The Behemoth TGS Interview – Part 1

This is part one of a two-part interview with John Baez and Dan Paladin from The Behemoth, makers of the Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and the upcoming ‘Game 3’ (see my preview of Game 3 here). In this first part we talk about the success of Castle Crasher’s, Game 3’s development and Castle Crashers and Game 3’s influences.

The interview was conducted at this years TGS and is edited only for clarity of meaning. I have divided it into two-parts only to make it more readable.

DF – Obviously Castle Crashers is your biggest game to date, how is that doing Worldwide? I remember hearing reports of one million sales.

John – That was a million users so a million users on the leader board. I think we are at one million two hundred thousand…

Dan – …one point two five million…

John – Are we at one point two five million now?

Dan – Yes, which is awesome! I mean, nobody expected…

John – THAT

Dan – …that many people to play the game. I mean Alien Hominid did okay but this is exponentially better. I think part of is we made Castle Crashers more accessible than Alien Hominid. It doesn’t kick your butt as hard and maybe it’s the genre as well. We are not a hundred percent sure, we are just making things that we like and we are lucky enough that people agree with us that they are good.

‘Game 3’ is even more accessible, so I guess there is a trend there. There is still a good amount of challenge involved, but you understand it right away then you just have to figure out your goals. I was showing you our online multiplayer mode, but we also have a story that can be played cooperatively or alone.

DF – Can you tell me any thing about the story? I saw a theatrical style, does that play in to the story.

Dan – Yeah the theatre plays in to it. I can’t tell you the details of why it’s a theatre just yet but I can tell you that guy you see with a hat, who’s always crying, he’s the bad guy. He’s psychotic. He always has several different emotions going on and you are trying to systematically breakdown what he’s got going, which is bad stuff. But we haven’t revealed the beginnings of the story just yet, and I hope to do that soon, as I have a lot of that in place.

A lot of the game has gotten off to a great start, it is solid, so a lot of what I am doing now is polish. I am trying to figure some clarity, see how people respond at the shows, addressing things as the reveal themselves. Usually after just one day at a trade show its obvious what we need to do. WE love to take it to the trade shows and see what people think.

DF – Has the reception been different in Japan? Have people taken to it differently?

John – Partially. If they have people have stumbled upon us. Like at the Tokyo Anime Fair, where we were one of the very few video games that were there, they didn’t know who we were. All they knew was that they really liked what they saw. Once we got them in to the booth and everything it was super.

Generally we go to PAX, and Comic Con so coming here for that has been really good. It has helped us grow our fan base because there are so few western developers. I don’t think this year there are any western developers besides us. EA isn’t even here this year. We actually got a lot of press from that last year, at TGS because the only Xbox developer, from the States, in Japan. All the Japanese press would say ‘what are you doing here?’ and we would show them our game. This was right after Castle Crashers came out and they were just blown away by it.

Dan – People really seemed to love it. We first started coming out here to let people know we exist, but then we find out that they already know, so now we are just showing them what we’ve got. We know we are released worldwide but we didn’t know that everyone walking by would be familiar with what we are doing.

My favourite game ever is Japanese, River City Ransom. That whole game was my inspiration for wanting to make a beat-um-up. Most of our inspiration just comes from the entire old-school genre that we are referencing.

But what I was saying was that the new game is referencing a one of our old mini games more than platformers in general. We kind of took each element of what we had already created and it spruced up. Just like the original version of Castle Crashers was thrown out, completely thrown out and redone, Game 3 is kind of way kind of like that.

[At this point Dan had to leave for an appointment with Game Trailers leaving me with John.]

DF – Before when we were play you were talking about how in previous builds you could have four teams in Game 3 why did you cut that back?

John – Currently its two teams, and then four players on each team, but we are not sure about the final number. One of the reasons we do all these trade shows is to get the player feed back from just watching them. We have had a lot of test cases where the technology can support so many more people but the problem is the number of players on screen at one time, per team, on one console.

Because camera has to zoom out to the size of furthest distance apart that two people are [there is no split screen]. So if you have a big level, and lots of people you end up with lots of tiny little characters and it’s not that fun. So we have been working, for about a year actually, and just slowly working back to the optimum number of players per game, which is looking about eight or twelve.

It’s a little bit difficult I guess because on the Xbox you can have four people on the same console, in the same room. So the four people there are possibly at a disadvantage, possibly at an advantage versus four guys all playing on their own systems. It has been a real challenge to find that balance between them.

Originally it was tempting to say like, ‘lets do a thirty-two player game’, and you know it was like the technology totally supports it, and it was like ‘man, this really sucks’, coz it really did, it really was not fun.

DF – Although still similar the art style in Game 3 has changed from your previous games, what is the evolution there?

John – It’s defiantly much richer than the previous games. It revolves around the theatre and there is a desire to have more of a feeling of wealth. Where Alien Hominid was really basic and Castle Crashers started to develop a different, more defined colour palette, Game 3 took another step; lots of gold, lots of bling, lots of shiny things.

Then you can see how it’s all rendered. There is much more of an emphasis on the primary parts of a level so you can see how everything works. For example you have a block sitting next to another block, and another block, and another block… where as Alien, well both Alien and Castle, every single background was individually rendered.

DF – I guess you kind of have an excuse this time too, with the theatre setting.

John – Right, yeah, its all kind of playing out in this big proscenium.

DF – I was going to say the difference in colour palette, kind of reminded me of the difference between like a box of chocolates and a box of… candy.

John – Yeah, that’s kind of exactly where it is, kind of tasty and substantial.

Continue on to Part 2 of the interview.