How do you get from Bully and Sleeping Dogs (not to mention Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3) to Ruby Skies?
The first two are open world console games. Bully is a high school romp while Sleeping Dogs is all about cops and gangsters in Hong Kong. Ruby Skies is a romantic exploration and treasure collection adventure on iOS.
So how did I end up taking the jump from a game featuring cleaver wielding maniacs and mass murder to one about looking for love while floating through pink clouds?
Really, they're not that different. They're all about characters and their relationships. The focus in writing them is to identify who the characters think they are, how they think they're being perceived; everything derives from that. Then you add airships, kung-fu, or slingshots as the environment requires.
At the core, it's all about the relationships. You may notice that there are dating components in both Bully and Sleeping Dogs; I pushed that as far as I could and would have gone further if I could. Ruby Skies, of course, has romantic relationships at the very core of the gameplay; it's a casual game, so it's still fairly simple but I hope to push it further as we continue with the game.
Human relationships too often end up trite and perfunctory in games. In some ways that's due to various limitations of the medium itself or the pitfalls of the production process. It's not easy, but it's what I'm trying to do. I hope it shows at least some of the time.
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