Adventure Classic Gaming

Indie game development often runs in families. For Karen Bruton, her husband Noel Bruton, and her brother Richard Lee, developing adventure games is indeed a family affair. With their debut adventure game, Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches, these newcomer developers are putting the name "Arberth" on the map—literally.

Their company, Arberth Studios, is located in rural West Wales and is named after a site in the Mabinogion, a series of Celtic legends. Their game, Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches, is an eerie supernatural mystery that continues those legends into the present day. The quasi-fictional setting is a farmstead outside Arberth, Glendowershire (not a real county, though there are real "Arberth" place names in Wales). The game is published by Got Game Entertainment in North America and Lighthouse Interactive in Europe.

We are privileged to have an opportunity to interview Noel Bruton, cofounder of Arberth Studios, about Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches. In the interview, Bruton speaks of the deep Welsh history and its legends that serve as inspiration for the game, the connections between among, medicine, and magic (or magick as Bruton calls it), the trials and tribulations of being an independent game developer for the first time, and finally the future of the Rhiannon series. Bruton also briefly discusses the company's latest project, Coven, that is currently in development.

A few classic adventure games have adapted elements from the Mabinogion myths, such as Al Lowe's The Black Cauldron and Roberta Williams' King's Quest III: To Heir is Human (with the magician named Gwydion). How well do you feel that such fairy tale adventure games capture the spirit of Celtic mythology? Why is your own adaptation of the Mabinogion modern instead?

I can't comment on those games specifically as nobody at Arberth has played them. I wonder though whether the Mabinogion fits into the classic mould of 'fairy tale'. The category, if it can be called that, comes from a tradition of popular fairy stories stretching over 100 years from the Brothers Grimm to JM Barrie, with Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Mabinogion chronologically dead centre. But actually reading the Mabinogion gives a very different impression - it's more like a history of events and personalities than a collection of fantasies. It's almost as though there is no question about whether what it describes actually took place, regardless of how outrageous that may look in the technological age.

These days, you have to shift credibility a long way to get to the Big Bad Wolf and Captain Hook, but not quite so far to get to a poltergeist and the alchemical end of magick. So we went for the almost-feasible with our story in 'Rhiannon'. We also wanted to give the player a recognizable frame of reference – the present day, with cars and Email and MP3 – and then blur it with the supernatural. There is a natural tension in taking the Everyday and poking it with the Inexplicable. You feel like you're on solid ground but you know it may shift paranormally, so you've got to keep your wits about you.

To extend the story of the cursed families in the Mabinogion, you added several generations of modern families: industrialists; hippies; and the combination of Jen the homeopath, Malcolm the geologist, and Rhiannon their teenage daughter. How did you decide on this eclectic mix of characters? Were any of these characters based on people from real life?

Our fictional Sullivans are recent arrivals on an uncertainly old Welsh country property. Like them, Karen and I moved to a farmstead in Wales. As a consultant in the IT industry, I travel the world on client engagements and speak at conferences, which our character Malcolm does in the oil business. There's more than a bit of the Sullivan family in Karen and me. But Rhiannon's personality and gushing into her diary are almost entirely Karen's inventions.

We needed a homeopath for one chapter, so that the necessary paraphernalia would be available for the puzzles, so that's where Jen's interests came from. We've made occasional use of homeopathy, so we could lean on those experiences. Then we needed somebody both wealthy and an engineer to have made the peculiar, folly modifications to Ty Pryderi for another chapter – hence the Edwardian industrialist who was born of Richard and me, a bottle of scotch, a flipchart and a late night. Then Karen needed a character to have been affected by fire, so we put the two together. We also needed a reason why the house had not fallen completely into ruin, so it needed to have been recently occupied - hence the hippies. There are such communes even today near where Karen and I live. But it's not safe to say that any character is entirely based on real life.

A number of adventure games designed by family teams -- the Williamses with King's Quest, the Coles with Quest for Glory, the Nyqvists with the Carol Reed Mysteries -- seem to garner praise for lively and entertaining storytelling. This is also true for Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches. Is this observation about family made games purely a coincidence? What is your process for planning, writing, and revising the script in your own game?

Even though Richard lives 200 miles away from Karen and me, we speak on the phone, Skype or email every day and we meet up every couple of months for a few days. We have a structured Wiki site where we all put ideas, then one of us will start to pull threads together prior to a story meeting. We don't have a script as such – more a set of tables to describe chapters, locations, characters and their interaction and interdependencies. We use a top-down approach – what has to be achieved? Then we imagine a story arc to get there, passing through ideas on the Wiki. Then that is broken down into chapters, in which new locations and challenges can be revealed. Now the puzzles can be designed. Each of the chapters has a theme, and along with the natures of the characters, that output gives rise to the music. All the way, one of us is challenging the logic, making sure the story follows, chronologically as well as psychologically. "Yes, but if Y's the case, then X must have happened earlier and Z needs to have different attributes" – that sort of thing. The final output is a walkthrough. And that tells us where every object is for every puzzle, which goes back into the graphic design and the inventory population.

Being both family and friends, the three of us are very close, have been for decades. We have similar tastes in movies and music. Our game has to have a good story because that's the way we like it. And I suppose it also means that unlike members of a firm, we're not tied to the workday clock – we can discuss plot and story at length, at whim, any time of day, any day of the week.

But maybe it's a product of the commercial truths of videogames. Big firms have big cost bases so need to make big sellers – so they currently can't afford to make adventures – and for those types of developers, guns and cars or platforms are typically more important than the subtleties of plot and character. That's not necessarily a criticism, it's a commercial maxim. On the other hand, the family-and-friend outfits don't have the resources to compete with the big boys – so they make adventures, where story is broadly more important.

What experience in game design did you have before you started developing Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches? What were your "day jobs" during the time when the game was in development?

We're all self-employed. Karen and I run a highly specialized IT services management consultancy, helping companies improve their IT helpdesks. Our years in IT have helped a lot in the technical side of making 'Rhiannon'. We've also written several management books together, so we're no strangers to international publishing, which has been a lot of help in dealing with publishers.

Karen has always had a need for research projects. For example, when she was designing our garden at home, she could tell you the Latin name of any plant. When she did a college course on philosophy, she passed with distinction. She's a knowledge sponge. Richard is a graphic illustrator who builds computer-generated 3D architectural models for a living, so for him this is more a cultural shift, than a technical departure.

We had never designed a game before, although Karen had played a great number. She and I had also worked together on a techno-thriller novel and some experimental television screenplays that featured the supernatural, so we'd dabbled in storytelling.

How close is the resemblance between the setting for the game and the place where you actually live, particularly in relation to Welsh legends and history?

Karen and I live on a farmstead in West Wales, which Richard used heavily as the model for Ty Pryderi. It's very close to the real thing in many respects. In the Four Branches of the Mabinogion, the seat of authority of Pwyll, his wife Rhiannon and their son Pryderi was at 'Glan Arberth'. There is a stream called the 'Nant Arberth' that runs through our garden, to meet the River Tivy some five miles away where, some speculate, Glan Arberth might have stood.

Magic, homeopathy, and some good ol' chemical explosions coexist colorfully in many of the puzzles in Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches. How much of the theory or symbolism in the game is based on actual books about history, nature, and the supernatural? How much of it is your own fictional creation?

Our use of Earth, Water, Fire and Air and the associated symbolism are taken from a study of putative practical magic Karen and I undertook a few years ago. Hence the trees, the emotions, the colours and the use of sound as symbolic puzzle resolutions. The symbolism in the Water chapter is extrapolated in part from an understanding of homeopathy, an article about the memory effect of water in an edition of 'New Scientist' magazine and the ideas of Masaru Emoto. For the Ogam, we're indebted to the research of Edo Nyland, although we have of course simplified it considerably. And then of course there are the Four Branches legends, which are rich in symbolism. There was quite a lot of research in 'Rhiannon'.

The title character, Rhiannon, is an absent character, though Chris (the player character) gets to know her from her diaries and emails. Why have you chosen to make Chris rather than Rhiannon the protagonist for the game?

Simply because we prefer to play in the first person rather than assume a personality designed by a game developer. We needed to make Rhiannon a certain type of character for the purposes of the plot. But in real life the player may not be a distraught adolescent female, but instead perhaps a farmer's wife, a middle-aged businessman, a world-weary youth, a rebel, a conformist, an explorer, a geek or who knows?. We would rather present the player – whoever he or she may be – with the circumstances, the clues and the challenges, and let them solve it their own way. In fact we only give the player a name so that the game has a way to refer to him or her. That's why the name is not gender-specific.

The name of an academic, Dr. Rhodri Gwyndaf Ap Trefechan, pops up in several contexts in the game. Since Dr. Ap Trefechan is fond of writing about symbolism, (I am wondering) what is the etymology of his extraordinary name?

When you're creating fiction, one of the first considerations is always copyright – it has to be our creation so as not to upset anybody, nor indeed to attract unwanted litigation. So everything is made up. For this character, we also wanted a name that would be about as Welsh as it gets – it had to indicate that he had a profound Welsh family grounding, which might go some way to explaining his obsession with the history and legends of ‘The Land of My Fathers'. Given those provisions, we then just used names we knew. The name of the current First Minister of the Welsh Assembly government is 'Rhodri'. Several people locally have the first name 'Gwyndaf'. There is a village on the back road to Carmarthen called 'Trefechan' in Welsh, 'Trevaughan' in English. The 'ap' has a similar usage as 'von' in German, 'van' in Dutch or 'de' in French names. Totally made up, no symbolism intended.

According to the credits, the game's beta testing team is quite large for an indie production. Between beta and release, how much has the game's design been changed (for example, in terms of puzzle balance)?

We were so lucky. We had great beta testers. We put out a call for help on the forums and they came, bringing well-established skills and a range of ages, geographical locations and gaming preferences. They found 135 coding bugs I had missed. As the test progressed, we asked some members to specialize – Len (Green) brought his superb command of the English language to the thousands of words of text. Astrid (Beulink) looked purely at playability. But every one of them brought a unique perspective, Regina and Bea with their speed and tenacity, Greg with his challenges to our assumptions and Jim's "I'll test it on everything – twice". Fantastic bunch. I could go on – sorry I haven't mentioned them all by name. They pointed out that some of the puzzles were not clear and that more hints were needed in places. For example, that meant a rewrite of a large chunk of one of the chapters, with new inventory items to round off a story gap. We added new hints, edited some papers, changed emphases.

For newcomers to game development, the process of finding publishers is presumably very competitive. What lessons have you learned from your own experience in securing publishing deals with Got Game Entertainment and Lighthouse Interactive?

Publishers have limited product portfolios. They can't possibly take everything there is out there, and it would be a disservice to those they do take on, if they were to spread their resources too thinly. So they need to know that what they choose to represent is what people want to play, and to a certain extent, I speculate, is not too much of a cultural departure from their existing titles. They need that assurance as early as possible, because localization, distribution and retail deals, cover design and printing all take time.

We tried to create market interest in 'Rhiannon' before engaging with potential publishers, hence the Website, early press releases and Rhiannon's Blog. Initially, we toyed with the idea that we could do our own publishing, but we now think that was a bit naïve for our first game. That said, for our next title, we're not ruling any publishing options in or out at this stage.

In any new relationship, there will be the danger of assumption. So everything must be clarified, including expectation on both sides, right down to the level of involvement expected of the developer. We've seen how some publishers prefer the developer to take as active a role in marketing as possible, while others prefer to do it their own way and make much less use of the developer. You have to be prepared for subtleties like that. I was used to being frequently published in print, but the videogame market is not as mature as that for books, so I found out the hard way that some of my preconceptions needed adjusting. Similarly, game publishers operate different ways with different business models – so there is more operational variety than there is in the print sector. That means flexibility is key, but then so are clear objectives and explicit determination.

We've been lucky – given the genre at which we're aiming with 'Rhiannon', we believe we could not have found two more suitable partners than Got Game Entertainment and Lighthouse Interactive to handle our supernatural adventures - although with our first royalty payments not due until February 2009, we don't yet know for sure how successful those choices will have been in practical terms.

Will there be a sequel to Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches? Will any character from this game make a return appearance in your future games?

With 'Rhiannon', we set out to make a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end – it's why the introduction seems so disconcertingly straightforward and yet the finale looks so very different. That said, we have considered another chapter to 'Rhiannon' and we've a clear idea of what it could look like. But rather than follow the too-common line of a 'Rhiannon 2', we've other stories we want to tell. Nevertheless, Chris and Ty Pryderi went through a lot in 'Rhiannon' and word will have got round those inhabitants of our fictional county of Glendowershire who have an interest in supernatural goings-on. I suspect we're not yet done with the town of Arberth.

What other projects do you have in development for the near future?

We announced our next project, entitled 'Coven', just before Christmas 2008. It's again set in Wales, but this time it delves into history rather than legend, although the supernatural is still very much in evidence. There's advance information about Coven at www.arberthstudios.com, along with some prototype materials.

Beyond that, we're already building a list of other potential stories and locations. We're hoping to be in this for the long haul, because it's what we want to do. It just remains to see whether the financial returns from 'Rhiannon' can turn that dream into a reality.

For a demo, trailer and more information on Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches, visit www.rhiannongame.com.

Related Articles

Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches  review

Related Galleries

Noel Bruton

Join Our Team!

We need your help! We are now seeking talented gamers to join our team as volunteers to be editors or contributors. No prior experience is required. If you like to write about adventure gaming for this site and see your work read by your fellow adventure game fans worldwide, read our authors' instructions and contact us for further information.

Your Opinion

There are no votes.

Staff Login

Username

Password