating all the big titles currently in progress, including Tales of Monkey Island and the future Sam & Max episodes. As always we started the interview with the most difficult question. Next we started to differentiate between indie games and Telltale games which may be not entirely fair as Telltale is all independent as far as I know, just maybe a bit bigger than Mark’s own company Pinhead Games. Oh, and Pinhead‘s games are freeware. (more…)

How funny can be a game that parodies the classic noir fiction, but happens neither on the Discworld, nor in the skeleton-laden Land of The Dead, but looks like just a “straight” parody of the genre set in our boring Earthrealm? Incredibly funny it seems. Presented in true B&W and equipped with a P.I. hero who likes to provide elaborate narrations full of metaphors, Nick Bounty is a game which stays true to the original detective novel, at the same time being completely crazy.

It all begins with a scene borrowed from The Maltese Falcon – a man delivers a box with mysterious contents (more…)

For this month’s Dev Intro we conducted an interview with the studio behind that striking Briefcase Romanin game – the surreal little thing which emerged totally unexpected with a superb HD trailer last month and has instantly become the talk of the town. While the game being announced as a participant in the XBox Dream Build Play contest gave a bit of an impression that it might become available only for that particular platform, fortunately this isn’t the case at all – the creators confirm a PC release as well!

So what is it all about? Well, in the center of the game is that very (very) strange briefcase you see… (but you can’t that well see on the screens here, so watch it in the excellent trailer below) (more…)

We proudly present our new series of “mini” interviews called Dev Intro. The goal is to give some (yet) unknown indie development studios the opportunity to talk about their premiere adventure game titles and their approach to game design in general. After more interviews in the series are published it will be possible to compare different ideas on starting out with your first indie title, as well as thoughts on the struggles connected to being indie.

Our guest for this interview is Oded Sharon of Corbomite Games who have just released the first episode in five of Pizza Morgana – an adaptation of a comic book under the same title. It is about the adventures of a young girl while delivering pizza for a company that also happens to hire monsters, vampires, faeries, and daemons. A demo version is to be found here. (more…)

Freelance adventurers Ben & Dan don’t have any extravagant goals in life. A nice, meaty session sat in front of the telly watching Magnum P.I is usually all they wish for. Unfortunately, it’s not the safest possible way of spending one’s time. In the award-winning game Ben There, Dan That it has caused our heroes to be teleported on an alien spaceship filled with gates to alternate versions of Great Britain -  from one where UK is ruled by the USA, to one where dinosaurs remain the dominant species and evolved to the point of producing electronic entertainment. (more…)