ALASDAIR DUNCAN speaks to Aussie game developer ANDREW GOULDING about his swashbuckling point-and-click adventure JOLLY ROVER.

ALASDAIR DUNCAN: Jolly Rover features pirate dogs, which is very eccentric and cool – how did you come up with the idea?

ANDREW GOULDING: I wanted to do a game about pirates long before I wanted to do a game about pirate dogs. When I started prototyping the art for the game, we had a few characters done as humans and I just had a hard time getting excited about them. Around that time, I was thinking about ways to make the characters unique, so that they really stood out from the crowd – so you’d see them and say “oh, is that Jolly Rover?” On the off chance that it might be a good idea, I had the artist I was working with draw one of the characters as a dog, and the result was a character I could get excited about and ideas started flowing rapidly about how we could really have fun with this.

AD: Having an idea for a game is one thing, but I’m really curious to know how you go from there to actually developing it – can you tell me about the work that went in to creating this one?

AG: Going from idea to development is a huge step as you’d imagine. I have lots of ideas for games, but they’re not all made into games. For a start you have to get yourself really excited about the game – REALLY excited, so excited that you’ll get up at 4.30am to work on the game for three hours before you go to your day job and you’ll write ideas while you’re on the train to and from work, then come back and try to wrangle some more time to work on it before you go to bed. The result is putting together a design document, schedule, budget, and hopefully a prototype that you can try and take to a publisher or apply for funding to get the game done so you don’t have to kill yourself finishing it.

I did basically this until I had a prototype, pitch document, design document, business plan, budget and schedule – all the boring stuff you need if you’re going to take the idea to a publisher and be taken seriously. I funded myself to go to GDC to talk to the people that might want to fund this game – casual game publishers. Though they were all interested in distribution, they weren’t willing to take a risk on it. I then looked around at more local funding options – I had a meeting with a company to talk about raising venture capital but was quite disheartened to hear the scale of projects they were interested in funding (multi-million dollars) and the kind of investment they expected (500%). For a small-scale game it wasn’t an option.

I was about to shelve the idea and set my sights on a much smaller game when I thought I’d have a crack at Film Victoria funding. Actually, someone I knew was going for funding as well took a look at what I’d done and suggested I apply. I already had most of the information they needed after all. But I needed to find a team that could do the job. Luckily in my search for artists I came across a company by the name of Viskatoons, who were looking to get into games and were willing to invest in the project. I feel this really helped get Film Victoria on board and agree to fund the project.

Going forward with any game, unfortunately you do have to have an eye on the business as well as the game.

AD: An engaging story is a key part of any adventure game – how did you go about creating the plot for Jolly Rover?

AG: I must say I’m very practical, if you’re making a game you can’t go crazy and create a cast of 100 characters that travel the world. So I start with scope, roughly how many characters and locations do I need to tell a decent story, the fewer I need to create the story the better. Then I like to work on ideas for the main characters, what are their personalities like, how do they interact, why will they be interesting, what is their motivation, what is their history and family tree back a few generations. I plot birth and death dates relatively as well for the main characters along with major life milestones such as the death of a loved one. I like to spend a lot of time on character development first, it helps the story flow later and what their decision making process might be like. I then like to think about the locations the characters might explore, where they would be, what they would be doing at the time. The plot for me is about driving the characters to these locations and giving them a reason to move on in the story. I would think: “What would make this character go there?”

AD: Keeping with the idea of plotting and story for a moment, I’m curious to know, what are some of your biggest narrative influences outside of gaming?

 AG: Outside of gaming? That gave me pause for thought! I rarely read for pleasure these days, but I always make sure I read the latest piece of fiction from Raymond E. Feist, and recently I got right into Alistair Reynolds. I feel Feist creates more engaging stories and characters then Reynolds, but I was really interested with Reynolds take on space travel and technology. I’m also reading more books on developing story and narrative, I’m reading The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler at the moment and just finished the audio book On Writing by Stephen King (so good!); but that’s getting too close to games!

There are a few TV series’ I manage to make time for – I stuck with Lost all the way, and I really like Mad Men. For my comedy fix I try to catch The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, The Cleveland Show and the IT Crowd. All these shows have the effect of making me spontaneously laugh out loud. I really liked Malcolm In The Middle, but have recently gotten into Modern Family as well. Not highbrow literature, but they give me a good laugh! But seriously, there is a lot we can learn from shows like this to integrate into games, such as timing, delivery and an element of surprise.

AD: Jolly Rover is obviously very inspired by old-school point-and-click adventures – what was your favourite thing about those games?

AG: I think the best thing was the dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, I started with the Sierra games, and loved the humour you would get from the observations about the world (Space Quest, I’m looking at you), but when I started playing the Lucas Arts games I just loved the dialogue of those games, something about them just clicked with me, I felt like the people that were writing the dialog were like me, and shared my humour. None of the other games really spoke to me like adventure games did, they were like this intimate little relationship with a bunch of really awesome people. As a kid I felt like the people making these games were my mentors and I wanted to be just like them.

Now, it’s hard to feel that same relationship with the developers of today’s games – it feels like there’s a level of disconnect. I guess games are made with bigger teams, it’s hard to keep this personality, but I still feel it when I play games made by small teams, like Machinarium or The Shivah. I got it on Portal too; the best thing about that was it felt like a big polished game, but made by a small team.

AD: A lot of gamers have ‘the one that got away’, that game they’ve never been able to finish, that may have caused them to tear their hair out in frustration – do you have one of these?

AG: Hah, that was almost going to be Jolly Rover! But way back when I was just starting out I made a game called Just Another Point And Click Adventure. You can download it for free from the Brawsome website. It was made in Adventure Game Studio and it was part fan game, part autobiography, I had grand plans for a three-act adventure game, but to be honest I doubt I’d ever finish it now. I used a lot of the ideas I was planning in that for Jolly Rover and to go and finish it now would feel too samey, I’d rather spend my time working on something new.

AD: It’s a tough question, but if you had to narrow it down to just one, what is your favourite series of games?

AG: It is a tough question! Not so much because there aren’t any great series’ of games around, but because no series managed to stay consistently good. I can totally understand why adventure games might have died out, because of weak sequels, which lost what made the games great, that small team personality. For example, I loved Monkey Island 1 & 2, but when I jumped into the long-awaited Curse of Monkey Island I instantly felt something was wrong. It wasn’t just a vastly different art style – it just felt like a different Guybrush, a different LeChuck, a different Elaine. I know I’m going to upset a lot of people, but I just felt it was Monkey Island in name only.

Oh, I just had an epiphany! What makes adventure games great, what I love about them, are the people behind them. Monkey Island IS Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman. If you don’t have them all on the team, you can’t make another Monkey Island. Just like Space Quest IS Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, Leisure Suit Larry IS Al Lowe, and Quest for Glory IS Cory and Lori Cole. Without the developers that made these games great, they’re just names and places. Like if someone other than Stephen King wrote a sequel to The Shining, how could it possibly be the same? On a related note, looking at Activision’s treatment of the guys from Infinity Ward, how is the next Modern Warfare game possibly going to be as good without the guys that made it great?

Okay I’ve digressed, but I feel I’ve made my point.

AD: You’ve had a lot of very positive feedback from the media so far – have gamers been contacting you too? What kinds of things do they say?

AG: Yeah, I’ve got some good feedback. Quite a bit of the time gamers contact me when they get a bug, get stuck, or when they’d like to request something. I don’t feel this game has mass appeal, I’ve said that from the start, but there are a small group of people that simply love this type of game. The feeling that I’ve hit the mark with someone, anyone, is a very rewarding experience. When you make any game that you have total control over, most of the time you’re making it for yourself, so when people like it it’s kind of like saying “hey, you’re like me, we like the same things”. I must say, it’s very validating knowing there are people share my viewpoint and like the same things as me. So often, especially as I’m getting older, I have trouble understanding why on earth some things are popular (reality TV, I’m looking at you!), to a point where I wonder if I’m the crazy one, and to some degree I suppose I am. I made a game for a dead genre right?

AD: You’ve worked for bigger game companies as well as being an indie developer – would you say that indie is better? Could you ever be tempted back to one of the big guys?

AG: Well being an indie is way more stress, but also more rewarding. Working for a developer is opposite. But it’s not black and white, I worked with Dave Gilbert recently and that was awesome; I’d do it again too. I guess the main reason I went indie is because I wanted to make point-and-click adventure games and there weren’t any studios doing that in Australia, so what choice did I have? I could have gone overseas, but that’s a pretty big deal, besides, I wanted to be a writer and designer and felt I had to prove myself before anyone would consider hiring me in that capacity anyway. I’ve had a hard time shaking off the ‘programmer’ stigma. I still find most of the contract work that keeps me going in programming.

I suppose my real passion has always been in design, but designers in Australia are generally on the bottom rung of the salary scale, and they normally stay there, programmers and producers seem to make the most money. I really hate to allow these things to influence my decision, but I’ve got a family to support and thus far I’ve been able to do that best on a programmer salary. I had a go at moving into production for a while, but the job was way too slow for me, and I wasn’t patient enough to ‘bide my time’ to move up. I still like production, but I’d hate to not be able to design as well. Hah, I suppose my main problem is that I’m tough to put in a slot!

If someone were to come to me tomorrow and were to ask me to write and design games from my home for a decent salary I don’t think I’d have no trouble accepting that offer. If I got to work directly with voice actors again, that would be great as well. But until the dream of a rewarding job writing and designing for a developer presents itself I suppose I’ll just have to make my own way.

AD: What advice would you give to a budding developer who wants to attempt a similar project of their own?

AG: Don’t do things by half, either develop that game you always wanted or don’t. If you can’t commit yourself 100% to an idea, find one you can commit to. Being an indie developer is a hard road, and sometimes the only thing keeping you going is your own motivation, commitment and vision. And don’t put it off, what are you waiting for? And most importantly, don’t let guys like me that tell you this is hard put you off.

When I was in high school, I was really excited about developing my own adventure games, but I happened to talk to one guy at school about programming who told me how hard it was, and I gave up. That was stupid, but if I was motivated enough at the time I would have ignored this and kept going anyway. Lots of people are going to tell you things are hard, and that you can’t do them, and you’re going to doubt yourself at some point, but I’m proof that it’s possible and if you work hard enough, stick with it and want it enough you’ll get there in the end.

AD: Are there plans yet for a Jolly Rover 2, or indeed 3 or 4? What about the future of Brawsome?

AG: There are plans for Jolly Rover 2. But a Jolly Rover-sized game is a big undertaking, to do another one would need a similar budget to Jolly Rover, which was big by indie standards. When I come to do a sequel I want to have the budget in place to do it right, and give me time to adequately market and edit and polish and make it much better than the first one, not bigger, but better. I might not get the opportunity to do this straight away (unless a lot of people go and buy the game right now – HINT, HINT), so before that happens I might potentially focus on a smaller title that I can do well with a smaller budget.

Ultimately the future of Brawsome is to explore comedy in games. Comedy in games is hard to do, and is rarely done well, which I think is a fine reason for having a crack at it. Point-and-click adventures are great for comedy, but I feel there’s still some evolution to be done yet, which hopefully takes the genre in a good direction while staying true to its roots.

JOLLY ROVER is out now. Details of how to download it and other Brawsome games can be found at www.brawsome.com.au

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