Ghost of a Tale - Interview @ BGU

Paul James (Basement Gaiming United) interviewed Lionel “Seith” Gallat about the crowdfunded game Ghost of A Tale. Some snippets:

How many people do you have working on Ghost of a Tale, and what sort of previous experiences in gaming or other forms of media do members of the team have?
I’ve already mentioned Paul and Cyrille but there’s of course the very talented Jeremiah Pena who is the game soundtrack’s composer. And for anyone interested in the details you can read this breakdown of the roles here: http://www.ghostofatale.com/who-crea…ost-of-a-tale/. To summarize Paul is a published writer dans game designer, and Cyrille is a professional coder. They both have experience in the gaming industry. Paul is a veteran all the way from Traveller’s Tale and worked at Namco and Cyrille has developed a couple of mobile apps (although his professional experience is closer to the feature-animation industry). Jeremiah already had worked on a couple of games before he contacted me. And I think you will hear about him (and his compositions) in the years to come.

What sort of impact does feedback from the community or Indiegogo supporters have upon the development process? Do you consider it to have been a very open, or quite closed development process?
The campaign backers have a great influence on the game’s design (even though many of them do not realize it). The biggest example being when I started the campaign; in the initial trailer I had Tilo hitting the undead rats with some sort of weapon, like a straight-forward action game. Even though I knew back then that this was a mere place-holder (before figuring out more satisfying ways to interact with the world), the reaction of the backers helped cement the idea in my mind: it would be much more interesting to use Tilo’s specific mouse skills rather than fall into the more expected hit-a-monster-until-it-falls routine.

As a result I would say Ghost of a Tale’s development is a very open one; I post regular updates on the progress of the game, talking about everything from the technical aspects to character design decisions, etc… I put a fine point in never concealing anything in case of issues related to the development. From the beginning I have been frank and open about the process and anyone with a modicum of interest can come in, read and ask anything they want.

When are you aiming to release Ghost of a Tale?
The release date has not been announced yet and I will post the information on the site whenever I get a better visibility on the topic. Let’s say I’m hoping for an autumn release on PC but it is still too soon to confirm that.