Interviews

There are different reasons,

The first one could be commercial; we are living in a marketing world where the one who shouts loudest is right. Basing our work on well known brands or characters is supposed to bring us an existing audience; I say supposed because most of the time it’s not true. The biggest successes are made with original stories. To work with existing IP allow a flexibility in the game conception, we won’t have to explain the steam punk style and justify it when working with Jules Verne, we won’t have to explain who this detective is or the way he is thinking, or why when we are making a Sherlock story. So it has two consequences, first less work on the presentation of the world/characters and second and most important, to go deeper into the story and into the characters since we don’t waste time explaining who they are and what they are doing here. So it allows creating deeper environments which are enjoyable for our players in the genre.

We like classics, I’d like to work with other detectives, but there are some patents and we would need to discuss the rights. Other classics are very interesting too, but so far the game play possibilities were the problem. We will wait for 80 Days’ complete results on the market and switch our game play in the same direction, even if we need to change or adapt. So far the feedback was really good from editors and beta testers, so we are quite confident that we are moving in the right direction.

We want to improve at every game and if you look to “The Mystery of the Mummy” and now to “80 days”, there is only three years but a long way. Forums help a lot; there are some very good and very sharp opinions which help us to understand what mistake we make. Games are a story between game developers and players and nobody can enter this relationship. The e-mails that people write us, (we had a lot a mail of congratulations for the silver earring, and it wasn’t the case before) push us forward to give more effort for better games.

We are not faithful!!!! I can say that every single publisher who worked with us made money, in all territories and for all our games. We are serious, deliver good games at a good price, but publishers are not necessarily doing the same for many different reasons. So far we signed twice with few publisher, the devoted to adventure DTP AG in Germany, and in Italy with Microids. We would like to have adventure passionate publishers and honest ones, and we hope Tri Synergy who worked previously on some other titles, will do just that.

Your reviewer clearly saw the innovations we propose in “80 days”, it’s an adventure game, which is in real time 3D (and playable :) ). Adding 3D to the genre is not really new but to this extent it is. We see very often on JA forums and on other sites if adventure games “can be in 3D,” or they “need 3D,” or anything else connected to “3D.” 3D is enhancing game play! You could even say it adds a new dimension to it :).

The idea when we conceived the game was; “let’s do a traditional adventure game and let’s add some fun elements we find in other genres and some original ones specific to this title.” So we created a nice homemade receipt which will create the feeling of Adventure, Racing, and discovery.

“80 days” has giant and various environments, which are allowing more immersion and discovery than in 2D, you will feel yourself in India, in Egypt or in Japan. You can drive weird vehicles, which is fun, and additionally we deleted the frustrating go back and forth during the level. Puzzles are in 3D, means that you play with the third dimension when thinking; it’s changing the way you solve the puzzles and stimulate other areas of your brain (which is obviously why we play adventure games). Dialogs and cut scenes are integrated to the engine, assuring a complete immersion into the game during all the gaming experience. Real time physics from Ageia (Unreal Engine) allow you to play with other type of puzzles than the ones we knew until now in the genre.

We are not pretending to create a revolution; it’s just a matter to go through the gap between other leading gaming genres and our genre. Still there is no fighting and no violence, as we don’t feel the need for it in our game play.

I fear this “classic” element is not very popular in computer games generally, but I strongly believe that classic stories allow deeper development than “modern” stories. I don’t have a lot of esteem for the stories we have in most computer games, they are usually lame, using childish triggers, Manichean stories, well known clichés and other sub-average keys for story development. Games are really the most immature support we can have, they look like bad B movies most of the time, or cheap travel books. It’s due mainly to money reasons today, where the most talented people work in movies (where there is money), and when they work in games, even if they have good stories they don’t have enough money to develop them fully and make them believable. Adventure games suffer even more of this lack of money, as the genre is not really selling, it cannot interest financial people, who are key to development. So bring classics to the screen is simple as put Sherlock Holmes by his window, smoking a pipe, with a nice violin music, and you are in the story already. This is simpler than explaining a world conspiracy or making you believe that you are the one to save the planet (again).

We adapted the novel for different reasons,

The first one is that the people who originally read “Around the World in 80 Days”, in the last century, were dreaming while reading it, because traveling was for few people only. But today travel is conventional, and travel by conventional means (plane, boat, or car) isn’t that exceptional. The second is that “Around the World in 80 Days” is a book where we don’t find what we like the most in Jules Verne: strange machines ruling the world, giant steam pumps allowing fast travel and electro zinzulator regulating the temperature of the Sun. All the travels are done by conventional means in the book. The third was Fogg himself, who is an absolutely average person, who has no dream, no ambition, no thoughts and in the book is more a machine himself than a human being (he fired passepartout predecessor for an incredible reason of shaving water temperature), Fogg is described as a satellite in orbit around the planet, he saves Aouda for obvious moral reasons and become human at 10 pages from the end of the book. This is why passepartout was here: to balance his master…

So we decided to make a Jules Verne world to be able to rediscover places and dream, have strange machines and only one hero who has enough various personality to go through all the adventure, met crazy NPC, and live a fantastic story and experience. Also we could use anachronism and get the best of the traditional and modern world you visit.

Our 3D engine, that we created specifically for the game, allow it to be played on low end computer as we had 4 years ago and still play pixel shader 3.0 when enabled. The graphic quality is very good and when played you feel totally immersed in this strange fun world. The texture quality used is 4 times bigger than in the current games, providing better graphic than normal 3D and as good as pre-rendered backgrounds. The engine is not too heavy so it can be played on 4 year old, good, computers. You can expect some nice graphic effect, as reflection, water, bump, physics, clothes animation, and lip-synch in every language.

“80 days” is a race, so you can do this race in “real time”, meaning that you have 80 days to do it.

I want to say that there is an option in the game to play without this constraint, it is less fun but some players want to take their time.

In the case you choose to play the game with the maximum difficulty, you have to manage your global time, in every location or levels (Cairo, Bombay, Yokohama, San Francisco and in the transport which are levels themselves the Colossus or Giant Boat, the Leviathan or Giant Airship, the Titan or Giant Train) you have a critical time to complete all the missions otherwise you lose (you arrive in Cairo at day 8 you have until day 14 to leave). You have a system of auto save and checkpoint which allow redoing some missions if you fail them or if you want to do them faster.

As it was not enough, you have energy to manage, meaning that Oliver is a human being and needs to rest and eat, so you’ll have to manage these elements too. Go to the hotel and sleep or eat during the day otherwise you will fall down in the street of exhaustion and find yourself without money.

Then money is needed to pay rest and food, buy items needed in some of the puzzles, send and receive messages, buy your transportation ticket, rent a vehicle, and even bribe guards and policemen.

So you have these three elements to manage altogether, renting a vehicle will spare you time and energy but cost money, sleeping regularly is good as you won’t fall down during a mission but cost money and consumes time, etc…

The idea is to have the feeling that your actions depend on the world you are leaving in (some shops are closed at night, some other places as a Harem can be accessed only at night) and that this world has its own agenda, and you have to fit in.