An Interview With - Puppygames

We're taking you away from E3 for a moment to give you an exclusive interview with Puppygames, a two-man Indie development team straight out of England. They're responsible for a handful of retro-styled games on the PC, including their promising new effort, Revenge of the Titans, which is currently in a downloadable beta and available for pre-order. We talked to the programming side of the team, Cas, who took the time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions, just for you!

- Kyle K.


Kyle K: Who exactly are you guys and what do you do?


Cas: I am the unlikely-named Caspian Prince, and by day I do horrible grind work for the Man as a contract programmer doing tedious things with Java and databases usually. At night I come alive, and write games, and attempt to take care of the "business" side of Puppygames, such as it is. I also take care of the sound effects mostly, and the overall production and release of the games.

Chaz Willets is the other half of Puppygames. I met Chaz at school over 25 years ago. Just like I've always been a programmery sort of person, Chaz has always been an arty sort of person. He does all the graphics and animations and particle effects in our games, and though he claims that I'm the designer, really we both share equal responsibility for what eventually turns into one of our games. Chaz also maintains our website. When he needs to earn money for food (literally) Chaz does other people's websites and occasionally a little contract graphics work for a select few indie games companies.
Our music comes from various friends. The Revenge of the Titans music comes from another old friend of mine, Dave Sunerton-Burl (http://www.strange-and-delicious.co.uk/)


KK: For people who don't already know, what exactly is Revenge of the Titans?


CP: Story-wise, Revenge of the Titans (RotT) is set in the aftermath of our seminal shooter Titan Attacks. The Titans are back after the kicking you handed out to them in 2005. And they're really cross, attacking on foot. It turns out Titans are huge and even the little ones weigh thirty tonnes.

RotT is a real-time strategy game that uses basic tower defence mechanics, in that it is passively executed strategy - you don't issue orders or direct anything (well, mostly). The enemies don't behave like traditional tower defence enemies, they behave like real-time strategy enemies. Actually somewhat cleverer than even those, generally. And in a final twist we added a bit of Cake Mania for arcade action. There's always something to be fiddling with. It's a blend of micro-management, macro-management, strategy, and decisions based on trade-offs, and arcade action. As the game progresses the balance of micro-to-macro management changes. We hope that it's quite a unique experience.


KK: You mentioned a couple times on your site that the response to your latest title has been phenomenal. How is it different from your previous games?


CP :It's a lot bigger for a start! Our earlier games, despite the kind words everyone writes about them, basically don't sell, and never have done. Everyone has their own theories as to why this might be, and different theories for every game, and we've got our own pet theories. RotT is different in so many ways, which if I were to list some of them in no particular order, are:

1. It's got far, far more depth than any of our other games, with multiple layers of gameplay all the way from arcade action down to the research metagame.

2. It's got very accessible gameplay - anyone can play it and have a bit of fun, rather like Titan Attacks, but unlike, say, Droid Assault. We've made it fun on all sorts of levels. Everything that's gone into the game has been put in there to make it a bit more fun.
3. We've made the demo extremely long. In fact you can play it for hours and hours before you run out of game to play.
4. It's our first proper "full-screen" game for quite a long while.
5. We've gone completely to town on production values. This is pretty much the best we can manage with the time and resources we've got. With more time and resources we could do even better, but sadly we can still only afford to do this as a hobby, so this is what we're stuck with unless RotT is a raging success.

6. The game has been in development for so long, and so extensively tested and balanced and tweaked and re-written and polished, that we've gotten a very, very shiny pebble of pure gameplay out of it, and I hope that it shows.


KK: Thanks to the iPhone, Tower Defense has become a dead genre, but you guys made managed to make it interesting again. Why did you decide to make ROtT a Tower Defense game?


CP: Well, we didn't actually decide to make a TD game at all. In fact when we started out it was meant to be like a Flash game called Storm the House. In about 2008 we realised that fundamentally this was actually a rather boring game - we were literally almost "finished" writing it when I decided it was rubbish and told Chaz to stop work while I did some gameplay experiments with programmer art. Chaz was in despair. But finally I convinced him to transplant the graphics he'd already done into the new game I was working on, which was essentially Tower Defence, but without the pathing. The aliens just ran in from all sides straight at the base. After about a year I realised that this too was rather boring, leading to bases and strategies which just involved making a big blob of guns and upgrades in the middle of the screen, so I added random walls. This meant that because the levels were randomly generated I couldn't do the path thing that was in all the "other" Tower Defence games. So I decided the aliens should probably work out their own paths towards their goals, which they do. And then I realised that the aliens should also probably change their strategy if they started getting shot at, so they do that, too. And to make the game more strategical I added that thing where the upgrade buildings need to be placed nearby the turrets.

There was a lot of headache around the resource collection concept. I tried a lot of different ideas, but the one that worked best was a cross between the traditional "crystal mining" meme from various RTS games, and our own "click to collect" idea which had been in there from the start.

Research was a very late change to the game. Originally, the levels were simply presented to you in order, and you got the technology automatically, in that set order. I realised that one of the most fun things in Titan Attacks was choosing what to spend your money on, so that went into the game, delaying the demo release by 2 months, and causing Chaz to lose some hair and grumble a lot.

So basically, the game evolved from something completely different over about 3 years or so, and kept on evolving and radically changing. It's settled a bit now. There never was an overall design or objective, it's just turned out the way it has. Rather like our other games. Did you know Droid Assault was originally about rescuing rabbits?


KK: Now, to change gears a little bit: Why did you guys decide to get into Indie Gaming as apposed to something more... Commercial?


CP: For me personally, mostly because I'm not very good at it and no-one would hire me. And I think Chaz doesn't really want a 9-5 job either, and has frugal living standards, scratching away a living in cheap foreign countries. I've never really asked him why he perseveres with our continual failure and skintness when he could probably earn a proper living working for a studio. I expect it's because he doesn't want to do the same old crap that everyone else has to do.

The other thing is, I foolishly see myself more as a producer and designer than a games programmer. I wish I could do away with the programming part and just get the machine to obey my commands. But unfortunately the only thing I'm any good at is programming, and even that, I'm not particularly brilliant at. I failed a Google interview because I'm not clever enough.

We make the games we make because nobody else seems to quite get it right, you know what I mean? We make them for ourselves. It just wouldn't work for us if we worked at Lionhead or EA.


KK: Retro-visuals are something that we frequently see in Indie Games. What do you guys do different to stand out of the crowd?


CP: The trick is that we're not actually doing retro-visuals. What we do is far, far beyond anything that could be done even 10 years ago. A single frame in Revenge of the Titans has maybe 8,000 individual sprites in it, all drawn at 60fps, in about 20-odd layers, in true colour, antialiased, blended, scaled, some of them rotated. It gives the fleeting impression of retro, but there's no limited palette, no scanlines, no jaggy edges (at least not that we don't deliberately make ourselves), no black backgrounds, and crucially, no talentless programmers doing the art. Chaz meticulously draws and composes layers and animates everything to perfection, usually several times over, until it's perfect. He's never satisfied with the first cut. It always has to be perfect. We're like that.

I wonder why no-one ever mentions the sound in our games. Bah. Although the music in this one has been receiving a lot of acclaim, as it should. Dave's awesome.