Ten Questions With… Steve Alexander & Shawn Mills (Infamous Quests)

SA: Hi, I’m Steven Alexander, co-founder of Infamous Quests, and one of the writers and directors on Quest for Infamy!

SM: Hey, I’m Shawn Mills, the other co-founder of IQ and I was a director and programmer on Quest for Infamy. I like to think I was inspiration too, but that’s probably not true.

SA: Well, of course – the Sierra games of the 80s and 90s were huge for me.  King’s Quest, Space Quest and Quest for Glory were big ones.  I was also big fan of The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam and Max Hit the Road.  We both also were fans of Dungeons and Dragons, and that definitely influenced us.

SM: I was also into computer RPG’s like Betrayal at Krondor, Balder’s Gate and Bard’s Tale, so there’s some influence there too.

SA: I’m proud of all the little minute details you can change with small actions.  We really tried to take care for all kinds of situations, to try and make the game as fully interactive as we could.  We wrote a lot of narrator lines, and we tried to keep them funny and interesting – we always looked at the narrator as another (and very important) character in the game.

SM: The combat and the wide variety of random monsters you can fight during the game. Some people complain the combat itself is too easy and others complain it’s too hard, so I’m happy that we found a middle ground!

SA: Obviously time and budget are working against you as an indie developer.  We made this game on a budget that an AAA studio would spend on lunch.  On a Tuesday!  So coordinating everyone’s time and work, and trying to use our resources the best we could to make the best game possible was the hardest challenge to me.

SM: Coordination of the team is the biggest challenge, if we were all working in an office together things would get done at least 67.425% faster but we live everywhere on the planet (we have team members in the US, Canada, Australia, Russia and the UK) and even time zones those countries factor in (two team members live in Australia and they’re in different time zones!) It’s a challenge sometimes just to talk to other team members. I learnt to stay up very late!

SA: For me – creating the world and the characters that live in it.  I not only designed the Valley of Krasna, where the game takes place, but I also took time out to write a whole bunch of lore about the world and history of Quest for Infamy.  There’s a lot of room to grow, so to speak, in the world of “Tahrsein”.

SM: I love writing, so to hear my lines spoken by James who voiced our Narrator in-game was brilliant.

SA: Well, I know we’d love to do a sequel to Quest for Infamy.  I have more plans in the story of Mr. Roehm, so I hope we’re able to pursue this in the future.

SM: Yeah a sequel to QFI is half designed in our heads! We’ve certainly talked about that. A lot depends on how well Quest for Infamy does!

SA:  I guess I’m boring, cause right now – the only “unusual” thing on my desk is Prilosec, a heartburn medication.  I imagine this is pretty common for game developers!  Oh, and my wife reminded me there’s two gift cards from winning a local trivia night…. and a Swiss Army Knife my cousin gave me as a present recently.

SM: I have a photo of Steve, myself and Gavin Greene (from Phoenix Online) we had taken at a party at GDC in San Francisco earlier this year. It honestly makes me laugh every time I look at it and reminds me of the brilliant time we’ve had making this game. I also have a jar of about 50 toy car wheels which I’ve confiscated from my two year old son who likes to bite the wheels of toy cars and chew on them. I plan on giving them back to him at his 21st.

SA: The whole experience of making the kind of game we love – and finding that there’s still an audience that loves these games as much as we do – it’s a dream come true.  When I was 12, I had what I thought was a silly dream – to work at Sierra.  Today, I suppose, I’m living that dream in a way.  Not many people get to do that almost 24 years later.  So I’m grateful for all the opportunity that has been afforded Infamous Quests by its fans, supporters and backers.

SM: Be good to your mother.