It has been an incredibly long time since our last blog post so we decided to restart regular blog posting action. I find it quite difficult to think of blog topics so Paul suggested we start fresh with an intro to the Well placed Cactus team series. So today it’s my turn to bring you some possibly interesting information about why I wanted to get into games development and maybe some other things if we have time. Where the hell do I start?

The greatest storytelling tool in history.

I’m Nic, I am from a small rural town in Queensland, Australia. I currently live in Brisbane and work with Well Placed Cactus. I like games, I think they are an excellent medium for both storytelling and constructing environments where players can create their own adventures. As a kid I loved to play games with a story, point and clicks were a favorite of mine, then came the Metal Gears and Final Fantasies. I also used games to tell my own stories. I would spend countless hours playing multiplayer worms 2 against myself, building bunkers out of girders and after the sudden death waters consumed the map the last surviving worm would be the victor and my badly acted worm drama would come to a close.

Background Storytelling in Eggolution.

So stories are cool and games are even cooler for being able to tell them and let players create their own. I think that is one of the main reasons I wanted to get into game development, also because you know, they are fun and stuff. And while at the moment I am making small mostly mobile games with simple mechanics and little chance for storytelling, I try and push for little details that add story elements to our games. For example when Eggolution was pitched to us it was an egg catching game that included a set of levels that were not linked in any way. What we ended up with though is an implied story that unfolds entirely in the background, the chickens start in a barn and start plotting their escape and over the next 24 levels, they flee the farm, build up their society, go through an industrial revolution, build a space ship, and escape to a planet they can call their own. So even as the small developer we are right now, we still have opportunities for storytelling, but our players don’t really get the opportunity to craft mines or their own stories. That is something that I would love to work on at some stage though, a world with a bunch of tools for players to just go crazy with. I should get designing.

Nic