There's a new interview with Dean Burke, jack of all trades at Straandlooper Animation and one of the primary creative forces behind the Hector series, by our friends and sometimes lovers at Adventure Gamers. Discussed in the interview are all things Hector, including the working relationship with Telltale:
Telltale were fans of the Hector game early on when they approached us with the idea of partnering. It was a huge compliment to have one of the most well respected studios in the industry not only tell us they loved our game, but ask us if we’d consider working with them. How could we refuse!
Myself and Kevin got a chance to visit their studio in California and met a lot of the originators of the Point & Click genre. Working with the Telltale guys has been a great experience, having holes poked in our scripts by one of the original writers of Monkey Island was a defining moment for us!
We ran everything by them but Straandlooper still had full control of content, plot, game design, dialogue, art, animation, music and voice. Telltale handles the programming, publishing and porting duties. They adapted their multi-platform game engine to fit the 2D style of our original game and episode 2 and 3 were built directly into it. Plus we had their QA, debug and marketing PR team. Team Straandlooper still remained relatively small but production on Episode 2 & 3 with Telltale took around 6 months back to back.
During production we hooked up remotely, linking up for the occasional Skype call and communicating a lot by email. There was a time difference for us here in Northern Ireland – Telltale would wake up with their morning coffee to start their day's work, right when we’d essentially be finishing our day – not that our days ever actually ended; we’d usually just wake up with a start after being slumped over our keyboard from the night before, ready to keep on clicking away.
The most interesting tidbit for me was the fact that the original game was a bigger seller in the US than it was in the UK. Even disregarding the British flavor of the game's humour, does that ever happen with an adventure game?
The final episode of the Hector trilogy, Hector: Beyond Reasonable Doom, is now available for PC/Mac.
Source: Adventure Gamer