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Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse interview: Making a point-and-click adventure

What are the challenges of making a point-and-click adventure in 2021? We talk to the team behind Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse to find out.

Ozzie Mejia

April 7, 2021 1:30 PM

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Early 21st century kids likely remember the old-school webcomic, Cyanide & Happiness. They were likely happy to see it return in 2021 in video game form with Freakpocalypse. There were quite a few challenges involved with bringing this game to life. Among those challenges, how does one put together a point-and-click adventure for a 2021 audience? We recently talked to Producer Adam Nusrallah and Assistant Director/Lead Game Designer Roger Barr to find out.

"I think one of the main things that we addressed is, a ways into the project, we realized that we wanted to get rid of the classic bottom menu where you're just clicking on something and always dragging it up to a verb-based interface," Barr told Shacknews. "So we wanted to free up more of the screen space overall, because the more screen space you have, the more things you can interact with and more puzzles and challenges you can have in there.

"One of the things I think that keeps a good number of people away from point-and-click is they're, you know, traditionally with a mouse and a keyboard. You wouldn't really expect to really play that on something like the Nintendo Switch, so we actually have a great interaction system, targeting system, that works with triggers on pretty much any gamepad, controller, or the Switch with the Joy-Cons, so that it'll actually move around the screen instantly to the next object you can interact with, based on where your cursor is at the time. So a lot of those things, it just didn't exist in the past for those classic games, so we just wanted to make it feel good, no matter what you're playing it on and, as a purist who grew up and loves using a mouse and keyboard, I play this game with just an Xbox controller plugged into my PC quite a lot."

Nusrallah and Barr also talk about working with these characters in a video game setting, as opposed to their original webcomic source. The transition looks to have gone well, if our review is any indication. Of course, you'll probably want to check out the comic before diving in yourself. You can find that on Explosm. For more interviews like this, be sure to subscribe to Shacknews and GamerHub.TV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?