The Design Behind Feist, 2009 IGF Finalist

Adrian talks about the design behind Feist

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/feist-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]ln9wBUoGkn8[/wp_youtube]

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference at the IGF Main Competition and with me is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Adrian: Hey, I’m Adrian. I’m the Co-developer of Feist.

Interviewer: What’s Feist about?

Adrian: It’s about exploration. When creating the game, actually, first we created the worlds with objects and enemies that could interact with each other.

Interviewer: The player creates the world?

Adrian: No, we created the world but the players explore. We didn’t actually plan a goal at the beginning. That is something we added at a later stage, and now we’re trying to get different goals and adding a story to the game to finish it up.

Interviewer: How long did the development take?

Adrian: We’ve been working on it five months now, and we’ve got to take time , and we plan to finish to the end of August, just the end.

Interviewer: What technologies did you use to develop it?

Adrian: We used Unity imaging mostly. It was a really great fit for our project because it really makes prototyping and trying out stuff really easy. It was great for the [?] device.

Interviewer: Is this multi-player or single player?

Adrian: It’s single player. It uses physics. We thought about using multi-player but think it’s quite hard to synchronize that over the network.

Interviewer: It got excellence in visual arts, so in terms of a nomination. Can you talk about what inspired the art stuff?

Adrian: We had been looking at a lot of independent animation clips and contemporary design, like the two European festivals, one in plasma and one in zero which released those independent animation clips which we really like.

At the beginning of the project we looked at tons of those videos to try and get inspiration for a game. That’s where we merged at.

Interviewer: What’s in store for the future of your studio?

Adrian: We don’t actually have a studio.

Interviewer: For this game.

Adrian: It started out as a final thesis at the University, so it’s more like a student project currently. At the moment we are trying to finish it up, get it released, get it out and then we’re going to see what the future is going to bring to us if we’re going to both work together afterwards, make another game or if we each take a different path. We’ll have to see that.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.