This is our inaugural Old Testament Adventures podcast, which I hope may become a semi-regular feature discussing the ups-and-downs of developing our Old Testament graphic adventure game, “Ebenezer“. We’ve none of us done this before, so it takes us a few minutes to warm up, but we tackle some really important and interesting issues that hopefully you will find thought-provoking.
Show Notes
Concept artwork
- Andy is struggling with the question of how to set a budget and exactly what to spend it on
- we discuss how to tap into the vastly under-served Christian market whilst battling the perception of “Christian naffness”
- Dave asks if we can use the low budget as a strength rather than a weakness, by choosing a deliberately simple art style like South Park, or Time Gentlemen Please by Zombie Cow Studios.
Women in Bible games
- our Bible passage is one of many that doesn’t explicitly feature any women, meaning that any female characters are going to have to be ones that we create. We discuss some potential candidates
- Monkey Island seems to have a disproportionately large number of female fans compared to other games/genres, so it seems to be an issue worth spending time on
- all the actors we’re mates with are actresses, so it’s decidedly inconvenient that the cast of the game is balanced the other way
- but that’s okay, because Dave Hall (the narrator for my video “The OTHER Secret of Monkey Island“) apparently sounds just like the actor Bill Nighy from Pirates of the Caribbean
Making God’s involvement clear
- the vital role of the narrator in Biblical narrative
- how to get the Bible into the game itself without ramming it down the player’s throat
- Dave has no idea how great coffee is because he has no sense of smell
- we discuss means of making God’s involvement in the events clear without sending the wrong message about how he works in real life
What is the game teaching?
- how do you avoid merely teaching a moral lesson about “treating God a certain way”?
- how do you keep the focus on God: what do we learn about him through this passage?
- what difference does Jesus make to the application? How do we avoid directly applying the OT to us as NT believers without considering the implications of Christ’s coming
- How do we draw out the ways the narrative points us forwards to Jesus?
- Are there examples in non-interactive media that does this well?
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