Feature: 'GDC: Bang! Howdy: Nuggets and Rustlin’ Tips'

In the latest GDC feature, wearing a ten-gallon hat and freely pouring whiskey, Three Rings CEO Daniel James had originally planned a postmortem examining the wild success of Bang! Howdy. Seeing as how the game hadn't yet shipped, he shifted instead to examining how Puzzle Pirates informed the creation of the soon-to-public-beta Bang! This part of the talk discusses how Bang! happened to veer into view: "At first glance, Bang! Howdy doesn't appear to borrow much from Puzzle Pirates. Rather than the previous effort's isometric, massively-multiplayer, pirate-theme puzzle solving, Bang! uses a new 3D engine to provide what James labels ‘a strategy game with antics'. And this time around, Three Rings is targeting multiplayer, without the massively modifier. The most obvious change in direction, however, is clearly the shift from the pirate motif to an Old West look and feel. Michael Bayne, chief technology officer at Three Rings, confided that moving away from the eye-patch and cutlass world offered in Puzzle Pirates was a pragmatic decision; “One of the reasons we wanted to create a cowboy game was that we were tired of wearing pirate costumes,” explained Bayne. The more sophisticated technology and more complex gameplay of Bang! is intended to overcome one of the most vexing problems of Puzzle Pirates – failure to download. Three Rings hopes that by appealing to a more sophisticated download-savvy audience, they'll convert a much percentage of website hits into download and paying customers." You can now read the full Gamasutra coverage on the matter, including detailed information on this interesting lecture (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).