Much has been written about the death threats made against him for his role in releasing Puzzle Quest. When asked about the detail behind these by PALGN, Fawkner laughed and responded, 'It may have been blown up a little bit, slightly out of proportion - we did get a number of death threats and a bomb threat about the game because people were angry [about a number of bugs].'
He continued, 'I'd written about this in Game Developer and it had slid under the radar, but one of the Gamespot guys had seen it [and asked about it] ... [we] had a bit of fun, and it popped up on Gamespot and Australian newspapers started picking it up. It really was kind of harmless - I don't really think anyone there was actually going to kill me. Well, one guy wrote a pretty nasty email, but I think if I'd have said boo to him he'd have run away.'
Speaking of the AI in Puzzle Quest, Fawkner said, 'I give my word there's absolutely no cheating. The funny thing is, I'll let you in on a big secret here - I've written AIs for a lot of games over the years, and Puzzle Quest is the first one I've written that doesn't cheat. Every other one cheats.'
He continued, 'To me it's all about making sure the player has fun ... we [generally] cheat them a little bit to make the experience better. Puzzle Quest? I wrote the AI in one afternoon, it took me two hours. These days when I write code, I'm too lazy to make the game cheat; it would have been so much harder to make the game cheat. It's a simple little AI - I really should publish it online and show people, but then they'd think I was publishing some fake code I think. The AI is literally about 50 or 60 lines, dead simple, doesn't cheat, it's just pure luck, but I think that it's just human psychology that people think that it's cheating.'
And finally, when asked about the lack of a PSP version of Puzzle Quest Galactrix, he responded, 'It's not so much a decision not to go for PSP, it's a decision to go for DS, 360, and PC. I know that's semantics, but they're the platforms we want to hit first for this game. If the game does well, I'd love for it to be on as many platforms as possible.'
Keep an eye out for the full interview, along with our popular recurring segments on the PALGN Podcast this Wednesday, the 3rd of September. To be notified when the episode goes live, hit this link and enter your email address. Or, subscribe directly through iTunes or RSS.
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