Part 25: Blackwell Convergence - Introduction

The Blackwell Convergence

Unused Theme Music

You may as well have some music to listen to while I set the scene here. The theme music linked above ended up not being used, though Regin quite liked it and uses it as an example of his work on his webpage.

So, welcome to the third game in the Blackwell series! I would say we're halfway done, but the reality is the third and fourth games are longer than the first two. The fourth, in particular, will likely be longer than the first two combined. So let's say we're around one third done!

So what is The Blackwell Convergence? After The Blackwell Legacy was a commercial success, Dave Gilbert set out to produce a sequel that would satisfy his new fans. Legacy was short, by design, but the plan was to make Convergence quite large. As I mentioned earlier, the original idea was for a scene in the game to remind Joey of a case thirty years prior, and for a flashback scene involving Lauren to occur. However, as time progressed, it became clear that Convergence was just going to take too long to make.

Gilbert's original announcement was that Convergence would ship in March 2008, roughly eighteen months after Legacy. The reality is Gilbert lost the first six months to interviews and other such media before work even began. There were a number of other events and issues that arose. The first was that Gilbert was approached by PlayFirst, a game publishing company looking to work with indie developers. They ended up obtaining funding for Gilbert to write and produce Emerald City Confidential, an adventure game based in the land of Oz (as in Wizard of Oz). Gilbert dedicated a lot of time to this project, which is reasonable given it was the first time he was receiving funding from a source other than his own bank account. However, it meant that work on Convergence ground to a halt. As it became clear the 2008 date would not see Convergence's release, Gilbert figured he should release a stop-gap game to maintain interest in the series, which ended up being Unbound.

Emerald City Confidential eventually shipped in early 2009, though the majority of Gilbert's involvement had completed midway through 2008. With his work on that game (and Unbound) all but finished, he returned his attention to Convergence, where the second issue arose. Many of the people he had used to produce Legacy were no longer available. The artist lead were unavailable, and the lead voice actor for Rosa had gone on to other creative pursuits as the award-winning head writer for The Witcher. Fortunately composed Thomas Regin remained available to write the score for Convergence. Gilbert had a bunch of art assets from the previous two games, but the new artists he brought on board had a different style which clashed with the original. Eventually the decision was made to scrap all of the old art and start anew. At the same time, Gilbert decided to push for increased production values overall.

In the end, Convergence shipped in the middle of 2009, which is a reasonable turnaround given that Unbound came out in late 2007, but obviously it was a long way off the March 2008 that was originally promised.

There was another change occurring around this time - the methods of distributing games had changed from 2006, with the rise of Steam, and other such platforms. Gilbert did not at this stage have enough money to hire a head marketing person, so he did the marketing himself, which he later admitted was a mistake. By the time the fourth game in the series was released, Wadjet Eye had enough money in coming from the earlier games and their other projects to allow him to hire a proper marketing person who eventually succeeded in getting Steam to distribute the four Blackwell games. However, in 2009 things were less rosey. Gilbert claims that by the time the additional production costs for Convergence were taken into account, he didn't make any more profits out of it than he did for Legacy, despite spending several times as long on the project.

One of Gilbert's more fascinating attempts at drumming up interest in the series was the commission of two short Blackwell cartoons, which did the rounds on Youtube and other such video sites. You should check them out:

Blackwell Cartoon 1 : On The Town
Blackwell Cartoon 2 : Television

The cartoons feature dialogue between Joey and Rosa as they begin to explore their new co-existence, complete with the official voice actors (it was the debut of Whittaker voicing Rosa), though the animation was outsourced to a professional studio. This did limit the amount of material Gilbert could get produced, since he was effectively paying a figure per minute of animation. He once claimed to have had three cartoons made, but I can only find two of them, including on Wadjet Eye's official Youtube page. Not sure if he just made a mistake, or if the third one is lost to the ether somewhere. The cartoons are kind of funny, though nothing special. Gilbert later commented that he liked the cartoons, but with no idea what to do with them other than post them on Youtube and Newsgrounds, they didn't end up really creating a buzz and were probably a waste of money that could have been better spent on something more productive.



So anyway, that's a lot of background on how Convergence was produced. How does it actually play? Well, it plays fairly well. The portraits are back to stay, which is very welcome for the purposes of this SSLP. Another major change is that, after being unhappy with the notebook system of puzzle solving, Gilbert decided to drop the combining clues system altogether, only using the notebook clues as prompters in dialogue sequences. This makes the game flow a bit better, but does make some sections easier than they would have otherwise been. The game is quite pretty, probably comparable in quality (though not style) to Curse of Monkey Island. The music continues to be of a high standard, with Regin writing most of the music for Convergence and Unbound at the same time (he was brought on the project before Gilbert made the decision to split the game into two), and the voice acting is strong across the board. Whittaker's debut as Rosa was extremely well-received, and rightfully so. When he eventually remade Legacy, Gilbert noted in his commentary that in his mind, Whittaker is the true voice of Rosa even though she wasn't the original.

The story itself is fairly well done too, though obviously I'll leave the details for the updates. As I mentioned, the story in Unbound was originally written to serve as a kind of backstory for Convergence, so there will be some related threads throughout.

Rosa and Joey themselves have now been together for around six months. It's still early days in their relationship, but they have come to a decent understanding of one another. Being forced to step out of her comfort zone on a regular basis has helped Rosa to mature, and she's a little less awkward in this game, although she's still endearingly dorky. Some reviewers actually complained that Rosa was more functional in Convergence than in Legacy (remember that our first puzzle in Legacy was to force a dog to interrupt Nishanthi because Rosa was scared of the crowd), but I think the change is a positive one. Gilbert describes the modification of the character as "accenuating more of Rosa's positives, while still maintaining the negatives."

We'll get started on the game tomorrow! Hope you're all looking forward to it! I know I am!


Edit: With us now entering our third game, there is plenty of material for any of you creative types out there to come up with some original content for this thread. One of my goals for this thread is to see at least a couple of pieces of fanart Surprise me, folks!