Her Majesty's SPIFFING
| Her Majesty's SPIFFING | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Studio | Billy Goat Entertainment | ||
| Publisher | Billy Goat Entertainment | ||
| Senior Developer | William Barr | ||
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
December 7, 2016 | ||
| platform | Android , iOS , Linux , Macintosh , Microsoft Windows , Nintendo Switch , PlayStation 4 , Xbox One | ||
| Game engine | Unity | ||
| genre | Adventure | ||
| medium | Download | ||
| language | English | ||
| Age rating |
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Her Majesty's spiffing (in German as: The spiffing Her Majesty , with spiffing is an abbreviation that as rigging can be read) is a computer game of the Northern Ireland developer Billy Goat Entertainment. The first episode of the three-part adventure appeared in 2016.
action
After Brexit, the UK is falling into chaos and isolation. Queen Elizabeth II exercises her sovereignty , dissolves parliament and takes power to restore the kingdom to its old size. Since it seems to be too expensive to reclaim British colonial times zones on the Earth's surface, the Queen (initiates the space agency spiffing Special Planetary Investigative Force For Inhabiting New Galaxies about, in German Special Planetary Research troops for colonization New galaxies ) to an intergalactic British Empire to found. The HMSS Imperialise 2 with Captain Frank Lee English and the Wales- born sub-lieutenant Aled Jones on board is sent out to find suitable planets for colonization. The player takes on the role of English.
English and Jones discover a planet that seems suitable for colonization. After landing, both of them discover that the planet is already being claimed by France: The French astronaut Antoine and his trained gorilla Pierre were there before the English and have taken possession of the planet. English succeeds in driving the French off the planet. Americans who land a little later and who also have colonization intentions recognize British rule over the planet and turn back.
Game principle and technology
Her Majesty's SPIFFING is a third person 3D adventure game. The three-dimensional gaming environment is of the Unity - Engine calculated in real time. The player controls the character through the game world with the mouse. Objects with which the character can interact are highlighted when the mouse is moved over them. In this state, a context menu consisting of icons and grouped around the mouse pointer can be called up with a right click, with the help of which objects can be examined, recorded, manipulated or combined with objects from the player's inventory. Communication with NPCs is also possible using the context menu . Dialogues are controlled by a single choice selection of topics given by the game that fit the situation. As the story progresses, more locations will be unlocked.
The voice output of the game is only in English. The game offers a switch to US English, but this is only expressed in the fact that, in the opinion of the developers, canned laughs are played in connection with what the developers think were funny dialogues , as has been common on US television since the 1950s. If desired, the game can display subtitles for the dialogues, which are available in five languages.
Production notes
The development studio Billy Goat Entertainment, based in Belfast, Northern Ireland , originally produced animated films for advertising agencies. To finance the production of Her Majesty's SPIFFING , the studio launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Kickstarter platform in November 2013 . However, the campaign failed because of the targeted 30,000 pounds just under 12,000 pounds were obtained support.
In October 2014, the studio started another Kickstarter campaign to help fund the game, again with the goal of raising £ 30,000. As part of the second campaign, a demo was published that gave an impression of the design of the game that went beyond screenshots . The second campaign was successful and raised nearly £ 34,000 in support. Further financial contributions were made by the Northern Irish film development agency Northern Ireland Screen and the business development agency Invest Northern Ireland. The release of the game has been announced by Billy Goat Entertainment for September 2015. The actual publication took place in December 2016.
In a narrative sense, William Barr originally planned a main character who, similar to the computer games Portal or The Stanley Parable, should only serve as an anonymous projection of the player's actions. In the course of developing the plot, however, it became apparent that the character of the captain offered too much potential for this approach, so that he was endowed with his own personality.
The game is divided into three episodes that will be released one after the other. The part of the game published in 2016 only includes the first episode called The Empire Staggers Back (in German about Das Imperium Taumelt Rück ). In May 2017 the same was released for mobile devices with the Android and iOS operating systems . Since then, the game has been silent. As part of the successful crowdfunding campaign in 2014, over a third of the supporters had purchased a so-called season pass with their financial contribution , a right to access to episodes 2 and 3. The developer studio has not yet commented on the release dates of the other episodes. In terms of content, the company revealed in a campaign update on Kickstarter that the second episode takes place on another planet, where Captain English and Aled are supposed to bring “Western values” and democracy closer to the natives there.
reception
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Her Majesty's SPIFFING received mixed ratings. The Metacritic review database aggregates reviews of various media to an average of 60 ( PC version) to 74 ( PS4 version) points, depending on the system . The trade magazine Adventure-Treff praised the “nice to look at” graphics and the humor of the game and pointed out that although it was developed for the PlayStation 4 , the controls work well on the console as well as on a PC . However, the magazine gave a mediocre rating due to the small size of the game: The majority of the game takes place in the spaceship of the protagonists, this is only a few rooms in size, and the total playing time is only two hours. The interesting approaches to the story could not unfold in this way, and the player would have the feeling of having received an unfinished game. The German-language games magazine Man! Ac drew comparisons to the adventure games from the US company Telltale Games . Editor Fabiola Günzl commented positively on the game's humor, which is made up of “amusing dialogues” and “crazy comical allusions” and evokes memories of films by the British comedian group Monty Python . In fact, game designer William Barr cites Monty Python and the British TV series Blackadder as the inspiration for the script for Her Majesty's SPIFFING . Man! Ac criticized the undemanding nature of the puzzles. The British daily The Guardian found Her Majesty's SPIFFING “a declaration of love” to the point-and-click genre and at the same time a modernization of the same. The game has a “witty script and dry political humor” that rounds out the situation in particular to target Brexit . The English-language trade magazine AdventureGamers found Her Majesty's SPIFFING “packed full of puns , pop culture allusions, clichés and metaphors” and praised the game's graphics. The magazine drew comparisons to the animated film series Wallace & Gromit and described the operation of the game as "unusual". AdventureGamers also criticized the very short playing time, which made it impossible for the story to unfold.
In 2017, Her Majesty's SPIFFING won the Industry Awards of the Independent Game Developers' Association in the “Creativity and Heritage Award” category, beating games like Total War: Warhammer II or RuneScape .
Web links
- Her Majesty's SPIFFING at MobyGames (English)
- Trailer on YouTube
Individual evidence
- ↑ Unity.com: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 15, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Gamasutra.com: Game Design Deep Dive: Rethinking adventure games to create empathy. Retrieved January 20, 2019 .
- ↑ Kickstarter.com: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 20, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Kickstarter.com: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 22, 2019 .
- ↑ Kickstarter.com: Looking ahead. Retrieved January 27, 2019 .
- ↑ AdventureCorner.de: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 24, 2019 .
- ↑ a b AdventureGamers.com: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 27, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Adventure-Treff.de: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 20, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Maniac.de: Her Majesty's SPIFFING - in the test. Retrieved January 22, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Metacritic.com: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 20, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Metacritic.com: Her Majesty's SPIFFING. Retrieved January 20, 2019 .
- ↑ Adventure Corner: Interview: Her Majesty's Spiffing (from 0:02:25) on YouTube , December 5, 2016, accessed on January 25, 2018.
- ↑ TheGuardian.com: Games reviews roundup: Her Majesty's Spiffing, Super Mario Run, Don Bradman Cricket 17. Accessed January 24, 2019 .
- ↑ TIGA.org: 2017 Winners. Retrieved January 23, 2019 .