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Behemoth - Castle Crashers
Well, I did write up a decent summary article, but my firefox froze, so now you get a copy/pasted article!
Quote:
Game Informer Online spent last weekend perusing the show floor of the San Diego Convention Center during the San Diego Comic-Con 2005 to squeeze out as much videogame goodness as we could. Among the countless Jedi and Spider-Man look-a-likes, The Behemoth, an indie developer was showing off their newly untitled game. Their first game, Alien Hominid, was a huge success. And after its beginnings as a simple flash game it rocked consoles worldwide. We chat with the team, talk about Alien Hominid for the GBA and PSP, and get the meat on their upcoming 4-player 2D hack-and-slash.
Game Informer: So what exactly can you tell me about your next game?
Tom Fulp, Game Designer, Programmer: It’s a classic four player hack-and-slash adventure, with RPG elements in the tradition of a simple action RPGs. We want to have the insanity of Alien Hominid.
Dan Paladin, Art Director: We want to make it a little easier than Alien Hominid because everyone whines about how hard Alien Hominid is. It crashes like crazy right now, [the new game] but the build is only like three weeks old. We’re planning on a Mario 3 style map where you adventure through and you can revisit worlds.
TF: Do you recognize what the intro is a reference to? It’s a Double Dragon tribute.
DP: There’s going to be a lot of homage’s and tributes in here. But essentially, we’re only allowed to say what you see right now with this new game. The idea is to save the princess, and every character has a different magical affinity. It’s kind of like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with their weapons, sort of. One guy is ice, one guy is fire, one guy is lightning, and one guy is poison. You can shoot your sword, and then have the ability to do archery and magic. We’re going to have it so the more you do something specific, the more you’ll level that up - more powerful attacks and more powerful combos.
GI: So in each of the levels you’re going to be able to save the princess?
DP: No, there this world where you go to 1-1, 1-2, and so on, and then you work your way through the map until you get to where the princess is being held, and then you save the princess. You can adventure through the lands sort of free form, and there will be gates that you’ll encounter, but you’ll have to be powerful enough to smash through them. Each level is zooming in on part of the level where there may be a boss, or may not.
TF: The game will have a very cool combo system with juggling moves, and air combos so you can do a lot of maneuvers.
GI: Are you planning on keeping that sort of “ode to the classic games” feel in all of the levels, or is this just for the demo?
DP: This is just demonstrating the overall gameplay of the game with what you see here. We don’t reference each old game in each level. We do it here and there but it’s not part of the overall formula, or anything like that.
GI: Are you looking to release this on current generation consoles or maybe take this over to the next generation consoles?
DP: We’ll port it over to whatever system people want it on. We just have the technology where we can put it on this system or put it on that system. We have tech guys that are amazing so we don’t limit ourselves to any platform.
John Baez, Producer: I think for us, from my side since I’m producer – no one has seen this game at any of the hardware manufacturers. So, that’s why we didn’t do a press release. It’s just a thing to see fan reaction. We don’t want to say it’s coming out for any particular console. We’re just not that far with any of the hardware manufacturers, yet. Other than that, it’s really doing what we want to do with the company, which is surprising people.
TF: We like surprising people. With the internet everything is so well covered, and nothing surprises you anymore. You go out and you know what you’re going to see. So we really like the opportunity to just put something on the screen that’s going to get the attention of everyone that’s walking by.
GI: With Alien Hominid, and even this new title, it seems very much rooted in “old school”. Simple things blended in the 2D style. Is that what you guys are always going to focus on?
JB: Probably not. We’re doing it this way, because that’s what we like doing. When Dan and I worked at Gratuitous doing 3D games it just got so boring. So we were like, “why don’t we try and bring 2D back. Why don’t we try to do something old school that looks visually up-to-date or a little bit into the future?”
DP: The plan was as long as we made something that we thought was cool, that someone else would agree, hopefully. (laughs)
JB: No focus groups or marketing people designed Alien Hominid.
DP: The only focus groups we have are like here at Comic-Con when we listen to what everyone thinks about it.
JB: It’s our third year here, and it’s incredible to interact with fans. You just don’t get that at E3 or GDC. Here we have 80,000 people and we can pick their brains about the game. And they don’t mind playing it over and over. It’s really cool. It keeps us close to our roots.
DP: We’ll have grandmothers playing with their grandsons on Alien Hominid together, and it’s really cool to see them pick it up, and they know how to shoot right away.
JB: The first year we were at Comic-Con was 2003 with Alien Hominid, and we had 10-year-old kids coming up to us thinking that we had invented side scrolling. (laughs) They never played one before.
DP: Yeah, they were like, “is this a new thing?” And we said, “We hope so!” (laughs)
GI: Well it is a new thing for a lot of the young kids. Once the PlayStation, Saturn, and N64 came out everything was pretty much rooted in 3D.
DP: And we don’t know why, either. We miss it. [2D] I just hope other people compete with us and make side-scrollers because I want to play ones where I don’t know where all the bosses are. (laughs)
TF: It’s tough because you get all the emulators and play all the old arcade games you like, but then eventually you run out. I went through this phase where I was searching for every old cool arcade 2D game, and I got to this point where I’d seen them all, and they’re not making any more. We need more people to surprise us now.
JB: We charted in Europe on the independent chart and it really was an affirmation that our small humble company can really do something that people respond to, and that 2D is a legitimate genre of gaming. It’s never going to go away, and there’s going to be guys – it may not be the huge publishers that are going to throw $10 million at a side-scroller – I don’t know what you would do with $10 million, if you had that kind of budget.
TF: It’d be a pretty killer side-scroller. (smiles)
GI: How many people actually created Alien Hominid?
JB: We had eight full-time and we had eight part-time and that could have been for a few months for help. We had a lot of friends help us out. San Diego is a great community, because there used to be a lot of console development here, not so much anymore, but there’s lots of resources here.
GI: Have you guys been talking about the GBA version of Alien Hominid at all?
DP: Sure! You want to play it?
GI: Of course! Now what’s going to be different with the GBA version?
JB: I don’t know the complete spec off hand, but it’s going to be around thirteen levels. Zoo Digital is the publisher and it’s being developed by Tuna Interactive, and they just did a fantastic job. It has allowed us to totally focus on what we’ve wanted to focus on. We want to focus on experimenting on new things. Everyone’s wanted to see Alien Hominid come out on GBA.
GI: Are you working on a PSP version?
JB: We are a PSP developer. It’s a tough question because we don’t want to focus on Alien Hominid right now. We want to use new technology to do new things. So I guess in a round-about way – not directly. Sony’s really excited about what we’re doing as a company. New technology deserves new stuff. We want to experiment, and we’re small enough so we can experiment. Our approval for PSP development just went through last week, so we have to get our hands on the equipment. We’ve been playing with them since we won them at the Independent Games Festival.
GI: Is it fun being that small and having that kind of freedom?
JB: Yeah. My background is in architecture, and if I had to work in a big gigantic mega studio where I was brick detail nerd #14 – it’s not worth it.
TF: It’s definitely fun to be able to do your own thing. If you have a good idea you can just implement it, and not go have a meeting about it.
JB: The little game that they’re playing right here is called “All you can Eat” – that was just a little fun game where there’s fat kids in the game that are doing the all you can eat thing. It’s really a fantastic ability not to have to go through a zillion approval processes just to have fun. We hope our games reflect that and that people find them fun, because we have fun making them. When you’re small it’s easy to keep the fun up.
GI: Do you think being that small is going to be difficult with the next generation?
JB: I don’t know if I’m that worried yet. I think we’ll just make 2D but the resolution will be that much better with that many more sprites and we’re just excited for more RAM. Right now our bottleneck is the RAM for all of the artwork so I just think as long as there’s a market for 2D and as long as the console manufacturers appreciate that, I think we’ll keep making better 2D games. At the end of the day I think hardware manufacturers want games that are going to sell the hardware and sell the games and keep their royalties coming in. All they want it to do is make it look at least current if not something totally new. It can probably be any kind of rendering. We really hope what we’ve done as a company will get people to experiment on rendering technologies so everything isn’t hyper realistic 3D. You go into an art museum and you see 500 painters doing their own thing.
TF: We love Katamari Damacy, so anything really different, we really like.
JB: We really want people to experiment like that, because if not, everything gets old and stale, and you’re doing sequels and licensed product and it has to look real. When it doesn’t look perfect when you are trying to be real, then you know it’s fake and the illusion is broken. Then it’s no fun anymore.
GI: Do you want to keep Behemoth small or do you want to expand?.
TF: It’d be cool to be able to do multiple projects. But we don’t think you need an infinite team to do a game, though.
JB: Hopefully soon we’ll be able to announce a thing that’s coming down the pipe that we may be able to show how we want to work in the future. Maybe it becomes a new kind of model for experienced developers who have been in the industry for a while and want to get out and start a new thing. If we’ve inspired anyone to do what we did it would just be incredible, and we really hope to be speaking at GDC so we can give back to all the people that helped us get where we were able to make Alien Hominid. Because otherwise we’d be back sitting in our cubicles making some board game for somebody else, and nobody would have been enriched with what we did.
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23-07-2005, 02:12 AM
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