We’ll be working on a review for MacGuffin’s Curse, so I got in touch with Andrew Goulding to talk a bit about the game. Come check it out!
PS4B: Hi! Good to have you back with us. How’s everything on your end?
Things are ticking along fine here. Warp Frontier just had a Chinese translation release for the Lunar New Year, and I’m working on getting a German translation released in a month or so. Reviews are still coming in for Warp Frontier, so it’s very much a game that has a slower burn than the ones I released ten years ago, but there’s less of a drop-off on activity. I’ve been very disciplined about not going crazy and putting it on any sales at a deep discount (the most has been the launch discount of 10%), so hopefully, the people that supported it early feel validated that the game has not chased that Steam sale money too soon.
PS4B: On that note, you’re getting ready for next month’s release of MacGuffin’s Curse. What can you tell us about this game?
MacGuffin’s Curse is a werewolf comedy puzzle adventure that is inspired by classic Nintendo games of the 90s. It’s Brawsome’s second game and was first released in 2012. At the time, it was fortunate enough to win an award for Best Game Writing at the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in 2011 and was selected to be in the PAX 10 at the inaugural PAX Australia. After the release of Warp Frontier, I took the opportunity to use some of the downtime to update MacGuffin’s Curse from a ten-year-old Unity project with the main goal of getting it on the N Nintendo Switch because I’ve always wanted to see it on a Nintendo console. The game is my second comedic release and is quite narrative-heavy with a large cast of quirky characters, branching dialogue, and quests. The core of the game is a unique twist on Sokoban-style puzzles featuring the ability to shift between human and werewolf forms to solve puzzle rooms.
PS4B: It’s a very different game from Warp Frontier! It’s been almost ten years since the game’s original release on Steam, so I was wondering how much it’s changed for its Nintendo Switch debut.
The game core is very much still the same. The graphics have had an HD remaster, and it’s been updated to support widescreens. It looks great at 1080p on a big TV – If I do say so myself! I fixed some very ancient bugs that may or may not have been in the original, with a lot of changes due to the versions of Unity. I’m also taking the opportunity to re-release this version on Steam at the same time and add Linux to the PC and Mac versions. It’s very likely the 10-year-old Mac version no longer works on any new OS, so hopefully, this version will stay backwards compatible a while longer.
PS4B: With MacGuffin’s Curse ready for launch in March, what are the odds of Jolly Rover also getting a Nintendo Switch release later in the year?
Oh wow, you really went back a while! I absolutely love Jolly Rover, and it still sells fairly well today. Making a new build of that for PC and Mac isn’t terribly challenging, but porting it to the Nintendo Switch is what I’d call a real port. Porting something to a new platform on Unity is a breeze by comparison. If I were to do a port to the Nintendo Switch, I guess I would spend around three months of effort, and going by the current sales, it is unlikely to be worth it from a financial standpoint. That being said, if MacGuffin’s Curse does well on Nintendo’s console, I think I would be very open to bringing the resolution up to 1080p and doing a re-release on desktop and Switch (including Linux!).
PS4B: Anything else you might want to add before we go?
I played through MacGuffin’s Curse several times to validate the game on the Nintendo Switch and desktop, and I have to say, I think it holds up really well today. I know I’m horribly biased, but I really think the writing, graphics, puzzles, and story are as good now as they were back then. It feels like the kind of game that could easily be newly released now. I strongly urge anyone to pick up the demo and try it out. I know it’s not going to appeal to everyone, but I think the game is solid and definitely going to find some new people to give it some love.
