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In Adventure Island, two to five players take on the roles of castaways and try to survive on an island full of secrets, supernatural mysteries, and terrible dangers by relying on good teamwork and collective decision making. We would love to ramble on about the story and the twists and turns it contains, but naturally we do not want to spoil the surprises awaiting in the game. However, what we may talk about is its development process.
It had been our dream for some time to develop a narrative game that players would be able to explore through a series of game sessions while greatly influencing the course of events. Certainly this dream was in no small part based on our active engagement in roleplaying and our fascination with making such an experience available for a broader audience. The rules were to be so easy that there would not be any obstacles for finding a way into the game, yet the decisions to make in the game were to be as hard as they can get.
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Then, however, the trends of the game market hit us hard as the great ascent of narrative games had begun. For game creators like us, it is always a shock to work on a game you think is innovative, only to see other games like it on the market before finalizing it. Our first instinct was to release it as quickly as possible and to speed up the development process considerably. Therefore, we knocked on the door of Pegasus Spiele, still carrying with us the urgent feeling of the pressure of time.
The editorial staff at Pegasus Spiele was thrilled by the game right from the start and managed to convince us that our game was set apart from the trend and that we could thus put as much fine-tuning into it as we had originally planned. In cooperation with the Pegasus Spiele team, we refined a version that took the journey to Mallorca. There it was tested at small group events by bloggers, game fanatics, and representatives of other game publishers.
Two things in particular about the reactions were remarkable. At first, the reviewers held back — but after about two weeks emails reached us comprising several pages of feedback. You could feel that the testers thought about the game even after their return from Mallorca. Over the course of the following development phases, the players of these test sessions regularly asked about the game when they met us.
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In a nutshell, the feedback clearly showed us that the players were fascinated by our adventure game — yet it also revealed a weak spot, which we had to attend to. We had designed the game in a manner so that it would have different endings. We thought every player would want to find and experience every ending. However, as it turned out, many players were satisfied with finding only one ending. In cooperation with Pegasus Spiele, we thus decided to give the game a new structure. Stefan Stadler, the responsible editor, played a particularly important role in this process. It was his idea to structure the game in episodes, each of which had their own goal — but at the same time we wanted to keep the freedom of action as it has always been a well-liked element by the test players, too.
This way the game has become what it is today: a co-operative and narrative adventure game that is played episodically. Players can decide themselves if they want to venture into the next episode or if they would rather replay the last one to discover more secrets and thereby improve their preparation for the things to come.
We were very glad not only about the support of the whole editorial staff at Pegasus, including Klaus Ottmaier, Sebastian Hein and André Bronswijk, but also about the fact that every single card got its own illustration and that, above all, by the illustrator of our choice, Lea Fröhlich, who got some back-up on her way to the finish line by Lisa Lenz.
Now, at the end of this long development process we are completely convinced of the game and we are excited to hear what you think of it.
Michael Palm and Lukas Zach
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