Review Fix Exclusive: Joe Fletcher Talks Guardian of the Galaxy in ‘Marvel Puzzle Quest’

Review Fix chats with D3Publisher Producer Joe Fletcher, who discusses the additions of characters from Guardians of the Galaxy in “Marvel Puzzle Quest,” the newest addition to the massively popular and successful “Puzzle Quest” series. From breaking down the development process for the new characters and how their stories are written, Fletcher gives Review Fix an inside look at how Marvel and D3 have teamed up to create one of the most ambitious mobile games of all time.

Review Fix: How will the Guardians of the Galaxy change the game?

Joe Fletcher: Introducing the Guardians not only do the standard task of increasing the choices in the metagame with new characters, but they also bring a new dimension to our story telling possibilities.  While Iron Man, the X-Men and others have been in space on occasion, the Guardians are the first actual cosmic characters to be brought into the Marvel Puzzle Quest Universe.  I can’t say that we’ll directly leverage that in the near term, but having more story options is always a good thing!

Review Fix: What was the process like to choose these characters over some of the other ones in the group?

Fletcher: You don’t need a process when the choice is between some human with a Walkman and a GIANT TALKING TREE.  Right?  In any case, it was really down to the story we wanted to tell in the near term.  Rocket and Groot are well known for traveling the galaxy on their time off and ending up on Earth on occasion.  Mr. Quill on the other hand doesn’t really do the whole terrestrial adventuring thing, so it made more sense to bring the duo into the game over the others.  Gamora then followed on with this mainly due to her overall character concept.  MPQ can use more strong brawlers with tactical brains.

Review Fix: How was the episode for these characters written? How much time and energy was involved?

Fletcher: New episodes for MPQ take months to get integrated into the game.  I know it sounds relatively easy to just toss together some background art and throw a few mission pins on it, but we do a ton of work making sure that everything flows well and the whole Episode feels “right” for the subject matter.  Take a look at the Deadpool Episode and our treatment of the chapter cards for it for an idea of that sort of thing.  In any case, after we have the concept for the story down, we develop an overall outline of the characters involved, high points of the story, and flow of each chapter in the Episode.  Of course, at every step of the way, we’re also making sure with Marvel that all the new in-game assets jive with everything that they’ve got going on.

After that’s all ready, we turn it looks to the wonderfully talented Alex Irvine, who takes that outline and works his writing magic to make the story really work.  He’s generally pretty quick with turnarounds, but obviously that depends on how deep and involved any given Episode is.  The Hulk had a ton going on, something like Deadpool not so much.  Meet Rocket & Groot hovers somewhere between.  While that’s cooking with Alex, we work to further refine each of the missions that go into it, tweaking enemies involved, base levels that work with our scaling system, and of course, the rewards that we expect players to be able to reach.  This goes through tons of QA balancing passes that help to refine the missions themselves.

Once the script is back, we immediately send it off for translation into all the languages our game supports.  Meanwhile, the teams go to work in making sure that all the dialogue sequences work and make sense in-game.  It’s one thing to write out a script, another to see it running in-game.  Alex has a great concept of what does and doesn’t work, so there’s generally very little tweaking, but sometimes scenes just don’t play out like you imagine.  Once the translations come back in, we push those in, do some more QC on the other languages, and make some final runs through the content on our server that mirrors the Live game.  That way we can make sure that everything is good to go for launch.  At that point, it’s simply a waiting game for when we have the launch of the Episode scheduled.