Here’s the first part of a documentary following the making of Mojang’s new game Scrolls. It’s a shame that, as with most of the discussion elsewhere, so much of this concerns the name rather than the game, but it’s still worth a watch if only to see the legal issue being discussed by the lead designer. Especially because he’s looking rather dapper while discussing it, with a bottle of Staropramen his only prop, suggesting that this is a man who has better things to do and better places to be than a courtroom. Do we actually learn anything about the game? Not really, beyond the fact that there will be ‘dust puff’ animations, among others. You can see the puffing of dust for yourself, below.

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Good news for fans of good news. All the Age of Wonders games have been re-released for the Direct Download market. At the time of writing, all three are available in a trilogy pack (plus soundtracks) on Impulse, the first is on Good Old Games and apparently they’ll be on Steam imminently. They’re some of my favourite turn-based strategy games of the last fifteen years, so I thought I’d grab the chance to talk to Triumph Studios’ original design director, Lennart Sas, about how the games came to be, his memories of them and the possibilities of a third one…
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[Ah, been a while. I did a series of Post Mortems for PC Format over a few years, chatting to a dev a month about the development of a game. I’ve republished the vast majority here already, but I find there’s a few left over like this one with Deep Red in 2006 about Monopoly Tycoon. It’s one of the games which I felt as if I was just about the only person in the demi-core-gamer demographic to actually get it.]

Monopoly Tycoon wasn’t what anyone expected. With the licence of a family-favourite boardgame of Christmas plutocratic warfare, you’d expect something entirely traditional. What resulted wasn’t just a brilliantly conceived reinventation – but also a brilliant game of financial warfare from Deep Red, who’ve gone on to explore similar entrepreneurial terrain ever since. Looking back five years, we chat to Managing Director and Deep Red founder Clive Robert about how the game came together.
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[Since the new Trackmanias are tearing up the internet, I thought it’ll be a good time to dig out a Making of interview with Nadeos’s Florent Castelnerac. This interview was performed in the lead up Trackmania Sunrise and focuses primarily on their first game. Florent was agreeably driven and funny, even through the occasionally broken English. Re-reading this a few weeks after I wrote about the rise of the PC arcade game in the Eurogamer review of Trials 2 amuses me.]

Any independent developer immediately has an uphill battle. They face opposition in the form of an industry that seems to think that any such initiatives are frankly impossible in the days of EA’s three-hundred men teams. However, PC arcade developers have it even harder. While the giants of PC gaming like 3D realms and ID originally made their names with freeware arcade 2D shooters, the idea that the consoles are where you go for simple play and the PC audience always demands something more (or, at least, something more deliberately cerebral) has become entrenched. Well… at least something more cerebral which doesn’t involve shooting in the first person perspective.
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