Jules Verne Last Travel - interview with game author Ivan | Loquiz- Create. Play. Grow.
Hello Ivan! We are today with Ivan who is an author of Jules Verne game and to talk a bit how it is set up. So, hi again. Hi Liisa! I'm Ivan and I work in Loquiz as a game expert and I decided to build this Jules Verne game to provide to every Loquiz user and this is based on the my ambition, I love reading Jules Verne and yeah I'm happy to share this today with you. Thank you! Can you tell briefly what the game is about? Briefly, the game is about traveling the world from France to a Pacific island to save people who are on the other side of the world. You will have a dilemma,
you will have to choose whether you want to go to the east or to the west. Once you make your choice you will have even more choices about the different vehicles that you want to take, all vehicles that appear in the Jules Verne story. And depending on your choice you will have to walk more or less with your game, with your device. So this game takes people indoor and outdoor. And I imagine creating this took time, so
how many hours did it take for you to create and test this final version of the game? That's a difficult question because I'm passionate about creating games and I didn't even count how many hours I was on it because I made a lot of tests with myself. I made a lot of adjustments, so it took me even more hours. So I would say maybe roughly 50 or 100 hours. Actually I don't know but let's say 50 to 100. Okay, that's a fair amount of time.
Yeah! I have actually played the game and I enjoyed it a lot. I took the route through earth but I know the game features also a second path I did not experience but my co-players told me about it. How did you make sure that the both routes are equally developed, challenging and entertaining? What I did ... From the beginning I really wanted to make sure that the two were equivalent, so I started making the first path and I started getting feedback for this path before I would start making the second. And on the second, I was using the same structure as the first, with the same distance and the same type of riddles and occurrence.
Then in the end I was playing outside with two devices and I was comparing the two with the distance it takes and the difficulty of the results. Okay, but who do you have in mind when building the game? Who is the target group or who is the game best suitable for? I had mainly in my mind people who are fans of Jules Verne and knowing it's the second most translated author in history. The first is the Agatha Christie and the third is Shakespeare. Then I assumed that a lot of people would fit into this persona, the type of people who would enjoy this game. And then in a wider way, I was also imagining people who enjoy reading stories, enjoy reading books. So,
for example, this is why in this game I thought I would add a bit more text than the others having this same type of person in mind. Okay. Does it suit a certain age group or it is suitable for school kids and for adults alike? Yeah, in fact it's ... There's a big debate about Jules Verne. A lot of people say that Verne might be more for the young people [inaudible]. As a
reader you can feel that there are many sort of ideas in history that can be crafted by the adults and in the end I would say it's quite wide, it's quite wide the population who can enjoy Jules Verne. And Jules Verne himself was saying that his greatest regret was the fact that he was only targeting children and not himself. But the editor saw that in a marketing way because, even in the 19th of century there was some marketing, and they saw that it was the best target to bring him success, which worked. Around this concern this could be played by school children, a teacher or it can be played by a group of friends who enjoy sharing what they read. It can also be played by people who are in their active life who are 30, 40, 50, 60 and they want to play the Jules Verne game based on the book they read in their young age.
Let's imagine someone has just started Loquiz and is watching this video and they're on their trial. Can they set up the game and let their colleagues play or friends play? How much effort does it take to actually get playing without all of the setup? To give a quick answer I'll say if we count the fact that the person is totally a stranger to Loquiz it may take 10 minutes to start the account, to start the game and the templates. And then to use the device and scan so that they can start. I'll say at this point the Loquiz team, the Loquiz developer made
amazing work at trying to make it simpler for people to get in the platform and to try the games. The games template because these are templates that you can take right away and then play immediately. I also know that there are some great improvements that are upcoming in this way, it's a back-end platform that will be even simpler to handle, to start even faster as you advance the game.
But a bit about the content, what is your favorite task in the game or the question or something you really like yourself and are proud about? I could think for quite a long time to choose one task that fits me but if i had to say my very favorite is one of the paths that is quite optional. It's the path when you want to go to Florida, to South America. To go you have two possibilities - either you take the submarine or you take the plane. Which one did you take? I don't actually remember, I think I took the submarine. And in this way my favorite task is the submarine because in the story, you will figure it out if you play for those who listen to us.
And if you notice on the submarine a lot of boats because it's a perimeter triangle and they both cannot go through there since most, a lot of boats are mostly disappearing. Perhaps they are thinking in the seas of the Caribbean. Then when you take the submarine you meet the Count D'Artigas who's quite a shady man with his smile and he invites you to be undersea with a boat that goes undersea and there are a lot of clues in the task that tell you that he's dangerous. For example, your partner is telling you that you may be in an iron coffin that is moving underwater and then you discuss with him, in the task it shows you some picture of the sunken boats, that are even from the 18th century, and at some point you make a mistake understating that some of the boats are there because of him. But then you realize that you are
responsible for all these sunken boats. I made it so that I don't tell it directly, I create a way to make people afraid that it could be this without the attack and then a personal picture of a creepy face looking at you, staring at you and writing down "Will you arrive alive?". So this is my favorite task and if I could take a second favorite task, I would say there is one when you are taking the train to the west side because you want to go to Turkey to get inside a volcano. Because you can, according to Jules Verne, you can move between volcano thanks to a underground [inaudible]. You have to first go to Istanbul you can represent yourself to Turkey, Istanbul and at the other side of Turkey-Syria border, you have the Karaca Dağ volcano but if you show in Istanbul that there is something that you need to do, you need to cross the bridge to reach the other side of the Bosphorus. You have the choice to
not pay the tax and you say to the policeman that "Taxation is theft". And then I mentioned about one... there's a comical story of Jules Verne who says the story about a man who walks around the Black Sea because he doesn't want to pay this tax. These are my few favourite tasks.
Thank you for a thorough overview! Do you have any future plans building similar games, can you give us a sneak peek about future ideas you are working on? I'm actually working on the idea that uses the same feature that is the automator, the common goal between the two is to bring an outdoor game so people can have a story that brings them outside and that makes them work and even do some tasks. So now I'm actually concealing a story about being some kind of a monster hunter. So you have to first in this indoor park prepare yourself, choose the best equipment and then once you're ready go to the ride, which is in the other tent when you go outside. And then when you are outside you have to do some tasks and work, work endlessly to try to spot some monsters and you have some clues about where the monster could be and you have to find some...
some crew. I forgot the word in English for this. When you succeed, you are facing the monster, that can be a dragon for example, and you can decide to fight it, to capture it or to leave it. Then you will have a number of points according to the monster that you captured. So this is what I'm working on currently.
To me it sounds like it engages both your physical body to move and actually your fantasy and mind to immerse into the game, so you're combining two good things - movement and your imagination. I would say that your analysis can be lame, to move, to move to go outside, it's difficult to motivate yourself even to walk. So if behind you add a story, storytelling, a storyline, then you can activate your mind and then your body will follow. That is very clever! I look forward to playing it. Then i would like to ask you a few last questions - is there anything you would like to point out about this game I didn't ask? What I would like to point out is that this game is out there but I never consider that it is fully finished and I always consider that there can be some improvement or even some new videos. And for those who listen to us I would enjoy if you start playing the game and you play it alone or with your friends, your family, your co-workers and then I would encourage you to send us some feedback so I could have some ideas about how to improve it even more.
Okay, but what would you say to anyone who is still hesitating to set up such an adventure game for their occasion? To someone who's still hesitating I would say that they can have a whole experience, a whole story, where they can become a character, you know like the book which you are the character, I don't know if you played this Liisa your childhood that they did a lot. But this is even more interactive and it involves some main life tasks that immerse you even more so if you want to immerse yourself in the story, you have to try this. And the second thing I would say is that it doesn't take much time to set up a game for yourself, you can even play this anywhere because it only takes into account the distance that you make. And the third thing that I would add is that when you play this game you have to keep in mind that everything that is in the game you can make it yourself because Loquiz offers you the possibility to create anything you want in terms of a story or content. And you have to take this, you have already have some ideas or stories that you want to create, for yourself and that you want to create for your family or your relative. So you can use this children's game
to give yourself some inspiration for your own game creator ability, just needs some preparation. So this might spark someone's creativity and their own ideas after trying this. Exactly! So that was my last question, thank you for finding time to have this short interview and I look forward to seeing the next games and other cool stuff you have coming up. It was a great pleasure and again I would say if you have some feedback please forward to me and also some questions and I am also available for those who listen to us. Thank you and have a good day! Bye! Have a great day! Bye! Thank you!
2021-07-23 09:39
