So work is underway in the production of the latest addition to the Hector brand – the iAPP game. Dean Burke – Straandlooper’s Head of Visual Development and creator of Hector, and Kevin Beimers – Straandlooper’s Head of Online & Mobile Development and resident iPhone whiz, have been hard at work coming up with a script for our proposed iPhone game.
Here we see Kevin and Dean thrashing out the story using a roll of wallpaper that Ali had brought in to the studio. I did say that budgets were tight. The story session is the most important stage of production as it is at this point where we can determine the level of work required to achieve our goals and then schedule our resources accordingly. Trying to strike a balance between what we can realistically deliver and what we want to deliver is always going to be one of the main problems we face as a company. Without the huge resources of companies like Lucas Arts and EA, we have to be very clever about what we develop in order to ensure that we do not waste any money and that any investment from the company will yield a potential return. But the Straandlooper team are used to working with tight schedules and budgets and have proved that they are more than capable of coming up with creative solutions to difficult design problems.
But never ones to make life easy for ourselves, rather than create a story for one iApp, Kevin and Dean came up with a story for a trilogy of games. To be fair the story that has been drafted is fantastic and promises to be an extremely entertaining game, but as Production Manager it is my respobility, no, my duty, to pour cold water on everyone’s ideas. While we do hope to produce 3 games, the CIIF fund that we have just received will be used to develop the first part of the trilogy and then we will look at raising the finance for parts 2 & 3 after we launch and deliver the rest of our slate of CIIF products.
The story sessions were extremely successful and have yielded what promises to be a really entertaining and engaging game. The only problem came when Ali came back into the studio after lunch and found that his wallpaper had been scribbled on. It turns out that he had been planning on wallpapering his downstairs walk-in humidor and that this was his sample roll from Harry Corry’s.
