interview

I will confess this plan of linking to my other articles is becoming increasingly appealing as I try make DoFuss a more active site. It has the benefit of adding content, directing you to my other work, and perhaps most importantly minimal effort on my part as I begin to study game design.

That said this post has the genuine benefit of being unique content, an email interview by me with Brandon Sheffield, editor for Gamasutra and Game Developer Magazine as well as acting as a game consultant. The interview actually focuses on his time working alongside Japanese developers, and some of the issues and conflict that can ensue from differences in culture and work ethic.

For reference Brandon drew on his experience working on a specific game he was aiding a Japanese developer with. Despite shaping up well the title was cancelled while still in alpha by the publisher due to lack of funds (along with eight other games).

GJJ – How did you find working with Japanese developers differed from with their Western counterparts?

BS – Working with Japanese developers was pretty different, mostly because one of the big things they wanted to know from me is “will Western fans like this,” which obviously a Western studio wouldn’t be asking. I felt like the team was mandated to ask this from above though, and they could’ve done a fine job without asking, really. Though there were a few cases where they tried to keep some gameplay elements that would look pretty stilted in the U.S. market.

Head over to Games Jobs Japan for a look at the full article, and if you want to keep up with Brandon check out Gamasutra and Insert Credit.

Thanks in part to the glowing review I recently gave Alan Wake at Playdevil.com my editor chose me to conduct an email interview with Remedy’s Mikko Rautalahti, one of the games writers. I jumped at the chance and the results are now online. I think it came out pretty well, though as with all email interviews I curse the lack of follow up to some of his responses. On the site the interview is accredited to ‘Staff’, but I assure you it is me, so here is a snippet with the rest available here.

DoFuss: Originally Alan Wake was originally intended to be a more open world title. Why was this initial vision abandoned? With this shift were any cuts or changes made to the narrative?

Mikko Rautalahti: Well, there were many factors in it, of course, but it mostly came down to what we wanted to do with Alan Wake. We knew we wanted it to be a moody, atmospheric game with palpable tension, one that took us halfway into the head of the protagonist and kept the player guessing. And that’s not really the kind of a thing open world games are best suited for.

I’ll give you a practical example of what I mean. Let’s say that Alan Wake is going deeper and deeper into a dark forest to meet someone who has information about his missing wife. Now, we have certain tools that are very effective at creating a creepy atmosphere: we can have the fog roll in, throw in a lot of foreboding audio effects, etc. We can throw in some scripted events as well – maybe there’s a glimpse of a shadowy figure, or you hear ominous whispers. This is familiar ground to those who have played the game – it sets a certain mood for the scene, and we can escalate in various ways until things get nasty.

But in an open world game, the player can just suddenly change his mind – you know, “oh, hey, I think I’ll go do that another mission instead.” That’s great in terms of player freedom, but for our purposes, it’s poison to the atmosphere, because is really emphasizes the fact that this is a game and conveys the message that what you’re experiencing isn’t really very unique, you can always come back, it’s no big deal. And that’s not a bad thing in itself. But for our particular purposes it is a problem, because when you’re trying to create a thriller that really rests largely on the atmosphere, when you’re dealing with questions like “what’s real and what’s fantasy or insanity,” and “what’s really behind all this?” it’s vital to control the pacing. You can’t keep breaking the mood like that. The player has to feel that pressure, and it’s incredibly hard to maintain it if they can just constantly veer off course.

And yes, of course this necessitated changes, but fortunately they weren’t as major as you might think. We didn’t yet have a scene-by-scene script for the game at that point, and this wasn’t a change that had a big impact on Alan Wake’s core story concepts.

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.

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.