Interviews

Interview: Meet the man behind the Ron Paul videogame

by Anthony on April 13, 2012 · 0 comments

in Computer, Featured, Interviews

Mario. Sonic. Rayman. Ron Paul? The presidential candidate is having a shot at platforming greatness in Ron Paul: Road to Revolution.

Developer Daniel Williams needed $5,000 to get his browser-based platformer funded through Kickstarter. He reached that goal in 24 hours. Hailing from Texas, the same state as the libertarian-leaning congressman, Williams spent the last few years as a freelance programmer and helped launch www.ronpaulswag.com, a merchandise site that makes ”liberty sexy with our unique mix of apparel and accessories.”

The odds of Ron Paul being the Republican nominee are slim, but Williams hopes to release this free game this summer before the August convention that will name the candidate. In this interview, he talks about the goal of the game not being to convert anyone, the unlikely inspiration for the puzzles and the odds of Keynesians showing up as enemies.

Can you tell me what Ron Paul: Road to Revolution is about?

Daniel Williams: It’s a sidescrolling adventure game where you play the role of Ron Paul. You’ll make your way across the United States collecting delegates, sound money, and ultimately end the Federal Reserve and rescue the Constitution.

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Tagged as: Kickstarter, Ron Paul

Interview: Behind A Valley Without Wind’s chiptune-inspired soundtrack

by Anthony on April 11, 2012 · 0 comments

in Computer, Featured, Interviews, PAX East 2012

As the composer for A Valley Without Wind, Pablo Vega has his work cut out for him. Not only is he responsible for the sound design, but Arcen Games hopes to regularly add to the game with free DLC and paid expansion packs that include new tracks. The first volume of the soundtrack for the yet-to-be released open-world RPG/platformer has 17 tracks. Vega hopes to do more than 100 tracks total in the coming years, and he started this project 14 months ago.

At PAX East, Vega talked about the unique sound he developed for A Valley Without Wind, seeing the randomly-generated world grow in size and how he finds inspiration. More details about the game can be found in this interview with Arcen Games founder Chris Park.

I love the soundtrack but I struggle to describe it. How would you describe the music in your own words?

Pablo Vega: The best way to describe it as trying to give a shout out to the old school 8-bit sound but sort of making it our own in the sense that we’re doing a fashion with more modern instrumentation and style.

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Tagged as: A Valley Without Wind, Arcen Games, Pablo Vega, PAX East 2012

Interview: Chris Park credits fans (literally) for helping A Valley Without Wind

by Anthony on April 9, 2012 · 1 comment

in Computer, Featured, Interviews, PAX East 2012

After months of community-based beta testing, A Valley Without Wind is coming out at the end of the month. The 2D platformer blends an enormous randomly-generated world with an ambitious amount of RPG elements. At PAX East, Arcen Games founder Chris Park talks about the value of letting customers test the beta, his hope to never make a sequel and how the much-maligned Zelda II: The Adventure of Link partly served as inspiration.

How helpful has this beta process been?

Chris Park: I cannot express how helpful it as been. You know difference from the start [of the beta release] until now. There has been somewhere between…1,000 and 1,5000 individual accepted submissions from players. We have somewhere in the vicinity of 120 players who are thanked in the credits because they’ve made that many material contributions.

We took a week off from actually doing work on the game to just brainstorm. We did all this brainstorming in the forums for the players. We talked with players. [The other developers and I] would be on the phone for 3 hours a day to talk about our ideas and the players’ ideas.

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Tagged as: A Valley Without Wind, Arcen Games, PAX East 2012

Laughing Jackal on Turning an Idea into a Game

by Anthony on March 19, 2012 · 0 comments

in Console, Interviews

The life of an indie developer isn’t always glamorous, but the folks at Laughing Jackal Games provide an insider perspective on their blog about the process of making games. The studio has worked on several PlayStation Network minis such as Fighting Fantasy, Orbit (read our review) and Hungry Giraffe. They give some detailed answers to the questions and it’s well worth the read. It’s the first of a planned series.

An excerpt from a question asking how the developers balance the disconnect between what gamers want and what they think gamers want.

When we find part of the game which is either no fun at all, or just not as fun as it could be, we then sit down to work out why that is and try to think of a way of making thing better while not breaking the rest of the game. Sometimes it’s a simple balancing issue [well I say simple: this can require a fair amount of iteration to get right :) ] and sometimes this can require a deeper change to the gameplay mechanics.

Tagged as: Laughing Jackal, PlayStation, PlayStation Plus

Interview: Howard Tsao Talks Guns of Icarus Online

by Anthony on January 28, 2012 · 1 comment

in Computer, Interviews


Based in New York City, Muse Games has been busy working on their biggest game yet. Guns of Icarus Online, a sequel to a 2009 release, is a frenetic airship-ship based shooter set in a steampunk world. Anticipation is rising for the game, as it’s already big hit on Kickstarter having raised $3,600 more than it’s $10,000 goal.

Muse Games founder Howard Tsao shares what the daily life is like at the company, the benefits of going big and an inside look at the multiplayer action coming out later this year.

What’s a typical day like for you and the rest of Muse Games?

Howard Tsao: As an indie team, it’s surprisingly hard to describe a typical day.  Besides working on the games, we may be answering questions on our Kickstarter page or forum, catching up with other indie devs to organize our monthly meetup, or chatting with our publisher.  On most days, there is something new and different we haven’t quite experienced before.  Once in a while, we are prone to get into zany debates on any random topic that after a while, we can’t quite remember how it even started.  

We have scrum every morning, and if it’s a Monday, we’ll have a sprint review meeting to start the week so we can go over how everyone is doing relative our sprint milestones and discuss solutions to various problems.  The rest of the communications during the day are informal.  Since we all sit next to each other in a room, we can review each other’s work, answer questions, and make decisions just by pulling our chairs over.  Sometimes at night, after we are burnt out from the day, we’ll play some Team Fortress, Rock Band, or Texas Hold’em.  On the last Friday of every month, we have a studio-wide game jam. The goal of the game jam is to build a one-day prototype, and any idea goes! It has been a great way for us to explore new ideas.

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Tagged as: Guns of Icarus Online, Muse Games, Steampunk