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

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…)

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…)

As a reviewer, you can’t help not having particularly great hopes when asked to review a first time developer’s indie game. Especially a project that a single designer without any game-making background spent 5 years on. Yet a reviewer’s life can be full of surprises – Remigiusz Michalski‘s Downfall provided what I quite frankly consider to be one of the finest stories told in an adventure game in the last 10 years. Moreso it really takes advantage of being an involving player experience – challenging you with choices and actions that have real emotional impact. Some time ago I wrote down my own personal experience of playing the game, and today I have the distinct pleasure to  pick the mind of the creative genius behind Downfall… (more…)

The Blackwell Convergence is the third installment of Wadjet Eye Games’ Blackwell franchise. For many, the wait has been even more of a killer than The Countess herself; originally slated for release in 2008, the July 2009 release of Convergence has had much to live up to. Delays usually lead to two main progessions of thought in a gamer’s mind: the game will either be of a lesser quality than before due to problems in development, or polished to a finer shine than was originaly expected. (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…)

Blackwell Unbound is the second episode of the Blackwell franchise from Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Studios. It is an interesting game in many ways, in particular due to the decision to tell a story from the past, rather than continue directly on from The Blackwell Legacy. The ever-informative director’s commentary immediately sheds some light on this decision: (more…)

The Blackwell Legacy is the first episode of Dave Gilbert’s The Blackwell Series, published by Wadjet Eye Games. It was actually originally released as Bestowers Of Eternity, created with the AGS engine and winning several awards in the process. Yet The Blackwell Legacy is more than a mere graphical update and the addition of voices to an old title. (more…)