Dave Gilbert – Wadjet Eye Games
[b]Laura[/b]: You were talking about Unavowed there and it sounds like the success of that almost took you by surprise?
[b]Dave[/b]: Yeah!! I was saying now it’s time to move to 3D and do something else, then the game comes out and it outsells everything we’ve done by far! And it gets an IGF nomination and people are flying me out to events and having me speak about the game…So now I’m second guessing myself – maybe I spoke too soon; should I be going back to 2D?! But I think again it’s more that it succeeded because the game was good rather than it was in 2D. It’s all voodoo to me. I don’t know why games do well and why other games don’t. I’m just grateful and lucky people like our stuff! Whatever we’re doing right, I just have faith and keep doing it.
[b]Laura[/b]: What do you think it was about Unavowed that so captured an audience?
[b]Dave[/b]: The RPG aspect of it might have been a reason. I call it an RPG because it’s got elements of branching, the party stuff – that’s interesting and it hasn’t been seen in an adventure game. I was actually inspired by Jen Hepler, who was at BioWare at the time and who gave this interview in 2013 where she talked about how you can skip narrative in combat-based games, but you can’t do the opposite. And in BioWare games she really wanted to do that, because the meat of the game was narrative – the talking to your characters, deciding which one to bone, that kind of stuff! I thought, that’s a great idea! Why isn’t anyone doing that; someone should do that! Nobody did. So in my fit of hubris, I was like…I’ll make that game!
[b]Laura[/b]: So you made the game, and then what happened?
[b]Dave[/b]: Suddenly it got a lot of names interested – people that people respect were talking about Unavowed. I also designed it for streaming, and I think that helped. Often when you watch a stream of a narrative game, you’ve gotten the experience, and that’s it! But with the branching and choosing different party combinations, if you’re watching the stream of it you haven’t gotten the experience and there’s a good chance you might want to go and buy it later. Also I pushed it a lot. I always say to developers, if you’re not tweeting about your game every day several months before launch, you’re doing something wrong, because it’s free!
Even Gilbert was surprised by the unprecedented success of the urban fantasy Unavowed
[b]Laura[/b]: What else inspired Unavowed?
[b]Dave[/b]: I always say, if there’s a big Triple-A game that you like and it has some little aspect that you really like, take that and make that your game as an indie. And so I took that aspect of BioWare titles that I liked – that I choose my party and I go out and they react to things around them and to things that I did. I knew I wanted to make that kind of mechanic, but in terms of the actual setting I’m just a huge fan of Dresden Files and Hellblazer, and I always wanted to make an urban fantasy and there’s not really a lot of them!
[b]Laura[/b]: What do you think about the shift even in larger titles towards narrative in the last few years?
[b]Dave[/b]: Visual novels are so big so a lot of companies are focusing on narrative because they see, oh, this is important. You know, there’s a narrative summit at GDC now – people are talking about it, more than they used to. And that’s always been my bread and butter, the narrative aspect.
[b]Laura[/b]: You can see just from Rezzed the amount of small indie developers out there now. What other advice would you give them?
[b]Dave[/b]: Well, when I started out things were so different, so all my advice and tricks I learned were relevant ten years ago. It’s important to stand out in some way. Because there’s so many games coming out, the ones that stand out and do well have something interesting and unique about them. I will also say start small. Don’t make that big game for your first one. You’ll burn yourself out, and you’ll run out of money and you’ll really do damage to yourself. There’s a reason why my first few games were very, very small.
Latha’s avatar can once again meet up with Cheffie in The Trance in Technobabylon: Birthright
[b]Laura[/b]: When will Technobablyon: Birthright be out?
[b]Dave[/b]: It might be close to being done at the end of this year, but I doubt it’ll be ready. It looks really good; I’m kind of amazed! I can’t wait to get the voice acting in there and see how that plays out. I don’t know when that’ll come out – or Nighthawks for that matter. We’re hoping for next year.
[b]Laura[/b]: Thanks for chatting with me!
[b]Dave[/b]: No problem! I will say: I don’t know how I managed to get this far but I’m very grateful that I have. The fact that I can do this for a living and support my family on it and live a fairly comfortable life while doing something that I love is an amazing blessing, and I’m just grateful for that every day. Especially to Adventure Gamers, because you guys were supporting me from the beginning and I’m always grateful for that; you guys have always been behind me and you reviewed my stuff from day one and that’s awesome. But also to our fans and everyone that’s played our stuff – since 2006 – I owe you all so much because I’m here because of that, and I’m grateful and thankful every day.
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