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Primordia - WormwoodStudios INTERVIEW

Written by Jack Allin — November 13, 2012

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Then Man the All-Builder stood and took the machines in his hands, andguided them to a great mountaintop. Together they looked upon theworld in its beauty. "All this world was made for you, and now unto you allthis is given. Keep it, tend it, and make it flourish." And the All-Builder fellsilent and passed from the world, and so ended the Primordium."

– Excerpt from the Gospel of Man

If you thought mankind was capable of destroying itself and the planet around him,wait 'til you get a load of what his machines can do in Primordia. The upcomingpost-apocalyptic adventure from Wormwood Studios and Wadjet Eye Games tells therelentlessly bleak tale of artificial life (and a whole lot of death) after Homo sapiens. Allthat's left now – at least in the barren, desolate wasteland outside the city of Metropol– is a cold metallic existence and a desperate struggle for mechanical survival. Irecently played through the first couple hours of this nearly-finished game and foundwhat looks to be a very promising retro title steeped in its own rich sci-fi mythology. It'sunapologetically dreary, but there's just enough humour sprinkled in to lighten themood considerably.

Primordia may not be a happy game, but it just might be a hopeful one. After all, whenyou've hit rock bottom, there's nowhere to go but up. And the bottom is pretty muchwhere the android Horatio Nullbuilt (version 5) and his floating sidekick Crispin findthemselves when a hulking robot invades and steals the power core from their home –a permanently malfunctioning vessel called the "UNNIIC" (pronounced "unique", asthe alternative would be far less flattering). The craft was already in shambles withrepairs going agonizingly slowly, but it had been providing shelter from the acid rain

PrimordiaPlatform(s): PC

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and radioactive sandy dunes all around them. Without its power, however, the robotscan't function, leaving only two choices: flee to the nearby city, or seek out theirattacker and retrieve their core.

Lesser bots would have chosen the easier path, but Horatio is fiercely independentand deeply mistrusts any idyllic propaganda out of Metropol, the "city of glass andlight". Clearly there's some sort of troubled history there, but the player is not privy tosuch background information at first. In fact, Horatio himself may not be. As "version5", his memory has been wiped with each upgrade, and it soon becomes apparentthat his earlier incarnations have experienced a remarkably turbulent history. Anarmoured "preacher of humanist creed" who closely guards a bomb as an enduringshrine to man (probably fitting) knows Horatio by another name as a former pupil,while a giant robot operated by malfunctioning smaller bots calls the android "theDestroyer". That can't be good.

But the Horatio we know is a likeable enough sort. He's rather serious, however,focused squarely on the tasks at hand in playing the straight bot to his hovering palCrispin. Like any good sidekick, Crispin is quick with the wisecracks, his "guiltsubroutines" never letting his “boss” (and creator) live down the fact that he was builtwith "all mouth and no hands". He can fly (having no arms was the compromise for hismag-lev unit), which makes him useful for reaching otherwise inaccessible places.Though he remains onscreen throughout, a Crispin icon is a permanent inventoryfixture, so you can use him like any other object. You can also use inventory items onthe real Crispin, which can get a little confusing, or click directly on him for a verygeneral hint about your current objective.

Other than Crispin, Primordia's point-and-click gameplay is entirely traditional in theearly going, with right-clicks used to observe hotspots and left-clicks to interact.Accessing the inventory at the top of the screen involves one click to get in andanother to close out, which feels unnecessarily cumbersome, but the currently


selected item does stay visible in the menu bar until used or replaced. Horatio'sdatapouch stores relevant notes for future use and includes a map that lets youquickly travel between major locations once they've been discovered (in fact, there'sno other way to reach them). Some places like a junkyard consist of only a singlescreen, while others such as the UNNIIC involve various rooms and levels to explore.A few areas surprised me by scrolling, so it's important to walk to screen edges to besure you aren't missing anything.

As you'd expect in a world built by machines for machines, many of the puzzlesinvolve practical makeshift constructions. I encountered no bizarre leaps of logic,though there was one serious case of pixel hunting. There was also a standalonepuzzle that proved to be an unsolvable red herring, which has wisely since beenremoved (who says good developers don't listen to feedback?). Overcoming obstaclesisn't as easy as it might sound, because many of the parts involve sockets, plugs,conduits and the like, so less mechanically-inclined minds may yet find good use forthe try-everything-on-everything approach. You'll also need to track down telescopecoordinates, answer some multiple-choice quiz questions, and make use of binarycode. One puzzle offers an "alternate" solution (really two variations of the same idea)that apparently has consequences farther along, but I didn't play long enough to seehow the difference plays out.

Though Primordia was in development long before Wadjet Eye got involved aspublisher, there's no mistaking the game as part of the company's stable of retro-styled adventures. The pixel art graphics would have looked right at home in thegenre's VGA Golden Age, and while they're nicely designed, this look certainly isn't foreveryone two decades after the fact. Even more distinctively, the game's paletteconsists of only three colours: brown, browner, and brownest. Okay, there are a fewother hues sprinkled in, but for the most part the early stages of this game are largelymonochromatic. That's entirely intentional, of course. What would you expect from aworld ravaged by war, now covered by permanently overcast, stormy skies in a desertcompletely devoid of life, littered only with the rusted husks of broken vehicles andequipment? It's ugly, but stylishly so, instantly sucking you into the oppressivefuturistic setting.

This game will also sound familiar to Wadjet Eye veterans, its lead characters voicedby Detective Bennet and Joey Mallone... err, I mean... Logan Cunningham(Resonance) and Abe Goldfarb (everything Wadjet, but most notably the Blackwellseries). The sound quality itself is a little off in places, but the vocal performances areconsistently excellent. That includes the various secondary robots. While the twoprotagonists sound human, the other bots all have blatantly mechanized voiceoversthat sound great. The soundtrack and ambient effects I heard were generallyunderstated, suitably supporting the sombre atmosphere without ever dominating theaction.

By the end of the preview demo, I'd managed to restore power to the UNNIIC, but hadfar more questions about Horatio's chip-wiped identity than when I began, and I look


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forward to continuing the quest for truth about what really happened since the glorious"age of building” when the game releases in December. I may not like the answers,but hopefully somewhere – anywhere – a hopeful ray of light will shine on this gloomyfuturistic world of machines.

If you like your sci-fi dark and dreary (think Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, And IMust Scream, but with jokes), keep an eye out for this one next month (you can evenpreorder while you wait). In the meantime, let's open up and peer inside the Primordiacontrol room to learn more about the game's creators Victor Pflug (concept / art), MarkYohalem (story and design), James Spanos (coding), and Nathaniel Chambers (music/ audio) – all of whom are human... we think.

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TheLongestJourneyNov 14, 2012

Is there going to be a preview demo for this like there was forResonance? I just pre-ordered the DVD today and am so stoked to playthis!

JackalNov 14, 2012

Iʼm told by Wadjet Eye that there will indeed be a demo about a weekbefore the gameʼs release.

inm8#2Nov 14, 2012

Vote on Steam Greenlight for Primordia.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=108108057

A.ANov 14, 2012

Well, whilst I donʼt take too kindly to anyone bad-mouthing my belovedGrim Fandango (“a lot of problems from a gameplay standpoint”-Poppycock, I tells ya! ), I wonʼt hold that against them. Especiallyseeing as one of ʻem is from Melbourne, just like me.

Looks great. Pre-ordered it just then.

Am delighted I use GoG and not Steam for my games. GoG is awesome.

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Adventure Gamers: The world of Primordia is clearly very different than the one weknow. How did it get from here to there?

Mark Yohalem: Well, at the outset, I should note that the world of Primordia isnʼtnecessarily a future version of our own. Certainly there are lots of things in Primordiathat suggest itʼs our world—broken down devices that look familiar, mythologicalreferences, things like that. But this isnʼt like Planet of the Apes or Children of Men orEscape from New York where itʼs meant to be a dark look at Earthʼs possible future.

So rather than trying to draw a line from our world in 2012 to Primordiaʼs world, what Ican say is that Primordiaʼs world has suffered from ecological catastrophe, acuteshortages of critical resources (including energy sources), and devastating war. All ofthat is pretty quickly apparent to the player. Beyond that, I donʼt want to spoil anything,but, like I said, itʼs not like Primordia is a murder mystery where the corpse is Earth.

AG: How many years in the future is this game set? (Hopefully many!)

Mark: As with the last question, I donʼt think thereʼs really an answer here. Some ofthe technology in Primordia is beyond what we have; some is primitive compared towhat we have. I guess the easiest answer is that I donʼt think any amount of timecould turn our world into Primordiaʼs.

AG: The preview teased some intriguing background mysteries and hints of potentialconflict with the city of Metropol, but itʼs still not entirely clear what the gameʼs story isabout. What can you tell us about the adventures awaiting Horatio and Crispin?

Mark: Horatio and Crispin need to get a power source for their airship. As anyone who


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http://www.adventuregamers.com/articles/view/23235/page2

Mark Yohalem

has watched The Big Lebowski or played Falloutknows, though, finding a spare part for your homeis never easy after the apocalypse! And itʼsprobably no spoiler to say that thereʼs never beena story where the heroes donʼt ultimately make itto the ominous location thatʼs tempting them(whether itʼs a witchʼs house made of sweets or anidyllic island awaiting Odysseusʼs crew!). Beyondthat, though, I donʼt want to spoil the particularobstacles, adversaries, and allies they encounteralong the way.

I will say that there are three levels the game isoperating on: a forward-oriented adventure to get back the power core; a backward-oriented mystery to find out about things that matter to Horatio (like Man and his ownpast); and a thematic discussion about various competing values (like independencevs. interdependence; mysticism vs. materialism; justice vs. mercy; creation vs.destruction; etc.). These levels interact with each other, of course, and everything tiestogether in the finale.

AG: It seems like the quest for identity will be essential to Primordia, which issomewhat ironic for a game about robots. How do Horatioʼs missing memories factorinto the game?

Mark: Compared to, say, Sanitarium or Planescape: Torment, I donʼt think Horatioʼsmemories matter that much, but they are still important. “Primordia” means“beginnings” or “origins” in Latin, and a big part of the game is the importance oforigins. In fact, as youʼve seen in the preview build, itʼs very important for robots totrace their lineage through “fabrinymics”—hence, Crispin calls himself “CrispinHoratiobuilt.”

You hit the nail on the head noting the irony of identity in a game about robots. One ofthe interesting things in crafting the story is that certain issues donʼt line up perfectlybetween robots and humans from a moral perspective. To take a trivial example:Horatio built Crispin with certain personality presets and functions and whatnot.Thereʼs nothing wrong with that—a robot has to be built in *some* fashion—but itwould probably seem immoral or at least morally questionable to engineer your childto be a certain way.

This fuels one of the big themes in Primordia, namely the extent to which a machine istrapped in the function for which it is built. To give another trivial example: Is the bombworshiped by Ever-Faithful a holy shrine, or it is just a bomb? Thereʼs a poem called“The Inheritors” that had a strong influence on me in writing the story to Primordia,and in the poem are the following lines:

“Blame the potter, not the ill-shaped clay.Nothing that is yet chose its own defect.”

The machines and robots of Primordia are both clay *and* potters, and their identitiesin both roles are critical to the story. And they are all certainly defective, in their ownways.


AG: Apart from Crispinʼs wisecracks, Primordia is unapologetically bleak (at least inthe early going). Is there a warning in that about the direction mankind is going?

Mark: The setting was driven largely by Vicʼs art, but that art fits with the story that Iwanted to tell in the game, which was a story of a world in which humans had fadedinto legend.

As for whether thereʼs a warning in it, I suppose so. If nothing else, like everypost-apocalyptic story, itʼs a memento mori (that is, a reminder of the fragility of ourown lives). Itʼs hard to write a post-apocalyptic story without having some kind ofwarning. After all, the post-apocalyptic genre, in the Western canon at least, startswith the didactic tale of Noah and the Flood. Even the meaning of “post-apocalyptic”almost implies a warning: an “apocalypse” is—from a purely etymologicalstandpoint— inherently an “uncovering” or “revelation,” so in a post-apocalyptic settingsomething important needs to have been revealed.

But beyond the sort of inherent “treasure life for it is fleeting” message, I donʼt think wewere trying to send any particular message. Iʼd certainly like it if people took bettercare of the environment, didnʼt start wars, conserved resources, and so on, but thatʼsnot what Primordia is about.

Instead, the bleakness serves as a test of character. In Cormac McCarthyʼs novel TheRoad, the point isnʼt what caused the destruction of the world; rather, itʼs the man andthe boyʼs response to that world. In the same way, Primordiaʼs world presents abattery of tests, like a qualitative analysis in chemistry, designed to reveal the contentof Horatioʼs self. His “identity,” as you said earlier.

AG: What are some of the sci-fi influences that helped shape your vision forPrimordia?

Victor Pflug: There are a lot of little things that helped shape my vision for Primordia.As a teen, I read a lot of science fiction novels from the '50s through to the late '80s,and I greatly admired the artwork of artists such as Syd Mead, Roger Dean, BrianFroud, Josh Kirby, and H. R. Giger. Watched the hell out of sci-fi movies like Dune,Alien, The Thing, etc.

James Spanos: I always subconsciously wanted Primordia to approach the neo-noirgenre. Iʼve not affected much content wise; perhaps, if anything, there are someunderlying references to my favorite film, Brazil by Terry Gilliam. Perhaps my biggestcontribution comes from the fact that I always felt a lot like Crispin: weʼre alike inseveral ways, and Crispin also partly imitates the behavior of Sam Lowry (the maincharacter of Brazil). Iʼve always encouraged Mark to write more and focus on certainaspects of Crispin. Not sure if that has been accomplished, but it certainly wasattempted.

Mark: Fallout, The Road, A Canticle of Leibowitz by Walter Miller, City by CliffordSimak, WALL-E.


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AG: The name Wormwood Studios is probably unfamiliar to most people. Tell usabout yourselves.

Vic: Wormwood Studios basically just came about when Mark, James, and I wantedto consolidate our creative and technical personas into one identity that could takecredit for the creation of Primordia. That way, when we came to do our next project,we would have some kind of brand name recognition. For myself, I live in Melbourne,Australia and have an art background ranging from aerosol art to game graphicscreation, and Iʼve tried almost everything else in between at one time or another.

Mark: Iʼve been making (or trying to make) games independently since I was about 10years old—Iʼm 32 now. Over the past decade, Iʼve also worked professionally in theindustry for BioWare, TimeGate, and S2 Games, among others. Like Daredevil, I am alawyer by day. In terms of Primordia, I jumped on board the project when I saw Vicwas recruiting a writer; itʼs hard to say no to art like his!

Jim: Iʼm James Spanos, the third wheel of the Wormwood Studios. I used to code myown overambitious adventure games before I joined the cause of Primordia. That kindof gave me the edge and the expertise required to work for a commercial game,though it didnʼt exactly start that way. At first, I was rejected, as another coder (acertain Victor Pflug) was already trying to do the job, but I offered my services in casea more complex part of the game would require them. As time went on, I was gettingcontacted more often, and then Vic and Mark decided to welcome me in the team.

Nathaniel Chambers: Iʼm based out of New York City. I hang out a lot at local NYCgame-developer events, which is how I met Dave Gilbert (head of Wadjet Eye


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James Spanos

Nathaniel Chambers

Games). Being a big point-and-click adventurefan, I was really hoping I'd be able to work on aproject with him someday, plus heʼs a really greatguy to hang out with. After much harassment, fun,NYC dev drink nights, and Doctor Who, there wasan opening where he needed a composer so Isent him a demo.

I was then brought into the project and told aboutthe game and the world and I absolutely loved it. Istarted brainstorming immediately. While Iʼm nottechnically part of team Wormwood Studios, theysaid I should still comment on this. I think thatsays what an awesome and welcoming team theyare.

AG: Why an adventure game for your first project? Are you all longtime genre fans?

Jim: Iʼve worked on a lot of freeware adventure games, so this isnʼt really my firstproject.

Vic: For me it just seemed a good genre to use my art skills. I had made a couple ofvery small adventure games using AGS prior to starting Primordia, plus some of myfavorite games are point-and-clicks.

Mark: When I came on board, Vic had already started on an adventure game. But thatwas perfect for me. Iʼve been trying to make a graphical adventure for about twentyyears, but the art always thwarted me. With Vic at the helm, there was no worry ofthat! Iʼve loved adventure games ever since I played Loom. After that, I consumedbasically all of the Sierra/Dynamix/LucasArts games, along with lots of games fromlesser companies.

Also, I think we had the misimpression that an adventure game was a small,self-contained project that we could quickly finish. Oops. AG: What kinds of adventures have inspired you personally over the years?

Jim: I never exactly found myself as a huge fan of the adventure game genre ingeneral, even though all the games Iʼve created fit into it. I always found them ratherunforgiving. Then I came across what I could possibly name my favorite game,Monkey Island 2: LeChuckʼs Revenge. Peter Chanʼs astounding art, along with themost dark and twisted humor ever to come across my screen, the fantastic trio of TimSchafer, Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman, really topped themselves as developers atthe time. I donʼt believe any other game does it for me the way this one does. The cultending always keeps me wondering, too.

Nathaniel: Sam & Max Hit theRoad was the first point-and-click Ireally remember loving when Iwas a kid, and now as an adult.The Telltale series captures thatsame feeling (especially TheDevilʼs Playhouse—it wasamazing). My other favorites wereFull Throttle and Toonstruck,though I also liked just aboutanything from LucasArts at thetime. More recent games andseries Iʼve loved are Mass Effect,Portal, Half-Life, The Walking

Dead, and Psychonauts, which pretty much sum up everything I love most in gaming:exploration, story, and puzzles. They all really pulled me into the universes with theirstory, dialog, voice acting (Jennifer Hale is amazing in Mass Effect), sound, andmusic.


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Taking “adventure” a little more broadly than just adventure games, my early musicalinspiration came from old Nintendo classics and John Williams film scores, which I'msure is a pretty common story. I was also really into cartoon music, such as Batman:The Animated Series, Looney Tunes, and Transformers: The Movie (the animatedone!). I even put the Batman theme on a recordable tape so I could hear it portably,though I did the same with many video games soundtracks as well.

Mark: Among the big names: Loom, Monkey Island 2, Quest for Glory, GrimFandango. Of the more obscure: Dragonsphere, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Spider &Web, Anchorhead, and Photopia. Regarding Grim Fandango, while I think it has a lotof problems from a gameplay standpoint, it does a fantastic job of never selling itscharacters out. You start off thinking that Manny is going to be a typical adventuregame loser character whoʼs the butt of the gameʼs endless humiliations, but heactually turns out to be suave and successful. I still remember the huge grin I gotwhen he turned his janitorial job at the end of the first chapter into a thriving nightclubby the start of the second. Regarding Dragonsphere and Spider & Web, they just haveabout the coolest twists ever.

Vic: For me, itʼs games like Beneath a Steel Sky, Kyrandia, Lost Secret of theRainforest, Space Quest IV, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. I really love games with anexploratory bent; being able to quest through a unique, exciting and visually lushgame world is what I want out of a game for the most part. Great story and charactershelp a hell of a lot, too.

AG: Wadjet Eye has shown itself to be a pretty good talent evaluator, so having themsupport the game is telling. How did that partnership come about?

Vic: About midway into the production of Primordia, Dave Gilbert contacted me andasked if I wanted to sign up to have Wadjet Eye publish the game. Dave had quite alot to bring to the table, and I decided Iʼd be a fool if I didnʼt join forces with him.

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TheLongestJourneyNov 14, 2012

Is there going to be a preview demo for this like there was forResonance? I just pre-ordered the DVD today and am so stoked to playthis!

JackalNov 14, 2012

Iʼm told by Wadjet Eye that there will indeed be a demo about a weekbefore the gameʼs release.

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Victor Pflug




AG: Itʼs pretty clear that Wadjet Eye has assumed control of the voice acting, but howare the responsibilities split apart from that? Are they pretty hands-off in letting youfinish the game as you envisioned?

Vic: I appreciate the question because, somewhat surprisingly, a lot of the coverageweʼve gotten describes Wadjet Eye as the developer, even crediting it with the art andstory, which is frustrating for a new indie developer trying to win a reputation!Basically, the original concept, story, writing, art design, graphics and gamemechanics, and to a large extent also the music, sound and voiceover direction, isWormwood Studios.

Being an electronic musician myself, I hadnaturally wanted to produce the soundtrack forPrimordia, but Dave insisted we neededsomeone who specialized in music, which ishow Nathaniel Chambers was brought onboard. Mark and I spent a lot of time workingwith Nathaniel, and I also composed a lot ofmusic for Nathaniel to use as references andconvey how I wanted Primordia to sound. Tohis credit, I think Nathaniel did a bloodyfantastic job, despite my overbearing directionin that arena. As for the voice acting, Dave andI had some disagreements over the castinitially, and while I might do things a little


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differently if I could make Primordia over again, his guys ended up doing an awesomejob there too.

That said, Wadjet Eye did bring a lot to the table during the latter half of production,and I daresay Primordia might not be the polished game it is today if it werenʼt forDave cracking the whip and urging us on to greatness. (I'll leave it to the players todecide whether we came close though.)

Mark: On top of the voice acting, you canʼt forget—or discount—the significance ofNathaniel, the composer that Wadjet Eye brought on board. Heʼs done superb work,not just with the music but also with the ambient and active sound effects. But asidefrom the audio, I donʼt think Wadjet Eye really had that much direct effect on thegame. The testers had more of an influence, and we should thank Wadjet Eye forputting them together as well. Mostly Dave worked as a facilitator, and did a lot ofgood work there.

To be sure, there were a few areas where he asked for changes, but when you workas part of a team, you have to accept quite a large amount of compromise. Thebiggest compromises were between me and Vic. By comparison, Dave asked for verylittle.

AG: I couldnʼt help but notice that the game is rather... whatʼs the word… oh, right,“brown”. It certainly conveys a devastated, lifeless wasteland effectively, but itʼs allso… BROWN. Will the look diversify at all in later stages, or is brown the new red,blue, and yellow? Any fear that people will find the game too depressing visually?

Mark: I do think that games have become too brown, particularly shooters. But whenyouʼre making a game about an inorganic, desolate world, browns, grays, and redsare inherently going to be your palette. And, if anything, Iʼd say Primordia is more redthan brown.

Vic: I donʼt really care about current gaming trends very much; I didn't decide on avisual style for Primordia based on what I thought might be popular. I see a lot ofgames these days with dreadful faded brown dystopian landscapes, perhaps itʼs atrend, I've no idea. To me it just feels like theyʼre bleeding the color from things, and Idonʼt think thatʼs really how my art is. I love sepia tones and subtle changes in hue,and use them to draw attention to, or perhaps accentuate the shape and design of myart. Itʼs been that way for many years, long before I made any video game art. Thatsaid, the color palette in Primordia does make some significant shifts as the journeythrough the game progresses.

I can understand people not liking my graphics, which is perfectly understandable asmy art certainly isn't for everyone, but as for depressing? I tend to think even thedarkest and most eldritch artwork ever created can never be depressing; if it is doneskillfully and shows you something fascinating youʼve never seen before. But thatʼsjust me.

AG: How would you characterize Primordiaʼs gameplay? As old school as its design,or are there any special “upgrades” (in keeping with the gameʼs robotic themes) to


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help set the game apart?

Mark: I would say the gamplay is quite a bit different from old school adventuregames. Consistent with how LucasArts changed the genre, we donʼt have deaths ordead ends. But unlike LucasArts, weʼve tried to have multiple solutions—of varyingsuccess—for most of the puzzles in the game. So you can “fail” a puzzle without dyingor cutting yourself off from winning the game. How the game plays out, particularly inthe endings, is driven by how well you solved puzzles and the choices you madealong the way.

In terms of particular features, there are three I want to mention, the first two relatingto the datapouch. Almost immediately in the game, Horatio recovers his datapouch,which lets him fast-travel to locations heʼs already discovered. I put this in placebecause I hate the way adventure games pad their length with tedious backtracking.We had already minimized backtracking for its own sake, but by making it possible forthe player to quickly return to old locations, we made it easier to explore and try outdifferent ideas. The datapouch also takes notes for the player. But this isnʼt like aquest-log that tells you exactly what to do. Instead, weʼve tried to mimic the things thata player would write down on a notepad (and, indeed, originally the player had to typethings in himself). So the notes are full of small details, red herrings, things like that.They act as both a record of your journey and a means of ensuring that we can havepuzzles that require information you gathered earlier without creating dead-endscenarios.

The last major feature is the integrated hint system. As a designer, I dreadwalkthroughs. Once a player loads a walkthrough, heʼll keep going back to it everytime heʼs stuck. And every time he does that, heʼs pulled out of the mood youʼveworked so hard to create. But if you set the difficulty too low, to keep the player fromusing a walkthrough, you rob the game of its essential character. Our solution was tohave Crispin nudge the player if heʼs stuck at a particular spot for too long. You canturn these hints off, of course. But because the hints start off fairly gently, I donʼt thinkthey deprive the game of challenge. Rather, they just keep the player from banging hishead against the wall for too long. (You can also get hints immediately by clicking onCrispin.) Creating this system was a huge amount of trouble from a writing, coding,and testing standpoint, but it winds up reinforcing Crispinʼs personality and usefulnessand (hopefully) stopping people from using a walkthrough. (It also wound up makingJim hate me, but cʼest la vie.)

AG: Whatʼs the status of the game now? Still on track for a December release?

Mark: Weʼre just doing the final testing and polishing now. Barring a second hurricanehitting New York [where Wadjet Eye is located], weʼre still on track for December 5.

AG: Well, I know weʼve got lots of sci-fi lovers here, so donʼt let us slow you down anyfurther. Good luck with the home stretch, and thanks very much for taking time toshare your thoughts about the game.

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