Frayed Knights - Interview @ Bits'n'Bytes

Jay Barnson has a new interview mostly focused on Frayed Knights at Bits'n'Bytes Gaming. A sample:

BnB: You’ve pre­vi­ously men­tioned imple­ment­ing adven­ture game ele­ments into Frayed Knights as well as what sounds like a deep and com­plex RPG aspect. My ques­tion to you would be, “Are you mad, sir?!” Or more specif­i­cally, how do you see the adven­ture game ele­ments as help­ing your game?

JB: If I was com­pletely sane, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t have even started this project.

Some of it is the old-school feel. Back in the day, there wasn’t quite the clear delin­eation between the adven­ture game and RPG gen­res. It was all fuzzy, and you had a lot of adventure-game style puz­zles mixed into your RPGs. And I have to admit, there are a cou­ple of titles out there that I never com­pleted on account of get­ting stymied by one of those puz­zles and los­ing inter­est by the time the inter­net made those obsta­cles easy to overcome.

We still have those today, but it seems that more of the time they’ve been sup­planted by “quests” — often of the “kill ten rats and bring me their tails” vari­ety. While Frayed Knights has a lit­tle of that kind of thing too, and adventure-game style puz­zles aren’t a huge part of the game, I really pre­fer it when the “quests” are really more organic, evolv­ing from a need to over­come an obstacle.

But some­times I allow you an out, too. There’s one guardian in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon that kicks off a whole quest line back in town just to get this one item. It’s pretty funny and not par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult, and some play­ers have already solved the quest except for the final stage before they meet the guardian. But because it involved back-tracking back to town, I left in an option to just say “screw it!” and attack the guardian, skip­ping the whole quest line and mov­ing on.  Assum­ing you sur­vive. An option for the impatient…