Interviews

JUST ADVENTURE INTERVIEW WITH TIM FURNISH, HUNGRY SOFTWARE

by Bob Freese
April 7, 2003

Tim, thanks a million for spending some time with our JA readers! I think they’ll find your story fascinating!

Quite alright.

A month ago, my editor asked me if I’d be interested in doing a review on a downloadable freeware adventure. “Freeware”, are you kiddin’ me? I checked out your rather extensive and enjoyable site, downloaded the game, and “signed on” immediately. I was impressed – very impressed. Let’s start in the beginning, please. Who is Tim Furnish, what is your background, and how did you get interested in this crazy business?

Who am I? I’m a 25 year old guy who since he can remember has passed the time by doodling, playing the guitar, eating copious amounts of pizza and writing computer games. I currently living with my girlfriend in Nottingham, England in a converted asylum. We moved here because of me landing a job in the area - kind of a good idea after four years of doing nothing much since graduating from university.

As for how I got here… well, when I was a kid we had a Commodore +4. It was the era of the Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum and other such powerful machines – and games for the lowly Commodore +4 were pretty thin on the ground. A lot of games came in books and magazines, and you had to type them in before running them. Thanks to that, I started picking up what the different instructions actually meant… and so I started trying to write my own games, using what I’d learned. We’re talking BASIC with line numbers, and graphically the machine could do 4 colours on screen at once in what I think with hindsight was probably 160x200 resolution. Hardly impressive stuff by today’s standards… but it got me hooked. As the years went by, I studied computing at various levels from GCSE to A level to degree, all the time writing my own silly little games to amuse myself and anyone else who cared to try them out. It was only a matter of time before I finished one and released it on the internet. It was called Ducks, and I finished it while I was at university. It’s still available today – although it runs on fewer and fewer machines these days, thanks to Mr. Gates changing the internal organs of his operating system every few years. Of course, Ducks needed a website and a message board and an editor so people could make their own levels… I guess that was probably the point where I’d say I went from futzing about with games in my spare time to actually being a game developer.

Tim, this is a quality adventure game – more fun than many retail games I’ve bought. Why freeware?

For a number of reasons. First of all, for the 6 months before the game was released I had a full time job. I didn’t want to let the first 95% of the game’s development go to waste, so I forced myself to finish and release it, just to show the world that I had actually been producing a game, not just some pretty pictures. By the time it came to release it, I really, really wanted people to see it – to see the whole thing, I didn’t care, I needed an ego massage. I suppose I wanted to show it off. I thought it was pretty damn good, and I wanted it to reach as wide an audience as possible. What I didn’t want, on the other hand, was to have any more work to do on it as it had sucked up a lot of my social life and sleep already. Setting up a registration site and writing an automatic email sending script and sending out unlock codes or full versions to people wasn’t on my wish list. So, it’s my gift to the world. And it’s a good advert for SLUDGE.

Although it’s covered in some detail on your web page, could you take us briefly through the evolution of your game’s programming language changes? Why did you decide on “SLUDGE”?

I originally started writing the game for the Commodore Amiga as a side-on platformer, with the emphasis on puzzles rather than firefights or jumping on enemies’ heads – kind of like Flashback, which I was heavily into at the time. The language I was using was called AMOS – pretty much the same as BASIC but with a bundle of extra commands for handing sprites and images and sound effects all built-in. I got as far as designing the first room – a bedroom – and a puzzle with a fruit machine that you had to break by inserting something coin-shaped that would jam up its internals. But that was as far as I got, because I’d foolishly decided that I was going to go one better than Flashback and have flights of stairs, and it turned out that in my programming, er… well, whatever the opposite of wisdom is, I couldn’t get the character to follow diagonal lines properly. It wound me up no end, so I put the project it on the back burner and tinkered with other stuff instead.

Then, at university, I learned C and C++ and decided the time was right to try writing the game again. This time it was going to be a text adventure. I coded up the whole of the main character’s bedroom, including a stereo which you could open and wire up incorrectly so that it would play CDs backwards. Sadly it just wasn’t… well… interesting to play, never mind to write. I really wanted the game to be graphical, so that got canned too.

I knew I didn’t have the free time to write a point-and-click adventure system, so the whole thing went nowhere until my final year, during which we were all meant to undertake a year-long coursework-based project in some field or other. Sure, we weren’t allowed to write games – that was one of the rules. But nobody saw anything wrong with me writing a game engine and accompanying editing system … and of course, that would need testing. Thus, the first point-and-click version of the game – by now called Out Of Order, for several reasons – was born. And then died, because the year ended and try as I might I just couldn’t stand to use the God-awful editing software I’d just spent a year writing, despite getting a good grade for it.

However, after writing Ducks and creating the editor and a few of my own add-ons, I decided to give the Hurford game one last shot. Or, rather, three. I tried writing a new system in C, which didn’t work too well and was canned early on. Not too much of a waste, as it would only have been for MS-DOS anyway. There were very few point-and-click adventure engines out there – and those that were about simply weren’t up to the challenge of helping me write the game I wanted the world to see, so after a few weeks trying to get AGS and AGAST to do what I wanted I started writing my own engine, this time for Windows 95. I called it SLUDGE, standing for Scripting Language for Unhindered Development of a Gaming Environment, kind of as an homage to LucasArts’ SCUMM system.

The plan wasn’t originally to release the engine for mass consumption, but I did want to write something reusable. My aim was simply to write OOO over a few years, putting nothing game-specific in the engine and having everything, from the interface to the menu system to the actions available to the sound effects to the inventory, all written in the scripting language itself. I had visions of producing more adventure games using the same engine in a fraction of the time once OOO was done. Letting the public use the engine was an afterthought, despite the facts that (a) the engine was released a long time before the game was finished and (b) other games written with SLUDGE, such as Cubert Badbone and demos of Otto and Iggy’s Pointless Adventure, were released first.

So why did I choose SLUDGE to write the final version? I didn’t, really. I tried writing the game with a lot of languages, and SLUDGE is the one I happened to be using when it actually got finished. If I hadn’t produced a full version of the game with SLUDGE, chances are a few years on I’d be doing a 3D version using something else. I’m kind of like that.

Was this production pretty much your own project, or did you have a lot of collaboration?

Mine, through and through. I had bits of help here and there – my girlfriend’s responsible for Sylvia’s hair and boots, for example – but it was mostly my own work. I also had a fair few testers, including an ex-employee of Sierra responsible for much of the programming on various Quest and Gabriel Knight games. I’d like to think that without their valued and informed help and input, the game would have been just the same but with fewer names on the credits.

I thought your working title “The Fantastic Adventures of Hurford Schlitzting” was knee slapper – why the final title “Out of Order”?

“The Fantastic Adventures of Hurford Schlitzting” sounded a little to amateurish to me – like one of the hundreds of 10-screen default-interface 320x200 resolution home-made adventure games that there are out there. Although maybe that’s just my personal opinion, because that’s what I’d been calling the past versions for years. But put it this way: Day Of The Tentacle wasn’t called The Incredible Exploits of Bernard Bernoulli. Full Throttle wasn’t called The Marvelous Escapades of Ben Whatsisname. Even Gabriel Knight and Tex Murphy took a back seat, name-wise, when their games were named. On top of which, the game isn’t about Hurford at all - it just happens to feature him. Anyone else in the title role would have been able to do exactly the same stuff, and the game would have played exactly the same way. Someone like Gabriel Knight maybe deserves to be in the title of his games a little more, as he’s an integral part of the plot. He finds out stuff about himself. He is the plot a lot of the time. Hurford, it’s safe to say, isn’t. He’s pretty much just a lazy dressing-gown-wearing onlooker, the player’s vehicle for the duration of the story – and he’s happy that way, so let’s not knock him for it.

So yeah, that’s why not. As for why… and I’ll try to be cryptic here, for anyone that hasn’t played the game… first of all, something electrical that’s responsible for the state of The Town – the place where Hurford is trapped – is broken, or more specifically stuck in a loop. Electrical + broken = out of order. Plus, the way the baddies of the piece are treating Hurford and his fellow residents is, some might say, right out of order. Then we get to the time travel… yes, you have to solve the game out of order. And finally, as the webpage says, if order comes out of chaos, what comes out of order? I guess that’s either a deep, meaningful, eternal truth – leave things to chance and a pattern will emerge, try and organize everything too much and it will degenerate into confusion – or it’s just something which sounded moderately cool with which I could fill up a little space on the front page of the OOO website.

Any gaming plans in your future?

Yes and no. People have been asking about a sequel on the forums, which isn’t going to happen, certainly for the next few years. Take a look at the credits, people! It says “2000 – 2003” for crying out loud! On top of which, the job I landed in the summer of last year is a job programming computer games – or, rather, PS2, X-Box and GameCube games – and I don’t really want to be coming home to do more of the same in my spare time. OOO and Ducks helped my get the job, so I’m glad I did them… and I’m very glad people enjoy playing them. Sadly I have bills to pay and gainful employment was the only way to go. I’m currently creating and coding puzzles and in-game cutscenes for a not-entirely-normal action adventure which should be released in about a year and a half. Just when the console-owning population were out of my reach…

The game’s making its first public appearance at this year’s E3 – but no, I haven’t been invited, nor are the company paying for me to fly out there. You don’t climb the ladder that quickly. But it’s a start. And I’d certainly like to think we haven’t seen the last of Hurford just yet. At least I’ve left him somewhere better at the end of the game than I landed him at the beginning. He’ll be OK there for a while, until I throw another problem his way a few years along the line.

Well, I for one want to commend you for your efforts. The game provided me plenty of laughs and I found many of your puzzles extremely fun and innovative. Congratulations, and thanks very much for your time!

It was meant to be hard-hitting social commentary! Damn, I’ve failed again!

Heh heh heh!

Thanks Tim!!!!