The Behemoth TGS Interview – Part 2

This is the second part of my two-part interview with The Behemoth, developers of Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers and ‘Game 3’ (read Part 1 here). The remainder of the interview is solely with John Baez. We discus the reception of Game 3 both in the West and Japan, features of the upcoming Castle Crashers on PSN and The Behemoth’s community orientated approach to promotion.

As before the interview is edited (slightly) in the interest of clarity.

DF – Do you find Japanese players make different mistakes when they play Game 3 here?

John – No, not really. There are quite a lot of similarities. Really what we have been doing after each trade show is refining how people react to the game when they step up to a controller for the first time. Compared to a year ago it is so much better. We really like to make our game culturally neutral.

You know as hard as Alien Hominid was, you could figure it out pretty quick; move from left to right and shoot everything in your path. That was very, very quickly understood. This kind of the same thing, its about ‘How do we communicate in as few words as possible’. We have made it very icon driven. The build we have been showing here at TGS is a reflection of what we have been working on all summer. After a show we’d go home and we’d say ‘Okay, we have to move that piece here, and we have to animate this, and then we’ll get a better response’.

The difficult thing is that you uncover a problem the first day on site, and you just have to live through the four days of the show knowing that if you would have done ‘this’ and ‘this’ it would have been so much better, but you know in the long run its fine. It makes it worthwhile to come here and see that, but it is tough to see people make the same mistake over and over again. It would be okay if we could do fine-tuning on site, but there are so many moving parts in making something for each show that you would never know if you were making more bugs than you would be resolving.

DF – Talking of cultural differences has anyone accused the lead villain of being a block of tofu yet?

John – No, not yet.

DF – Really? It was the first thing I thought of when I saw it. Actually when I first saw shots it reminded me of the Phantom of the Opera, maybe because of the theatre setting I suppose.

John – Right.

DF – But when I saw it here, I guess because I am surrounded by Japan, I though ‘It’s a block of tofu… a crying block of tofu’.

John – Well you do know have the tofu, horse, refrigerator for sure, a lot of its subliminal.

DF – Its all mounted up. Will the story mode have cooperative play like your previous games?

John – We still haven’t determined if you can play the story mode or the mission mode with multiple people.

DF – So this would be the only game you’ve made where the story mode would be single player?

John – If we go down that route yeah.

DF – Is that why there is a heavy emphasis on the online team match aspect?

John – Well it has been designed from the outset as a venue to enjoy with a lot of people. Its ancient roots are the Alien Hominid PDA games. It has evolved a lot, so now there’s not a whole lot of comparison between them other than that are both platformers. Many people enjoyed playing the PDA games, and still enjoy playing them, that encouraged us to follow them as a point of exploration for our next game because we hadn’t made a strict platformer yet, and we like to do a different genre for every game that we do.

DF – Right so you’ll have another ‘departure’ for ‘Game 4’?

John – Well there would never have been a Castle Crashers if we had done Alien Hominid 2, so the idea is lets keep doing, for as long as we can. Keep doing like Treasure does and never make sequels. Just new franchise, new genre, push it as far as it goes, ship the game, start over.

You know, when you are a game developer that isn’t relying on a fixed revenue stream from a number of different titles in the same franchise, it just opens you to explore some many ideas. That’s what we are doing. Its all about having fun, exploring, and really trying to get as much out of it as we can for as long as we can.

DF – You have also Castle Crashers coming out on PSN soon, are you expecting that to hit bigger in Japan than the Xbox version did?

John – Well yeah, the install base is bigger but we are the number one Xbox Live Arcade game in Japan. There have been some other games in there but since launch, which was a year ago, we are told we’ve been at number one. If we aren’t at number one we are in the top three or five. That said, there are only a million, million and a half Xboxes in Japan right now. So it will be interesting to see what kind of up take we get on PSN in Japan when it launches.

DF – Will you be able to communicate over PSN with headsets?

John – I don’t know… since it doesn’t ship with one, and because nobody ever buys the peripherals, ever, period. It’s not native to PSN either, but we do tend not to, or we try not to, not to remove features. But it depends on the programmers; perhaps they will need the bandwidth to ensure the online multiplayer is the best experience. You know, as fun as it is, it does take up a certain amount of bandwidth even on the Xbox, so… and mostly what’s said over the headset is you know is ‘Your stupid’ ‘No your stupid…’

That said I cant even imagine what the install base is people with a headset. If you are going down that route then those are gamer that may not be in our fan base, they are the hardcore kind of Call of Duty players, so its less than likely they are going to be picking up our game. But you never know.
Maybe our programmers will surprise me and turn around ‘Yeah! Its been in since day one!’ and then I can come back and say, ‘Of course we support that, everyone go buy a head set!’

DF – This year you seem to have a bigger footprint on the show floor. Last year you had this little corner, but this year you have a whole area.

John – Yeah, we really used the first two days as our warm up. Like yesterday we didn’t have any fake grass at the booth, and that was something we had planned since from the Tokyo Anime Fair. That all happens at Tokyo Bigsite, not out here at Makuhari, so its much easier to get around Tokyo from there and I happened to be in a department store, lost, and I looked down and there’s Astroturf, and I though ‘My God! That’s going to be the perfect booth thing!’ And so yesterday when we arrived we spent all day walking around trying to find a place that had enough for us to do our booth. We finally found it and last night jumped into a taxi and went and bought every piece they had.

But what it really does is, the first two days, is smooth out all of that for the public days. Last year during TGS, when people showed, up it was fabulous. We did not know it there was going to be any interest. Castle Crashers had just launched and we had planed on coming out here. Then when we had our tiny little micro booth, very easy to set up, buy the TVs give them away to the translators when we are done, that kind of thing. It worked out really well.

Now this year, we are three times bigger and still short on space. And next year will be four times as big. We had so many people come by last year. They bought us their handmade fan art, from cookies to face masks to drawing. You know, we have received everything, even sculpted three-dimensional plushies, of our characters, just amazing stuff. All those people show up on Saturday and Sunday. They bring their kids and take pictures. And this year we have a whole lot of Castle Crashers posters that we will be signing.

It is a much more low key for us to be here than in the United States, because in the United States we sell our merchandise and it’s a huge headache, the money, the transactions, the whole inventory. I mean its great, because people may have to stand in line for half an hour to get our stuff but then they can kind of get it there and take it away, and that really cool. But here it’s totally different.

DF – Last year when I came I had actually just bought Castle Crashers. A friend and me played through it in a day and finished it. Then two weeks later we came here and were in awe to see you guys, the actual designers, there on the floor.

John – That’s another thing they commented on in the press here. You may have these game developers who are huge celebrities but they are never down in the trenches with regular people. You can’t walk up to a booth and shake their hands. For us it’s the interaction with the people who actually use our stuff.

We have given up on press releases and all that type of thing and totally focused on forums, blogs, just real direct contact with the people who use are stuff. If they are happy they tell their friends, and their friends tell their friends and it just goes. It seems to be going really well.

DF – It really speaks to the quality game. Well thank you very much Jon, Ill let you get over to Dan. Good luck with the new game.

John – No problem. Thank you.

Read Part 1 of the interview.