Hi, folks! Today we’re having a serious sit-down with Heather Hazen, producer with the Video Games Platform group at PopCap Games and maker of Peggle XBLA!
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Bjorn Unicorn: Hi, Heather. How’s it going?
Heather Hazen: Hi, Bjorn, great to see you. Your horn’s very shiny today.
BU: Thanks. I polished it special just for this interview! So, what’s producing like?
H: Basically, I just had a bunch of people on my team and I had to make sure they were doing what they were assigned… other than that I didn’t really do anything. Basically I just manned the ship and steered in the right direction and everybody else does the heavy lifting.
B: Sort of like… a couple of weeks ago I spoke with Matt Johnston, so a similar role to that, then.
HH: Very much similar to that, except Matt doesn’t like rainbows as much as me so he’s not nearly as good at his job.
BU: How does Peggle XBLA differ from other forms of Peggle?
HH: Well, first and foremost, you can play it over Live…
BU: GASP!
HH: ... meaning that you can play with up to four of your friends or rivals on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s called Peg Party, and you can basically see what’s going on with everybody else’s board while you’re playing them, and you can get a pretty good idea of what their shots are like, and you have a scoring rollup at the end of each round.
BU: So this is like a field of battle for you and your friends, you can prove your Peggle supremacy over the Internet.
HH: Yeah, a field of battle, with lots of pretty flowers, and rainbows, and beer.
BU: You can deliver, say, verbal beat-downs to your friends.
HH: Yeah, yeah, we have… it’s a voice-enabled mode, so if you have a XBLA headset you can just plug it right in and talk crap against whoever you’re playing against.
BU: Neat!
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That’s it for today, but come back tomorrow for problems of game adaptation and details on the real-time “Challenge the Masters” event! And forget neither the Peggle Art Contest nor the Peggle Daily Sweepstakes!