Charles Cecil On A Christmas Carol Page 2

02 Dec 2009 at 16:09:03 by Tim McDonald

So how much of the adventure game genre is there in there? From what you've said this sounds like it's focused on telling the story and on the smaller minigames, but then you also mentioned interaction with background elements and characters...

If we were to say that half the game was minigames and half the game was environments in which you must interact with background elements and people, in the right order... Effectively, you're creating chain reactions which, once you put all the component parts in place, gives the desired result – but you don't talk to people. The best description is to say that you're the hand of fate. You're driving Scrooge by doing what a hand of fate would - you can rattle locks, you can light candles; you can do the sort of things that a poltergeist could do. But the key thing is that, like the book, we've tried to convey a lot of humour. Ultimately, we're telling the story, but we're telling it in a fun way, and we're telling it in a slightly different way, but we don't deviate enough to actually worry anybody. It is still A Christmas Carol.

With the film tie-in, the game is presumably aimed at the younger market. Do you think there's a lot in there for adults to enjoy, too? Will they enjoy the retelling of the story in the game?

What I do know is that Disney put it out to testers, and it was very, very well received, both by younger audiences and older audiences. I certainly hope so. It's primarily aimed at a younger audience, but with the intention of being played by older players as well.

I presume you've enjoyed it, at least?

Oh yes, very much so! It was a great honour, to be honest, to be asked to come up with a design, and really, really fun. It's why games design is such fun, to be honest. You've got a problem, you throw some ideas around, and then you suddenly think “That would work!” Then people get excited, and hopefully people like yourselves and the audience will enjoy playing the game.

Finding solutions to creative problems, as it were, then.

Absolutely.

Now, it's a DS title, and from what you've said it's going to be heavily stylus driven. Do you make use of the DS' other capabilities? Does it support the new camera on the DSi, or the microphone, or anything like that?

Not the camera, but the microphone, absolutely, yes. What we have is a hint system, where if you're stuck, you can blow into the microphone and it's like a sort of snowflake effect which highlights the hotspots on the screen. What we were aiming for was to have a game where it was actually quite difficult to get stuck. I think what a modern audience wants is to know why they're stuck, and they want to know what they need to do to progress, which is quite difference to the adventurer of the 90s. That's why, in many ways, a minigame works well. If you fail twice in a minigame, you get better and better, and then the third time you succeed. It's much, much easier to put a gameplay ramp-up in that sense, than it is in a traditional adventure, where there was a fairly constant level of difficulty all the way through. But yes, to answer your question, we do use the microphone.

Time to wrap this up. What's the one thing that you really want people to take away from this?

Does it have to be just one?

*laughs* No.

*laughs* Okay, the key things I want: I want people to enjoy the gameplay through the humour, and through the satisfaction of solving the puzzles, and I really hope that people will be inspired – having played the game and watched the film – to go and read the book.

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