Fanadventure-Portal BS2.5 Interview
steve

26 Apr 2007 | No Comments

On April 13th 2007, German adventure game site Fanadventure-Portal posted an interview with mindFactory member Daniel Butterworth. The interview that follows, originally in German, has been translated by Skizzo. Enjoy!


Interview with Daniel Butterworth, alias Foxhunter
Written by JimmBimm on Friday, April 13, 2007

Tell us something about yourself first. Your name, your age and how the idea of creating your own sequel to a game came to be.

Okay then. My name is Daniel Butterworth, I am 21 years old and I am project leader of the Broken-Sword-2.5 project. Currently I am still completing my civil service, and will study film the next winter semester. The idea to make a new Broken Sword game came to us a few years ago. Then the idea still was that after Broken Sword 2 the series would end and we just couldn’t accept that. This wonderful adventure series just had to continue and we thought “why don’t we do it?” And well, here we are!

With how many people were you when you came up with the idea and how long ago was it that you started on the project?

When we started on the project the team counted 4 members. They were later joined by Sebastian Nisi (who joined the team 2 months after the founding of the project), Marius Gosch and myself. Presently we are working on the Broken-Sword-2.5 project with around 15 men (and women)! But it is crazy when you realize how small our team was at the beginning of the project and the avalanche that the project created. All that started around 6 years ago. How time flies.

6 years is a very long time and 15 people are quite a lot for a private project. How do you find the motivation to continue this project over all these years? Were there also times, where you would have rather just let the whole thing die?

Oh yes, there have certainly been a few of these moments. Especially when some team members had to leave us for personal reasons. Those were the major setbacks. But we always managed to pick ourselves up and now that we are so close to our goal, nobody is thinking about giving up.

We motivate ourselves every day and not only that. There are also the fans who always encourage us to keep working on the project. We are very grateful for that.

“So close to our goal”. Can you give us some preliminary results?

I cannot give an exact release date yet, or my teammates will lynch me, but I can tell you that you won’t have to wait that long anymore.

Okay ;) You are also a writer on the team. Can you give away how many pages the script counts and how much time you have sacrificed to it?

When I started to write the script for Broken Sword 2.5 I was 17 years old and I was 20 years when I finished it. The script is about 140 pages long, which also tells you about the effort it takes to convert the whole thing. Originally we had planned a script of about 20 to 30 pages…

But I believe that we could not have done things differently, and especially shorter, and still tell a true Broken-Sword story. The fans and eventually we ourselves as well would not have accepted that.

Can you imagine yourself making another sequel or creating an entire new project?

Probably not another computer game, even if I’d have the opportunity to do an internship at House of Tales. I prefer film. At the moment I am working on an animated movie. So these 2 projects are currently taking up all of my time.

To get back to the project again: some good fan adventures are beaten to death because of licence rights. Were you bound to certain restrictions or requirements by the developers/licence holders, to be allowed to publish the game, or did you receive permission out of sheer goodwill?

The only restriction that Revolution Software gave us was that we were not to make any money with this game. We must, and want to, uphold this restriction. Unlike many other developers, Revolution has even supported us and is very enthusiastic about the project. That is not very common these days and that is also one of the reasons that we see ourselves obliged to deliver a well-developed game.

In what way did you receive support from Revolution Software?

At the beginning of the project they sent us the original sprites of the main characters. That was a major help. In the meantime we have made new sprites of the main characters ourselves.

That’s really generous. Talking about being generous: how did you convince the voice actors to lend their voices to the project?

That took a lot of convincing. We had to convince people to work on the project without getting paid. But most of the voice actors agreed to help us after reading the script. And we’re very happy about that!

I think you have told us enough for now. Or is there anything more you would like to add?

I would like to thank you for the interview, it was fun to do and I’d like to add one more thing: Don’t cross the road until the little man shows green ;-)

Oh, thank you so much for this life saving lesson ;) Thank you for this very interesting interview, your time and the small insight you gave us into the project :)! I wish you and the entire team all the best with the rest of the project!


Thanks again to Fanadventure-Portal for allowing us to post the interview; and to Skizzo for doing all the hard work!

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