I'm curious about the idea icons. Can they be manipulated the same way as inventory items? And can you use them with inventory items?

Yes you can. Let's say I have the idea to put Froderick in a dress. He will say something like "yeah, great, I'll put on a dress if you need me to, but not until you absolutely need me to". Suddenly you will have an idea icon of Froderick with a dress on. Generally Mona can then slowly but surely solve puzzles in her head before finally enacting them.

We did think at some point that you could do this to such a degree that you could solve any puzzle just in the inventory, but we thought "that's lame, that's not fun, so let's not do that". You could take it that far but we want people to walk around and explore. 'Cause you could have an idea icon of the problem as well as the solution and put those two together.

That's one way it worked in Brian Moriarty's The Dig [an earlier version that was never released], where you had a cliff and you had a metal pole, idea icons of the metal pole and the cliff, and then you would have to use them together to climb out of a pit. That's how that worked. Also in Brian Moriarty's The Dig you could use the pole except it was slippery, but Lowe had magnetic boots, so if you somehow used a magnetic battery — this is where science comes in — with the metal pole you'd make it magnetic, and then you could climb up. You did that by using the battery idea with the pole idea. But it started getting really crazy, so we decided in the final The Dig to throw it out.

I thought this is a good solution for A Vampyre Story, but we'll make it just objects that are big enough that you wouldn't carry them around. And a few abstract ideas, like maybe a song title or password or something like that. Things that are not physical but that you can still use.

Sounds pretty sensible. Normally if you would have to remember a song title, you'd probably have to take a lyrics sheet of the song or something like that and have it in your inventory, which can get a bit contrived at times.

If someone gives me an address or something then maybe you can keep it in there and maybe examine it and say what the address is, but yeah, exactly. I don't think we have fully explored the ultimate extent of this idea but I think in future games we will come up with more interesting things to do with it. But I like the way it works and we will probably use it in most of our games. I don't know why we didn't use it before. I think it's because at LucasArts they took it too far. But it's not a bad idea, you just have to work on it.

How do you feel about the whole process of getting A Vampyre Story funded and published?

Big pain in the ass. It's fine, going to college is also a big pain in the ass. It's been a learning experience. Everyone goes to college and they volunteer to go to college because it is rewarding. So it's been a little like going to the gaming business college. It's definitely been rewarding and I feel strongly that the next games we do we will definitely feel more confident about how we do it. I understand the business more. I understand European business more, which is different from American business.

In what ways?

Well, you have 300 million people in one place, but there's 12 different cultures and 12 different markets. You have 250 million people in the United States, and it's one market. So in the US you deal with just one publisher and you've got all of North America or the world covered, and here you have to deal with each one. So I didn't know that and had to slowly but surely learn that. I go "hey, [French publisher] Focus Home, do you want to do my game?" and they say they would love to, so I go "alright, here's the budget". And then they say, "we can pay for one fifth of that, can you find four other publishers?"

How was that ultimately set up?

Focus Home have been interested for five years. But funding close to a million dollars — that's a lot of money. They can't really afford to do that. They can do it for their territory but they can't do the whole thing. Crimson Cow had gotten funding, and they wanted to take a chance and buy the worldwide rights and then sell it to each local publisher. That's good for me because then I only have to deal with one publisher and I only have to hire my expensive $300-an-hour lawyer to do one contract rather than 12 different contracts.

What are your future prospects now? You've got funding for this game, and you're already thinking about the sequel?

Well, we over-designed. That's what we tend to do anyway, you always over-design and cut down to fit your schedule, but we were designing so much that we cut 50% and realized we can actually make another game out of it. There were such cool ideas, like fantasy monsters and werewolves, and all these other characters and locations and puzzles we thought would be great. I'd hate to just throw it out to fit it into one game. So we were thinking "hey, why not do this in a sequel?" Our plan is to do one pretty quickly, within a year or 16 months after the first one comes out.

The team at Autumn Moon took great care in blending the 3D characters in with the hand-painted backgrounds.

Like a one-two punch.

Yeah, it only takes maybe a month to gear up to do that, because it's almost already designed. We've already done the models and art for it. We wrote cutscenes and wrote some of the dialog and it's partially finished.

It's great to see a cartoon style like this game come out again. They're pretty rare.

I've seen a number of them but it seems like the publishers are afraid they might not sell and gave them only small budgets. Then you're stuck making games that couldn't have quite the high values that you wanted. So I'm hoping A Vampyre Story will prove that you can pay a decent amount of money to get quality higher, and it'll still make money. In fact, it helps make it more money. Maybe if this game sells really well, bigger publishers will go "hey, that's a market we need to tap into" and then maybe LucasArts would decide to do more adventure games. You might see a Monkey Island game one of these days. Or Full Throttle 3... umm, 2?

Earlier today I saw So Blonde, and I'm also reminded of Runaway, in that your style seems to have somewhat made it into those games. How do you feel about that? When I see a palm tree in those games I'm thinking "hmm, that looks kind of like Monkey Island 3".

Yeah and they even have Brian dress up as Guybrush in the second Runaway. Actually, there's some Monkey Island in a lot of things, like that one movie, I don't know what it's called... Pirates of the Caribbean?

Hmmm, nope. Can't say I ever heard of that one...

I've seen certain things that were in our games end up completely on the screen. It's pretty fun. You go like "hmm, Orlando Bloom, he kinda looks a little like Guybrush".

Indeed he does. Well, it looks like we have to wrap up now. Thank you for the interview and good luck with the production of the game.

Thanks. We're almost done!