About the game

[axelkothe]

Hey Will,

tell us a little bit about your game. Who are we playing with, waht can you tell us about the characters?
How much of the first episode will take place on board the HMS Spiffing? Will there be planets to visit? Other Ships?
Will there be voice overs for the whole game?
What kind of puzzles do you plan on?
Is the game targeted to an experienced adventure game player or more a casual player?
How long is the episode supposed to last?

[Will]

Hi Axelkothe, just quickly to address something Michael mentioned in another post (that should answer part of what you asked yourself):

Her Majesty's Spiffing ist planned to be released in three episodes.

I forgot to say that, while our overall story is split into three parts we very much consider each part to be a substantial game in it's own right. They aren't going to be as long as adventure games from the mid 90s (when millions where spent on these things!) but we're hoping to have a gutsy 4-5 hours of stuff for you to do in each chapter.

The example I've been using when talking about the story is the original Star Wars trilogy, how a New Hope (good first entry) leads into The Empire Strikes Back (the highlight of the saga) followed by the Return of the Jedi (has its moments, not as good as the first two).

Our hope is that our three games will follow that trajectory, good, great, alright.

NOW TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTIONS:

Sorry, we've been moving about a bit so I didn't get a chance to post that before. ANYWAY...

Q. Tell us a little bit about your game. Who are we playing with, waht can you tell us about the characters?

... In short the Queen of England has decided she wants to expand the British Empire once more (you can read a press release we put out explaining her rational behind this here, it's all very current, and obviously totally silly!).

You assume direct control of Cpt Frank Lee English (the commander on this mission) and are accompanied by Aled Jones, his Welsh junior officer, as part of the new space organisation set up by the Queen called HM SPIFFING (Her Majesty's Special Planetary Investigative Force For Inhabiting New Galaxies).



^ Here they are in game.

Q. How much of the first episode will take place on board the HMS Spiffing? Will there be planets to visit? Other Ships?

The game starts as you're en route to a planet that you think is rife for colonising, things go wrong, you've got to fix them, eventually you get there but find out you aren't alone, then you have to try and dispatch the folks that beat you there.



^

The dude on the left got there first

So yes, there will be other locations to visit and you'll spend some time onboard other folk's ships!

Q. Will there be voice overs for the whole game?

The game will be fully voice acted (and lip synced!) we're very keen to have German voice acting as well, however to afford to do this we would need additional funding beyond the £30k that we're looking for on Kickstarter.

Q. What kind of puzzles do you plan on?

The puzzles in the game will be a bit silly, but hopefully people will be able to work them out logically (without resorting to just attempting to use everything together), we also intend to have some puzzles that have multiple (er, by which we typically mean two) solutions or trigger a slightly different set of events. An example of this is actually in our demo, we try and introduce the player to our inventory system with a simple tutorial to bring back a cup of tea for Aled. You can give him either English's mug or his own and a different set of events play out.

Q. Is the game targeted to an experienced adventure game player or more a casual player?

As for who the game's targeted at... Er... I'm not sure, we're trying to make a good game that more people find amusing than not. In saying that we still want to challenge folks, but the story does come first. I hope that we can make an 'accessible' adventure game

[Rockford]

1. Will the game contain minigames? (For my part I don't like minigames much).

2. I am glad to see there will be a version for linux. I am curious what engine and language do you use for development?

[Will]

Q. Will the game contain minigames?

There will be mini-games (sorry) however they're there for joke purposes so you wont be able to fail them. For example, in our demo we have a mini-game where you get to 'control' English's ship (you can watch a video of it here, the mini-game is about 8 minutes in).

You're not expected to beat it, it's just there to tell a 40 second joke (that took about 3 weeks to set up!).

Q. I am glad to see there will be a version for linux. I am curious what engine and language do you use for development?

We're developing our game in Unity3D so it's relatively straight forward to deploy to a wide variety of platforms, Unity does much of the work for you. All the code is written in C#, we developed a few tools of our own to develop the game (a couple of developers have asked us if we used the adventure creator plugin, we'd thought about it but we're using Unity's animation system Mecanim as a state machine to control a lot of the logic in the game so we've had to write our own tools).