Ryan Creighton will be speaking at SCREENS 2011 about how to turn your project into a lightning rod to attract success, and how to capture that surge of success without letting a single spark go to waste. Ryan took the time to answer a few of our questions so FITC fans and followers could get to know him a little better leading up to the event. In verbatim, meet Ryan Creighton...
What are you passionate about?
What am i NOT passionate about? My passion borders on a personality flaw, really. i will argue with you to the DEATH over whether or not squirrels should wear helmets. i think i have overpassionitis. Is that a thing?
That kind of passion serves me well in my work, but quite often the projects i take on are just meant to tick a box in someone's interactive strategy checklist, and i wind up delivering an excellent game, rather than just a game. i live in a fantasy world where everything has to be awesome. It's a blessing and a curse.
What personal projects are you working on?
Untold Entertainment has two original projects on the go:
Spellirium - (rhymes with "delirium") is a graphic adventure/puzzle game in the spirit of the classic LucasArts adventures from a few decades ago. It's a tale about survivors of a cataclysm who aren't allowed to read or write. Your character, Todd, is one of the only literate people in the game, because as a Runekeeper, you curate a secret underground library of forbidden writing. You team up with a big blue monster named Lorms to solve a murder mystery, by spelling words to solve puzzles using an eerily powerful device called the SpellCaster. It's like Labyrinth meets Boggle, and it's gonna kick ass.
Putty Crime - On the Tail of the Foxy Badger is a puzzle game set in jolly old Fake England, where a criminal mastermind is mobilizing gangs of criminals. It uses the combinatorial matching rules of a card game called Set, and it's modeled entirely in clay.
We're also working at an elementary school within the Toronto District School Board to develop a course that teaches kids how to program their own video games. i'm very excited about that!
i update the Untold Entertainment blog regularly. It's a mixed bag of designer diaries, programming tutorials, industry commentary, and dick & fart jokes.
What tools are you working with now?
We use a code editor called Flash Develop to program our games in ActionScript 3. We use Flash and Photoshop to create assets and animations. Spellirium is the fifth game we've developed that uses UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System, which is an AS3 framework we've built to help us make graphic adventure games more easily and quickly. Our big hit, Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure, was our fourth UGAGS game. Spellirium is the fifth.
Where do you get your news?
i read the NextMedia daily digest pretty faithfully. i follow a lot of folks on Twitter, and rely on them to float the most interesting stuff to my attention. The stories that catch my eye usually comes from BlogTO, Kotaku, Gamezebo, JayIsGames, Mashable, Kotaku, The Escapist, GiantBomb, and Gamasutra. i never miss a CollegeHumor original video.
If you could have superhuman powers, what would they be?
i'm happy to just settle for human powers. The ability to sit cross-legged without my legs going completely numb after three minutes. The ability to not get so nervous during conversations with new people and resort to swearing as if i had Tourette's. The ability to not eat the whole goddam bag of chips. Really - i mean, REALLY - should i be wishing for the power to fly when i can't even be counted on to do a chin-up? That's irresponsible.
Connect with Ryan Creighton online:
[Twitter] @untoldent [blog] untoldentertainment.com
For more information on SCREENS 2011 visit www.fitc.ca/screens
