Hemophiliac under High Pressure?
Video games are not just made by big time developers associated with big time publishers. Communities of independent developers have been thriving for years. Consisting of teams as small as two people or even individuals laboring away with a passion, these folks offer up their creations for anyone to play at sites like addictinggames.com. I've had brushes with both sides of game development, indie and big time, and it seems I'm once again getting in on the action.
I'm working with Will Perone, programmer extraordinare and fellow DigiPen Survivor, on the sequel to
Beat Me Up. The original game was a fun little time waster where you got to unload the day's accumulation of stress on a hapless ragdoll dummy, effectively beating the crap out of it. Now I'll admit up front that I'm a total prude, but even I had to crack a smile at the combination of gore and absurdity to be found in
Beat Me Up. Add to that the ability to build your own Levels of Doom and this simple premise offered up a lot of content.
It's exciting to work on a project that will be going public in a month or so and I decided to share the fun and keep a developer journal which I will try to post weekly. To start off with, I've conducted a mini interview with Mr. Perone to find out why this crazy game came to be.
AA: How would you describe this game to somebody who'd never played the original?
WP: The goal of
Beat Me Up Too is to beat up a ragdoll as much as possible in a certain amount of time. You swing the guy around on an elastic rope and get to throw stuff at him. There is also the secondary goal to make your own levels and share them, but that's more on the meta level.
AA: What are you hoping to accomplish in this sequel?
WP: The goal of the sequel is to do everything how I should have done it in the first game. Now that I actually have time to do everything correctly. So, more emphasis/ease of use with content creation/sharing/player interaction, better graphics, more stable engine, and more interesting things to do in the sandbox.
AA: What inspired you to design the original game? Where did that idea come from?
WP: I've been programming games for 15 years and when I decide to learn a new language/platform I write a game in it. This time it was Flash so I thought to myself “what types of things can I do to take advantage of the fact that this game will be on the Internet and widely available?” So, I decided to make a sandbox type game that emphasized content creation/sharing in the pretext of a simple physics engine.
The content creation/sharing became problematic though because the game became so popular that my web host suspended my account for overloading their bandwidth which caused me to have to make a special version of the game without the custom content stuff, which sucked in my opinion. But people still loved the sandbox stuff in the game and I deliberately designed the game to be over the top with some shock value.
The point of the shock value was to get a reaction out of people and getting a reaction out of people is what causes people to talk about your game over other games because it tore them out of their normalcy/expectancy of what a game is. No matter if they were telling people about how disturbing the game was or how much they loved the game; either approach was good because it created a network effect of people telling people which dramatically increased its popularity. All that mattered was that people were telling people about it because the game affected them in some way.
Creating a name for yourself when you have no previous image/products in a market is MUCH easier when your product isn't more of the same stuff people have already seen. So that's my story with the first game. Of course, you know I have a history of making excessive games.
AA: Hah! Yeah. Thank you very much for the interview.
Will and I will talk some more about creating
Beat Me Up Too next week so don't forget to tune in!