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Interview

Interview with the Xoron GmbH Team, the creators of Paul Pixel

Do you like story based games? We do! But with less and less story based games hitting app stores around the world, it’s actually becoming difficult to find a decent one to play…😢

Today we’re excited to bring you our interview with the team who created one of the coolest new story games of this year Paul Pixel! For players who love pixel art it’s a no brainer, you need this game.

Read our full review here.

Before we start, we’d like to thank Peter Solveig for participating in our interview, and for spending some of his valuable time answering our questions. Thank you very much Peter.

Now without any further ado our interview begins.

 

Ok first up, why did you decide to make Paul Pixel?

We love pixel art. We have Eboy posters in our office and we play pixelated games on our mobiles like Game Dev Story, Pixel People or McPixel. And we played a lot of adventures in the past: Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken, Beneath A Steel Sky etc. Why not make a new point-and-click adventure with retro feeling, but better graphics and sound than the classics? We needed a gameplay for the impatient Apple generation.

 

Awesome, so what programming language and or software did you use when making Paul Pixel?

“Paul Pixel – The Awakening” is written in Swift and uses only Apple APIs. We also created a small new programming language for scripting. It is similar to the SCUMM engine that the old classics used. But it also contains new commands e.g. for particle effects.

Swift is great. You can code fast and the code is readable.

Our programmer would like to have an Apple API that lets the game app talk like Siri, but with different voices. So a command would look like:

siri.talk(voice: .oldMan, accent: .british, text: “Hello World”)

He is sure, we will get it in a few years.

 

Ok, here is a difficult question. What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Paul Pixel?

The biggest problem with point-and-click adventures like “Paul Pixel – The Awakening” is that you have so many art assets and sound files. Everything has to be put into the right place and time. That takes a lot of time.

 

Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?

(inspiration: see first question)

Ideas are not really a problem. Everybody has a lot of ideas. The problem is to find out which ideas are usable and which are not. Just google “idea guy”.

 

A few words to Paul Pixel fans on Edamame Reviews.

We’ll probably be porting “Paul Pixel – The Awakening” to Apple TV and Mac. iOS buyers will get the Apple TV version for free.

 

Lastly a few words on how you feel about Edamame Reviews and our service.

You do a really good job with the reviews on your site. Keep up the good work!

 

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