Avadon: The Black Fortress Developer Diary #4 and Q&A
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OK, I'm not going to deny or hide the perfectly obvious. Shadowwalkers are suspiciously similar to ninjas. I wanted a character type that was fragile but could inflict a ton of damage in melee and had all sorts of cool tricks. That narrowed it down to ninjas and pirates, and I though ninjas fit better. This is, in come ways, a real pandering, fan-service sort of move, but it has its reasons.
This is my favorite class because of the cool tricks it can do. My favorite are the abilities that let you teleport and stun enemies with smoke or leave a decoy of yourself behind to trick foes. Introducing teleportation into my games has caused some tricky programming issues to deal with, but it's worth it.
And, to be honest, whenever I need to design something in one of my games, my first instinct is to do the thing I would most enjoy if I was playing. That is a compass that has almost never led me astray. And so, when I had the idea of fitting a ninja-type into the world, I was, like, "Yeah! Cool!" It's neat, and it adds a little bit of silliness to a world that sometimes threatened to be dark and serious.
Since we haven't seen much about the game lately, I did a quick search and discovered this recent interview on Inside Mac Games, as well:
FP: Are you planning on having clear-cut good and evil factions, or will everything be a bit grayer in Avadon?
JV: I want almost all of the moral choices in Avadon to be pretty gray. You are warriors tasked with uncovering people who pose some sort of threat to the Pact, the alliance you are from. However, when guilt is ambiguous or when the tactics you employ can be pretty questionable, in the end the player will have to make a lot of tough (or cool) decisions.
