The following interview with Island Officials, developer of Orions’s Odyssey: A Pattern Blocks Adventure, was conducted and written by Pure Nintendo contributor Trevor Gould.

 

Orions’s Odyssey: A Pattern Blocks Adventure for the Nintendo DSi had an uncertain future on May 6th.  Its ambitious Kickstarter campaign, while collecting over $7000 in pledges, was well short of the large  amount needed to produce actual DS game cards, boxes, and manuals.  While the collector’s among us may mourn not having physical media, all is not lost.  In fact the game (now with a revised much lower goal) is now well on its way to finding a new lease on life as a digital download.  Pure Nintendo recently had a chance to interview Island Officials CEO Ryan Morrison about the project …

Pure Nintendo: Please tell us a bit about the project and how it originated?

Ryan Morrison: We knew from the beginning we were going to do a follow-up to Tangrams, and pattern blocks seemed like the next natural step. Pattern blocks are a very different kind of puzzle than tangrams, in that they’re a lot more free-form, allowing many different solutions for one shape rather than one or two solutions. So aside from adding more features over the previous game, we had to ask ourselves what we could to transform the concept into a game itself. So we added features and aesthetics that promoted creative, out of the box thinking, including a scoring system that rewards players for unique solutions, and a challenge mode which forces them to approach the problem in a way they might not be used to.

PN: Would playing your earlier DS release, Hands On! Tangrams, serve as sort of an appetizer for Orion’s Odyssey? 

RM: Absolutely. Although the game is lighter on features and doesn’t include an adventure mode, many of the ideas and concepts from Orion’s Odyssey were born from Tangrams. Aside from sharing many of the same basic controls and feel, many of the characters and elements we used in Orion’s Odyssey‘s story were lifted directly from Tangrams.

PN: How disappointed were you when the project was revised from physical media to a digital download?

RM: The original vision of Orion’s Odyssey was for it to get a physical release, so of course there’s a little disappointment to not have a box we can hold in our hands. That said, we knew going into the original Kickstarter that digital would be a contingency we were willing to accept, as making sure the game we’ve been working on for two years was available to the public is our first and most important priority.

PN: How has it been working with Nintendo?

RM: Nintendo’s been absolutely great. They’ve provided tons of support every step of the way, and we couldn’t be happier with our relationship with them.

PN: You’ve had successful Kickstarter projects before.  It seems to be a quickly growing option for game developers.  How do you feel about Kickstarter, and what role do you see it playing in the future of the game industry?

RM: As a platform, Kickstarter is still relatively young. It’s already done great work helping give independent studios and niche markets a bigger voice by opening doors to projects that wouldn’t have seen the light of day before, which raises many new questions about how bigger publishers and AAA developers use that information. Do they utilize Kickstarter to find support to smaller or riskier projects? Do new avenues evolve from Kickstarter for that purpose? The only thing certain right now is that Kickstarter has made a significant impact, we’re just going to have to wait for the dust to settle to see what the results are. Either way it has paved the way for new and different kinds of games, so we consider that a win-win for gamers and developers alike.

PN: If Orion’s Odyssey is successful would you consider doing a sequel?  Or do you have an original project in the works?

RM: We don’t have anything to announce at this time, but I think that it’s natural for developers to kick around ideas they would have liked to included or new stories and scenarios they’d like to see these characters experience later on, so a sequel is always a possibility. As for original projects, we have Frantic Frog, a twitch action game for Android and iOS coming soon, as well as Pixel Lincoln, a side scrolling action game for PC coming in the near future, as well as other projects will be talking about sometime in the near future.

PN: For gamers on the fence, what would you say to convince them to take the plunge on this game?

RM: Orion’s Odyssey has something for everyone; an engaging, funny story guaranteed to make you laugh, a hardcore challenge mode that nearly doubles the amount of gameplay, dozens of extras, fantastic art and music as well as a whole lot of heart. And even if you don’t have a system to play it on, we still have lots of physical goods and digital media for you to consider.

Check out the Orion’s Odyssey project on Kickstarter!