Thanks for asking. I love rambling on about our production.
The original game was indeed pretty much a one man effort, though the music wasn't done by me and I did get quite a lot of help in the beginning from my colleague Mathias in thinking out the basics of the plot as well as scripting up the core game play mechanics. Also, during the wrap-up I had tons of help from a bunch of testers who did a great job ensuring that the whole experience was solid. They should have some credit too.
Most of the time spent for me on the original of chapter one was sheer thinking. Thinking out the story, puzzles and how to put everything together in a nice flowing manner. Production wise I'd say animation by far was the heaviest load. Something that I'm now very happy to have dumped over on Henrik, my animator buddy. This gives me more time for writing and designing environments and characters - the stuff I'm actually pretty good at.
As for gobby, honestly, our main reason for building our own engine was the very simple fact that our two programmers at SkyGoblin (Markus and Mathias) simply thought it was more fun to build the machinery from scratch. Also, we have a lot of experience working with half-baked solutions and have realized that there's always something that we wind up not being able to do, because we are dependent on someone else's limitations. This is a very good reason to build your own tech. Especially in this case where we knew so clearly from the start what we were building. Besides, Markus and Mathias are wizards. They built Gobby (and it's sibling gob-ed) in practically no time and it's all working like a charm.
Can this be motivated financially though? I seriously doubt it, but I do think TJD has pretty good potential at working real nice on handheld devices, it's pretty much made for it. That doesn't mean I think our chances of making any decent money on handheld are very good though, being seen there seems virtually impossible, but who knows.
Any more questions, please ask. Again, I love talking about this stuff.
