Rebecca Heineman and Jennell Jaquays Interview
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In the 375th episode of RetroMacCast, we hear from video game industry veterans Rebecca Heineman and Jennell Jaquays about an assortment of topics, including their extensive development history, their collaboration with inXile Entertainment to re-release enhanced version of the original The Bard's Tale trilogy, what to expect from their original RPG Shredded Worlds: Dragons of the Rip, and more. There's also a transcript, so I'll do the usual quoting from that:
RH: My case of design is that the first thing I do, even with my writings and my novels, I write the ending first. I figure out dragon_wars2how do I want this story to end. What is the resolution of all the characters? Each character, this is what's going to happen, this is how it's going to end, this is their state of mind, these are the hardships that they're going to go through, I don't know how they're going to go through yet. In a game, same idea, like in Dragon Wars I wanted this combat that doesn't seem to end. You kill Namtar and no he comes back to life. You kill Namtar again, you'd start getting him close to the canyon, then he's struggling and panicking and he gets closer and closer and calling for help, until finally your party is sick and tired of this guy, and then you finally chuck him over the edge. And then, the game ends.
JL: Spoiler alert.
RH: However, how do you get there? And how do I set it so that in the story it makes sense that oh, Namtar is going to call minions. Okay then, I start saying what kind of minions is he going to call? This, alright. Where do the minions come from? Okay, I'm going to make this area in the mountains. Okay, then I'm going to have a scenario there. Now I'm going to make a sub-adventure. If you happen to, in the course of the game, go that castle and kill the monsters there, when Namtar calls for his minions they won't show up. But if you didn't solve that then they come running in and help him. In that case, there was two different groups of minions that come and two different adventures you can play. But if you don't play either one of them, or you don't even discover them, then the final battle is going to be tougher. I keep building upon it. Now if there's going to be this castle with these minions here, okay, well I need an entire adventure for this. What to do? Going on this. Give wild goose chases. And connect it all together so that then finally, we get back to the very beginning of the game which was you are stripped penniless and naked in this prison. How do you start the game? And then, now that I've gotten the ending, and I've back traced how to get to where you are, I start filling in all the blanks that came in, and other things. The beginning needs to be as open-ended as possible.
So I sat there for many weeks, and even during the course of programming the game, as I was playing the game, I said, (Hmm, there is this ledge and there is an ocean below based on the text written. What if my characters had a high enough swim skill that I could jump over the ledge?) All right then, I then made this level even below. And then at that point, if the characters were there, and if you had swim skill I think of three for all of your characters, because anyone who had less than three died, but those higher would survive the fall. But of course, you can't really start the game with swim skill three unless you pay all your points, or you level-up your character enough and just spend your skill points on that. And then another one is that near that area is the trash bins, where they take the trash and throw it over. Hide in the bins. Same spiel, it throws you over. So you could either just jump, or you can hide in the bins and they chuck you over. Another one is that, what if you just level up enough, and I put the guards out front, the guards are very high level, but if you get high enough level you just kill them and just walk out the front door. And then there was the gladiator pits. I said, (Great, if you win the gladiator pits you are granted your freedom.) And now you are given citizenship papers and so forth, whereas if you had gotten out any other way you could buy citizenship papers on the black market. So all these things that kept building and building and building and building, but was that when someone plays the game they don't know all this stuff.
JL: Yes, the sense of wonder when you first start that up, you're penniless, naked, and again on the Apple IIe, here's this open world.
BW: Anything is possible.
RH: And this is exactly what we're doing with Dragons Of The Rip, is that you start the game in an adventure's guild, in a world in which kind of like Pokémon adventuring, is a location and so forth, and its own little medievalish world. I can't get into any more details without spoiling some of this stuff I'm going to show for the Kickstarter. Okay, here it is, you're going to go adventuring, finds some quests and so forth, and as you start finding more and more things you then start realizing, (Things don't quite add up, not just in the world you're living in, but just some things don't seem quite right.) Through some encounters and stuff you discover portals, these rips, and then that's where the game really gets fun.
