The Rose-Tinted Glasses
skizzo

30 Jul 2007 | No Comments

"Die rosarote Brille"
Originally written by Sebastian Nisi on March 1st, 2005.

The ‘Broken Sword’ game series is popular with adventure game fans. The series can easily stand together with the ‘Monkey Island’ games, or the ‘Indiana Jones’ series. With the announcement of the fourth part, friends of the genre can once again look forward to an official sequel. Truth be told, mindFactory – that is how we hobby developers call ourselves – was hoping to put Broken Sword 2.5 on the disc of ‘Broken Sword 3’ as a special surprise. With permission from developer Revolution Software and publisher THQ, of course. That at least was the wish of all of us developers. But the development of our game went more slowly than we had anticipated. It was not long before it became apparent that we would not be able to finish the game before the end of 2003. Trailers, press announcements and promotional actions were all food for the fish. Clearly we had overestimated ourselves. It goes the same with many other teams. Even with commercial titles the PR managers, who sometimes throw around some announcement dates, are not to be taken too seriously. Far too late the mindFactory team recognized that it was better not to make any more announcements about possible release dates, simply because it is impossible to predict the release date.

Trailers are a nice thing. They offer the player the first real impression of the game. Partly because of that we have also immediately developed two trailers. Both went well with the fans. Why then didn’t – as is tradition – the third trailer arrive at the start of 2005? There are several reasons for that. The first two trailers cost several months of work – we should have simply abandoned them. As so often happens, we only learned this after we had done all the work. Some time ago we could celebrate the completion of one of four sequences which will be found in the game. In the finished game you will find an intro, an ending, a death sequence and a cut scene around halfway through the game. That last one is now ready and with the death sequence only the music needs to be added. At the moment our sequencers are working on the intro, which will possibly be finished around the middle of 2005 already. The problem with these sequences is the immense amounts of rendering it takes. One single second of sequence means many hours of calculating. That means that there is a lot of time put into this project. The nearly finished sequences then go to the sound team, which adds the necessary musical support. Meanwhile many quality checks take place, although we cannot always be too strict with those, simply because of the lack of time. So sometimes we have to accept the things as they are.

Our dream of a new ‘Broken Sword’ game in 2D has not vanished yet. We believe we can do it and rejoice, because there are so many people out there who believe in that as well. You reading our newsletter at this moment proves that.* Many thanks for all the trust!

*This article was originally sent with the Broken Sword 2.5 Newsletter

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