Puzzle Quest: Galactrix Post-Mortem

iTWire has posted an overview of Steve Fawkner’s presentation at the recent Dissecta event, in which he revealed that two more Puzzle Quest titles are in development while also discussing how Galactrix ended up as part of the Puzzle Quest franchise.

Many of the early iterations just were not fun, but with the hex style requiring matches to be made in six different directions, with the gem fall direction dependent on the match direction. (This gave a whole space feel with gems falling in different directions,) Fawkner said, (just those little changes, squares to hex and the direction of the gems falling totally changed the feel of the game, the prototype was fun to play, this was the one.)

The studio grew with the development of 3.5 games at once (three PuzzleQuest games and a side project as part of the ABC program Good Game), from 10 to about 45 people. During this growth the lack of a QA department really hurt Infinite Interactive’s relationship with publishers.

Sending out buggy iterations of the work in progress did not go down well, and then there were the more humorous results of a lack of over arching quality assurance.
In the game today, there is a mission to steal food from New-Ethiopia, not an ideal or politically correct situation to be in. Nor was it intended, simply a result of multiple changes made at the one time, in name and content areas.