Walking a fine line with Hinterland
Walking a fine line with Hinterland
Interview - posted by DarkUnderlord on Mon 5 January 2009, 05:40:19
Tags: Hinterland; Tilted MillGamaSutra interview Titled Mill. They cover Hinterland:
Like a lot of PC developers, over the past eight or ten years we trended toward fewer, bigger titles and of course that means less variety in a given amount of time. Tilted Mill did three big titles in our first six years, but we’ve already done three smaller titles since June of this year.
In terms of scale, how did your approach to making a city-building game like Children of the Nile differ from your approach to making Hinterland, which could be described as a village-building game that's a bit smaller in scale?
It was a pretty big adjustment going from SimCity Societies to Hinterland. Even though we’d all cut our teeth back in the day on games that were about the scope of Hinterland, it was still a big transition for us to go through. That’s just on the production side.
As far as the actual approach to the game, well, because Hinterland is so unique, we were always walking a very fine line, and running the risk of being a “not good enough” city-building game combined with a “not good enough” RPG, or whatever.
Games are tough that way – if you have some strong RPG elements, you’re compared to the very best RPGs. If you have some city-building elements, people expect a full blown city builder.
On top of that, with the game being only $20 (our plan from the get go), then of course there are limits in terms of how robust each part of the game can be.
So, on the one hand, it was tough making sure we were always getting the best bang for our development buck, but, on the other hand, working with a smaller team that was more senior overall was a huge advantage as well.Small titles vs big titles. Which do you prefer?
Spotted @ GameBanshee
Like a lot of PC developers, over the past eight or ten years we trended toward fewer, bigger titles and of course that means less variety in a given amount of time. Tilted Mill did three big titles in our first six years, but we’ve already done three smaller titles since June of this year.
In terms of scale, how did your approach to making a city-building game like Children of the Nile differ from your approach to making Hinterland, which could be described as a village-building game that's a bit smaller in scale?
It was a pretty big adjustment going from SimCity Societies to Hinterland. Even though we’d all cut our teeth back in the day on games that were about the scope of Hinterland, it was still a big transition for us to go through. That’s just on the production side.
As far as the actual approach to the game, well, because Hinterland is so unique, we were always walking a very fine line, and running the risk of being a “not good enough” city-building game combined with a “not good enough” RPG, or whatever.
Games are tough that way – if you have some strong RPG elements, you’re compared to the very best RPGs. If you have some city-building elements, people expect a full blown city builder.
On top of that, with the game being only $20 (our plan from the get go), then of course there are limits in terms of how robust each part of the game can be.
So, on the one hand, it was tough making sure we were always getting the best bang for our development buck, but, on the other hand, working with a smaller team that was more senior overall was a huge advantage as well.
Spotted @ GameBanshee
