Well, I was looking through some of the old previews on (url="http://"http://www.insidemacgames.com")Inside Mac Games(/url) and I saw the one for Ferazel's Wand so I went to check it out. They only had one screenshot of the entire screen showing (the others were just of specific parts of the screen) and I noticed that it looked quite different from the current screen. That shot is shown below:

I was just wondering Ben, how far along in the development process was that shot taken, and what made you decide to change from the two-sectioned item list to just one? It's also interesting to see that before you could apparently select the type of fireball you wanted to shoot. I see that you changed from having no 'blocks' to about 12 I think it is in the health and magic meters. Was that just to make it easier to tell how many hits you could take until you died?

Like I said, this is unimportant stuff, but I'm curious

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-- Jeff

(This message has been edited by Merciless (edited 03-04-2000).)

Wow, that's one of the first screenshots that we released from Ferazel. I think it's from a version from about a year ago. To answer your questions, we switched to a single inventory because it took an excessive number of keys to manage two. The various fireball arcs I thought were a cool idea, but ended up cluttering up the list, and weren't that useful in actual gameplay. The "blocking" of the health and magic was done to make it easier to quantify how much health you were gaining or losing (e.g., "Ow, I took 2 blocks of damage from that mace".)

-Ben

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Thanks for answering my questions Ben. That screenshot sure shows how much a game changes during development. It looks like the parallax scrolling was souped up (as in more layers seem to have been added) Great game Ben! Can't wait for the next one.

By the way, did you use the shell from Harry to make Ferazel's Wand? Some of the dialog resources are from Harry (like the photocopier save point)

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-- Jeff