Interviews

• What was your contribution to On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness?

My main function was to look at the adventure game aspects of the project, which was the puzzle solving and, more importantly for Penny Arcade, the structure of the dialogs. When you're doing interactive Monkey Island-style dialogs, there are some rules you need to follow to make sure they don't get repetitive and that they flow correctly for the player. Jerry is a great writer, one of the best I've seen, and I gave him a crash course in how dialogs work in an adventure game. He's a fast learner.

• What did you learn from working on Rain-Slick that can be improved upon for your upcoming DeathSpank episodic adventure?

Getter a better handle on the scope of an episodic game. There is no tried and true structure yet and being involved in the Penny Arcade game is giving some good insights into game length and scope. The biggest challenge for episodic is not a creative challenge, but rather a production one.

• Any chance of an episodic RPG featuring Humongous characters – Putt Putt, Freddie the Fish, Spy Fox?

Unfortunately, I do not own any of the rights to those games, so I can't say. But, if you look at the scope of those games, they really were episodic if played by an adult.

• There is a quote on the front of the Jack Keane box, ‘This is Monkey Island done right, at last. – Gameboomers.com.’ What exactly is it you did wrong with Monkey Island?

Nothing. That game was about as close to perfect as you can get.

• What do your parents think you really do for a living?

My parents were always very supportive of my desire to make games and let me follow my dreams. My Dad is a physicist and was always around computers, even in the pre-C64 and Apple days, so I had good exposure to all that through him.

• Are you taking the secret of Monkey Island to your grave?

No, the secret of Monkey Island is that Guybrush is really a banana. Think about it. It's all right there.