Greetings, weary Internet traveler! Time for your third dose of Whisper Q & A.

Jimbomonkey asks

Do you want to ride your bicycle?

I would like to ride it where I like.

Do you think it'll be difficult to access susurration.net because "susurration" is a really hard word?

We like to think of it as a way of teaching you new things. Besides, most ways to access Susurration.net will be hyper-links, apart from any link to the site within our non-web-based games. Besides, it's a good way of promoting good spelling and grammar on the site if you're able to type in "susurration" perfectly.

What's Whisper's motto? Is it in Latin?

Well, we're still debating between "wat" and "'Play' is Goal Number 1; 'Enjoy' is a Secondary Goal." A few people kindly pointed out that the latter might be interpreted as showing that we don't care about our end-user target markets. This is obviously not the case. All that's meant by that is that we aim to make sure that you can actually play our games; the enjoyment of doing so is just a happy consequence of that playability.

Challenge: see if you can come up with a better motto for Whisper. Post it in the discussion thread.

Are we planning to attack any other gaming sites just for the hell of it?

I should make it very clear that if any of Susurration.net's members are found to be trolling other game sites and blaming it on us, or trying organize it here, we will not hesitate to separate your ties to the site by way of a ban. Further offenses will results in permanent bans. Whisper promotes friendly and fun discussion and involvement, not outright silliness and crude "lol this gaem suxx, whispers games are much bettr lululul!"

Thankfully you guys are awesome and cuddly and would never do stuff like that.

Which reminds me, if Whisper fanboys start popping up, that's quite cool and we'll appreciate the praise, but we will not condone fanboyism (which pretty much means that you disrespect someone for enjoying a particular game because you happen to have a preference) on the site as it promotes negativity. Moar happy ppl plz.

Cortana Grace asks

Sexy historical references in your games? Deep storyline?

Now that would be telling, of course. I will say that there is most certainly a theme involving a certain type of history, and oh yes, all of our story-based games have a Universe so deep that it you wouldn't just be yelling "oh gosh, the wall of text!" you'd be looking at a real skyscraper.

Yes or no?

I'm going to take that as being a separate question, so I will answer with "Yes."

GamerzGirl asks

One thing that I always was curious about was why Coconuts, and Pies? Why not light bulbs, chinchillas, Planets, or other things?

Do you happen to have something against Coconuts and Pies? I'll assume you are a cake sort of person. Perhaps we'll come full circle with cake later on to satisfy those desires. My personal take on it is that usually when it comes to visual appearance, the less complicated an object or character, the easier it will be for people of all ages to understand what's going on. Obviously this isn't an outright rule, but for mini-games, it's almost an unwritten and unspoken rule that just happens naturally. You'll notice that Coconuts, Pies, Cakes, Planets, Hedgehogs, fat plumbers, pac-eating pizzas with eyes, and geometric tools of war all have a very similar design which can be summarized in one word: simple.

For Pie Collect, CAVX has this to pitch in with:



I think "Pie Collect" has a better ring to it than "Drowner Rescue". Anyway, in reality, the point of the mini-games is to be our area of abstract game design. It's become very apparent to us that games don't need too much realism at all in order to be fun and addictive. Pie Collect is a great example of this. I mean, what other game out there lets you control a sweeper in order to consume pies whilst avoiding giant flashing orbs of doom? No seriously, let us know. We want to play more games like that.

Do the games that you come up with, and develop have a certain meaning behind them?

I guess you could come up with a few metaphorical meanings behind Pie Collect; life's great goal to avoid dangers of the world whilst repeating an endless routine - you know - until you die?
But that's Mini-Games of course. Quiff and Heron have a lot of metaphors, a lot of deep meaning, and a lot of interesting backstory.

I can't discuss too in-depth right now how deep any meaning behind them actually are, for the purpose of keeping spoilers out of the road for now, but I can definitely say that for Quiff, there's a lot more to Quiff and his world than what initially meets the eye.

Badballer asks

How's progress on Heron and Quiff?

Ah, that last question led me quite happily into the next. Good job guys.

Well, progress for both Heron and Quiff are going rather smoothly. Programmers are currently concentrating on Pie Collect in an effort to get the game working well. It's been in an entirely playable state for a long time now, but it's the actual UI that we're interested in perfecting. I have to say, the Picnic Blanket works wonders. It's much rarer than the Orb-Away, but when it appears, the combination of the animation and the actual functionality just makes it one of the better features.

As for Quiff, levels have been laid out, the storyline completed. The artists are currently working on fleshing out enemies and level-appearances, whilst the coders are prepping themselves for the code. I'm currently working on painting rough layouts of the levels in Photoshop, and then importing them into Flash to play-test with the prototype builds Legoroy programmed earlier last year. Now that's a lot of fun; being able to immediately playtest entire levels that you can tweak ever so slightly and instantly jump right back to see how that plays instead. Very rewarding.

Heron is blistering forwards with the speed of a very . . . fast . . . thing. The Universe Bible has been fleshed out to the point that most men would have gone mad by now, the enemies and gameplay have been designed. The next task is to flesh out the design of the actual levels within the game, which is currently precisely 50% complete. Mission objectives, difficulty curve, all that fun stuff.

We're still debating whether to continue on with the idea in mind that these are Indie Games, or go for broke and pitch for XBLA. We'll decide that towards the end, depending on our thoughts on how good we think the games are going to be. We obviously think they're going to be amazing, but there's a big gap between "Indie Game" good, and "Arcade Game" professionalism.

A lot of you are asking: "What happened to the Website update that CAVX was planning for January?"

Well, you used the right word there; "planning". One of the key aspects (probably the most important thing) about Whisper is that any and all work is done when each Emp has time to commit.
We've all had a rather busy past couple of months, but rest assured, work is definitely flowing (with both game and web development), just at a slower pace than we'd originally anticipated, but what's been done so far for the website update is already a rather monumental chunk of work for completely reworking the whole site.

Thanks for the questions again, guys! Feel free to add more to the Q & A thread in the Theater, and we'll see you again next time.

And remember, we think about you guys every day. Not a second goes by . . .