Keepsake Wrap Report

Key Strengths

One of the key strengths of Keepsake is clearly its unique fantasy setting and mood. From the music to the graphics, I believe we did a fantastic job of creating a strong, distinctive atmosphere that really draws you into the game. You really feel the vastness and emptiness of this place. It also serves as a differentiating aspect of the game since not many adventure titles use this kind of setting.

Creating a game with such a close-knit team was a very good experience. One of the reasons for this is that you can touch on many subjects and have tremendous opportunity to learn in various domains.

Another key strength is that even though adventure games are usually very linear, we also did a really good job keeping the progression as non-linear as possible. You can visit a wide array of places, trigger story elements, and solve puzzles in any order that you want. There are few requirements to access various places in the gameworld, and most of them are just to keep the game from seeming too large and to make sure the player doesn't feel lost of overwhelmed.

The deep and focused story also ended up as a really strong part of the game. This is something we tried very hard to do, and that proved very challenging to get just right. The interaction between the two main characters played off nicely all throughout the game. It's also very rare to find this kind of beautiful, melancholic, nostalgic story in games where things seem to skew more towards explosions and high-octane excitement.

Areas for Improvement

The two biggest areas for improvement are the character animations and the lack of more varied environments. Even though Keepsake features a very large environment, it is still all within the Dragonvale Academy and its close surroundings. This can appear limiting for some adventure fans; however, we aimed to make Dragonvale appear grand and spacious. Including a few satellite locations to add a little more variety to the places the characters visit would perhaps have made it more interesting.

The other area for improvement is related to the character animations. This came as a side effect of being such a small team. A little more time to focus on them and motion capture equipment would have brought more realism to the characters; however, we think they still look pretty good. This is something we will definitely pay more attention to in the future.

Lessons Learned

Keepsake has been such a great learning experience on every level. Among the things we learned was to really put a stronger emphasis on creating testing tools throughout the duration of development. Even though we made a point of always fixing bugs as we discovered them, when testing with multiple people started, too many glitches that could have been prevented or found other ways popped up. This ate up a huge chunk of development time towards the end of the schedule that we would much rather have spent elsewhere.

A slightly less obvious yet overlooked aspect that we learned about was buying better high-end computers. Because of our self-financing status, we always strived for more efficient spending, which meant buying different computer parts and putting them together ourselves. This turned out to cause various troubles that eerily followed Murphy's Law by arriving at the worst possible times, in the worst possible ways. Needless to say, next time around, we'll be going for brand name computers, especially considering how little we actually saved by buying cheaper.

Something we learned related more to the game itself was that the player spends too much time walking from one location to another, sometimes with too little to do in between because of the large, continuous size of the Dragonvale Academy. I think people would prefer being able to do more things in the various locations they visit as well as having perhaps slightly less back and forth between some places.

Audience Response

We have seen mainly two kinds of response to the game from media and gamers alike, and it is exactly what we expected. People who see and expect a story-driven, immersive adventure game have responded very favorably and have enjoyed it quite a lot. Those who tend to expect action with rocket launchers or a hardcore role-playing experience are, of course, disappointed, and will see this as something of a throwback game. We were also pleasantly surprised by how well adventure gaming sites around the net received the story and the fantasy setting. It is incredibly rewarding to see all of our hard work received this way and certainly encourages us to keep going.

Personal Thoughts

Creating a game with such a close-knit team was a very good experience. One of the reasons for this is that you can touch on many subjects and have tremendous opportunity to learn in various domains. But it is also a double-edged sword in that we all had many more responsibilities, and we had to deal with the pressure of creating the entire game all by ourselves. Although I still hope we can grow to make games with a larger scope, we have had tremendous fun creating and designing Keepsake. We hope you'll enjoy playing it as much as we did creating it! Cheers!

Mathieu Rivest

Technical Director, Keepsake

Wicked Studios

[Wrap Reports are intended to complement reviews by providing a post-release viewpoint that often isn't seen, the developer's. Since introducing this format in November of 2003, it has been our pleasure to publish quite a few, primarily within the RPG and online world categories, with selected action and strategy games also represented. A complete list of the previous ones may be found on the next page. - Ed.]