Hi!
Last week IGN Spain made an interview to InXile about Tides of Numenera. Sadly, IGN USA or UK didn't use it
but I think It's very interesting. I hope you like it
1. How many people in inXile were involved in the development of Planescape Torment?
Kevin Saunders (Project Lead): Three of the core Torment: Tides of Numenera team members were involved in the development of Planescape: Torment: Colin McComb (designer on PST, creative lead on TTON), Adam Heine (scripter on PST, design lead on TTON), Aaron Meyers (artist on both). Chris Avellone, who was PSTs lead designer, has been providing input and feedback on the game story and design and is writing one of the companions.
2. How did you face the development of the sequel of Planescape: Torment without Planescape campaigne setting? How did you come to Numenera Monte Cook?
Kevin: Colin McComb and Monte Cook were two of the three primary designers for the Planescape setting (the third being David Zeb Cook, who originally created it), so Colin and Monte already had a working relationship. Monte Cooks Numenera setting has many of the features that drew people into Planescape it is exotic and unfamiliar and rife with opportunities to use ones imagination. Part of the appeal of Planescape: Torment was how it took players out of the familiar, and Numeneras science-fantasy flavor provides the perfect setting for us to do this with TTON.
3. Why did you choose an isometric perspective? Are the scenarios reactive to the player actions or are they pregenerated?
Adam Heine (Design Lead): The primary reason to go with an isometric perspective, of course, is because our thematic predecessor used the same perspective. It's what most of our backers expect, and we found no strong argument to do otherwise. Additionally, the isometric perspective allows us to create our environments as 2D backgroundsa thing most of our backers wantedwhich lends the more painterly style that fans of Planescape: Torment enjoyed. A third (unplanned) benefit to this is that Pillars of Eternity is using the same perspective and environment creation methods, so their technology gives us a natural advantage.
Like any story-focused RPG, our scenarios will be a mixture of reactive and prescripted, but we are leaning heavily towards the reactive side. As much as resources allow, we want every scenario to react to the player's choices, to include true, branching reactivity wherever possible.
4. From What can change the nature of a man?, to what does one life matters?. What kind of adventure is Tides of Numenera?
Colin McComb (Creative Lead): Its a philosophical journey through life, a search to find meaning in a world that is immeasurably ancient, where a human life passes in the blink of an eye. Its a personal story, and we hope that its also one that will make an indelible impression on our players.
Thats the high-level, thematic concept. Beyond all that, were putting you in the place of the Last Castoff. Youll be playing the game as someone who was born inside a body that has already been used. Your sire is the Changing God, a man who has cheated death by growing bodies and transferring his mind into them, casting those bodies aside when he has achieved his goals. Youre the latest and the last in the string of bodies hes created to house himself. Your consciousness born when his fled your body, you awaken in a world that is immeasurably strange, where technology is so advanced that it seems like magic, where you might learn to control some of the fundamental forces of the universe. You might take a sentient, shape-shifting ball of goo as a companion, or a knave who can change her face with the touch of a button, or a warrior whose weapons change form to match his personality. Youll travel through forests that devour cities, explore inside the guts of vast predators, traverse impossible deserts, and confront enemies inside a caldera once used to refine ores for spacecraft. Its fantasy crossed with science-fiction crossed with the far reaches of the mind.
5. The players Will is one of the most important things in Tides of Numenera. We have a world, characters and a story that respond organically to the player. Does not collide this idea with your willingness to tell a story?
Colin: Well, were not making a sandbox game or an emergent narrative game our game is in the tradition of Planescape: Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, which is to say a deeply personal exploration of a character that the player gets to define through his of her choices. Certain of those choices will advance the overall story of Torment, and the way the player makes those choices will allow us to react appropriately to the players actions.
That is, our game is a guided narrative, with significant reaction to the choices you make throughout the game. Well never be able to match a tabletop RPG for ease of adaptability to the players wishes, but were working hard to make sure we honor your choices in the context of the story youll experience.
6. In the western RPG, every time weve been told to choose between options, it has been inevitable to fall into the manicheism. In Tides of Numenera you are using the Tides and Legacy. What can you tell us about them?
Adam: From the beginning, we have intentionally veered away from limiting the player's choices to good vs. evil. Life is rarely so black and white, so TTON is about difficult choices and ambiguous heroes and villains. So the Tides have nothing to do with good or evil, nor with the player's motivations. They judge what the player does, only venturing into motivation when the player explicitly voices it.
The Tides encompass five broad concepts. Blue represents reason, wisdom, and enlightenment. Red represents passion, emotion, and zeal. Indigo represents justice, a global worldview, and actions that benefit the greater good. Gold represents empathy, compassion, and sacrifice. Silver represents influence, respect, and power. Many of the player's actions and words will increase different Tides, until one or two Tides are considered "dominant."
The player's dominant Tides, then, determine their Legacy, influence some of the people around them, serve as a reputation for the player, and have some gameplay effects. They will rarely define a major branching of the game, but they should provide subtle reactivity throughout.
7. How many different stories will we live as the Last Castoff? How long will be Tides of Numenera?
Colin: The player will inhabit several different bodies in this game but keep in mind that those experiences are more in the nature of vignettes or short stories, with a curtailed playing time, so they wont make up the bulk of the game. They will, however, drive a number of choices and deliver specific information, and we hope that theyll create a cool counterpoint to the main part of the game. Its impossible to talk about length right now. Torment will be as long as it needs to be to tell the Last Castoffs story. We will favor polishing the experience over adding filler content, because a shorter, more intense-but-fulfilling game is more in the spirit of Planescape: Torment. Its also worth noting that the reactivity we are implementing increases the replayability of the game, rather than making it longer. We want this game to be something you can play again and again, and find delight in each time.
8. Youre also creating a new item system with the artifacts, cyphers and oddities. How will they work? Will the players be allowed to create their own weapons and armours?
Adam: In Numenera, while there are all sorts of common itemsbasic armor, weapons, thieves' tools, and even a form of healingthe magic items in the game, collectively known as the numenera (little n), are separated into three categories:
1. Oddities are relics of the past that are wonderful and strange but ultimately have very little utility for an adventurer, and thus little or no gameplay impact. For example, a glass sphere that appears to contain an entire ocean inside, complete with tiny little whales and sea monsters. Or a square plate that reverses gravity such that you can put items on the bottom of it and they will stay, but if you put them on the top they fall off. Thematically, oddities emphasize the power and incomprehensibility of the past civilizations. Mechanically, they serve as a kind of gem, being saleable for a little coinoccasionally you might find a gameplay use for an oddity, but it will almost never be the use for which it was originally intended. Narratively, oddities should be some of the most fun descriptions to write and read.
2. Cyphers are one-shot items and always useful. Numenera cyphers are typically more powerful than the consumables in other RPGs. Certainly some are healing potions or buffs, but others can confer the ability to teleport, rest anywhere, cause a massive earthquake, or many other things.
3. Artifacts are devices from prior worlds (or cobbled together from the detritus of those prior worlds) that can be used more than once, sometimes indefinitely. They are not always as powerful as cyphers (though some are), but because they can be reused, and in many cases repaired, they are powerful in a different way.
Players won't be crafting their own plate mail, but they will be able to take an existing suit of plate mail and attach various components to it, imbuing the armor with different powers and abilities. Some of this customization can change the item's purpose entirely, so they can create weapons and armor in that sense. Additionally, each combination they try will come with quirks and side effectssome good, some notand so the player can, with trial and error or with lore skills, create exactly the kind of weapons or armor they want for a given situation.
9. How will the magic work? Should we expect special animations, like in Planescape Torment with the most powerful spells?
Adam: "Magic" in Numenera is performed by tapping into the ubiquitous numenera around youeven in the air and the dirtand using it to reshape the world. Most people call these spells, charms, or enchantments. Even some users of esoteries consider what they do to be so mysterious and arcane that it might as well be magic.
Mechanically, esoteries are cast by spending points from the character's Intellect Pool. This is the same pool used to decrease the difficulty of Intellect-based tasks (using the Numenera concept of Effort) and where the character will take Intellect damage. Like all the Stat Pools, Intellect can be recovered with rest and with certain cyphers, artifacts, or esoteries (spells).
The animations for powerful Planescape: Torment spells like Mechanus Cannon and Abyssal Fury were some of my favorite parts of that game. But they were a risk; we were pausing combat to play an unskippable animation, one that took a lot of work to create and debug. We arent planning to do massive animations like that in TTON, so that we can focus on making other things better, but casting spells will definitely be a visceral, exciting aspect both in and out of combat.
10. The Changing God, a millenary being who had lived uncountable lives in uncountable borrowed bodies, seems to be inspired by the Trascedent One, who did the same through the incarnations of the Nameless One. What makes Tides of Numenera a sequel of the first Torment? Are both connected?
Colin: Thats an interesting comparison; it might be more apt to compare the Changing God to the Nameless One, but as a man who remembered his lives. But even thats not a 1:1 analogy; the inspiration comes from a number of different sources, in part humanitys endless quest to extend its lives just a few more years. When Adam and I were first talking about our main characters, we talked about the Nameless One and wondered what a person who could truly cheat death would be like especially if he couldnt keep his first body.
Were not a direct sequel to Planescape: Torment, though, and even if we could explicitly connect the fiction of the two, we wouldnt want to. The story for Planescape: Torment has been told, and its story is complete. The unanswered questions make its story sweeter and more thought-provoking. We hope to do the same thing with our story.
11. What kind of things are you doing now that you couldnt do 15 years ago?
Colin: Apart from working with people who live halfway around the world? ☺ Actually, thats a pretty major thing that Id like to address. The internet was in its commercial infancy when we were working on PST. We had to spend significant time waiting for communications; thats no longer the case. Finding reference materials is incredibly easy, with the advent of more powerful search engines (both text and image). The digitization of the world lets us work almost anywhere and find almost anything we need at a moments notice.
More specifically for this project, were not typing our dialogues into a Word template and then importing it line by line into a dialogue editor were able to write our dialogues directly in the editor and can play them immediately in a snazzy previewer that Steve Dobos created for us. We have a much faster creation pipeline for our areas, and the tools are generally more intuitive.
Ill also add that we know more about character creation, more about dialogue creation, and more about how to develop a convincing, believable companion. Were drawing on the accumulated knowledge of 15 years worth of development in that field, and we hope to make our characters truly shine.
But the basics of my work remain the same: generating ideas, writing them down, reviewing others work, and trying hard to make the best possible game we can.
Additionally, because were working in a new world now, we are no longer bound by the strictures of the alignment system, and were free to create a morality/ethics system thats all ours. We have a much more streamlined system for our characters, with different classes and stats, and were free to invent new systems on top of those.
Adam: Like Colin said, a lot of the day-to-day work is the same, but there are three things that weren't around 15 years ago that make this development process very different from PST's.
The first is the Unity Editor. The Infinity Engine had a number of editors for the various components of the game, but ultimately it was designed by developers for developers. Import processes were long and occasionally buggy, and putting a level together required a higher level of technical knowledge (as well as a few different editors) to get it working. By comparison, an area designer can be trained on the Unity Editor in like a day, creating a scene and testing it almost instantaneously, and Unity imports its assets on the fly and with much better error handling. It makes the back-and-forth testing required for area creation go much faster.
The second thing is Kickstarter. PST was a huge risk at the time and almost didn't even happen, and the sales were such that a sequel was never really a possibility. Maybe if crowdfunding had been a thing in 1999, a PST sequel might have been a thing. I don't know, but I do know that TTON would never have gotten off the ground without Kickstarter and the tremendous support of our backers.
The third thing is the internet. TTON's production team is primarily in California, but we've got a creative lead in Michigan, a design lead in Thailand, a programmer in Italy, a line producer in the Netherlands, and writers and concept artists everywhere. I haven't met half the people I'm working with, and yet we're putting together this amazing project. There are occasional time zone hitches, but overall it's pretty awesome living in the future.
12. Did you expect this reaction of the fans when you founded the Kickstarter project? How has been the behaviour of the community in the past year?
Kevin: We did not expect the level of support we received from the fans. It was a great surprise. Overall, the community has been terrific. Before the Kickstarter, we were talking with the community and getting their input on what to have for rewards and pledge tiers they helped us in designing the campaign. Throughout preproduction, we continuously receive ideas and thoughts through our forum and UserVoice site we review these on a regular basis and consider the suggestions that we feel fit well within our vision for the game. We tend to have verbose, but infrequent updates, and the backers have been supportive of that we appreciate their patience while we have concentrated on laying the groundwork for the game.
13. How have change Kickstarter the original idea you had of Tides of Numenera?
Kevin: Every once in a while, Ill revisit the vision document we posted during the Kickstarter to see that we still have the same target. Over time, our vision has grown stronger and more detailed, of course, but it remains consistent with everything we had talked about back then. We spent considerable time prior to the Kickstarter to flesh out the themes, key story elements, and of course the Tides. Im very glad we did that, as that foundation has served us well. We have had major changes to the story since the Kickstarter, but we revealed very little then, so no one would know. =) The brief synopsis Colin described in the pitch video still holds true. Our understanding of the game, the setting, and the characters increases daily as we delve deeper into the details and see pieces of it come to life. Our plans for the game have been evolving, but were remaining faithful to to the vision we laid out at the start.
http://es.ign.com/feature/13702/entrevista-exclusiva-torment-tides-of-numenera
Last week IGN Spain made an interview to InXile about Tides of Numenera. Sadly, IGN USA or UK didn't use it
but I think It's very interesting. I hope you like it1. How many people in inXile were involved in the development of Planescape Torment?
Kevin Saunders (Project Lead): Three of the core Torment: Tides of Numenera team members were involved in the development of Planescape: Torment: Colin McComb (designer on PST, creative lead on TTON), Adam Heine (scripter on PST, design lead on TTON), Aaron Meyers (artist on both). Chris Avellone, who was PSTs lead designer, has been providing input and feedback on the game story and design and is writing one of the companions.
2. How did you face the development of the sequel of Planescape: Torment without Planescape campaigne setting? How did you come to Numenera Monte Cook?
Kevin: Colin McComb and Monte Cook were two of the three primary designers for the Planescape setting (the third being David Zeb Cook, who originally created it), so Colin and Monte already had a working relationship. Monte Cooks Numenera setting has many of the features that drew people into Planescape it is exotic and unfamiliar and rife with opportunities to use ones imagination. Part of the appeal of Planescape: Torment was how it took players out of the familiar, and Numeneras science-fantasy flavor provides the perfect setting for us to do this with TTON.
3. Why did you choose an isometric perspective? Are the scenarios reactive to the player actions or are they pregenerated?
Adam Heine (Design Lead): The primary reason to go with an isometric perspective, of course, is because our thematic predecessor used the same perspective. It's what most of our backers expect, and we found no strong argument to do otherwise. Additionally, the isometric perspective allows us to create our environments as 2D backgroundsa thing most of our backers wantedwhich lends the more painterly style that fans of Planescape: Torment enjoyed. A third (unplanned) benefit to this is that Pillars of Eternity is using the same perspective and environment creation methods, so their technology gives us a natural advantage.
Like any story-focused RPG, our scenarios will be a mixture of reactive and prescripted, but we are leaning heavily towards the reactive side. As much as resources allow, we want every scenario to react to the player's choices, to include true, branching reactivity wherever possible.
4. From What can change the nature of a man?, to what does one life matters?. What kind of adventure is Tides of Numenera?
Colin McComb (Creative Lead): Its a philosophical journey through life, a search to find meaning in a world that is immeasurably ancient, where a human life passes in the blink of an eye. Its a personal story, and we hope that its also one that will make an indelible impression on our players.
Thats the high-level, thematic concept. Beyond all that, were putting you in the place of the Last Castoff. Youll be playing the game as someone who was born inside a body that has already been used. Your sire is the Changing God, a man who has cheated death by growing bodies and transferring his mind into them, casting those bodies aside when he has achieved his goals. Youre the latest and the last in the string of bodies hes created to house himself. Your consciousness born when his fled your body, you awaken in a world that is immeasurably strange, where technology is so advanced that it seems like magic, where you might learn to control some of the fundamental forces of the universe. You might take a sentient, shape-shifting ball of goo as a companion, or a knave who can change her face with the touch of a button, or a warrior whose weapons change form to match his personality. Youll travel through forests that devour cities, explore inside the guts of vast predators, traverse impossible deserts, and confront enemies inside a caldera once used to refine ores for spacecraft. Its fantasy crossed with science-fiction crossed with the far reaches of the mind.
5. The players Will is one of the most important things in Tides of Numenera. We have a world, characters and a story that respond organically to the player. Does not collide this idea with your willingness to tell a story?
Colin: Well, were not making a sandbox game or an emergent narrative game our game is in the tradition of Planescape: Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, which is to say a deeply personal exploration of a character that the player gets to define through his of her choices. Certain of those choices will advance the overall story of Torment, and the way the player makes those choices will allow us to react appropriately to the players actions.
That is, our game is a guided narrative, with significant reaction to the choices you make throughout the game. Well never be able to match a tabletop RPG for ease of adaptability to the players wishes, but were working hard to make sure we honor your choices in the context of the story youll experience.
6. In the western RPG, every time weve been told to choose between options, it has been inevitable to fall into the manicheism. In Tides of Numenera you are using the Tides and Legacy. What can you tell us about them?
Adam: From the beginning, we have intentionally veered away from limiting the player's choices to good vs. evil. Life is rarely so black and white, so TTON is about difficult choices and ambiguous heroes and villains. So the Tides have nothing to do with good or evil, nor with the player's motivations. They judge what the player does, only venturing into motivation when the player explicitly voices it.
The Tides encompass five broad concepts. Blue represents reason, wisdom, and enlightenment. Red represents passion, emotion, and zeal. Indigo represents justice, a global worldview, and actions that benefit the greater good. Gold represents empathy, compassion, and sacrifice. Silver represents influence, respect, and power. Many of the player's actions and words will increase different Tides, until one or two Tides are considered "dominant."
The player's dominant Tides, then, determine their Legacy, influence some of the people around them, serve as a reputation for the player, and have some gameplay effects. They will rarely define a major branching of the game, but they should provide subtle reactivity throughout.
7. How many different stories will we live as the Last Castoff? How long will be Tides of Numenera?
Colin: The player will inhabit several different bodies in this game but keep in mind that those experiences are more in the nature of vignettes or short stories, with a curtailed playing time, so they wont make up the bulk of the game. They will, however, drive a number of choices and deliver specific information, and we hope that theyll create a cool counterpoint to the main part of the game. Its impossible to talk about length right now. Torment will be as long as it needs to be to tell the Last Castoffs story. We will favor polishing the experience over adding filler content, because a shorter, more intense-but-fulfilling game is more in the spirit of Planescape: Torment. Its also worth noting that the reactivity we are implementing increases the replayability of the game, rather than making it longer. We want this game to be something you can play again and again, and find delight in each time.
8. Youre also creating a new item system with the artifacts, cyphers and oddities. How will they work? Will the players be allowed to create their own weapons and armours?
Adam: In Numenera, while there are all sorts of common itemsbasic armor, weapons, thieves' tools, and even a form of healingthe magic items in the game, collectively known as the numenera (little n), are separated into three categories:
1. Oddities are relics of the past that are wonderful and strange but ultimately have very little utility for an adventurer, and thus little or no gameplay impact. For example, a glass sphere that appears to contain an entire ocean inside, complete with tiny little whales and sea monsters. Or a square plate that reverses gravity such that you can put items on the bottom of it and they will stay, but if you put them on the top they fall off. Thematically, oddities emphasize the power and incomprehensibility of the past civilizations. Mechanically, they serve as a kind of gem, being saleable for a little coinoccasionally you might find a gameplay use for an oddity, but it will almost never be the use for which it was originally intended. Narratively, oddities should be some of the most fun descriptions to write and read.
2. Cyphers are one-shot items and always useful. Numenera cyphers are typically more powerful than the consumables in other RPGs. Certainly some are healing potions or buffs, but others can confer the ability to teleport, rest anywhere, cause a massive earthquake, or many other things.
3. Artifacts are devices from prior worlds (or cobbled together from the detritus of those prior worlds) that can be used more than once, sometimes indefinitely. They are not always as powerful as cyphers (though some are), but because they can be reused, and in many cases repaired, they are powerful in a different way.
Players won't be crafting their own plate mail, but they will be able to take an existing suit of plate mail and attach various components to it, imbuing the armor with different powers and abilities. Some of this customization can change the item's purpose entirely, so they can create weapons and armor in that sense. Additionally, each combination they try will come with quirks and side effectssome good, some notand so the player can, with trial and error or with lore skills, create exactly the kind of weapons or armor they want for a given situation.
9. How will the magic work? Should we expect special animations, like in Planescape Torment with the most powerful spells?
Adam: "Magic" in Numenera is performed by tapping into the ubiquitous numenera around youeven in the air and the dirtand using it to reshape the world. Most people call these spells, charms, or enchantments. Even some users of esoteries consider what they do to be so mysterious and arcane that it might as well be magic.
Mechanically, esoteries are cast by spending points from the character's Intellect Pool. This is the same pool used to decrease the difficulty of Intellect-based tasks (using the Numenera concept of Effort) and where the character will take Intellect damage. Like all the Stat Pools, Intellect can be recovered with rest and with certain cyphers, artifacts, or esoteries (spells).
The animations for powerful Planescape: Torment spells like Mechanus Cannon and Abyssal Fury were some of my favorite parts of that game. But they were a risk; we were pausing combat to play an unskippable animation, one that took a lot of work to create and debug. We arent planning to do massive animations like that in TTON, so that we can focus on making other things better, but casting spells will definitely be a visceral, exciting aspect both in and out of combat.
10. The Changing God, a millenary being who had lived uncountable lives in uncountable borrowed bodies, seems to be inspired by the Trascedent One, who did the same through the incarnations of the Nameless One. What makes Tides of Numenera a sequel of the first Torment? Are both connected?
Colin: Thats an interesting comparison; it might be more apt to compare the Changing God to the Nameless One, but as a man who remembered his lives. But even thats not a 1:1 analogy; the inspiration comes from a number of different sources, in part humanitys endless quest to extend its lives just a few more years. When Adam and I were first talking about our main characters, we talked about the Nameless One and wondered what a person who could truly cheat death would be like especially if he couldnt keep his first body.
Were not a direct sequel to Planescape: Torment, though, and even if we could explicitly connect the fiction of the two, we wouldnt want to. The story for Planescape: Torment has been told, and its story is complete. The unanswered questions make its story sweeter and more thought-provoking. We hope to do the same thing with our story.
11. What kind of things are you doing now that you couldnt do 15 years ago?
Colin: Apart from working with people who live halfway around the world? ☺ Actually, thats a pretty major thing that Id like to address. The internet was in its commercial infancy when we were working on PST. We had to spend significant time waiting for communications; thats no longer the case. Finding reference materials is incredibly easy, with the advent of more powerful search engines (both text and image). The digitization of the world lets us work almost anywhere and find almost anything we need at a moments notice.
More specifically for this project, were not typing our dialogues into a Word template and then importing it line by line into a dialogue editor were able to write our dialogues directly in the editor and can play them immediately in a snazzy previewer that Steve Dobos created for us. We have a much faster creation pipeline for our areas, and the tools are generally more intuitive.
Ill also add that we know more about character creation, more about dialogue creation, and more about how to develop a convincing, believable companion. Were drawing on the accumulated knowledge of 15 years worth of development in that field, and we hope to make our characters truly shine.
But the basics of my work remain the same: generating ideas, writing them down, reviewing others work, and trying hard to make the best possible game we can.
Additionally, because were working in a new world now, we are no longer bound by the strictures of the alignment system, and were free to create a morality/ethics system thats all ours. We have a much more streamlined system for our characters, with different classes and stats, and were free to invent new systems on top of those.
Adam: Like Colin said, a lot of the day-to-day work is the same, but there are three things that weren't around 15 years ago that make this development process very different from PST's.
The first is the Unity Editor. The Infinity Engine had a number of editors for the various components of the game, but ultimately it was designed by developers for developers. Import processes were long and occasionally buggy, and putting a level together required a higher level of technical knowledge (as well as a few different editors) to get it working. By comparison, an area designer can be trained on the Unity Editor in like a day, creating a scene and testing it almost instantaneously, and Unity imports its assets on the fly and with much better error handling. It makes the back-and-forth testing required for area creation go much faster.
The second thing is Kickstarter. PST was a huge risk at the time and almost didn't even happen, and the sales were such that a sequel was never really a possibility. Maybe if crowdfunding had been a thing in 1999, a PST sequel might have been a thing. I don't know, but I do know that TTON would never have gotten off the ground without Kickstarter and the tremendous support of our backers.
The third thing is the internet. TTON's production team is primarily in California, but we've got a creative lead in Michigan, a design lead in Thailand, a programmer in Italy, a line producer in the Netherlands, and writers and concept artists everywhere. I haven't met half the people I'm working with, and yet we're putting together this amazing project. There are occasional time zone hitches, but overall it's pretty awesome living in the future.
12. Did you expect this reaction of the fans when you founded the Kickstarter project? How has been the behaviour of the community in the past year?
Kevin: We did not expect the level of support we received from the fans. It was a great surprise. Overall, the community has been terrific. Before the Kickstarter, we were talking with the community and getting their input on what to have for rewards and pledge tiers they helped us in designing the campaign. Throughout preproduction, we continuously receive ideas and thoughts through our forum and UserVoice site we review these on a regular basis and consider the suggestions that we feel fit well within our vision for the game. We tend to have verbose, but infrequent updates, and the backers have been supportive of that we appreciate their patience while we have concentrated on laying the groundwork for the game.
13. How have change Kickstarter the original idea you had of Tides of Numenera?
Kevin: Every once in a while, Ill revisit the vision document we posted during the Kickstarter to see that we still have the same target. Over time, our vision has grown stronger and more detailed, of course, but it remains consistent with everything we had talked about back then. We spent considerable time prior to the Kickstarter to flesh out the themes, key story elements, and of course the Tides. Im very glad we did that, as that foundation has served us well. We have had major changes to the story since the Kickstarter, but we revealed very little then, so no one would know. =) The brief synopsis Colin described in the pitch video still holds true. Our understanding of the game, the setting, and the characters increases daily as we delve deeper into the details and see pieces of it come to life. Our plans for the game have been evolving, but were remaining faithful to to the vision we laid out at the start.
http://es.ign.com/feature/13702/entrevista-exclusiva-torment-tides-of-numenera
