Jörg Beilschmidt is the lead game designer for Fusionsphere Systems, the company making the graphic adventure game Secret Files: Tunguska. The game is based on the Tunguska event: the 1908 explosion in central Siberia that was probably caused by the airburst of a meteorite.
Or was it?
So, yeah, that's the game's premise. Anyway, in the interview promised in this newspost's title, Jörg discusses the Tunguska event, the game's design, and more.
Q: In an interview with JustAdventure, you said: We have mainly concentrated on inventory puzzles but we are also try to ensure a varied puzzle design. So what can we expect from the puzzles in the game?
A: A lot. Most adventure games have a certain way of puzzle-design. This has the consequence that the beginning could be very difficult because the player hasn't found out which way it is. But after he did, the game becomes easier and easier - very untypical for computer games but very typical for the genre. We always changed our way we designed our puzzles. This enables us to have an easy beginning and a really difficult ending - not only a theoretically difficult one. Sounds simple, but believe me: Sometimes we were close to going nuts (some people even say we were not just close …)
Infocom's history is familiar to most fans of interactive fiction, but that doesn't stop me from being interested in how magazines cover the company. Now The Escapist has an article entitled The Short, Happy Life of Infocom. It covers the usual ground: Infocom was formed by a bunch of guys from MIT; they wanted to create business software, and sold games software to get the company started; Cornerstone failed; Activision bought Infocom but then, after a corporate reshuffling, killed them off.
Mike Snyder has released the source code to Distress, his Hugo game which placed 4th in the 2005 IF Competition.
GameSetWatch has an interview with Scott Adams — not the Dilbert one, the one who formed Adventure International in the 1980s and who had success with games such as Pirate Adventure and The Count. Not that he's doing much with adventure games these days:
What can you tell me about your newest project, The Inheritance: SAGA Bible Adventure #1?
I have the prologue done and have not worked much on it in the last few years. Just in the last month have I picked it up again.
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How did you feel about the popularity of the adventure genre in the 90s, and its current demise – or hiatus, hopefully?
I don't play adventure type games myself currently. Other games tend to hold my interest more.