Oh, tons of stuff, most of which I don't remember. A lot of it was
really bad, and deserved to get left out. Some of the things that were
in the game should have gotten left out as well (like the dog castle
maze).
In order to explain this, I need to explain in more detail how the ideas
of the game developed. The original idea of doing an adventure game
based on animal characters was suggested by Joe Pearce. Robert McNally
and I then developed this idea further, in particular the idea of
"tribes". We brought in Mark Iennaco and Lisa as "consultants", since
they were heavily into furry fandom and very creative. Then I took on
the role of lead designer. I worked a lot of the various characteristics
of the different tribes and the general geography of the island. Then we
hired about a dozen furry artists to draw up a bunch of concept
sketches, for about $20 a sketch I think.
Then we started looking around for writers to flesh out the story and do
the actual dialog. We went through about 5 writers. Some of these were
very good writers, but they had a lot of problems with interactivity,
and so the material they produced wasn't directly usable. That is, even
the best of their stuff came out like a "choose your own adventure"
novel, which is far short of what can be done, even in a Sierra-style
game. Eventually I took a whole bunch of ideas that had been created by
everyone, filtered out the stuff I didn't like, and came up with a rough
plot outline, one that would take into account the puzzle-solving,
non-linear character of a true adventure game. Then I worked with a
screenwriter, Bob Leh, who wrote the actual dialog. It was a lot of fun
working with such talented people, but it was a little frustrating at
times too.
OK, so once we had the story, we started "noodling it up", which means
adding a lot of little interactive details which were sort of incidental
to the story, little cute items here and there, things to play with, and
so on. Carrolly Hauksdottir helped a lot with the "noodling" (the term
"noodling" is in fact hers.) Unfortunately, this is where the budget
started to get kind of tight. We managed to squeeze in most of the
story, but there are a lot of places where the interactivity is kind of
shallow, that is you can navigate through a bunch of dialog trees but
nothing really happens except that you find out a lot of information.
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