Anachronox Q&A
GameSpot talks with designer Tom Hall about the challenges his team's faced in developing the RPG Anachronox, and what gamers can expect once the game finally ships later this year.
GameSpot: What's been the greatest challenge in developing Anachronox?
Tom Hall: The greatest challenge has been to give all of the different aspects of the game a fair share of time. You can do a lot in Anachronox: Talk to folks, interact with the environment, use World Skills, play minigames, solve mysteries, fight monsters - all in an adventure that crosses six planets. It's pretty huge, and we're trying to do with 15 people what Square does with 80-100 people! But it's getting done, and it's turning out very cool.
GS: Anachronox uses the Quake II engine, but looks quite different than a first-person shooter. Can you talk about some of the changes and enhancements you've made to the engine?
TH: Well, there's some Quake II engine left, but we've done a lot to it. It has 32 bit graphics (8 bits RGB, and 8 bits alpha), Ralph Barbagallo's cool editable particle effects, lipsynching and facial deformation for expressions (super cool), nice shaded models, and a programming language to let you make 2D or even 3D minigames/interfaces called APE, that Squirrel did. On top of all this is the wonderful 3D spline-based camera system called Planet. It allows us to do incredibly fluid in-engine cinematics with relative ease. Jake, Seneca, and Jay have done some amazing stuff. We'll be showing a cool lipsynched scene at the show, and some massive destruction sequences. Plus a rather unique minigame....
GS: Anachronox has an unusual science-fiction setting and style. Which games and other media have most greatly influenced the game's design?
TH: The initial inspiration was Chrono Trigger - a really fun, amazing SNES RPG with 13 different endings. I recommend it to anyone, and people joining the team have to play it. Other influences: books are Gateway, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battlefield Earth (not looking forward to the movie); in movies, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Aliens, Usual Suspects, Princess Bride, and films of Spielberg, Hitchcock, Scorsese; in games, Chrono Trigger, FF7, Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Super Mario 64, and most recently Ape Escape. I tend to swirl everything in my life into the game somehow. I like having all sorts of disparate influences and eclectic info being stirred into a rich batter.
GS: The game's hero is the gumshoe Sly Boots. Can you talk about some of the companions he'll meet on his quest? TH: Some of the other characters are:
-Grumpos Matavastros, a crotchety old guy that offers him a protection job.
-Stiletto Anyway,a mercenary. They used to work on cases together.
-Dr. Rho Bowman, a heretical scientist with wild theories about MysTech.
-Paco "El Puņo" Estrella, a dejected superhero.
And some others....
GS: Without spoiling anything, can you describe the game's story? Why is down-on-his-luck Boots caught in the middle of everything?
TH: He's sort of fallen into dire straits financially, owes a lot of money, and needs a job. He gets a small bodyguard job, which soon plops him in the middle of a grand galactic mystery. He begins to get suspicious something is going on when the planet he is standing on splits in half.
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