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Interview: Puzzle Quest Lead Designer Steve Fawkner
Written by Modojo Staff on Wednesday, June 6, 2007
We ask about PSP bugs, Xbox Live Online Play, and what's next for Infinity Interactive (plus more...)
...Continued From Page 1 Mo: Some PQ players are adamant that the AI "cheats" by knowing what pieces will fall from the top of the board. We've found these falls benefit the player as often as the AI, but some owners are insistent. Can you confirm/deny, and possibly walk us through the AI's decision-making process when it examines potential matches?
SF: The AI definitely does NOT cheat. I actually scripted all the AI for the game, so I am 100% certain it doesn't cheat, and as I mentioned in a post on our Forums, I'm far too lazy to make the it cheat anyway - if I'd wanted to make the game harder I would have just given the enemies more Life Points!
The AI has a very simple decision-making process... it looks around the board at all available moves and gives each one a score between 0-100 based only on what it would give immediately (it doesn't look ahead at all). It then looks at all its available spells and gives each one a score between 0-100 based on how useful they would be. Finally it picks the move with the best score. On "Hard" difficulty it always picks the best one, On "Normal" it picks one of the top 10%, and on "Easy" it picks one of the top 50%.
One interesting thing the AI does is to bias its scores slightly higher towards the bottom of the board, because matching lower down tends to give more possibilities for cascades.
Mo: Could you see casual type time killers married with addictive and involving RPG elements becoming a more popular game type? Minesweeper: Mine Layer's Revenge? Diner Dash Destiny? Forgotten Heroes: Poker Chips of Power?
SF: Yes indeed, though I might draw the line at "Poker Chips of Power." I think we're just opening up a huge potential market here, and the great thing is that this is a genre of games that I really love, so I'm going to thoroughly enjoy making some more of these Puzzle/Hybrids for everybody to play.
Mo: Will we see Puzzle Quest released on consoles, or maybe a downloadable service such as Xbox Live Arcade? Online play & downloadable quest packs could be this formula's Killer App... [Note: Q&A was conducted before PQ's XBLA announcement]
SF: Xbox 360 Live Arcade was just recently announced. I've been playing it here in our office and the online play is to die for (not to mention the achievements).
As for other platforms, once again I have to cast the "Silence 15' radius" spell and refer you to D3PA for any future announcements.
Mo: We've seen that Galactix is on the horizon, with a similar playing system revolving around a space opera-like theme. But the early screens paint a mixed picture. Is the base puzzle a similar "match 3" mechanic? What else can you tell us about the project?
SF: Galactrix is actually based off of the Collapse style of gameplay, which is definitely related to match-3, but has quite a different style to it. With Galactrix we're after a much more visceral and hectic feeling for the player, so most of the puzzle games in it have a certain real-time element to them.
We want to ensure that Galactrix feels like a great game in its own right, not just a sci-fi clone of Puzzle Quest.
Mo: We're sure there were many outside doubters along the way - is there anything you'd like to rub in their faces now? We won't hold it against you.
SF: Actually, no. I think the only people who doubted it were the ones who didn't play it. Generally, once we convinced them to give it a try, they were hooked.
But the truth is that Puzzle Quest is a little different, and that's always going to be a bit of a risk to publish. We are just very glad that we fell in with D3PA along the way. It's fantastic that a publisher like D3PA will take a slightly offbeat title and give it the care and attention it deserves to get it on the shelves and give gamers a new and exciting experience.
posted June 7, 2007