Bill Tiller – Duke Grabowski, Mighty Swashbuckler!

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[b]Jack[/b]: You’ve said Duke Grabowski wasn’t originally intended to be a full-fledged game, but rather a short, experimental test for a new engine. What made you change your mind about giving Duke his own game?

[b]Bill[/b]: Yep, a proof-of-technology demonstration. One of the hardest and most expensive issues we had with A Vampyre Story and Ghost Pirates was engine development. It was costly, slow, and very expensive, not to mention frustrating. Jeremiah dealt with that issue first-hand, and wanted to come up with a better solution. He started using Unity and Adventure Creator and realized it would work well for our needs.

So, Jeremiah needed art assets and a short game design, and asked me to help with that. We didn’t have a budget and didn’t want to raise money just for a demo, so we decided to reuse as many assets as we could from AVS and Ghost Pirates. I sketched up an idea for an Old English-style inn with a pirate ship on top of it. Like I had said before in one of our Kickstarter updates, I’d seen a nightclub in San Francisco that had a cargo plane installed in the center, so I thought this would be the pirate equivalent. I thought it was a strong image and that we could base a puzzle on trying to get in. None of the main characters from Ghost Pirates made sense for the puzzle, so I talked Jeremiah into going with a new main character.

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My family and I had just seen Blazing Saddles and loved it, especially the scenes with Mongo. I remember thinking, I wish Mongo had his own movie, and that’s when it hit me: Let’s make Mongo a pirate, and give him his own game.

Kickstarter campaign video

Now, I like variety in character designs, and in Ghost Pirates we had good variety of ethnicities, genders and body types. We didn’t have a really pale character, so I decided we would make this guy really blonde and pale, but in the sun he turns lobster-red. His body type has no business being in the tropics at all. Duke will never die in a fight, he’s too tough, but he will probably be taken down by skin cancer.

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Clearly a big guy like that needed to have a one-syllable, solid first name, and I liked “Knute”, but then his last name was going to be Polish, “Grabowski”, after the nickname for Chicago Bears fans, so that wouldn’t work. Then I thought “Duke” might fit, because it’s John Wayne’s nickname, who is a pretty tough and big guy. Big Duke Grabowski.

Then I thought, why does he need to get in this bar? To meet women? I didn’t want to make a pirate Leisure Suit Larry, so I figured he might have been goaded into getting in the bar, probably as a joke or a wild goose chase. And the story just kind grew from there. I thought it might be funny to see this big dimwit try to woo women and act smooth. Ultimately it doesn’t work out, but he is so nice and good-hearted that he gets women to like him for who he is and what he does, rather than being a smooth operator or a pick-up artist.

This plot was too big for just a demo and I kept expanding it, which my brain often does. I just loved this character and the scenario too much. At the time, Gene and I were actually working on the design and story for a completely different game. But we had put so much work into this proof-of-tech demo that it became obvious that Duke and his story needed its own, albeit short, game.

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[b]Jack[/b]: So Duke will be a fairly “small” game in terms of scope?

[b]Bill[/b]: Yes, an estimated 12 locations, one-fourth the size of A Vampyre Story. We decided to fund the game on Kickstarter and we didn’t want to have to raise a lot of money. We figured if we kept it short, we could do it while keeping our full-time jobs and make the game in our free time over the next 12 months. This way we wouldn’t need to hire a whole crew and we could do the work for free. We would just raise enough money, $40,000, to pay for what we couldn’t get for free or do ourselves, like buy software, pay for new models, and pay an animator.

[b]Jack[/b]: Is Duke Grabowski intended as a one-off adventure, or could it be the beginning of a whole new series?

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