Every Snapshot will see us ask five questions of a game developer, hopefully providing you with a little insight into what they do and why they do it. Also, we show you their desk.

First up, we have this guy. He made Puzzle Quest.

Who Are You?
My name is Steve Fawkner. I’m the CEO and Creative Lead at Infinite Interactive. It’s my job to come up with the crazy ideas for our games, and also to try and take credit for other peoples’ crazy ideas when they’re better than mine (which is frequently the case).

What Work Did You Do Today?
I spent most of today helping one of our teams add our cutscene system to their project. I made them a small example scene with a huge Daemon asking for Ice Cream. Other than that, it was the usual round of Production/Design meetings to make sure all of our projects are on track.

How’d You Get Your Job?
I started Infinite Interactive about 20 years ago, so I guess I promoted myself to my current position.

What’s The Last Game You Played And How Was It?
The last game I played was Assassin’s Creed. I’d been meaning to play it for about a year, but finally got around to it last weekend. Technically, it’s just a beautiful game. I’m not averse to a bit of subtle assassination either.

What’s On Your Desk?
Surprisingly little gaming paraphernalia, but lots of empty Red Bull cans, and every designer’s friend, the Thesaurus!

(Note the crazy herbal drink from Sweden and the D&D Monster Manual, a blatant clue that they’re not yet done with exploring fantasy worlds – Ed.)

If you’re a game developer who’d like to be featured in Snapshot, we’d love to hear from you. Just answer the above questions and send us a photo of yourself and your desk.

Last month, Namco Bandai announced plans to turn Puzzle Quest and Oneechanbara publisher D3Publisher into a subsidiary. Today, the plan went into action.

At the time, Namco Bandai already had deals to score up to 70% of the company, with plans to go for full ownership. As of this morning, they’d bought 95.02% of D3’s company shares at $628 a pop for a total buyout value of $12.55 million, according to Japan’s Nikkei newspaper.

D3 Publisher’s Publicity Manager, Tamara Sanderson Low, emailed Kotaku the following statement:

Bandai Namco Games, owned by Bandai Namco Holding Inc, plans to acquire 100% of D3, Inc., and its subsidiaries D3Publisher of America and D3Publisher of Europe. D3Publisher operations will remain unchanged at this time. Development of our current and unannounced titles is ongoing and will move forward as planned. D3Publisher is thrilled to join forces with Bandai Namco Games to further strengthen their position in the US and European marketplaces and continue to make quality games that gamers will enjoy.

I guess the era of hostile takeovers is gone, what with the depression and stuff. Does this mean we’ll be seeing Puzzle Quest: Naruto next?

Namco Bandai To Acquire Game Developer D3 [Nikkei - subscription required]

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix ships today for the Nintendo DS and PC, with the Xbox Live Arcade version dropping tomorrow, and D3 Publisher releases a trailer a bit too epic for a puzzle game.

It’s not so much the visuals in the Galactrix launch trailer that get to me, as they seem to have taken their own concept art and just moved it about on the screen using… I dunno, Powerpoint? Primitive, but it works well enough for a game that straddles the line between casual and hardcore gaming so very well.

No, I think it’s the music. The sweeping, space opera music, struggling to maintain its epic feel, while in the background the actually gameplay makes little bleeps and bloops. Of course it won’t stop me from picking up a copy, but I can’t help but giggle a little. Bloop.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix doesn’t simply stick you in one ship and send you off against the universe. The game allows you to collect and customise more than 30 different ships across seven different categories, allowing you to tailor your three-ship fleet to fit any situation.

Check out the descriptions of the various ship classes below, along with some rather lovely screens and concept art to get you in the mood for next week’s release.

Warships

Trident Battleship, Vortraag Destroyer, Trident Gunship, Vortraag Cruiser, Trident Warship

These ships have large reserves of Red Energy, useful for outfitting with lasers and missiles. They focus on directly damaging an opponent. It’s always good to keep one of these heavy-hitting ships in your fleet for when you find that inevitable boss fight! Take care with some items like Mines and Minelayers though, because they can sometimes do as much harm as good.

Fast Ships

Acheron Ghostship, MRI Blade, Cy-Tech Botship, Cy-Tech Needle

These are useful ships to have if you plan on spending a lot of time running away from encounters or smuggling contraband. Of course PSI Power will also let you escape your enemies so you may choose to concentrate on that instead. Keep in mind that many of the fast ships are also small, so you may be in trouble if you get caught. If you can manage to obtain an Acheron Ghostship though, you should be able to outfit it with quite a bit of equipment.

Science Ships

Lumina Archive, MRI Science Station, Lumina Warship, Lumina Cruiser

These ships have a large amount of Green Energy, representing the massive computer systems they have on board. Green Energy is useful for buffing your own ship, so Science vessels are often good defensive ships to keep around when fighting some big enemy capital ships. A science vessel with auto-repair functionality can last a very long time in combat.

Cargo Ships

Elysian Ferry, Jahrwoxi Homeship, Standard Hauler

If you want to make your fortune mining, then it is worthwhile to reserve one or more slots for these behemoths. Your cargo capacity is determined by adding together the capacity of each ship in your fleet, so it is never a waste to keep Cargo Ships around. Although these ships are not good in combat, they will save you the effort of constantly visiting distant stations to get the best prices for your cargo.

Long Range Ships

Cy-Tech Missile Array, Quesadan Lightship

These Ships have a high reserve of Yellow Energy. This is very useful for manipulating the board and can be a great way of denying a specific enemy the energy he needs to activate his most powerful items. In fact it is often worth keeping a long-range vessel and occasionally customising it on the fly before a battle with a tricky opponent. Keep an eye out for Thrusters, Waves and Transformers that can be outfitted to these ships to target various gem types in play.

Capital Ships

Lumina Archive, Trident Battleship, Gamma Sphere

These ships have 8 item slots and can be literally filled with all sorts of items. They are often slow, but also have good cargo capacity, so you probably want as many of these in your fleet as possible. However they are very expensive to buy, and even if you can find the plans it is very difficult to build one yourself!

Well-Balanced Ships

MRI Mindship, All Soulless Ships,

These ships are obviously very versatile. Your biggest problem is locating one or finding all the cargo necessary to create one yourself.

A free version of Puzzle Quest for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been submitted to iTunes and should be hitting the App Store next week.

Even better, TransGaming tells me that Chapter 2 of the iPhone trilogy will be released for free to owners of the original iPhone title as an update. The free update should be hitting in the next week or two and will include another 20 hours of gameplay for people who purchased Chapter 1.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, now may be the time. Fahey seemed to love it.

D3publisher takes the award-winning combination of roleplaying game and gem-based puzzler and brings it to the iPhone with Puzzle Quest: The Battle of Grulkar.

Rather than release the entire game in one large chunk, D3 and TransGaming instead decided to split the original Puzzle Quest and its expansion, Bane of the Plague Lord, into three more manageable chunks, releasing the first one with a lowered level cap on Apple’s iTunes App Store for the premium price of US$9.99. Does the price match what is essentially one-third of a much larger title, or are players better off playing the versions already released on consoles and dedicated gaming portables?

Loved
The Game Remains The Same: This is still the same Puzzle Quest that I’ve played through a dozen times, with an extra shot of touchscreen support. The combination of jewel-matching puzzles with roleplaying game concepts like spells, experience points, and stats is just as compelling and addictive as it was the first time I got my hands on the Nintendo DS version of the game.

A Nice-Sized Chunk: Despite being only half of the original Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords game, The Battle of Grulkar still manages to deliver a great deal of gameplay for a relatively modest price. You not only get half of the main quest, which is a good 18 to 20 hours worth of puzzle battles, you can also continue playing once the story ends, leveling up to 25 (the original cap was 50), conquering cities, capturing monsters, and developing new items and spells in preparation for the release of part two.

Hated
Big Fingers Need Not Apply: The main issue with the porting of Puzzle Quest to the iPhone is that the menus and indeed playing the actual game itself can be frustrating with the tiny touch targets presented. While touching worked on the Nintendo DS with a stylus, having to hit impossibly small menu buttons with the tip of your finger, especially with fingers as large as mine, gets old fast. The game seems a bit more forgiving in terms of actually moving gems during battle, but you still have to play pretty close attention to what you are doing in order to avoid screw ups.

A lot have fuss has been made over the price of Puzzle Quest: Grulkar, which gives you half of a $14.99 game for $9.99. At first glance it seems like a bit of a rip off, but when you take into account the fact that TransGaming has included the four additional classes that so far have only appeared in the Xbox 360 downloadable expansion Bane of the Plague Lord, which was included in the recently released PlayStation 3 version. With D3Publisher having confirmed that the next two installments would be at a lower price, it isn’t quite as bad a deal as people had feared.

For those of you who’ve not yet experienced the sublime melding of roleplaying and puzzle genres that Puzzle Quest delivers, Puzzle Quest: The Battle of Grulkar is still one hell of a game, and the perfect title to hide on your strictly-for-business iPhone.

Puzzle Quest: The Battle of Grulkar was developed by TransGaming and published byD3Publisher, released on December 23rd, 2008 for iPhone and iPod Touch. Retails for US$9.99. Played game once to completion. Reviewed version 1.1.

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Finally. PuzzleQuest just hit the App Store so iPhone and Touch owners can get their game on over the holidays. But what’s this? It’s the first of a trilogy?

PuzzleQuest: Chapter 1 – Battle of Gruulkar sells for a mighty US$10 and is described as the first chapter in the trilogy of the Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords for the Apple portables.

Each chapter will include the ability to store characters, spells and high scores so you can carry your character from chapter to chapter. This first 68 meg or so download is said to include about 20 hours of gameplay culminating in a battle with Gruulkar, leader of the Orcs.

What the game’s description is not clear about is whether this is a new story or if we’re getting the same game, only doled out in three $10 chunks. That would sort of suck if it were true.

[Thanks Veselov ]

Weir takes a reasonably detailed look at how designers successfully married RPG and match 3 elements, and why Puzzle Quest is the best example of a well deployed hybrid design. He offers the following words for designers:

When creating genre-spanning games, developers should follow Puzzle Quest’s example. They should choose genres that can interact well with each other, and look at places where the tropes of one genre can be exploited, as with Puzzle Quest’s use of puzzle gameplay as a battle system.

Additionally, developers should not fall into the trap of believing that the novelty of genre fusion will make players forgive a shoddy implementation of the individual genres. An FPS/RPG hybrid need not be the best FPS or the best RPG, but it should present each genre in a way that it could at least hold its own against single-genre games. Combining shoddy implementations of two genres does not lead to a single good game, but a sort of shambling Frankenstein’s monster. Puzzle Quest, on the other hand, is a true hybrid, taking two well-executed genre games and combining them into an even better whole.

Anyways, nice quick read on a nice game — Weir has some interesting points on the implementation of various design elements.

‘The Interactive Palette’ – Puzzle Quest and the Best of Both Worlds [GameSetWatch]

Now about Puzzle Quest: Galactrix, D3….

Tokyo Game Show 2008 [D3P via PS3Fanboy

She’s like the most hardcore Puzzle Quest player you’ve ever meet. She’s finished it six times now, [been through] the expansion pack twice with four different characters – one of them she completely maxed out to level 50 and unlocked everything in the game.

When your mum gives you a pat on the shoulder and says “that’s nice dear” she’s being polite. But this? Yeah Steve, your mum is addicted.

The PALGN Podcast, Episode 42 [PALGN]