Review Fix Exclusive: Q & A with ‘Barn Runner: The Rich Dame Who Cut The Cheese‘ Creator Scott LeGere

Review Fix chats with ‘Barn Runner: The Rich Dame Who Cut The Cheese‘ Creator Scott LeGere to find out the details on the cool and hilarious retro detective tale. A part of the AGS Bake Sale, all of the titles involved will go to support the Child’s Play charity, which brings video games to children in hospitals all over the country.

Review Fix: What was the inspiration for the game?

Scott LeGere: I’ve been making Barn Runner games for years, but I’ve never had the opportunity to tell an old-fashioned “whodunnit” in the traditional style: A room full of suspicious people, all with their own motives, no one can leave, and it’s up to you to solve the crime. Classic stuff! I’ve always wanted to try my hand at it.

Review Fix: What games did you play as a kid? Did they influence this one?

LeGere: The earliest adventure games I played were the old text games like Zork and Leather Goddesses of Phobos, so clearly I’ve been around a while (read: I’m old). I always liked the funny ones more than the others, so games like Planetfall and Monkey Island were a huge influence on me when it came time to make my own silly little games.

Review Fix: The game is getting some buzz on the forums for its sense of humor. How does that make you feel?

LeGere: I love it. I’m not the best programmer, my puzzles are usually pretty easy, and my art style takes a little getting used to. So I focus most of my energy on my writing. If I can make the player laugh a few times as he plows through my lines and lines of dialog, then I consider the game a success.

Review Fix: What was the creation process like? How was using AGS beneficial to the process?

LeGere: I always plan out my games on a legal pad. I try out different designs for new characters the player will meet; I try to lay out the geography area as a whole and then the individual rooms that the player will visit to make them as intuitive and easy to navigate as possible; I even try to put a little effort in my admittedly lame puzzles. But mostly I write as many jokes as I can think of. AGS makes that a snap because its dialog system is very simple and easy to use. Plus, thanks to its module and plugin support, I can use other people’s code to smooth over bits of the game that might stump me if I had to do code it all by myself. That said, the forums were down one weekend and I was forced to write my own code to reflect the player in the bathroom mirrors. It’s not the prettiest code ever written, but even a mediocre programmer like me could kludge something together that works in this versatile and durable engine. And that’s a ringing endorsement of AGS if ever there was one. :D

Review Fix: What’s your favorite element of the game?

LeGere: The looping rooms. The restaurant and the penthouse office above it are on the top floor of a circular skyscraper. I love that the hero can walk in one direction long enough that he’ll come around to his starting point again. I’ve never done that in a game before, and I had a real sense of triumph when I was finally able to pull that off (after much cursing and shouting at the monitor). It works so smoothly, the player will never even suspect how hard it was for a doofus like me to do.

Review Fix: What would you change?

LeGere: I wanted to have close-up portraits of the NPCs when the player spoke to them. I was only able to finish about half of them before I ran out of time. Some of them were quite nice, and it’s a pity I wasn’t able to use them in the game.

Review Fix: Who will get the most out of this game?

LeGere: Players who like games with lots of NPCs to talk to and interact with. Every time you meet a new person, you can go back to people you’ve met before and ask them about the new guy. Plus, many of them have reasons to suspect (or to try to get you to suspect) the other people in the restaurant instead of them. No person’s story quite meshes with any other person’s story. Everyone has something to hide. It was a real challenge writing all that dialog and trying to keep all the plot lines straight. If you’d enjoy a new take on an old-fashioned whodunnit, then give this game a spin.

Review Fix: What are your goals for the game?

LeGere: To entertain the player and make it worth whatever money they donated to Child’s Play.

Review Fix: How do you want it to be remembered?

LeGere: As a worthwhile part of a fundraiser for a very worthy cause.