James Dearden (2015)

Looaaads of stuff, and though some of it was due to executive meddling on Dave's behalf, a lot of it just took up too much time. There were two sections that ended up being dropped, Galatea was originally two separate characters whose roles were merged, and Regis was originally a much more terrible person (but it complicated the plot a bit too much)

2011 in Busan, South Korea, with some of my students while I was teaching English over there. It's a beautiful city, I really recommend it!

Fortunately, it's just my surname backwards - it's what I've been using as a pseudonym since forever, since it's the kind of thing that nobody else has already taken.

Unlike my brother's, "Vomitor", which keeps finding people who've already taken it.

When designing puzzles in adventures, I like to treat them like mystery stories - that is, start with a conclusion, and work backwards. What's the obstacle? The cat was in the tree. How did we get them out of the tree? Cutting the tree down. The gap between those two things is where the "puzzle" comes from, like "getting an axe" or "negotiating with lumberjack". In any case, make sure it's logically consistent - Technobabylon at least tries to retain a sense of cyberpunk logic to the way puzzles work, though Dave made me cut out most of the things involving balloons.

Fortunately he's not bad with the meddling - certainly the changes that he's suggested have made sense. The biggest was the complete rejig of part 2 of the game, which people who played the old freeware ones will notice is missing a scene on the balcony. The office was added to give Regis and Lao more investigating early on, but it meant that a whole new scene had to be created for it!

Rump, though that's more out of habit than particular choice. It's all kind of samey, to me.

I've started the preliminaries on three different projects at the moment, actually. Whichever one of those I end of pursuing in the end, it'll definitely be in Unity though - I want it to work with everything

Idea A: WW2 themed adventure that's kind of Biggles meets Monkey Island
Idea B: Sci-fi/Space, kind of "Mass Effect with more talking"
Idea C: Technobabylon Sequel, because why not?

The problem with being sleepy is that it's hard to do constructive things, since fatigue leads to them being done sloppily. So I fire up my tablet and read, or play Battlefield.

He kept it for a snack. ;)

I had considered keeping it for a puzzle that was dropped, and figured it was funnier just to keep the hand anyway. It can be thrown away in the disposal chute in the office, which I'd originally considered making an achievement for!

Almost all of the names of non-speaking characters in the game are cameos of people I know! I like including real people in these things, whether as names, or their voices (e.g. if you dial random numbers on the phone)

Thanks! Wadjet Eye are in the process of converting their whole back-catalogue to iPad, so there will eventually be an iOS version of Technobabylon, but since it was the latest game they've released, it might be a while yet.

The next game I'm making, I intend to be able to release for PC, iPad and Android at launch!

Have to give it a while, I'm still figuring out how Unity works! On the plus side, at least some of the assets for A are already in place. http://i116.photobucket.com/albums/o33/Nedraed/outside_wip02_zps4655195e.png

Me personally, or anybody? And what kind of car? You're leaving an awful lot of details up to speculation.

It's kind of been my ambition since I was about six - for years, I've been making small games myself, and messing around with Doom WADs and Half Life mods. With Technobabylon I thought I had an idea that merited a bigger game. So, I approached Dave Gilbert at the AdventureX conference in 2012 to see if he'd be on-board with doing anything with it, as he'd done with Gemini Rue before. At that stage, him saying "yes" was the unrealistic-best-case outcome, but it worked! So, that gave me enough reason to give up the day job!

English breakfast, milk (whole), two sugars.

You know why communists only drink herbal tea? Because all proper-tea is theft.

Fairly, but that's why I wanted to get on-board with someone like Wadjet Eye before I started. That way, their pre-existing audience/publicity machine is already there, and I don't have to start from scratch building a reputation quite so much!

In an ideal world, I'd love to be part of Deus Ex, but Montreal's a fair bit of a commute from the UK!

Me too, it's what keeps me going!

I shall endeavour to keep living up to the standard!