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!!!