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Interview with Zeboyd Games Bill Stiernberg - What Inspires You
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QJ: You mentioned Cthulu, which is incredibly detailed and funny, but where did the inspiration for your unique style of RPG's come from? Were you a fan of classic RPG's back in the day?
BS: Our primary source of inspiration derives from Guadia Quest, a game within the Retro Game Challenge game for Nintendo DS. This was our motivation for making a retro RPG; it was a relatively small but great playing RPG in the NES style, and we figured it would be perfect for the kind of story and game play we wanted to implement. As far as inspiration, the biggest one is Dragon Quest in terms of basic style and presentation.
We were also inspired in part by Earthbound, which is a funny game, but also maintains really fun gameplay mechanics. Some other games that inspired various concepts in CSTW include Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Okage: Shadow King, and Brave Story. Ultimately a lot of design choices came from removing things that we simply felt stood in the way of progressing the game, and we wanted to keep the player interested by constantly introducing new level choices, new characters, or new areas of the game world. We wanted to avoid having players feel like they're slogging through a game for a hundred hours simply because they weren't leveled up enough, or that the random encounters kept slowing them down.
QJ: What do you think would be a better model for XBLA and Microsoft?
BS: A better model for XBLA? As another disclaimer, I haven't worked directly with Microsoft on XBLA. But based on the article you linked, it sounds like some of the suggestions therein might be helpful for indie teams/companies. Going by what I read, the suggestions that would really help with be a more standardized form of contract to reduce time wasted on negotiation, to eliminate the exclusivity clause, to eliminate the requirement that indie studios release under Microsoft Game Studios or by some other publisher.
I understand that Microsoft has a vested interest in maintaining and raising the bar for quality on their service, but I don't think making these suggested changes would harm that. I think the timed exclusivity clause has more to do with presenting XBLA as the go-to place for digitally distributed games than it does with maintaining a quality bar. And if they want to improve XBLA game quality, then reducing "negotiation overhead" and would certainly help. The other suggestions would simply make the platform more attractive to independent developers if they can "publish" their own game and if they aren't closed off from other markets for a period of time. I can see why a company like Team Meat would simply refocus its efforts on the PC than restrict itself to a single platform for a game launch, for example, for many of these reasons.
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