AWAKENING DRAGON KEEPER SERIES

To be honest it wasn’t a conscious decision. Why did you choose a young female protagonist? We knew that Lucy needed to be able to handle some pretty weird situations, so felt that she needed to be headstrong enough to take them in her stride rather than being phased by them, her consistently sardonic and sarcastic outlook is probably a coping mechanism too. We wanted to create a protagonist who could say what the player might be thinking, an internal monologue which acts as a commentary throughout the game. We absolutely love the characters found in books by Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams who, despite their often fantastical context, are very much rooted in real characters. Lucy’s sarcastic and cynical sense of humour is very much inspired by British comedies like Blackadder and Red Dwarf. Lucy is a funny character with a big personality. He loved them all, and they are definitely the inspiration behind Lucy Dreaming. After that, he played a succession of LucasArts point & click titles like Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, Indiana Jones and Loom.

It wasn’t until a few years later that he had a computer powerful enough to run it, but it was one of the first games he bought, and he was finally able to complete it on his own. A few years later, he saw a friend playing a brand-new game on his Amiga 500, The Secret of Monkey Island.

AWAKENING DRAGON KEEPER SERIES

The first point & click adventure game Tom ever played was King’s Quest IV, it came on four floppy disks and kickstarted his journey through a large number of Sierra adventures (Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest and others in the King’s Quest series to name a few). Lucy Dreaming You obviously had point-and-click influences on Lucy Dreaming. Tall Story Games just seemed to fit what we wanted to create with the business, and we couldn’t quite believe it when we found that the name wasn’t already taken. Not all of those tales are going to be believable though, they might be fanciful or exaggerated. We want to create games which have great stories and we wanted that to come across in the name of the company. That was when we founded Tall Story Games and started taking it a bit more seriously. We both realised early on that this was going to be a massive amount of work and potentially a huge investment so I suggested that, if we were going to do this, then we’d better do it properly and turn it into a business rather than just a hobby. This spurred him on to produce a full-length game and Lucy Dreaming was born.

Tom started to work on a personal point & click game ( Lockdown), and discovered a whole community of indie developers keeping the genre alive. We were after a new creative challenge and homeschooling and living through pandemic didn’t seem to be quite stressful enough! We’d reached 40 too and I think that does funny things to you. I think that was a time that many of us stood back and took stock a bit. When Covid hit, things were a bit quieter, many of our clients are charities and museums. We were lucky enough to be given the opportunity to produce one, as part of a marketing campaign we were working on with our other digital design business, which was brilliant, but Tom still felt like he hadn’t quite scratched the itch. Tom’s always wanted to create a point & click adventure game after playing and loving them as a child. Time to have a chat with Emma and Tom! Tall Story Games Tell us about what led up to forming Tall Story Games. Overall, I can’t say too much more without spoiling the whole thing, but if you love point-and-click, Lucy Dreaming is a game you cannot miss.” Everything I love about Sierra games is in here, and the devs didn’t include all the stuff people don’t like about them. There are weird puzzles with fun locations. It has a joke about how the local fair successfully “installed the rain” just over its location and nowhere else. It makes fun of the Great British Baking Show. Mina reviewed Lucy Dreaming and thoroughly enjoyed it, giving it our highest praise of Two Thumbs Up.

Emma and Tom form Tall Story Games and they specialize in narrative-driven games like Lucy Dreaming. This time our indie Dev interview is with Tom and Emma Hardwidge, the husband-and-wife team based in Shropshire, England. Especially for our Patrons in Tier 2 and 3, we have made another Indie Dev interview Consider joining us on Patreon in Tier 2 or Tier 3 for as little as $3.00 a month and unlock it all!

Awakening dragon keeper