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.

Tale of Tales (ToT) is a group dedicated to the creation of original interactive experiences. Founded in 2002 by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn they currently have four (The Path, The Graveyard, Fatale and The Endless Forest) titles available for PC and Mac and one project on hold (’8′). These titles are more akin to interactive poems or storybooks than what would be traditionally be regarded as a ‘game’, but they are engrossing experiences that form deeper ties with your avatar during the short time you spend in their worlds than most games achieve in ten hours.

This interview was submitted a few weeks before Fatale’s release (currently available from the ToT web site) so please forgive any continuity anomalies in my questions.

DF – What inspired you to found Tale of Tales?

ToT - Each other.

We started working together on the day we met for the first time, now 10 years ago. And we never stopped. First we made websites as Entropy8Zuper! and later videogames as Tale of Tales.

We switched to using video game technology because we saw an opportunity to really make the things we could only simulate or refer to in web technology. We played videogames once in a while. And they had had their influence on our work. But we had never considered making games ourselves. Even when we started working with the medium, we had no intention to make traditional games. That wasn’t the aspect we were interested in. We wanted to work with emergent narrative and emotional immersion.

DF – Looking at your manifesto you seem to have some very clear views on the direction artistic experiences in an interactive medium should take. From where did you draw these artistic principles?

ToT - The Realtime Art Manifesto sounds like a lecture but is actually more of a personal shopping list. It serves to remind us that, if we are artists, we should also be designers and if we are designers, we should also be artists. More than anything, the manifesto attacks purity, in favour of embracing.

Some of the ideas in the Manifesto come from witnessing a kind of ambiguity in other creators. We want to stimulate the fine artists to take the medium of games seriously and really make things with it, rather than cynically mod some engine from their ivory towers. And on the other hand, we want to encourage game designers to take up their responsibility as authors, to really think about what they are doing and try to contribute something to people’s lives and society.

Other ideas come from our own play experiences and often frustrations with games. Especially when it comes to the conflict between narrative immersion and the more sports-like aspects of games. We don’t think everything made with this medium needs to be competitive. There should be room for other types of experiences, other types of challenges.

DF – Your first project according to your site was 8, which remains on hold, could you tell me about the title and why it remains a work in progress?

ToT - “8″ was our first game project, our first project as Tale of Tales. But we had worked on many other projects before “8″, as Entropy8Zuper!.

“8″ was to be a fairly large game that takes place in the palace of Sleeping Beauty, during the spell of sleep. The premise of the story is that the princess of the fairy tale never woke up because the wicked fairy returned and sent 8 false princes into the palace, over several centuries. The goal of the game is to figure out how these false princes broke the spell and correct the situation so that the princess and her court may finally wake up.

At the time, we were not able to raise sufficient funding for the production of “8″. Which became one of the reasons why all of our subsequent projects were much smaller in scope. But we could never let go of the story of 8 and its dreamy world. So we always wanted to return to it in some form or other. In the mean time, we have come up with a plan to create a new game, based on the world of 8 but much less difficult to produce. If all goes well, we will start prototyping this project soon.

DF – How complete were you ideas of The Path when you began its development?

ToT - That depends a bit on what you consider to be the beginning of its development.
The idea to make a horror game with Little Red Ridinghood is as old as Tale of Tales itself. But it wasn’t until Creative Capital gave us a grant for the project that we really started working on it. The grant, however, was donated on the basis of a very high-concept description of the project. It took quite a while to get from there to a real design.

But for us the gameplay elements are secondary to the general atmosphere, themes and emotions we want to work with. In that sense, our ideas were quite complete when we started developing. The actual interaction, or even the idea to let go instead of pressing a button, for instance, came only during the development of the first prototype (the one that became a finalist in the Independent Games Festival). And elements such as the map and even the text on screen were added much later, during the play-testing phase of the project.

DF – What came first in your creation of The Path? Little Red Riding Hood or the theme of innocence, and how did one inspire from the other?

ToT - This is actually an interesting question because it betrays certain assumptions that explain how some people approach our work, or even art in general. We don’t make a distinction between the two. Thinking of Little Red Ridinghood implies thinking of innocence. And of all the other themes that the story touches on. That’s the power of narrative.

So when we say, we want to make a game about Little Red Ridinghood, we implicitly mean we want to make a game about innocence, loss of innocence, seduction, guilt, self-destruction, growing, etc. And we don’t choose Little Red Ridoinghood as some kind of metaphor to talk about these themes. We really want to deal with the story. It’s almost like a ritual. The story, telling the story, thinking about it, has value in and of itself, even if it may not directly mean or express anything. It’s like a heart beating or lungs breathing or a tree growing. Stories like that are part of human civilisation like organs are part of a body. That’s what makes them so fascinating.

DF – Little Red Riding Hood has been seen in dark forms before, but you emphasize a loss of innocence with a very modern theme, why did you develop The Path along such sexually suggestive lines?

ToT - We tried to stay as close to the story as possible. To look at it from different angles, yes, but only to see more facets of it, not to add meaning. Many versions of Little Red Ridinghood have a lot of sexual symbols in them. Perhaps in our version, these symbols are made a little bit more concrete. But a talking wolf may have been as concrete to people from the middle ages as a creepy young man in a playground is to us.

On the other hand, the experience of loss of innocence as a combination of extreme delight and violent destruction is something that is very personal to us. So to some extent, we probably used The Path to deal with our demons and lick some wounds. To try and make sense of what things that have happened in our own lives.

DF – Why did you break little red riding hood in to six desperate girls for the story?

ToT - Because 144 was too many! We were originally going to name The Path 144, when we fantasized about calling all our games numbers. So we wanted to have 144 different Little Red Ridinghoods. When that turned out to be impractical, we reduced the number to 6. It was fairly arbitrary. Probably motivated by the fact that the number 6 is often used to denote evil (the number 666 being the number of the Antichrist in the Bible).

We liked the idea of playing with girls with different personalities. And we also liked that they had relationships with each other, which makes the experience of the story stronger. It also adds to the ritualistic nature of telling a fairy tale. Many fairy tales have repetitive elements, sometimes it feels like the narrator is chanting. There’s something about rhythm, about repetition that transcends the rational. Doing something repeatedly somehow adds a certain layer of magic to it. Breathing, chanting, praying, playing. We felt that playing the same game six times would deepen the meaning of each individual story and lift the whole to a higher level.

DF – The Graveyard I believe was a side project you started while producing The Path. What motivated the project and its theme?

ToT - The idea of The Graveyard is older than the start of the production of The Path. But it often takes a long time for us to get from idea to production.

There were two high level motivations to our desire to create The Graveyard. One is formal: we wanted to experiment with realtime 3D in combination with minimal interaction, in order to focus on the narrative, the “being there”. The other is content: we want to create a tool that allowed us to investigate a little bit the idea of being old, of living with death nearby. The latter was probably influenced by Michael’s grandmother who was still alive at the time and very old but very lucid and very conscious of her own approaching death. She often talked about her dying and this made a big impression on us. And finally there was the inspiration of a real place, a cemetery in Belgium that Michael often visited as an adolescent in search of solitude and calm. The interesting thing about that place, that we tried to replicate in The Graveyard, is the harmonious coexistence of life and death, with the rows of graves being surround by slightly unkempt plants, flowers and birds and insects. We want to embrace death as part of life, and learn how to live with it. We don’t want to be afraid of death. We don’t want it to make us sad. Because it’s such a normal thing. We want to discover its beauty.

DF – What was the impetus behind releasing ‘the full version’ of The Graveyard when it offers such a similar experience to the demo version?

ToT - It was a cheeky gesture for sure. One should not underestimate the humour in our work.

But there was a serious side to it as well: we wanted to ask the question what you pay for when you buy a game. Do we really pay for 150 levels, 26 different kinds of shotguns or 7 races and 14 classes -as the publishers seem to think we do. Or do we pay for an experience? Something to happen to us that would not have happened otherwise. Something that stays with us. That we learn something from.

We also thought that it was very poetic that a difference that is so small, technically (it literally is the difference of checking one checkbox in the game’s code), causes such a huge difference, the biggest contrast imaginable to man: the difference between life and death. The fact that, in The Graveyard, the distinction is so small, is part of its message. Especially because despite of this minuteness, the experience is drastically different. You can know that an old person is going to die, and prepare yourself for it. But every time it happens, it comes as a shock. We wouldn’t want it any other way. And we also don’t want to ignore that experience or pretend that death doesn’t exist. Living life to the fullest includes having an acute awareness of death.

DF – Your latest project Fatale is taking its inspiration from than Oscar Wilde play Salome, that in turn took its inspiration from the biblical tale, what drew you to this story and how clear will its ties be to it religious origins?

ToT - Even in the Bible, the religious aspect of the tale of Salome is rather vague. Its only reason for being in the bible is to explain how John the Baptist died. The whole story is told in a single paragraph. But throughout Christianity, over the ages, the story has continued to pop up in arts and literature. So when Wilde took at as the starting point for his stage play, it wasn’t just the Bible he was thinking of. The story had already gathered a lot of other connotations and associations. Especially the idea of Salome as a femme fatale must have been important to Wilde, considering the ubiquity of this figure in 19th century art and Wilde’s own homosexuality.

We’re always attracted to these old stories. Not because they are old per se, but because they have been part of civilization for so long. Stories like these are like time travellers of which portraits have been made in different time periods. They are so much a part of our culture that it almost feels like each and every Westerner is born with a vague memory of them, as if the story of Salome has somehow become part of our DNA.

There’s many stories like this, of course. And there’s specific reasons why we chose to work with Salome.

First of all, we wanted to do something with the theme of femme fatale. We are interested in the combination of love and destruction that the figure of the femme fatale represents. But we wanted to investigate whether the femme fatale was really as evil as she was portrayed in the 19th century or if there was a part of this character that we could understand, on a human level, and perhaps even sympathize with somehow.

Wilde shows us the passion of Salome. His Salome is not a cool Siren who, unfeelingly, lures men to their deaths, but she is a hot blooded princess who falls in love with the one man who will not, who cannot return her emotions. From Salome’s perspective, John may be seen an “homme fatale”. He casts her into a desperation she can only deal with in a dramatic way. When she asks for the head of her lover, part of her has already died. It’s a sad story, when you look at it this way.

The thing we add to the story in FATALE is a look into the head of the victim. When John was alive, all he cared about was the Messiah. He was a bit of a workaholic and didn’t have time for earthly trivialities like love for a woman. But now that he is dead, things are different. How does this story look through the eyes of a dead man? A person who has all the opportunity in the world to see the facts from many different sides. The idea of this ultimate peace, brought on by death, attracted us.

DF – Fatale’s character designer is Takayoshi Sato, famed for his work on Silent Hill. What began your relationship with him and what did he bring to you creative process?

ToT - Our relationship began with us being fans of his work. Then we interviewed him for our blog and realized that we weren’t wrong. That he was one of very few people in the world who uses 3D modelling as an artform, as a new form of sculpting. It was disappointing to us to see how, after his move to the USA, his talent was not being used where it was most effective, in our opinion. So we wanted very much to show his work in a more optimal context.

When we came up with the idea of FATALE, with the idea of still characters in a style that is more realistic than what we’re used to, we immediately though of him. We shyly asked if he would want to be involved with the project and to our surprise he said yes.

I think his greatest contribution, apart from the sheer beauty of his models/sculptures, is probably the ambiguity of the character of Salome.

Rather than going for the look of a young girl, or that of a grown woman, he came up with a character that was both simultaneously. His Salome could by one of those girls who looks older than she really is and therefore confuses the grown-ups. Her age is hard to gauge and we rely on context to make our assumptions. Maybe she seems mature on the nightly terrace. But imagine her in a Japanese school uniform and she’ll suddenly look like a young teenager.

Her mood is also ambiguous. Sometimes she seems triumphant or even angry, other times she seems melancholy and confused. We really like all these different simultaneous layers.

FATALE is available now from the Tale of Tales site for $7.

Dark Presence and its sequel Conquering Light are two upcoming titles from developer Galloping Ghost. Both are classic one on one 2D fighters being developed specifically for arcades, but perhaps more notable is the fact that they use digitized characters. At first glance this call up memories of jerky low res games of old such as Pit Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but closer inspection shows that while it may owe a lot to its pixilated grandparents, this is a far more evolved title. Promising to offer over 150,000 frames of animation and full HD graphics, the stills currently available look very different from anything we have seen in recent generations from a release of this scale. Only time will tell how they look in action so keep an eye on the Galloping Ghosts website for updates.

Intrigued as I was at the prospect of a return for the digitized fighter I got in touch with Galloping Ghost’s head Doc Mack who was kind enough to agree to an email interview for DoFuss.

DoFuss (DF) – The big question is why a digitized arcade game now?
Galloping Ghost’s Doc Mack (GG) – We wanted to go with digitized characters for several reasons. First, it’s a style that was never really pushed past what was seen in the 90’s. Since all our characters are in high-definition and the quality is incredible, the game has a very unique look that separates us from most everything out there.
Many of the 3-D fighting games out there are great, but to me, they all seem to have the same look. It’s hard as a newcomer to the fighting genre to bring gamers new characters that they don’t know and expect them to play our game versus a franchise they have been playing for 15+ years. Giving gamers a unique experience in as many ways possible and a game that plays great and is fun will hopefully get them to try something new.
Making it an arcade game really was the best platform for us. Releasing a game for the arcades and doing it in a way that is hopefully beneficial to the arcade industry as a whole is a great motivator. It was really surprising to see all the new fighting games come out with so little effort to bring them here to the US, when there clearly was a demand.
Designing for the arcade offered us complete freedom from a hardware standpoint, and allowed us to explore and develop features on the cabinet itself.
Personally, from a creative aspect, it was an enjoyable challenge. Making it with live actors presented many other elements that don’t have to be dealt with when making a drawn or 3D modeled game.

DF – As this project was conceived in 1994 how much has it changed since its conception?
GG - The shell of what I wanted the game to be is the same, but with the advancements in technology since that time, we’ve been able to come closer to what was originally envisioned. The characters, basic story, and even some of the core of the game play mechanics are the same, but it’s always been an evolving process. We had worked with the original concept of the game until about late 2004. It was playable and almost complete, but we scrapped it, as it looked so dated. Everything from the development aspect was completely restarted.
We completely changed how are finishing moves are handled. Originally, they just happened in the same view as the in-game fighting, but now we have much more elaborate finishing moves that have a cinematic feel to them.
We also changed the control scheme from the original. It was fun to play, but it was admittedly a bit awkward and took a while to get used to. The new layout is much better and easier to pull off moves.
A lot of the elements we were trying to put into the game way back in 1994 still have not been done in any 2-D fighting game to date. Separate left and right stances and move sets, multiple basic stances, backgrounds with changing seasons and weather, and the characters running at 30 frames per second were in the original game, and made it to the new version. The scope of the project back then was just too big for the time, but now we are able to do everything we wanted. Of course, in the process, we’ve added many new features along the way.

DF – Could you tell me a little about Support Your Local Arcade initiative and how Dark Presence and Conquering Light fit into it?
GG - With Support Your Local Arcades, we are trying to help bring attention back to arcades, help promote arcades everywhere, and improve the industry from several vantage points. We are talking with arcade operators, distributors and gamers, and using their feedback to that end. Right now, we are trying to extend many services to operators to help increase their business. Offering free web sites (hosting and design) as well as going to arcades and repairing and cleaning cabinets, and listing their locations on sites like Aurcade.com, will hopefully drive business.
We are doing everything we possibly can with Dark Presence and Conquering Light from a developer’s stand point to benefit the arcade operators, which is something most developers don’t seem to do. Making game elements that are unique to the arcade that can’t be recreated on a home console, as well as giving operators a longer arcade-exclusive time period, are just a couple of ways we are trying to help strengthen the appeal of the arcade version.
Once development is complete we are planning an extensive tour and will be trying to demo the game at as many venues possible as we are hitting mass production.

DF – Arcades in Japan are still doing relatively well as you know, however they do employ a number of different mechanisms the classic US machines do not do you intend to mimic these, or stick to a more traditional US arcade model?
GG - Currently, we are planning on designing a new secondary, single-player, sit-down cabinet. We have already been receiving e-mails from gamers in Japan who are anxious to see the Dark Presence in action and we want to provide a cabinet option and variation that will appeal to the Asian market. The goal is to be able to accommodate as many people as we can and give them options to find a cabinet that works best regionally. With the original cabinet, we have tried to put as many features on it and make them all component-based. We’ll look at doing the same with our second cabinet design as well.
We still have a few more features to announce on the original cabinet too, but once we are finished with the last updates on this cabinet, we will start construction on the second design.
Personally, I prefer the old-school, standup machines, and really like playing on our original cabinet. It’s really to the point where I couldn’t even think of another feature to add or how to improve on it, but we don’t want to ignore the evolution of the arcade cabinets. So, it will be good to have a choice of cabinet styles.

DF – Are there any limits to the number of units you can produce?
GG – No, we will be able to meet whatever demand arises. Because we are still in the development phase, mass production is not our main focus right now. However, our operation is easily scalable to ramp up production to meet all the future demands.

DF – Tell me a little about the actors.
GG - All of our actors are really incredible, and it was great working with all of them. The filming process was incredibly long and demanding, and very physically challenging. Our actors all handled it really well. Since we were filming for nearly three years, the actors had to maintain their physical appearance for the sake of continuity. They couldn’t change hairstyles, or get too much sun in the summer time, as any change would be noticeable. It was really a lot to ask of them.
When we first started, we knew it would be difficult to get everyone to do the 250+ basic moves, and then all the finishing moves. Even in the test filmings, everyone was usually leaving covered in bruises from all the falls and reactions. Also, with the finishing moves being so violent, we were concerned with how everyone was going to react to those. The actors rarely complained about any of it, and were always quick to try even the most difficult moves we gave them. Looking back on it, some of the moves were just plain dangerous, and I’m thankful we made it out of the studio without any more serious injuries.
Some of the actors were very well trained martial artists, while others were trained and taught right in the studio. Story-wise, some of the fighters are not supposed to be technically-trained fighters, so we were able to just cast people that fit the parts, and then teach them the moves as we went. We cast people from several martial arts schools and the local gym, and then had online casting calls that received massive responses. Since we filmed Dark Presence and Conquering Light at the same time, all the actors got to know each other really well, due to the massive number of filming sessions.

DF – On your site you mention finishing moves, will these moves side towards the realistic (like Mortal Kombat) or cartoony (like Killer Instinct)?
GG - It’s difficult to compare our finishing moves with other games out there. We kept the moves realistic, and filmed them from several camera angles. We then edited them together for a very cinematic look. Each actor filmed with every other actor (when possible, as a few characters are played by the same person) so there are no generic animations like in most games. This allowed us to personalize them more from character to character too. This way, we could get more of the story element in the game, and show how the characters relate to one another.
I would say the finishing moves are more violent than gory, overall. We tried to keep the realism level high, and didn’t want to be punching heads off and stuff. Each character has three separate finishing moves (1, 2, and 3) that can be linked together (one to two and two to three). So once gamers figure out how to do them, they then have to figure out how they go together to make one really long end move.

DF – In terms of the mechanics, what fighting game is Dark Presence most similar to?
GG - Again, this is hard to compare to other games out there. We have tried to incorporate a little more realism to the fighting system. For example, if you punch your opponent in the stomach, they will hunch forward, which will leave them open to an uppercut attack. The more a player understands and knows all of a character’s moves and how they can be linked together, the more effective they will be.
We filmed a lot of unique reactions to really expand how our combos can flow. Characters will roll from hook attacks accurately to the attack direction. Some attacks may cause heavier reactions on some characters too. We are also testing having different elements factor in to what reaction happens. This would prevent auto combos and make gamers react to what is happening instead of just throwing the same combo over and over.
Fighting is different from character to character since the weapons and fighting styles are so different. A combo that works on one character might not work as well on another. For example, if Wilson kicks Kyla, she may go sailing backwards and fall to the ground, whereas Titan may just stumble back, setting him up for another attack. We are really trying to adjust the attacks so the characters react accordingly.
Character movement is also different then most games. Most characters can’t jump over one another and will have to entangle their opponents to switch sides. That added a big element to the game play, as the move sets are different from side to side. Players will need to fight for position.
Control wise we have: LEFT ARM, RIGHT ARM, LEFT KICK, RIGHT KICK, BLOCK and SPECIAL. With so many basic moves, we may use common special movement sequences like: Down to Forward and a button for variations of regular attacks. We had to add the Special Move button just to give us enough controller functionality. Those already familiar with other fighting games should have little problem learning the controls quickly.

DF – Will there be humor in the game?
GG - There are not a lot of gag moments in Dark Presence. With the story having all the characters to the point where they are ready to kill each other, none of them are in a joking mood. The character Titan has a few moves when he is winning a fight, he mocks his opponent a bit and those are kind of funny, but they really fit well with his character.
There are elements that, to us working on it, seem pretty funny, but I guess it’s all kind of relative to what you find funny. While working on finishing moves, we are often laughing about how hard it looks like the characters are hitting each other.
It’s hard to balance once you start trying to bring humor into things. It’s a violent game and it didn’t make sense having the characters act “funny”. At the same time it’s a game to be played for fun and we didn’t want to come off as overly serious so we have tried to add a little levity to stuff like achievements but wanted to keep the game and story a little darker. We may even look at getting some of the outtake footage to gamers, as there were some pretty funny accidents and mishaps throughout the filming process.

DF – How does the lack of projectile weaponry affect the game play?
GG - With so many other new game play elements and the way we are balancing the characters, projectiles won’t be missed. The character’s move sets and attributes like weapon reach, speed, and damage levels really make it a non-issue. Originally, we had considered adding them for awhile, but it just didn’t fit with the story, and might have detracted from the character visuals. We wanted to keep the fighting more realistic.

DF – Finally, while the game will be exclusive to arcades for a while, are there any plans for a home conversion?
GG – Yes, we do plan to bring it to the home consoles eventually. But we aren’t in a rush, as we want to give the arcade operators plenty of time to make their money on it. So many other developers don’t do that, and that’s really not good for the arcade industry as a whole.
One of our concerns with a home console release is that Dark Presence and Conquering Light are very large games from a data standpoint. Even with our compression system, it certainly could not fit on a single DVD, and even a Blu-ray disc would be cutting it close. Then there may be other limitations with the amount of RAM in the current home systems too. Once we have fully completed the development stage, we’ll look more closely at those problems, but for now, we just want to put all of our efforts and energy into making the arcade games the best they can be, without scaling things back just to make an easy conversion to the home consoles later.

In closing, I really appreciate you taking the time to find out more on our projects. It’s been a lot of fun and I’d be happy to answer any other questions you or your readers might have. Please feel free to contact me at ghostlord@gallopingghost.com. Of course we will be updating the Galloping Ghost Productions website as development continues.