CaptainD Interviews Wham (currently making "He Watches")

I interviewed Tomi Kähkönen (otherwise known as “Wham”), an adventure game developer in the AGS community, about his forthcoming game He Watches . Look out for the game sometime this year… or maybe next year? Read on to find out… 1/ First off, the obvious question – tell us a bit about your game “He Watches” He Watches is a moment’s brainchild I came up with in the summer of 2011. I’ve always loved classic horror stories and detective stories, and as of late I’ve been reading up a lot of the more modern variations of these scary stories, known as “internet creepypasta”. One night I was reading up on such material and I started getting ideas of this very classic horror story of a haunted house with teenagers trapped inside, but with twists taken from elements of modern creepypasta. I started writing down ideas and realized that I had just recently started testing ways to create atmospheric lighting in AGS and it all just clicked. I whipped up a quick tech demo and everything just snowballed from there. 2/ What’s the most difficult part of the game creation process? Definitely graphics. He Watches consists of well over 50 rooms that all need to feel distinct and unique, and yet connected and stylistically in line with one another. While I can make a single room in just a few hours on a good day, usually it takes me several days to get the rooms just right. Then there is the character art and animation, for over 5 unique characters, which is also a huge work payload, especially since I work almost completely alone. 3/ What aspect of making an adventure game do you enjoy most – storyline, puzzles, coding? Can’t I just answer “D: all of the above”? The aforementioned three elements are the three main reasons I make games, along with the will to make “better games” than what I feel the mainstream media is producing nowadays. If I absolutely have to pick one as my favorite, that would be coding. While story designs and planning out puzzles are fun, they lack the same sort of immediate rewards that coding has. Nothing quite beats the rush you get in the middle of the night, after problem-solving scripts that handle footstep sounds on different surfaces, or adjustable lighting, and suddenly everything just clicks. You can test it out immediately, see the results in action and celebrate. Nothing quite like it. 4/ He Watches is planned to be a commercial release, all going well. There are some great freeware adventure games out there, so what do you think the main difference(s) are between a game you’d intend to release as freeware and a game you’d like to sell commercially? It all boils down to quality and feedback. I’ve been trying to squeeze out as much feedback as possible from people who have played the demo, or have seen the design documents or concept art, and in every turn I try to make a game of quality. If there is enough constructive feedback, and I manage to evolve myself and the game in such a way that I can turn that feedback into positive feedback, that will encourage me invest more time and resources into the game. If the game seems to be a mediocre but enjoyable one, I might release it as freeware. However, if the project goes well, the test audience enjoys it and I feel it is good enough, I will probably hire voice actors, do extra work in polishing animations, details and the overall look and feel of the game and just put a massively bigger investment of time into the project so that I can feel that the end result is something people might want to pay money for. I also have to mention that being a “real game developer” has been a lifelong dream of mine. I’ve already proven to myself that I can make games, but with He Watches I am hoping to prove that I am able to evolve as a game designer to such an extent that the games I can create are of such quality that people would be willing to pay for the result. I’m not in this to make huge sums of money, since I already have a job that can support me, but rather I just want to see if I can really do it. 5/ Does creating adventure games really lead to nervous breakdowns? > Occasionally, mostly just teeny-tiny small ones. Mostly the issue is that I work alone and as such I have very limited capacity in testing everything that I am creating. This has led to some instances where I have put hours and hours into creating something, before realizing it will not work and having to start all over, sometimes abandoning days or weeks’ worth of work just to improve an existing design that was just not good enough. It’s overhauls such as this that have kept my previous game project; “Infection – Episode 2” (started development in 2008) out of action for so long and it can be a bit soul-crushing at times. 6/ What are, in your opinion, the finest examples of the adventure game genre? I am a huge fan of the old Lucas Arts adventure games such as Monkey Island 3, The Dig and Grim Fandango. These were all games with fun and often surprising storylines, clever and occasionally rather insane puzzles and humor and all in all they were just great games. A bit more modern game called “Scratches” also deserves a special mention for being a fantastically well-made modern adventure game with a wonderful atmosphere that still sends shivers down my spine. 7/ Did any particular game / game designer inspire you to want to make your own adventure games? Yes, that questionable honor would go to Mr. Yahtzee and his 5 Days a Stranger. 5DaS was featured back in 2007 as part of a small freeware gaming article in a Finnish IT magazine called “Mikro-Bitti” and I remember looking at the picture and thinking “that reminds me of Monkey Island and The Dig”. The article had two URL’s listed on it: one was a download link of 5DaS and the other was ” www.bigbluecup.com “. Within a few days my teachers at school were wondering why I had become so quiet in class all of a sudden, as I was working on trying to make my first room and character and walkcycles using MS paint in class. 8/ Apart from adventure games, what genres do you enjoy playing? I play a lot of games: First-person shooters, JRPG’s, WRPG’s, platformers, hack’n'slash games, real-time-strategy, military simulations… Almost anything I can get my hands on. I also do tabletop gaming and pen&paper RPG’s such as Call of Cthulhu and Dark Heresy, the latter two of which are great ways to practice story writing. 9/ Back to “He Watches” – what aspect of the game design are you most proud of? My first real new innovation: the adjustable lighting system. While it’s not really that robust or amazing to the hard-broiled scripting veterans on the AGS forums, it was something I had never seen done in AGS before and it was just incredibly fun and rewarding to make. To think that a simple overlay with adjustable transparency can create such an illusion of light and shadows was just mind-boggling to me at first, and it allows me to do a lot of tinkering with visual scares, atmosphere building, puzzles and gameplay mechanics. For example, the game is designed so that the main character cannot see small items or little details in the dark, so in some rooms creating a stable source of light to search the room by will be a puzzle in itself. 10/ Finally, what sort of time period do you expect to be able to release “He Watches”? When I started the project in July 2011, I was optimistic, as I had already released two small games that year, and I thought I could do it by Christmas 2011. We all know that didn’t come to pass… I’m trying to be realistic here so I’d say that IF the game ends up freeware, you can expect to see it during 2012 for certain. However, if I do go the extra mile and make the game a commercial release, with extra animation, improvements, full voice acting with authentic accents, more music and all that, a 2012 release is possible, yet unlikely. I am looking into scrounging up some money so I can actually hire someone to playtest the game in a more professional manner, as well as to hire the voice actors etc. If I can do that, things should speed up quite considerably. PC Game Reviews and News

See the original post here
:
CaptainD Interviews Wham (currently making "He Watches")