Tell us about yourselves and the company. When did you start the company and why?

Hi, my name is Tristan Lambert and I'm one of the three founding members of Vertigo Games BV. Vertigo is an independent game development studio located in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Our company was founded in 2008 because at the time we felt nobody was doing what we wanted to be doing: creating original high quality games for Christian audiences.

Tell us about the Adam\'s Venture series. How long have you been working on it? How many episodes will there be? When are the release dates? What is the story?

I love telling stories, so allow me to start with that part of your question:

Adam Venture, a young explorer from the 1920\'s, stumbles upon a collection of ancient scrolls which pinpoint the exact location of the Garden of Eden. He realizes the immense implications of this discovery and embarks on an expedition, which is funded by the Clairvaux Corporation, to find out if there\'s any truth in these writings. This sets of a series of events which eventually takes Adam to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, in times of great unrest: the Clairvaux Corporation is ignoring all religious considerations and digging for King Solomon\'s treasure. Something\'s got to be done, and in his own clumsy way Adam tries to find out what that "something" is...

We\'ve been working on the Adam\'s Venture series from the very start of Vertigo Games, and have committed ourselves to finishing at least three episodes. "The Search for the Lost Garden", our first episode, has already been released. The second episode will be called "Solomon\'s Secret" and is scheduled to be released in Q1 2011. The release date for the third episode is still unknown at this point, but we\'re expecting to announce this soon after the release of episode II.

Was Adam\'s Venture inspired by a game or a movie? 

Certainly. For my part, I\'ve drawn inspiration from several games and movies I loved to watch or play when I was a child. Oh, who am I kidding: I still love them! Movies like "Indiana Jones", "The Mummy" and "Star Wars", games such as "Syberia" and "Riven"...they have all been an inspiration to me. Instead of telling a complicated story badly, all of these titles succeed in telling a simple story right: and that\'s something I greatly admire. Also a certain "Book" was quite inspiring, of course.

Who is the target audience/gamer?

That\'s one of the things that makes Adam\'s Venture stand out, I think. Because we\'ve incorporated Biblical themes we feel the game will especially appeal to gamers with a Christian background. Also, we\'re probably the first studio to make an old school adventure game using the Unreal Engine, so if you like the way that sounds...Adam\'s Venture might just be the game for you.

Do you plan on releasing a demo?

We have created a small tech demo for a Dutch developers festival, but we\'re not planning to release it to the public. Frankly, for such a small studio as our own, we feel gamers are better off if we put all of the effort that goes into a demo towards making Adam\'s Venture a better game.

Have you implemented everything you wanted in Adam\'s Venture? Is it everything you hoped it would be or better?

I sure hope not! Once I can\'t take of any improvements anymore, it\'s probably time for me to quit. I\'m quite thrilled with the progress we made as a studio during the production of Episode II, but we already have tons of idea\'s about improving the third episode even more. It does feel rather good that those idea\'s are starting to be about smaller issues and details though.

How was the first episode received? Our biggest complaint was the amount of game play but the rest of the review was positive.

I feel that was spot on. There were a few other things that could have been a lot better if we would have had the time or the money, but overall the reception was quite positive I think. For episode II, we\'ve taken a really good look at all the external and eternal feedback and, I\'m happy to say: putting in more gameplay became the number one item on our TODO list.

What can we expect in Episode 2?

It\'s probably a huge cliché, but the words "more" and "better" come to mind. More gameplay, more diverse environments, better storyline, better animations, more characters, more unique puzzles...but hopefully also less disorienting camera transitions. We really tried to push ourselves to our limits (and sometimes a little beyond) to make the game we always wanted to make, and I think episode II has brought us one step closer to achieving that.

Do you have any questions for us or comments for our readers?

We\'re always interested in more feedback, constructive criticism and where you and your readers would like the Adam\'s Venture series to go (unless that\'s somewhere far, far away)...