The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, sequel to the warmly received comedy adventure first released back in 2009, had a bit of an unorthodox development cycle. Unusually for an adventure game, it went down the crowd-funding route, with a successful Kickstarter campaign that gave developer King Art funds to create a bunch of extra content. Then it popped up on early access late last year, with a new chapter of the game released every month. Now that it’s out in the wild as a full release, I tracked down Marco Rosenberg, director at King Art, and Martin Kreuch, producer at Nordic Games, to quiz them about the game and its development.
GameWatcher: First off I wanted to ask about the early access model you’ve been using for Book of Unwritten Tales 2. Has that been an easier process than more traditional game development? Has it brought its own challenges?
Marco Rosenberg: It’s been great because normally you just finish the game, ship it out, and you don’t know what the players will think of it. With early access we had the chance to make some adjustments and make feedback directly from the player. Also they helped us fix some bugs, and sort out some quests that weren’t working right. It gave us the chance to adjust that before finishing.
Martin Kreuch: We had a lot of questions about the Kickstarter and early access when we announced it. People wondered why we were using those models, because Kickstarter is not a platform that typically features games that have publishers already attached. So we were very direct with the backers, we told them up front that the game is already financed and in development, but the Kickstarter is just about extra content, the new puzzles, the orchestra recording and so on. We’ve got great feedback with all that already. It’s the same with early access. People were initially wondering how an adventure game would work on early access, but as Marco said it’s been a really positive process for us. We’ve had great feedback from the players, and some great suggestions. Like, some of the backers suggested that the middle mouse button could open the inventory – really simple idea, but without the backers we might not have thought about it. It’s been a really positive experience.
GameWatcher: It must make bug-fixing in particular far easier when you have an army of fans essentially doing the QA for you.
Marco Rosenberg: It definitely makes the game more polished than it might otherwise have been. Because there’s branching dialogues, parallel puzzles that can be solved in a different order. It’s impossible for us to fully test every aspect of that as a team internally, so it’s great to have thousands of players playing the game and helping us with that. They don’t try to break the game, but they’re better at trying different stuff than us.
GameWatcher: The latest update adds a lot of additional content that was promised during your crowd-funding campaign. How did you end up integrating the Kickstarter stretch goal rewards and sidequests into the game?
Marco Rosenberg: It’s all in the final release. One of the main points of course is the orchestra recording of the soundtrack – we haven’t had that before, and it’s really great to hear the music properly recorded in the best possible way. We’ve got a great composer and using an orchestra adds so much detail to the music. Also there’s our ‘projection mapping’ tech, which is a technique that allows the game to appear three dimensional, but with a low usage of memory. It doesn’t take much power to run, so even people with less expensive computers can play the game. Then of course we have optional puzzles in there. We hope the player likes those as much as we do.
GameWatcher: So how do players access the optional puzzles and sidequests?
Marco Rosenberg: We tried to make sidequests optional, so it’s for players who like to spend more time in the world and solve those extra challenges. If you don’t want to you can ignore them and carry on with the main story. We mainly use characters and locations that are already there, except for some big new locations, but yes, they’re optional and they add a lot more detail to the world.
GameWatcher: How difficult is it writing a comedy game that translates across regions? It must be a tricky thing to accomplish.
Marco Rosenberg: Well, it’s quite a lot of dialogue for one! We’ve got more than 150,000 words in there. We try to have a universal style of humour that works internationally, which is the hard part. Not every joke will work in every country – some only work in Germany, or only in the US. Pop cultural humour works well, we have lots of references to movies like Harry Potter, The Hobbit, Back to the Future, other fantasy games like Zelda, Skyrim and so on. It’s kind of a collection of things that we like, and sometimes we have meetings as a team to try and come up with cool items and inside jokes from other games. The writing is the biggest part, because it’s the basis of the game. If the writing is no good then the rest doesn’t work.
Martin Kreuch: One thing I should mention that I always find very funny is that one of our main characters, Nate, is voiced by Doug Cockle, the guy who does Geralt in The Witcher. It’s funny, because the Witcher is this gruff, serious guy, and then you have Nate, who’s this kind of goofball pirate adventurer in love with the ladies. It’s pretty funny, the difference between the two characters. The actor himself loves it, because he’s often booked for deep voices, evil characters and anti-heroes, you know, but with Nate he basically gets a nice break to do something fun.
GameWatcher: How big is your writing team at King Art?
Marco Rosenberg: Most of the game is written by Jan Theysen, my boss and King Art’s co-founder. I helped him sometimes, so did other people. For the basic story and structure, we’ve had around seven or eight people involved on and off. It’s hard to says exactly how big the team is at a given moment, but less than ten people.
GameWatcher: So how has the world changed from the first Book of Unwritten Tales? What’s the general theme and feel of the sequel?
Marco Rosenberg: Well the first game had the big war between good and evil in the background, and Wilbur, one of our main characters had gotten hold of a ring that could end the war. He was trying to stop the war by getting the ring to the archmage, and the story kind of evolved around that. In the end they won, and this game picks up around a year or two later. The world is in peace again, but you can still feel the aftermath of the war. For example most mages were killed, so there’s not many left. Wilbur, who kind of cheated his way into a mage diploma in the first game, is now the only teacher in a re-opened school of magic. Another part involves two of the other main characters, Nate and Ivo. They had started a relationship in the first game, which has already broken up, so Nate’s trying to win Ivo back.
Martin Kreuch: I’d say that the first part was more about the epic battle between good and evil, and the second part is a bit more reality-based, and looks at the political aftermath of a difficult time of peace.
GameWatcher: Adventure games at the moment seem to be splitting off into two directions – you have the cinematic, TV show style work Telltale is doing, and the traditional point and click model that King Art specialises in. Do you think you will end up being influenced in any way by the Telltale model?
Marco Rosenberg: We ourselves have been influenced by games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, the classic Lucasarts style of adventure games. That’s the way we want to make games. We don’t want to change a winning system for us, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. So we build on that established system with new gameplay and a sense of humour, and graphics-wise, systems-wise we’ve taken those to a new level and improved them.
GameWatcher: Do you see Unwritten Tales as a series that can run and run? Do you have other stories to tell in this world?
Marco Rosenberg: Of course there are more stories to tell, but first we have to see how successful this game will be. If it goes well and players like it, there will definitely be a third entry in the series.
GameWatcher: Do you think you would use the same early access model in the future?
Marco Rosenberg: It worked well this time, so we might use it. But we’re not thinking about anything beyond this game just at the moment.
Many thanks to both Marco and Martin for speaking to me. The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is available now, and as you can tell from our review, we rather liked it.
