The arrival of Dirk Dagger and the Fallen Idol marks the debut of the classic adventure game genre on the N-Gage platform. Mixing humor and mystery, it puts you in the shoes of a traditional gumshoe detective, hot on the trail of the latest case.

 

This game has just arrived for the N-Gage platform and can be downloaded as a free trial from the Dirk Dagger game page. You can also visit www.dirkdagger.com for trailers, screen shots, and a demo of the game.

 

To find out more about Dirk Dagger, we spoke to Samuli Huuhtanen, Nokia Producer and original concept creator, as well as Tommy Palm, Jadestone's game designer on the project.

 

 

Tommy: We always felt that the adventure game genre got an undeserved dip after the entrance of 3D in the late 1990s, and that the time for a broad comeback of adventure games in now.

 

I had been pondering on similar concept myself for a long time so when I was approached by Samuli and his detective game idea, it was a perfect match. Adventure games works extremely well on handheld and the N-Gage allows for file sizes without the need of compromising on the graphical quality.

 

Samuli: Like Tommy said, adventure game works perfectly on handheld. Also, this is one of the game genres we all grew up with and it was something we’ve always wanted to do.

 

 

Tommy: We always thought about Dirk as a classical film noir detective, so we watched a lot of the classic film noir movies. As it turns out they really did not carry though properly to present time. Very few people have actually seen films like Big Sleep, Asphalt Jungle or D.O.A. So instead we used more modern inspirations such as L.A. Confidential and Sin City.

 

When it comes to game influence, the entire team is LucasArt fans and loves the old games like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. There are also some really great new adventure games like Phoenix Wright, Nick Bounty and Samorost to mention a few. I should also mention Tracer Bullet, the best, most hardcore detective of them all, who really captured the humor we were striving for.

 

 

Samuli: Humor was one of the most important things to be included to the game from my point of view. There’s always a risk with humor, but we could see quite early in the development that the visual style and the humor was a perfect match!

 

Tommy: When we started out we tried some different directions both visually and storywise, and it showed quite quickly that the warm colors and humorous approach was superior. As a game designer the wacky humor also helps a lot when trying to work out puzzles. The bright colors and strong contrasts fit the mobile platform extra well as it makes details much clearer.

 

 

Tommy: Henrik Petterson is the artist that makes Dirk and the environments stand out the way it does. He has a fantastic broad spectrum in his drawing and an amazing sense of finding the details that make every scene worth close inspection. He usually makes a lot of different sketches and lets the rest of the team vote for which one they like the best before he chooses the one he goes with.

 

Samuli: Yes, Henrik did amazing work! In the beginning my vision was actually to make this much darker, like Sin City, but seeing Henrik's work, it was easy to admit that I was wrong.

 

 

Tommy: Everybody who knows me knows I am normally very humble and quite shy but I would have to say that it can all be accounted to me. The rest of the team had nothing to do with it; come to think of it they kind of cramped my style. One or two jokes might have come from the author Andy Walsh but that is it. 

 

Samuli: That’s bad humor Tommy :) But to be honest, one or two jokes might have come from Tommy. They are quite easy to find, you won’t laugh at those jokes.

 

 

Did you encounter any difficulties translating the humor when localizing the game into languages other than English?

Samuli: Oh yes! Normally, you can send out the text files to translators, they do the translation and send it back to you. Within this game, we had to have a “pre-production” for localization. We wanted them to play the game, mark every joke and after that we pointed things out if we felt they missed something. For example, there couple of graphical jokes that were really hard to translate to other languages, but after all the end result is worth the extra effort!

 

 

Tommy: Ask Rosy! She is more involved than a cherry in jam.

 

Samuli: Great advice! Also, you want to make sure that you explore everything from each location.

 

 

Tommy: Samuli, who is the girl on the desk in Dirks office?

 

Samuli: Heh! Yes, she’s my wife. I wonder what she and Dirk are up to? There might be or then not. We don’t want to spoil the fun of finding those (if there is something to find).

 

 

Samuli: You never know. But the whole production of Dirk Dagger and The Fallen Idol was so much fun that we wouldn’t mind doing that again!

 

 

--ikona