Review Fix chats with “Tick’s Tales†developer Bryce Covert, who discusses the game, the inspiration behind it and goals for the project moving forward.
Review Fix:Â What inspired this game?
Bryce Covert: Among other things, in the months leading up to kicking off Tick’s Tales, I was watching a lot of Adventure Time. The genius of the show is the simplicity in how the characters are crafted. There’s a dog obsessed with food, an evil wizard bent on finding a bride, and a teenage boy who is the neighborhood hero. In keeping the characters’ aspirations simple, it allows the storyteller to put emphasis on the narrative adventure. It also leaves a lot of breathing room for humor, because you’ve already accepted the characters and setting as being pretty eccentric.
I wanted those qualities in Tick’s Tales. If the player can roll with the fact that the town of Remington is populated with characters named Brian O’Brainy, Captain McHulk, and Gandarf, then it’ll create a good setting for a really fun and funny adventure.
Review Fix:Â What did you play as a kid? How did they influence this game?
Covert: Tick’s Tales certainly is a product of years of mulling over what I loved so much about the games I played as a kid. My first interactions with a computer were playing King’s Quest, and as such, it’d be hard to deny the influence of that series on me. Tick’s Tales doesn’t really play like King’s Quest, or any game from the Sierra lineup, but I think there are numerous qualities of the series that I did incorporate — terrible puns, a simple setting, and, perhaps most importantly, not taking itself so seriously.
As a kid, I also spent hours glued to the TV screen playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo classics like Mega Man, Zelda, Battletoads, and Final Fantasy. Some of the aesthetic qualities, and certainly the music, draw more from these games than the early adventure games. In many ways, I wanted to portray, in a modern way, what I loved about games of the era, not just adventure games of the era.
Review Fix:Â What was the thought process behind the game’s visual engine?
Covert: I wanted to capture and portray what I loved about the games of my childhood, not necessarily create a direct clone of them. In the early adventures, a lot was left up to the player’s imagination because low resolution art could only be so precise. So my primary goal artistically was to trigger the imagination of the player in the same way as the early adventures did, but in the context of the 21st century player. I’m quite pleased with how this manifested itself — It looks like a limited palette pixel art old school game, but doesn’t feel like one. Playing a game at 320×240 resolution feels very stiff on a 24″ LCD display because it was never meant for that. I worked around this stiffness by embracing the fact that the game is going to be run on higher resolution displays. The huge discovery for me was in finding that emulating a handheld camera that pans and zooms on the protagonist results in a very lively feel, while still having that low resolution style.
Review Fix:Â What do you think makes this game special?
Covert: I think, more than anything, this game is appealing to an audience of game players like me. Tick’s Tales started by me asking, “What sort of game would I want to play?”, and, to the best of my abilities, following that question to its logical conclusion. It wasn’t designed to cater to a specific audience, but I believe that there are others out there who happen to share the same appetite for adventures that I do.
Additionally, as a one man development team, there’s a sort of unavoidable reality in which Tick’s Tales gives a window into my personal thought process, humor, and storytelling. My hope is that others share in the entertainment and fun that I had in writing and making it.
Review Fix:Â How do you want this game to be remembered?
Covert: The early adventure games inspired and challenged me as a young person. In order to play the early parser adventures, I needed to learn how to read. Later, the idea of making my own game encouraged me to pursue a career as a programmer. In many ways, making Tick’s Tales is a fulfillment of that lifelong dream. If this game encourages someone, in whatever capacity, to pursue their own dreams, then I will be thrilled.
Review Fix:Â What has the development cycle been like thus far?
Covert: Being a one-man team was hard, but one of the advantages was that I was never bored. There was always something to do. If I got bored programming, I could always spend some time animating, writing music, or drawing backgrounds. Fortunately, the choice of art style, programming language (Clojure), and writing style meant that I could iterate over and over pretty easily until I was happy with the result.
You hear a lot about that 80/20 rule – that 80% of the work takes 20% of the time, and this definitely proved true for Tick’s Tales. The game as a whole was playable from start to finish about 4 months from when I started, but I then spent the next 16 months refining it!
Review Fix:Â What’s next?
Covert: There’s a lot on the table! I know that the next game will continue in the tradition of engaging narrative adventure, but I’m still in the brainstorming stage. Realistically, most of my ideas would need a team size larger than one person, so I’m hoping Tick’s Tales will help me form a partnership with other designers who want to pursue the next game together.
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