Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption Interview
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Here's a snip:
While Corey and Lori Cole may be spearheading the creation of this new tale set inside their famous world, award-winning Melbourne indies Brawsome are joining them as the developer of the project. How did two Sierra veterans end up working with what is essentially a one man team on the other side of the world?
Lori:It's because Brawsome was a fan of ours. He sent us emails saying '˜I've got this great game, would you like to take a look at it?' It had been sitting in my email pile for a while, and I finally got to it, I actually took a look at MacGuffin's Curse. We had seen Jolly Rover when he put that out, but when I saw MacGuffin's Curse I said '˜look at this, this is exactly the sort of thing that would be easy to produce, and we could make the game with this style of game.' We knew that we couldn't do an adventure game, it's just so expensive to do an adventure game, we didn't think we could raise enough money for that. Yet a nice little simple game, along the lines of MacGuffin's Curse, we could pull that off no problem, and I was really, really thrilled.
Corey: We went through quite a few evolutions of the game. We talked about making a Quest for Glory style game, then we kind of had to abandon that because we said we don't have the million dollars or more it would take to make it. Then we talked about making a Rogue-like dungeon game. We said that would be kind of fun, but we're not sure it is really a commercial product, maybe we could do that just for fun.
Somewhere the ideas kind of combined and we said, '˜what if we could do the Rogue-like dungeon look, with the monsters on the squares, but instead of having a random dungeon crawl thing, instead put a real adventure game in that setting?' Then we saw MacGuffin's Curse and we said '˜hey, this thing uses tiles and squares and stuff and it is exactly the look that we had talked about'. We knew that Andrew of Brawsome really wanted to work with us, he actually contacted me back in 2010 and sent me Jolly Rover. I said '˜it was a pretty fun adventure game, but we're not really doing adventure games right now, we don't have the funding for it'. Then he sent us MacGuffin's Curse and as Lori said, she got hold of it and started looking at it and she said '˜hey, this is what we've been talking about for the last two months'.
Lori: We were just so excited because for one thing, Andrew is a very, very good game designer. I mean that takes real talent, you don't think of game design being that hard, but it really is. A good game designer is a rare thing, and Andrew has that talent.
Corey: He's also a very hard worker. He programmed all those games himself, and Jolly Rover he actually did while he was working full-time. He would get up at four or five in the morning to work a few hours on it before he went into work. That combination of good work attitude and real creative talent is pretty hard to find. He also has management and production experience, he marketed his own games very well. Basically he's got all the pieces that we need for him to be a partner, not just a programmer on the project. That's just a huge load off of our back.
Thanks, RPGWatch.
