Martin, were there things that you learned from developing Mystery of the Druids and fan feedback that had a direct bearing on the development of TMOS?

Oh yes. Ooooohhh yes.

We knew that we were going to throw the MOTD engine overboard and rewrite it from scratch.

But there was a lot a player and reviewer feedback that we always kept in mind when developing MOS. Integration of puzzles into the story was one major aspect. Puzzle fairness. Narrative pace. Difficulty level. Character depth. Dialogue trees (!). A lot of things.

The bad thing about MOTD was that it was criticised in almost all areas. The good thing about it was that much of the critcism was true, insightful and motivating.

MOTD was a debut game, and that meant much of it had to be created in a sort of dada-collage way. We would run into fundamental problems all the time, and we'd constantly find ourselves trying to work around them or fix things, which made the overall game feel incoherent and patchy.

Parts of MOTD's dialogue would try to force link problematic parts of the game design together rather than drive a story forward.

I recently replayed MOTD and found myself smiling about many things we did. In a way, it's like watching Plan 9 from Outer Space or something like that.

But I'm proud of MOTD. It has a some weird kind of charme. It was the start to something, and we knew we could do a lot better.

Great answer, thank you! As good as TMOS is, I can't wait to see what your next game is like! Now that this game is finished, are you seeing some things that you would change for your next game?

More things to do. More interactivity. More body acting. And: more sleep for the development team.

Sleep just takes a lot of time out of the day! That's great about more interactivity. I have to confess I played around with that displayed space suit in TMOS for hours (on the space thingee) - I was sure there was something I could do with it!

You mean on Lunar 5? Oh yeah, that was an idea we had, too. Btw, we also had a puzzle planned that involved the diving gear and the Zeppelin hull...

I'm kind of sad we had no time to include the two, but time and money just ran out at some point.

I liked it. It had it's problems but it also had great moments. The first time I arrived at Twelve Bridges was one of my favorite moments in gaming. I remember around the time MOTD first came out someone was asking if it was a real place, like Stonehenge.