Especially for someone like me, it is a hard transition to go from being a writer to a journalist. I’ve always been able to hide behind my words and journalism takes away that protective barrier.
I did my first interview of sorts today with Zachary Mahl, who is the programmer of Lights Out with NomNom Game Studios. He patiently played and talked with me while I failed miserably at his pride and joy, which is essentially a physics multi-player game that consists of fiery foxes jumping from box to box until one falls to the ground a certain number of times, and then the player with the most points (gained from jumping boxes) wins.
The fact that he was so eager and excited to talk about Lights Out made the process slightly easier and less awkward for me. We discussed what each of the boxes did. Many had symbols and the symbol on the box determined whether you were launched into the air or whether time slowed down. (This allowed me to typically live an extra two to five seconds.)
Zachary explained that they were still in the very early builds of the game and that eventually there would be a story mode of some sort and then I found the thing that I liked best about interviewing Indie game developers. They don’t necessarily have a set notion in their head of how things are definitely going to be. They are open to your input and your ideas, or at least Zachary was.
We brainstormed ways the multi-player portion could be more fun and talked about adding in items that could give you special abilities; like the ability to knock your opponent out of the air with fire. We tossed around the idea of making the boxes be stacked to different heights or placed slightly differently; which would make things both easier and more difficult, as well as the idea of various abilities or items and such that could make things more competitive and engaging for the co-ops.
Upon further conversation, Zachary let me know that Lights Out was the first game he had ever worked on programming and that essentially; he just woke up one day and wanted to program a game. Then he made it happen, which I found to be super impressive. I would say this is certainly a game to keep in the back of your head as the potential to allot of fun is for sure in the works. I look forward to seeing what NomNom studios does next with the game and exactly how many of Zachary’s ideas come to fruition. This is a game I will definitely be on the look-out for in the future.