Developer Diary: Developing the Story
29 October 2002

Well, here we are again in production land. Work continues sporadically on the backgrounds and characters, as the end of the year approaches and exams begin for most of the staff involved in Flummaxed.

Character casting is to begin soon as we start to tie some loose strands together and complete minor modifications on the story.

Flummaxed, as you may already know, has been in production for about 8 months, most of that being pre-production. It was definitely an exciting, yet tiring experience to write an adventure game. The initial brief was to create a game set in the future. And it had to be funny. Let me assure you this is harder than it sounds, and many concepts were pitched to that brief; and turned down.

Late in December 2001, a small group sat down and spent an afternoon constructing the initial concept that would make up the story. Over the six months following, the story had to be broken down into puzzles, characters and scenes. And as you might guess, it was reformed many times by a number of helpful editors. It was always exciting to be able to visualise how a puzzle might be animated, or how a scene might look filled with odd characters.

The title is a story in itself. For Barry the Bum, writing the story (albeit short) and moulding a title took little time, yet Flummaxed had many on-going discussions. Other titles included Coalescence, Identity Crisis and Max gets Milked. However, Flummaxed seems to sum it all up. (Credit to Daniel, Marina and Bryan)

Hmm, that seems to sum up the story writing process to date. If you have any questions send them to flummaxed@bigcheeseproductions.com

See you later

Stuart Bryson
Project Leader