Interviews

CONSPIRACIES

Interview with Team Anima
Conducted by Vicky Indrawan

JA - How did you find the North America Distributor? Is it a difficult process compare to the European Distributor as we all know that North America has a luke warm response to adventure games?

The truth is that finding a distributor is a serious problem for every “new comer” into the game market. Fortunately we did set high goals and standards for our game and this proved to be in the end very wise, especially when we began discussions with distributors, since today’s market demands are very high. After lots of discussion and contacts with several distribution companies (in Europe and in the USA) we decided to co-operate with Got Game Entertainment, because of the professional, friendly and in general impeccable style of its President, Howard Horowitz, who from the first moment showed, with actions and not only with words, his interest in our game, something that is very hard to find these days. In Europe, although we contacted distributors early, we had to deal with very slow company procedures ending up in delays and that is the reason why we’ve decided to distribute the game ourselves, for the time being, through our website.

JA - What is your expectation for Conspiracies sales number in North America?

As I mentioned before it’s our first time in the gaming market and it would be pointless to make any predictions. I wish I could give a better answer on this but as you may also understand it is impossible for me to tell…

JA - Why did you choose a first person instead of a third person perspective for Conspiracies? Lately, most of the successful adventure games are in third person perspective, such as Runaway, Syberia, or The Longest Journey.

The truth is that we’ve always liked first person adventure games much more than a third person perspective. That means that our choice had nothing to do with what kind of adventure games are the more successful but with the fact that we liked this specific kind more. Nevertheless many gamers loved it as it is: a first person adventure game. Also they loved its gameplay. If everything goes well, into the near future we intend to have, into the sequel of Conspiracies, both a first person and a third person perspective, something that we are sure many of our players would love to have!

JA - Why did you choose a live actor (FMV games) instead of computer-generated characters? As we all know not many FMV adventure games have had good sales figures.

Our first goal was to help our player identify himself with Nick, our protagonist. We think that seeing a real character and not a 3d virtual one is much more attractive and more human. We think that a player connects more with a human and alive character (as it happens to the movies) than with a virtual one. The expression of the feeling by our game characters, their way of speaking, their behavior and perhaps some of their face expressions are so everyday things and so “us” that they make the player part of their world. For us it would be much more easier and less painful economically to create virtual characters, but the love and the addiction we have for FMV games drove us to create CONSPIRACIES and it’s something we feel very proud of!

The fact that the sales of the FMV games are lower today is caused maybe by the fact the there aren’t any more FMV games with a really strong gameplay. Also, because of their huge cost, demanded for cameras, actors, make-up artists, bluebox and lots of other things, the developers are focusing to videos presenting a final result with shallow gameplay, which maybe the reason that the public “punishes” the FMV games. We tried to diminish this problem and we believe that we will be justified.

JA - What were the most difficult parts in creating the game?

The greatest difficulty we faced in our long effort to make this game, concerned the persons who were members of our team for specific periods of time and then left because they never believed in the project and also in their abilities. Of course this fact turned to be good in the end because we replaced them, after thorough search, with new collaborators with vision, faith and self-confidence. Fortunately everything in the end went fine.

Another problem was the money, since CONSPIRACIES was funded exclusively by us! But of course money is a problem for everybody …

JA - I heard some people complain about the pixel-hunting style that are being heavily used inside this game. Some people also complain about how easy it is to get killed inside the game without any notification or sign prior to it. What do you think about that?

We don’t believe CONSPIRACIES is a pixel-hunting style game. The fact that there are some complaints about this surprises us because in order to avoid this specific problem, we set the use of the mouse right button click with which a description of all the usable items is made. Maybe for this reason the complaints come from hasty players who try to find everything by clicking continuously the mouse left button. In any case, the items that cannot be clearly seen in the game are not more than 2 or 3. In fact, that may easily be surpassed by increasing the resolution of the game from the video - option menu that can reach the limits of DirectX, that means a resolution bigger than even 1600 X 1200.

In the case a player plays in high resolution there is no pixel hunting but only small objects. In comparison with others, the object must all be to scale. For example, you can’t make a credit card as big as a laptop just to be seen. It would be abnormal compared to the rest of the objects. Can you imagine dropping both a laptop and a credit card to the same place to the ground and have the same size ?

Concerning how easy the player loses, if we were to warn that a player could be killed then no one would be killed and then from the beginning we would have made a game where the player could not lose. But we must say that it is a matter that will be taken into consideration for the CONSPIRACIES sequel.

JA - Most of the characters are not blended nicely to the rendered background. To be honest, they look like a flat board. Is there any reason why they were not polished more before releasing the game?

The creation of the game CONSPIRACIES began in 1998, when many hardware limitations existed concerning speed and complexity of graphics. It is the only reason why we left our characters a bit “flat”. In any case if you ask any of them and look at them, he or she will speak to you through a video and not through his 3D figure, so having this in mind we thought that we shouldn’t spare polygons on them but only on the other objects that wouldn’t have any explanatory videos. Of course today this is not like that, such limitations are almost extinguished.

JA – The North American version will contain both CD and DVD version inside the package. That is really nice. What made you chagce your mind? I heard that the original plan would only have the DVD version.

Yes, you are absolutely right. Our initial thought was to publish the game in DVD format only. We thought that DVD drives would be a common part of every modern Computer. Watching though the discussions in several forums and also from e-mails received by pre-order buyers of the game who were asking why there is no CD version, we’ve decided to satisfy them too. For us, it is very important to be able to satisfy our players no matter how hard it is, as long as it is something we can do. In this way we think that we show the proper respect to those who honoured us by buying our game.

JA - I see some similarities (style, navigation, etc) between Conspiracies and the Tex Murphy games. Were you got influenced by the Tex Murphy games (or other games/movies) when designing Conspiracies? Don't get me wrong, Conspiracies is a really nice game.

Of course our influence by Tex Murphy is obvious; we never tried to hide it. Most of us into the team played and loved Tex’s adventures and we were really sorry when we heard that they were not able to produce a fourth sequel. We adopted some of the characteristics we judged to be successful and functional from the Tex Murphy games.

Of course as it may be easily realized, CONSPIRACIES have their own philosophy. We mention as an example that its places are in their majority clear and light in contradiction with the rest of the games released the last few years. We could very easily design dark and misty places and be sure that we would receive positive criticism by the specialists, at least concerning the graphics. We, on the other hand, decided to take a risk and create a game full of light with a strong and unpredictable scenario and a gameplay for which only good things were said up to this moment.

JA - Tell me a little bit about your company background.

I am Project/Product Manager CEO of ANIMA ppd-Interactive. Anima post production was founded in 1993 by me, and it is located in Drama-Greece. Since 1993 Anima adopted State of Art equipment and know-how, with which it produces TV and radio commercial spots, logos in 2 or 3 dimensions, classic and modern ones. In 1995 Anima started designing also websites and multimedia productions and 3d real-time graphics with the use of Direct X.

In 1998 the company began to apply its know-how in multi-media, directing, programming language applications ability and real-time programming and graphic designing into the production of a long-term and ambitious project which has recently been completed, entitled: "Conspiracies"

JA - Is Conspiracies your first major game?

Yes, and we hope not the last… hahahaha!

JA - Finally, I have heard that Conspiracies 2 is in production right now. Will some main characters from the first game come back again? When will we expected to play this game? Will it be the continuation of the first game or will Nick investigate different case?

Our goal, if everything goes right, is to proceed to one at least sequel and according to the way the public accepts it we may proceed to a second sequel or to a prequel.

Your question concerning the characters is very successful since it is very impressive how pleased is the people who participated to the shooting of our first game. They are now asking us when we start making the next project and if we want them to participate in it too. Of course who will be playing in our next game depends upon our scenario-writer, Marina Kokkinidou, who is writing right now without saying anything.

We hope, if the sales of our game help us, our next game will be ready in approximately two years time or maybe sooner. At this moment that we are speaking we are upgrading – developing our engine from Dx8.1a to Dx9 incorporating all new features making again an even more powerful new 3d graphics system engine, which of course will be used in our next game. We also have already begun to renew our blue-box studio. Concerning the scenario, we can say only one thing: unexpected!!!