Indie Interview: Georgina Bensley of Hanako Games
by Jay Barnson · 12/04/2006 (8:37 am) · 3 comments
As I said earlier, I'm trying to do monthly-ish interviews with indie game developers or other notables from the industry. This month, I interview Georgina Bensley, creator of the award-winning, best-selling "casual" Sim / RPG "Cute Knight."
Cute Knight combined some elements of the Princess Maker series with the pseudo-3D (or "stepwise 3D") perspective dungeon-crawling of the Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and SSI "Gold Box" D&D games. Cute Knight features a unique magic system, tons of replayability (and over fifty endings, with variants on each!), a crafting system, and a randomly-generated dungeon beneath the city to explore with each game. It won last year's "Indie Roleplaying Game of the Year" award from GameTunnel.com (well-deserved, even if the competition in that category is routinely sparse).
More recently, it has become a hit game on several casual game portals, sharing honors with Aveyond for demonstrating that there is such a thing as a "casual RPG" that the market will embrace. It's not just match-three puzzle games, folks!
I got the chance to ask Georgina about Cute Knight (including getting lots of details - down to the nuts and bolts - of the magic system), about how she became an indie game developer, what tools she uses, her design methodology, and certain of her impressions on the indie game development community. I hope that gamers and indie game developers alike can enjoy and gain value to a peek behind the curtain at the workings of a successful indie game developer.
Well, that's the intro. If you are interested in the interview, you can check it out here:
Indie Game Developer Interview: Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight
If you liked this one, you may enjoy some of the past interviews I've done with members of the indie development community, and notable figures in the games business:
Amanda Fitch, Creator of Aveyond
Scorpia, One of Gaming's Most Popular Columnists
Mike Rubin, on 3D Interactive Fiction and Vespers 3D
Cute Knight combined some elements of the Princess Maker series with the pseudo-3D (or "stepwise 3D") perspective dungeon-crawling of the Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and SSI "Gold Box" D&D games. Cute Knight features a unique magic system, tons of replayability (and over fifty endings, with variants on each!), a crafting system, and a randomly-generated dungeon beneath the city to explore with each game. It won last year's "Indie Roleplaying Game of the Year" award from GameTunnel.com (well-deserved, even if the competition in that category is routinely sparse).
More recently, it has become a hit game on several casual game portals, sharing honors with Aveyond for demonstrating that there is such a thing as a "casual RPG" that the market will embrace. It's not just match-three puzzle games, folks!
I got the chance to ask Georgina about Cute Knight (including getting lots of details - down to the nuts and bolts - of the magic system), about how she became an indie game developer, what tools she uses, her design methodology, and certain of her impressions on the indie game development community. I hope that gamers and indie game developers alike can enjoy and gain value to a peek behind the curtain at the workings of a successful indie game developer.
Well, that's the intro. If you are interested in the interview, you can check it out here:
Indie Game Developer Interview: Georgina Bensley, Creator of Cute Knight
If you liked this one, you may enjoy some of the past interviews I've done with members of the indie development community, and notable figures in the games business:
Amanda Fitch, Creator of Aveyond
Scorpia, One of Gaming's Most Popular Columnists
Mike Rubin, on 3D Interactive Fiction and Vespers 3D
About the author
Jay has been a mainstream and indie game developer for a... uh, long time. His professional start came in 1994 developing titles for the then-unknown and upcoming Sony Playstation. He runs Rampant Games and blogs at Tales of the Rampant Coyote.
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