Interview from the gutter – Frédéric Calendini & LoneWolfDS

As a followup to my recommendation to play LoneWolfDS, I hooked up with the game’s creator to ask a few questions, which he generously answered. Frédéric is certainly talented, and the chances look good from his comments that we will see another installment of LoneWolfDS. Also, because he created the music, perhaps Frédéric will treat us with a soundtrack from the game.

Q1: Would you mind introducing yourself, a little bit of your background and interests?

Well, my name is Frédéric Calendini, I’m 34 and live in France. Since I got my first computer (a loooong time ago I’ve always been interested in multimedia productions and video games. Lately I felt like programming something for fun on my spare time, and I thought that the DS might be the ideal platform. That’s how LoneWolfDS was born.

Q2: What is your most significant addition to Aon’s Flight from the Dark HTML gamebook to port it to the DS?

My main goal was to create a video game, but since I wanted to focus more on the technical and visual/musical side of things, I was looking for a ready-to-use material relative to the background scenario. That’s how I found the books written by Joe Dever and converted to HTML by the Project Aon team.

I think then that the most significant addition to the books themselves was adding elements of gameplay that should make them more enjoyable: avoid tedious numbers computations during fights, prevent cheating, handle your inventory and kai disciplines automatically, and everything that could become a fun gameplay element.

Q3: What other additions or changes did you do for the LoneWolfDS?

I wanted to respect the original work from Joe Dever as much as possible, and that was the deal with Project Aon to keep it untouched. So the text is really the original one (except slight modifications in the rules explanations to make them consistent with the DS gameplay). So, my own efforts consisted in trying to put everything together in the most enjoyable way and to make the book available to all those who didn’t know them already.

Q4: Did you do the artwork for LoneWolfDS as well as the coding?

The illustrations you see while browsing the book are taken from the original editions, and drawn by the talented Gary Chalk. There are additional illustrations made by J.C. Alvarez which I took on the Project Aon site and that I found quite good too. Finally the cover was painted by Alberto Dal Lago. The rest was indeed made by me (code, global design and interface).

What gave me the biggest headaches was to figure out how to make everything fit on the DS screen (which is not that big), keeping readability without losing too much eye candy.

I also made the music, which was another fun thing to create (and tricky, given the fact that the DS has only 4 MB of RAM).

Q5: How easily can you reuse the Flight from the Dark framework for another gamebook, such as the die rolling, combat system, character sheet, and inventory?

I made the game engine with other Lone Wolf books in mind. So it’s rather flexible and expandable, but for now it’s still highly related to the Lone Wolf set of rules and gameplay, so adapting it to other gamebooks series might still represent a good amount of work (especially for the inventory layout).

Q6: Do you have any plans to make the code open source?

I will make it open source when I consider I’m done with this project, so other people can continue to work on it and maybe port other books. But right now I want to keep things under control so I’ll focus on my own ports.

Q7: Is there anything that you might do differently or might add for the next installment?

I think the second book will rely on the same mechanics as the first one. Each new book adds some subtleties to the rules and gameplay though, so the more you’ll progress, the more the game will get interesting (hopefully). In later books, things get more complex, so I’ll have to make my engine handle all this. I’d also like composing other tunes to add even more variety to the musical score. Finally I’ll try to implement players suggestions, as long as they stay reasonable.

Q8: When might we see another LoneWolfDS gamebook?

I’ll release a final version of book 1 very soon (the current version was a release candidate), then now that the basic bugs related to various linkers should be ironed out, I’ll begin to work on the second volume. No ETA yet though!

Q9: How has the response been? Do you think getting the word out about DS homebrew like LoneWolfDS is easy or difficult?

Well, to be honest, the feedback I received is just amazing! I would never have imagined that so many people would be so excited by LoneWolfDS. I underestimated one aspect of this project, which is nostalgia for gamebooks, especially the Lone Wolf series. The first release candidate was downloaded around 2,000 times during the first 5 days, which is far beyond my expectations, and I received many mails from fans all over the world. The DS homebrew scene is really a nice, fun and very active community. No need to say I’m now quite motivated for a second book release

Q10: In closing, is there anything you’d like to add or say?

Well, I’d just like to thank the Project Aon team, because without their hard work I would not have been able to create this game. I’d also like to thank all the great people that I met during this project, who helped me on the technical side or tested the game on their DS. And finally to all the people who sent me kind emails and donations, this was really rewarding! ^_^