Why make a Point & Click adventure about an obscure Bible passage?
One of the questions I get asked most frequently about my Bible-teaching computer game project (besides “are you done yet?”) is “why on earth did you choose that passage?” 1 Samuel 8-12 is hardly the best known section of the Old Testament! The short answer is that there isn’t a very good reason, but I’m guessing you’re here for the longer answer.
The idea of making a Christian Point & Click adventure game started way back in January 2005. I was working as an apprentice for a church down in Fowey in Cornwall and was sent along to a conference called “The Bible-Centred Youth Worker” organised by The Good Book Company. As part of the conference, we were working through the book of Ruth, and I think everybody there was really struck by how this really short little story (only four chapters!) could teach us so much about the awesome character of God. Somebody suggested that it would make a great animated cartoon, but it planted the seed in my mind of making it into an adventure game.
Fast forward to 2006, when I moved to London. After chatting with friends, I decided that for my first game it might be good to do something a bit more well known than Ruth, so that it had more of an instant “wow” factor. I decided that the story of David and Goliath was probably about as well known as it gets in terms of Bible stories, and so I started work on a story based around 1 Samuel 16-17. It was only some time later, however, that it occurred to me that the first game I made was bound to be of inferior quality – both my technology and my story/puzzle writing skills are very basic at the moment! It seemed a shame to waste one of the best stories in the Bible on what was inevitably going to be the worst of my games, and so I decided to go a few chapters earlier to make it possible to use David and Goliath as a sequel.
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