Hi there, friends! Welcome back on board of “San Francisco”, a huge spacecraft travelling far, far way from planet Earth.
Let’s continue our story. Last time we’ve talked about a famous game that encouraged me to launch the development of my own game.
Without further ado let me say that it was Life is Strange =)
(no one guessed, so we just pick a winner at random. Aaaaand IFIYGD - is a winner! Congrats! We will send you you steam key ASAP)
Ok, now let’s back to Life is Strange.
Yes, perhaps the game has a wonderful atmosphere and storyline, but… And there are quite a few “buts”.
Before I go into detail, let me explain my first expressions. As I already mentioned, by that time I had been thinking about developing my own quest and evaluated some new games.
So here I am, launching the first Life is Strange episode with a faltering hope. By the way, the game’s genre is stated as Adventure anywhere you look. I remember the character sitting behind a school desk and me realizing that I can use the items in front of her. Wow! Be still my pacing heart. I examine the first location and see new actions, dialogs, storyline progression.
Could it be?!
Could it be a real quest with location examination, atmosphere and smart logical solutions? I looked forward to many hours of wonderful game play and could not believe my own luck…
You all know what happened next. In the next ten minutes my hopes were shattered. I was deeply hurt. It felt like I was tricked and my present was taken away.
No, I’m not criticizing the game. Life is Strange is a solid project with a wonderful atmosphere. It has a lot of fans and deserves some praise.
But it’s not an adventure game. It’s not a game at all, honestly speaking. It’s an interactive movie pretending to be a game. You won’t feel the satisfaction of finding a slick solution. And I could not forgive this.
I remember the same evolution of Tell Tale Games projects (obviously, LiS is created based on Tell Tale projects pattern). Their first series - Sam&Max, Tales of Monkey Island, Hector – were similar to logical games, especially Sam&Max, but what followed … Later there was less and less “game” in the game play and more and more interactive movies, where the player makes no decisions. I understand that they had their reasons to change the direction (probably due to marketing reasons). But it was sad, and Life is Strange яwas the result of this sad path of changes. By the way, do you agree? I’m not saying there are no decent games, but in my opinion Tell Tale and LiS have chosen a wrong direction…
That was the point when I realized that Odysseus Kosmos must be created. I knew I was not alone. There must be more people craving for smart and deep game play with logical puzzles and location examining. I knew right away what my goal was.
I started by describing character concepts. It’s a rather long story, so let us take a break for now. This week we are giving away another key and the question is:
Who played the part of Odysseus Kosmos in the fist test build? Let me give you a hint; what black character I took from a famous animation series (and the character even had its own series!) to play the part of Oddy while Roman (our artist) was working on the final character design?