Interview with Francisco Gonzalez, First aired 3rd January 2019

Adventure Games Podcast: Could you briefly introduce yourself and then say if you have a favorite adventure game?
FG: Sure. My name is Francisco Gonzalez, and I am an adventure game developer. I started off making adventure games as a hobby and in about 2001 I pretty much just sort of cut my teeth on a sort of open source community project called Reality on the Norm. I made a few games there. I also made a pretty long term freeware series called Ben Jordan Paranormal Investigator from 2004 to 2012. And yeah, I went commercial in 2013 and I've released three games since then, A Golden Wake and Shardlight which were both published by Wadjet Eye games and most recently, Lamplight City, which was published by Application Systems Heidelberg. And as far as favourite adventure games go, I have a lot of favourite adventure games. My top four are Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Curse of Monkey Island, Quest for Glory 4 and.
AGP: I haven't actually played Conquest of the Longbow.
FG: I think it's one of Sierra's most underrated adventures, honestly. It was designed by Christy Marx, who was the one of the creators of the 80s cartoon Jem and the Holograms. She actually made two games in the Conquest series The first one was Conquest of Camelot where you play as King Arthur going on the quest for the holy grail, which I've joked with friends that it actually is a King's Quest because you are a king and you're going on a quest. It’s based on actual history and I love that sort of thing. In Conquest of the Longbow you play as Robin Hood, and you basically are trying to raise a ransom to get King Richard back and fighting off the Sheriff of Nottingham and, you know, hanging out with your Merry Men and all that stuff. And yeah, it's a great game, not only because it's fun, and it's historically interesting, but also because it has a lot of branching, which was pretty revolutionary for back in the day. I mean, based on how you play the game, you get, I think, five different endings.
AGP: Oh, okay. So back. Yeah, it was, you know, a big thing back then.
FG: Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff going on that it doesn't really actively tell you. I mean, obviously there's certain things like you can go through encounters either peacefully or you can threaten everybody or shoot them with your arrows and things like that. And that obviously has an effect on things. But yeah, it kind of organically branches the story a little bit or at least gets you to a different ending differently. I'm actually planning on replaying it soon for inspiration. But yeah, the only downside is that it is a bit of a case of copy protection in the game because there is a puzzles where you need the manual to solve the puzzles and it's kind of annoying, but that’s really the only one of the games glaring, bad points.
AGP: So you mentioned a few games that you were involved in very briefly. You said you worked on Reality on the Norm series. Could you tell us what that series was about?
FG: Sure. Yeah. Reality on the norm was pretty much a crowdsourced adventure game project that was actually created by Ben Croshaw, who most people might know as the Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation. Amongst a few people, they created this town called Reality on the Norm and it was sort of this weird English generic town. That was kind of like Royston Valley from the League of Gentlemen in a way. The idea was that the art style was very basic so the idea was that even if you didn't really have many art skills, anybody could just draw something in MS Paint or something and make a game and it was a shared world and shared characters. So you know, if one person created a character, another person could make a game using that character. It was pretty fun in the early days. People like me and Dave Gilbert got their start doing that and we would make these games where we tried to have parallel stories happening and like one game would lead into the other game and things like that. Then after a while, most of the founding people sort of moved away from it. And there was this period of time where there were people that were just making games constantly. And I think the amount of games just ballooned. But the problem was that a lot of them were, I mean, not to be mean or anything, but some of them weren't as great quality as the early ones. And so, yeah, trying to kind of find the ones that were worth playing versus the ones that were just like, obviously, cobbled together as jokes became kind of difficult. And then after a while, it sort of just sadly stopped.
But it was fun. It was fun while it lasted. That was like, I want to say like 2002 to 2003 ish, maybe. AGP: So you could could say that was the original Marvel Cinematic Universe.

FG: Yeah, sure. I made three games and I was working on a fourth one that I never finished. But I made one about a pirate that comes to reality on the norm name Hokey Mud Pegleg. And yeah, he becomes the postman because Dave had made a game where the postman was murdered. And so there was a vacancy for the postman. So I thought, oh, let's make him the postman. So the whole joke was that he was hooking like pegleg pirate post, but he was also illiterate. So you had to learn how to read in order to properly deliver the letters. It was very silly. And I also made one called the chef about an Italian chef and his nudist brother who come to town and open a restaurant and it was very silly as well.
AGP: So tell us about the character Ben Jordan and those games.
FG: So Ben Jordan was after Reality in the Norm. I wanted to keep making games, but I didn't really know what to focus on. Because the great thing about Reality on the Norm was there was a template there and it was easy to come up with something but I wanted to sort of branch out and do something unique and something different. So I had a few false starts on some projects. There was one project I wanted to do about this. It was very in jokey, it was a game about a guy who was searching for the source code for AGS or Adventure Game Studio, which is the engine that I use. And like having to travel around the world to meet up with, like the forum members and find the source code or some something like that. And then never really got very far. But the whole idea of going around the world and seeing different things kind of stuck with me. And from there, I decided that I would make Ben Jordan which is a series about a kid who wants to become a paranormal investigator. And so, like I said, I was very influenced by the first Gabriel Knight game, but I didn't want to make a game that was super dark or, or spooky or like, monster of the week type stuff like vampires or anything like that. So I decided that I wanted to make a game where each game was a different case. And so I would do a series. I had no idea how many games I was going to make when I started. I made the first one in about two weeks.
AGP: Wow that's impressive!
FG: Well, I mean, if you played the first one, you wouldn't say that, but
AGP: I play it years ago, but I remember liking it, you know, I played the rest of the series.
FG: Fair enough. Well, good. But yeah, the sort of unique thing I wanted to do with it was I wanted each of the paranormal phenomenon to be based on some sort of real life, sort of folklore or legends or stuff like that. So I started the first game being about the Skunk Ape, which is the Florida Bigfoot, essentially. And since I grew up in South Florida, I had an idea about it, so I figured I'd start off in my own backyard. I made the first version of the first game and about two weeks, and then I made the second game in about two months, and then the third game took me a little longer than that. I did release the first three games in one year, which I don't know how I did that.
AGP: Okay, that definitely is impressive!
FG: I think it was, it was mostly because I did them like at the end of the spring semester over the summer going into the fall semester of university. So I had a lot of free time to work on those things.

AGP: What would be the main thing you think that you learned maybe from the first to the third game?
FG: Well, mostly it was coding stuff. I mean, I'm not a programmer by any means. But I learned how to use Adventure Game Studio and I learned how to code in Adventure Game Studio and making all those games was pretty much what gave me my knowledge base and doing that. When I first started, I mean, my art skills weren't great. I used to draw the backgrounds with the mouse and just like do all the animations by hand and sort of eyeball them and stuff. But as I made the games, I sort of got a little bit more ambitious and like I started trying to refine my art and it wasn't until about the seventh game that I got a tablet and started not painting with the mouse anymore, but then I started like doing very basic rotoscoping which is the animation technique that I still use to this day. So yeah, in the end there ended up being eight games and I remade the first two to be a little bit more consistent with the other ones and sort of fit into the overall plot a little bit better. But yeah, like I definitely felt like I learned and I improved in pretty much every aspect like going back and playing them the stories are little in and like, you know the writing is kind of in but whatever. Design is also A little questionable. But I mean, you know, we got to start somewhere.

AGP: What I like about the series is we can see you're developing your skills throughout the series, as each game progresses, each game is better than the last one. When did you start to feel more confident in your ability?

FG: I think it was this third one because the third one is definitely the one that I have the fondest memories of working on. Over the summer I remember I was taking classes so I would go to class in the morning and then I would come back to my apartment and then just start working on Ben Jordan three. I would get music from the guy that was doing the music and I was like, Oh man, this is great. And it just sort of all came together. And funnily enough, that seems to be the fan favourite. And then the fourth one I really like too. And then the fifth one, I kind of got a little over ambitious and I really wanted to make it more like Gabriel Knight. And in doing that, I don't know, I kind of felt like it lost the spark that kind of made it unique. And the fifth one is actually one of my least favourite ones. I mean, it's not a bad game. It's just, it just doesn't feel like Ben Jordan. It just feels like I'm trying to do Gabriel Knight with Ben Jordan.
AGP: Why do you think that was?
FG: The third one had a day structure. It was like day one, day two, day three, but the fifth one was a lot more procedural. I probably could have been a little bit more creative with it. So yeah, after that one, I did the one in Greece, which was lot more colourful and was a lot more fun. Like the fifth one was a lot more bleak and dark. And the sixth one was just more fun. And then the last two, I kind of saw as kind of two parts of the same hole because it was kind of the whole big final story. And yeah, I like those, even though the eighth one took me literally four years to make as I also had a day job. There were times where I wouldn't touch AGS for like six months. And I had the stupid idea to draw the backgrounds on paper instead of just doing them on the computer.
AGP: Did you work on your own for most of the games? Who did you work as part of the team?
FG: No, I did them all by myself. Except for the music. I had someone do the music for me, but I did everything.

AGP: At what point did he know the end of the Ben Jordan series?
FG: About the third case was when I kind of got everything together and I sat down and I wrote a series Bible and wrote the details, e.g. what I wanted, where I wanted it to go, what I wanted the story beats to be, what I wanted each case to be, that sort of thing. Because I figured, if I'm going to be making these games, I want to have a clear endpoint. Because I don't want to be making them forever. Although people still ask me when I'm making Ben Jordan nine. amuse me.
AGP: Do you have any plans on revisiting Ben Jordan or are you moving on making other games?
FG: I've moved on. I've made three other games since I finished.
AGP: How do you feel now that you finished the series?
FG: I feel proud. I'm happy people enjoyed the games. It helped me sort of establish a fan base. I'm proud of the games. I'm proud that I was able to accomplish eight games in the span of eight years. In addition to learning all of the coding and everything, it also instilled in me more or less reasonable work ethic for finishing games.
AGP: How much research did you do for each each game? Or in general because I know you said for your first game you kind of knew about the Skunk Ape having grown up in Florida, but for the rest of the games, at least, did you do a lot of research and how did you choose the topics.
FG: Yeah, it's funny because that, in talking about this with you, I've realized like I've said in the past that people seem to consider me like the history guy. I'm like, I don't know why they get that idea. But now I'm starting to see why. Yeah, it's true. All of my games tend to have some sort of real life or historical element to them. It depended on the game. Sometimes when I was planning out what I wanted to do, sometimes I did it based on the location. Sometimes I did it based on the particular legend like when I had read the whole story about that house about number 50 Barclays square in this comic book in school. And I knew that it was a thing and I thought it was creepy. So I thought it would be interesting to to explore that. So obviously, it had to be in London. I mean, it was in the house the whole time. I mean, I like the whole idea of Scotland. I thought, well, obviously the things you think of her like the Loch Ness Monster, but then I thought, well, what about witches? And I think like, the third Harry Potter movie had just come out recently, when I was very influenced by like, the idea of Macbeth and then, I just started thinking about exotic locations. I was like, Oh, well, I could do Japan. But then I knew about the whole thing about the idea of using the puffer fish toxin to make “zombies”. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be interesting if I took zombies and put them in Japan? Because I didn't think anybody had really done that? And also that game. That's the one subtitle I didn't come up with. I asked for help on the AGS IRC channel and I was like, “Hey, does anybody have a good title for a game about zombies in Japan,” and someone came up with Land of the Rising Dead. And even though I don't like the game as much, I think that's probably one of my favourite titles. Greece was actually funny, because I was telling you before we recorded about the yearly AGS gathering, and then 2005, it was in Greece. So basically, Ben Jordan six is kind of a game version of my experience in Greece. And the whole sea people thing was just a story that one of the people there told. So that's one of the ones that's not actually based on any real particular lessons. And then I got the whole idea for the religious person searching for relics from watching a small clip of an X Files episode, where they're filming like a movie or something. And there's a crazy priest who has some sort of bowl. It's a relic. And I thought, oh, that'd be cool. That's an interesting idea. Like some guys looking for relics. He thinks he'll get power from them. And then maybe I can connect this all somehow. And so I did. But as far as to your original question, how much research did I do? Well, back then there was no Wikipedia. So I just kind of pulled things and hope for the best. So I did research, basically just kind of doing a little bit of research, not a whole bunch, because obviously, it was fiction. So it wasn't like I wanted to keep super, I didn't want to keep to an insane amount of fact. So Yeah, I did, but not too much.
AGP: I know the games are still free right?
FG: They're still up and you can still download them from my website grundislavgames.com
AGP: Was it always your intention to make a commercial game after episode eight and when did you decide to try your hand at a commercial game?
FG: Well, in about 2007 Dave told me that he had already started Wadjet Eye and he'd started making his own commercial games. And he said I should think about doing that. And I was like, yeah, I would like to do that, but I always wanted to finish the Ben Jordan series because I didn't want to think about going commercial before I had finished this project that I had started. So yeah, once I was getting close to finishing the eighth game, I started thinking about what I wanted to do. And then Dave told me that he would be interested in publishing whatever game I did. So I was like, well, now I have to come up with an idea that would be worth publishing. So I started thinking about stuff. And yeah, I got the idea to make a Golden Week, which was my first commercial release, which basically was a historical fiction piece about a real estate agent in 1920s Miami. So once again, like with Ben Jordan, I went back to my own backyard. And I did a lot of research on this one because it was the most historically themed game about the Florida land boom in the 1920s. And I mean, I always was fascinated by the history. I thought it was a really interesting period of time. It was interesting to see the whole idea of all of these people from around the country coming down to basically this swamp land being promised these amazing tropical paradise homes. I mean, there was plenty of swindling happening. But yeah, this whole idea of that and then, South Florida becoming this glitzy sort of mob. Prohibition and bootlegging coming from the Caribbean being brought in. And, you know, Havana being right there and all of this happening, just like at the beginning part of the decade, and then you have a giant hurricane that destroys everything. And then just as things are starting to look up, you get the Great Depression. I was like, this is just a crazy story. And I think it would make a great backdrop for an adventure game. So that's where that came from. And originally, my plan was to make it be a lot more about the main kind of it because the game focuses on the development of this planned community called Coral Gables, which still exists to this day. And originally I was thinking about having the game be about the guy who developed it, George Merrick, and you playing him, but then I thought that would be a little bit too rigid. And so I decided to just make it more about a rise and fall story about a young kid who comes down to try and get a piece of the pie. And then he gets sort of involved in everything.

AGP: I remember playing that game a few years ago, and I had no idea about the history of it.

FG: Yeah, I was learning as I went along. That was part of my intention too. I wanted players to learn about this and realize that it was a real thing too. And I mean, in hindsight, looking back on it, it might not have been the best idea to start off with a sort of niche. I mean, adventure games are nice enough, but a game about real estate. Even though the game isn't really about real estate, it's about a real estate agent. But I mean, in hindsight, if I could go back and do it again, I would do things a lot differently. Overall, I'm happy I got to make the game. I'm proud that it was out. It wasn't like a huge hit or anything. And some people thought it was kind of bland, but I mean, it's unique. And I'm still proud of the fact that, there's really no other game out there that's like it or about the same subject matter or anything like that. It's funny, because anytime I tell people about it, they give me this look like “Wow, that sounds really cool.” I'm like, Well, hopefully you think so.

AGP: Which real characters appear in the game?
FG: The main one is George Merrick who I mentioned before, who was the founding father of Coral Gables. And there was a another character who I really liked a lot named Edward “Doc” Dammers, who is sort of stereotypical kind of carnival barker. And there's also Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, who was a reporter in the 20s and later became a big Crusader to protect the Everglades. I had actually made reference to her in the first Ben Jordan game, so it's kind of bringing that back full circle. It was really interesting dealing with those characters, because obviously, if they're based on real people, I didn't want to really, necessarily paint them in a bad way, you know? Because before the whole sort of Florida land boom was kind of based on a lot of maybe not lies, but maybe not necessarily the whole truth. So I didn't want to like paint these people as you know, criminals or as two dimensional characters. Unfortunately there was certain characters like Doc Dammers, for example, there's actually very little written about him so I kind of had to make mostof him up. It's funny because after the game came out, I actually was able to find a little bit more about him and I was like, I didn't make him flamboyant enough. I could have done a lot more crazy stuff true to life. I actually have a book that came out after the game came out that my mom gave me as a gift about it's a complete biography of George Merrick and I haven't read it yet because I worry that if I read it, I'm going to say, “Oh my god, I should have put this!”
AGP: What things would you do differently if you were to make the game again?
FG: I think one of my biggest mistakes was that I stuck a little too close to history and not really enough on the characters, like, the characters are there and they have their arcs and stuff. I think one of the things that I got the most criticism for rightly so is that at in the halfway point of the game, the main character makes this kind of big decision and a lot of people felt that it came out of nowhere and maybe planting the seeds of that a little bit more with a sort of a different approach would work better. Because I mean, ultimately, there's a good story there. You know, there's the whole question about what drives a person to act this way against this backdrop, but I feel maybe like it could have been a little bit better done. One of the things I probably would have done from the get go would be to add a rival character so that when the main character is trying to prove himself and get himself noticed, the rival character could be trying to sabotage him or something like that, to kind of make things a little bit more interesting or maybe not focus so much on the more trivial things. I probably would have would totally cut the whole airshow sequence, because that doesn't really go anywhere. It's just fun. And that puzzle isn't very well coded. So it's kind of annoying. I think there are some things I could go back and change and make this story a little bit better. I've thought about it, but I've it's kind of way, way, way, way way back on the backburner.

AGP: Can you tell us, again about the story of your next game Shardlight?
FG: Yeah, Shardlight is a very different in tone. It's quite bleak actually. It's set in a post apocalyptic dystopian future in which a young woman named Amy is trying to find a cure for a disease, which she has and is dying from while also trying to bring down the government and make the world a better place.
AGP: Why did you decide to make a post apocalyptic game? Was it something that you're generally interested in?
FG: Well, actually, the first initial idea I had, again, going back to the history thing was I wanted to make a game set during the medieval war in medieval times, during the black plague, and I had two images in my mind of a ruined landscape with people dying of a horrible disease. And then I also wanted to have this sort of death personified character that was represented by a raven. And so they were just images I had in my mind. And then I started talking with Ben Chandler (game composer), who is a friend and who I've known for a while, but who also at the time had just recently been hired as the full time artist. And so between the two of us, we just started talking about it. And we kind of changed the idea from medieval times to post apocalyptic future and just in talking, the whole setting just kind of fell into place and the story kind of fell into place. And then I was like, oh man, it would be so cool if the government dressed in French Revolutionary attire, because I really like powdered wigs and all that stuff. So we came up with the idea for that. And that's kind of where the game came from.
AGP: Did you read any post apocalyptic books or play any post apocalyptic games or watch any movies or series to get a sense of the setting or?
FG: Yeah, I mean, I didn't I didn't really read any books but I mean, obviously Fallout is kind of go to there. Although I was really more inspired by things like The Hunger Games and definitely the film Children of Men. It was brought to my attention later on that I should have read stuff like A Cantible for Leibowitz. It's like a post apocalyptic novel but yeah, I didn't really read much or study much post apocalyptic stuff. I just wanted to kind of do my own thing.
AGP: What would you say makes Shardlight unique and different to the other post-apocalyptic games.
FG: Most post-apocalyptic games tend to focus more on the survival aspect where you have to kill or be killed. Whereas in Shardlight, we tried to show that there was still a community and the humanity was still trying to get by. People still work together. And were friends even though there was a big class divided between the rich and the poor, and everything based on this whole vaccine system, which for the record, I just want to say that vaccines can not only be preventative but also be used to treat diseases as well as prevent them. I've seen a lot of comments where people have been like, “Oh, why do they say it's a vaccine? The vaccines aren't for diseases you already have.” They actually are. Anyway I think what sets it apart as well is it's a hopeful story. It's not just that everything is terrible and everything's gonna continue to be terrible.

AGP: How did you come up with the title shardlight? Did that have any significance?
FG: So Ben drew did the backgrounds and the characters for that game. He just drew a background with these hangings with yards of glowing glass. And I was like, “Oh yeah, that looks really cool.” So he's like, “Well, what are we going to call our game? Where what's the folder? I should

save this too? And I said, “I don't know.” So he said, “I'm just gonna make a folder called Shard light.” I was like all right, that'll be our temporary title. And it's stuck. We never came up with anything better.
AGP: You mentioned that Lamplight City was published by Heidelberg Applications. Why did you decide to go with them as a publisher?
FG: Ben was already working as the full time artist at Wadjet Eye and since he was going to be working on the project with me, Dave decided that rather than just be paying him a salary, the whole time he was working on the game and me waiting to get royalties until the game was released, he was just going to hire me on and pay me a salary. But then unfortunately, as it happens in this industry, after the game came out, he couldn't afford to pay two full time employees. He was still interested in publishing Lamplight City, but in the end, after he played a few builds, we kind of both realized actually that, you know, the direction he thought the game was going in, versus what I was doing didn't really line up and he said, “The changes that I would want you to make would change the game so much that it wouldn't really be the same thing.” So we just kind of agreed, let's just call it and I'll go my own way. So yeah, then I started looking for another publisher. And I spent about six months looking for another publisher. And in the end Application Systems Heidelberg, came along and said, they were interested, which was great, because I was getting a little desperate. So I went with them and they've been really good to me. They've done a lot as far as marketing and everything. It's been great being with them. And hopefully, we'll continue our relation for some time,
AGP: Would you mind talking about the plot of the game?
FG: Yeah, sure. So lamplight city is a detective adventure in which it's okay to fail. So the idea basically came from the fact that I wanted to make a detective game where it didn’t hold your hand and lead you to the right solution no matter what. I've played games like LA Noire and Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments and things like that it’s possible to accuse the wrong suspects sometimes, but if you do that there aren't really any long term consequences. In LA Noire, one of the biggest gimmicks or one of the biggest features is that you have these interrogations where you're supposed to read people's facial expressions and determine if they're lying. But even if you get every single interview wrong, which I did on purpose for research purposes. It will still give you the clue. So if you fail in interviewing a suspect that will just be like, “Oh, hey, we found this clue somewhere which you would have gotten if you had correctly interrogated the suspects.” So it still pushes you in the right direction. And if you get into a chase or you're following somebody or something and they get away, it'll say, oh, game over, they got away and then you restart the chase. So I was thinking, well, what if you could make a detective game or have a detective game where if you're following a suspect and they get away, for example, they're gone. And you now have to find some sort of alternative way to get that information or it's possible to just lose that information completely and not be able to solve that lead. So yeah, that was where Lamplight City came from. I wanted to just make a detective game where you had to actually do detective work and hopefully feel like a real detective in doing that. So the story of the game is you play a former police detective turned private investigator named Miles Fordham who starts hearing the voice of his dead partner, and he's not sure if it's actually a ghost or if he's just going crazy. So he feels or hears this voice in his head which tells him that if he finds the person responsible for his death he'll be able to move on. So that's kind of what drives him but then in the interim he also doesn't really have any leads to find this guy. So he's solving other cases in the meantime. So that's the bulk of the gameplay: it's these five different cases that you're solving and each case has multiple suspects and potential leads to follow and potential leads to screw up so you know if there are three possible suspects in a case there's a separate path to successfully determine that person as a suspect based on the clues you find, the evidence you gather, the conversations you have with people, it's kind of like the whole three trial system in Monkey Island where you can see the paths in any order you like. But in the meantime, if you make somebody angry, or if you do something that accidentally closes off one of the leads, then that lead is then closed off and you're not able to accuse that person. So you could potentially accuse the wrong suspect. Or you could close off all your leads, at which point the case becomes unsolvable and then you move on to the next case. However I did just roll out a patch, which allows you to declare the case unsolvable once you complete a suspect because people were rightly getting annoyed at the situation where they could find themselves in where they had closed off the lead to a person they thought was the right person, but the only way to close the case was to accuse an innocent person in their eyes. Now you have the option where if that's the only person that is available, you can also declare the case unsolvable in case you don't want to accuse them. Yeah, so the idea too, is thatif you accuse the wrong suspect, you might have consequences for that later on. If you meet somebody that they knew in another case, then they'll be mad at you and they might block you off to another lead and if you declare too many cases unsolvable then you get a different ending and that sort of thing.
AGP: Why did you decide to make the game this way?
FG: I wanted to have players unlearn the sort of behaviours that adventure games have instilled in all of us, like the idea that, if you're talking to somebody and you insult them and then after it's like it never happened. So I wanted it to be like, if you insult somebody, they're gonna react like a real person would react if you insult them in real life.
AGP: Exactly, you just go go down to that next dialogue tree and contineu as if nothing happened.
FG: Right? And that's the other thing too. Like there's some dialogue options that if you ask about certain things, it will make the person upset you know, to kind of get away from the whole Oh, it's a list of topics I'm going to have to click every single one of them and exhaust every single dialogue option. There's certain things where if you click on the things, the people get upset. I mean, the game will obviously warn you but just to vary it up a little also, there's no inventory.
AGP: Why did you decide to have no inventory in the game?
FG: It was mostly because the tone of the game was sort of more dark. The game’s atmosphere is inspired very much

by the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens. It's sort of alternate Victorian, with a little bit of steampunk peppered in. But the whole tone of the game, it didn't feel right to have puzzles where you had to combine items to make other things. If you're a detective, you're going to be trying to solve the case by interrogating people and analysing crime scenes and looking at stuff, you're not going to be combining a rope with a fish with a stick to make a fishing rod. I just kind of felt like that would be immersion breaking and just not right for the tone. So that's why I decided to just you pick things up and if you have to have items in your possession to be able to be able to use them. But the mouse cursor is context sensitive. So if you have an item that you can use on the thing, it'll change to indicate that you can use the item on it. So I tried to streamline the whole inventory thing a little bit more. And I actually really like it. So I'm glad that it's been somewhat well received.
AGP: As we mentioned before the game engine is still using AGS (Adventure Game Studio). Has the game engine improved or changed from when you first started using it.
FG: Oh, for sure. When I first started using it, I was using the DOS editor. It used to be worked on by one guy named Chris Jones. And he made it open source about 10 years ago and ever since then, there's been this small group of people, or I think it's, again, just one individual that really actively works on it. But yeah, they've been updating it. And it's a great engine. I mean, I love it. Admittedly, one of the biggest drawbacks is that it's not super easy to port to other platforms. We've pretty much gotten Mac and Linux working fine and I look forward to the Switch. But no one has figured out yet how to Port AGS games to the Switch. So yeah, I mean, it's possible to put port them to IOS as well. So there is definitely ability to port but it's not as easy as other engines. I've thought about switching but I have yet to design really anything outside of the scope of what aAGS can do. So I'm not feeling the pressure to switch engines.

AGP: Would you say this is maybe the most challenging game to develop? It definitely sounds ambitious.

FG: Maybe. Yeah, it was it was definitely the most ambitious game that I've done. But yeah, I had to keep track of all of the variables and all the possible solutions to the cases and all that sort of rush, but I really enjoyed it. I've been making games for long enough that I try and push myself with every game I make. And I think that with this one, I would not have been able to make this game 5 - 10 years ago, but I think I got the point where I have enough of an understanding that it's not a monumental task. I don't want to sound like I'm blowing my own horn or anything. I think I'm mostly lucky in the fact that from working on the Ben Jordan games and learning every discipline little by little as I've gone along, it's helped me from a commercial standpoint in so far as with Lamplight City and with A Golden Wake I did everything myself except for the music. Shardlight I just wrote and designed it and programmed most of it and Lamplight City again, I did everything except the music so as far as production costs go, it's not like I have to pay an artist or pay a writer or pay a big team to make these games so I can keep the production costs relatively low. I think I can consider myself lucky that I can get away with doing that and that people still appreciate the games because it's a niche genre, and it's a saturated market. And those two things together, make it kind of intimidating to want to do this as a career. And I do consider myself lucky that I have been able to make this my full time career. My fear was that I'd been working on this game for two and a half years, I was worried that it would come out and like, maybe sell 500 copies. And that would be it. Thankfully, it's done a little bit better than that. It hasn't been a hit by any stretch of the imagination, but I mean, it hasn't been a complete failure. So I mean, at least, it's afforded me the luxury to be able to continue doing this for a little while longer.

AGP: One thing I was thinking about which may be one reason why you were successful is some games try to recapture the feeling of the old LucasArts and Sierra games and appeal to those players. However I see with your games the stories they seem modern, they have their own identity. What do you think about that?

FG: You bring up a very valid point. I think one of the potential pitfalls that a lot of adventure game developers have is the whole nostalgia element. And I mean, obviously, as developers and fans, we mostly all grew up playing the classics, you know, so there is a very rich library to look back on and reference and take his inspiration and stuff. And I mean, obviously, there's the whole on the shoulders of giants thing, you know, if not, for those games, we wouldn’t be doing what we're doing. And, certainly we owe a debt to them for doing that, but I definitely think it's a very real and dangerous thing for people to want to recreate those old games because, like it or not, the world has changed. People don't have the patience that people had back in the 90s. You know, when you had to call a hint line to get past a particular puzzle, you can't design a game like that now. And back then, adventure games weren't coming out. Well, games in general weren't coming out as much. Yes, you could design a game and think, “Oh, well, I'll put this puzzle in and maybe it'll take players six months to figure it out.” Players nowadays don't have six months to figure it out. In six months, there's like 10,000 new games to play. So you have to at best imagine that your your audience will sit down and play your game in one sitting or over a weekend or something, because they just have so many games to play. And if they put down your game because they don't want to consult the walkthrough or whatever, then they're probably not going to pick it up again for a very long time, if ever, so, there's that to consider. And then the other thing to consider is the internet is a thing now, and you can just look up a walkthrough right away. So the whole idea of putting up puzzles as obstacles to make the game feel longer, whatever is just not a thing anymore. And the whole idea of, “Oh, I'm making this game and it's a throwback” I think it's partly a marketing thing as well to say that. Because in any adventure game, you're going to say, “Oh, it's like Monkey Island, or Oh, it's like King's Quest or whatever.” But as long as the comparison ends there. With Lamplight City obviously I was very inspired by Gabriel Knight. I ripped off the aesthetic of the close up portraits against the black screen and Lamplight City has elements that look like New Orleans. But I tried to make it its own thing and deviated from everything else so that people looking at it might think, “Oh, this reminds me of this game,” but then when they play it they think “Oh, this was a good game on its own” not “Oh, this was obviously a Gabriel Knight fan game or whatever,” and I'm not dropping little winky references or not having Cedric the owl show up in on a flagpole or something.
AGP: Would you ever consider Kickstarter from what you've seen of it, or is that something that you would steer clear of?

FG: I personally have always made it a point to steer clear of Kickstarter. To me, running a Kickstarter campaign just is a full time job in and of itself, which detracts from the time that you would need to make your game if you're already well into development. And I think to do a Kickstarter, it just seems like you need it for the final push. Like with Lamplight City, really what I needed the money for was for Voice Over and for music costs. And I contemplated doing a Kickstarter, but then I thought, I'm asking for the amount of money that it would take for the game to break even. So if the game comes out and the people who have already pledged get the game, where's the new audience that's going to come in to get me to make a profit? That's what turns me off the most because the game comes out and all the backers get their reward. I've used the money for development. Now, where does all the money come from? I don't know. But then you have examples like, like the Nighthawks Kickstarter which was asking for 125,000. And they funded so it's up in the air. Who knows? I see some projects, which seem like they'll get funded, not get funded. And I see some projects, which I feel like it's crazy for them to get funded, and they do get funded. So who knows? All I know is that personally, I don't think Kickstarter would be a viable option. For me personally.
AGP: That's fair enough. That's that's really good advice there. Is there anything else you'd like to say to adventure game players?
FG: Please wishlist lamplight city if you haven't already, and if you have, consider buying it for a friend, or seven, thank you :)