Igrorama in English

- Hello. Would you be so kind as to introduce yourself to our readers,
and tell us a little bit about your team?




The other half of Puppygames - for there are indeed only two of us -
is Chaz Willets, whom I have known since we were at school, and he
does anything arty or webby that we need to do for our games, and lots
of design work for them.

We have a lot of friends who do music for us. Please don't offer :)



- How did you get to be a part of the Humble Indie Bundle project? Are
you satisfied with it's results? Would you recommend future projects
of the same kind to other independent authors?

I spend a lot of time "networking", or as my girlfriend says, "wasting
time nerding on internet forums". However, over the many years I've
been doing it, I've made a lot of virtual friends (and met quite a few
of them in real life!) Eventually I got to know Jeffrey Rosen, who is
an all round brilliant guy, and he asked if we'd like to bung one of
our old games into the Humble Indie Bundle #2. And I said, well, why
don't we release our brand new game on it instead? And he was really
enthused by the idea - it was quite a coup I suppose. I like to think
that maybe Revenge was the start of the Humble Bundle but that's not
very humble ;) We hope to develop a special relationship with Humble
Bundle, Inc., ongoing, and it's worked out very well for us.




- Are you planning on expanding the offer for Revenge of The Titans?
We've heard you're intent on adding Steam achievments. Have you
thought about releasing a modding tool or map editor?

Yes, we have a few things in the works. The next patch to v1.80.11
introduces basic modding capability for the brave and foolhardy (you
will need to be proficient with XML and maybe Java). I'm working on
Steam API integration in the background - I plan to support Steam
Achievements, and hopefully the Steam Cloud.

The maps are pseudo-randomly generated right now, but I did think that
the addition of a way to load ascii-based map files would be
interesting. We have a planned expansion of a few more fun buildings
at some point in the future, and would like to add a sandbox game
mode. It's all up in the air right now as we decide how to spend our
time, as cash is tight and time is limited.

Puppygames: Caspian i Chaz

- All of your games have been made with appealing retro graphics, and
the details are full of references to olden platforms, like ZX
Spectrum. How did you decide on using this style in the entire series
of games? Do you think that there still are people who gladly remember
the time when pixelised sprites were the best there was, in terms of
graphics? Are your next games going to continue this tradition?

Chaz: "They're easy to draw :)"

There are a few people who look through rose-tinted spectacles at
low-resolution graphics of yesteryear, but actually copying those
graphics rarely looks good. Usually it just looks like a programmer
who can't find an artist to do good graphics for his game. Puppygames
"retro" graphics are actually quite cunning in that they're really
very, very modern graphics which give a very good impression of being
retro (so good, ahaha, that people often mistake them for graphics
that could be done on old computers or even in Flash. Oh, no, you
can't!)

We're probably going to continue with the theme for the foreseeable
future as it's quite a recognisable style. And, as Chaz says, it's
easy to draw, hehe :)



- Although there are lots of free flash-based tower defense games,
there aren't too many commercial games of this kind. How much did the
undersaturation of the market affect the decision to make such a game?
What was your motivation?

As usual we didn't really think about that, which historically has
probably been why we have been so unsuccessful. In fact the original
game was based on Storm the House, a free Flash-based game that is
nothing to do with tower defense. One reason it took us over 3 years
to finish Revenge of the Titans is we kept on getting quite far with
it, and then deciding it was rubbish, and starting again. We
eventually hit upon a design that's a little bit like the RTS / tower
defense hybrid you see today. Then in January 2010 we decided we'd
target Steam in particular, which meant massively expanding the game
and really serious polishing - it took another year before it was
Steamworthy. Hopefully the production values are so beyond what you
find in a Flash game they'll never catch up with us!

In reality it's not a tower defense game at all, it's a real-time
strategy game, but one where most of your units don't move. It's hard
to pigeonhole into any particular category, which I like - it makes
the game pretty unique.



- Revenge of The Titans is also available on GNU/Linux. Do you see a
viable market for commercial games on this free/libre operating
system?

Viable enough, though hard to reach without some cunning. It's mostly
viable these days thanks to the Mac, rather strangely: if it weren't
for the Mac making the underlying Unixness more familiar, and the fact
that the Mac uses OpenGL graphics, probably there'd be almost no Linux
games at all out there. In fact the only reason we support Linux, or
even the Mac, is that I didn't have to do any porting work to get it
to run on them. I'm just not that clever!




- What are your plans for the future? Are you thinking about a new game?

We desperately want to make a new game. We've been working on Revenge
for over 3 years now and frankly we're bored stiff with it! We want to
make a multiplayer game next.We get quite a few requests to make
Revenge multiplayer but it's not going to happen - that's for a new
game. The next game.




- What would be your one golden advice for all the potential indie dev
teams in Serbia?

Stay in Serbia where it's cheap to live! I really envy development
teams who can live somewhere that cheap. England costs a fortune but
I'm stuck here because that's where all my roots are.



- Thank you for answering our questions. We wish you the best of luck
in your future endeavors.

No problem! I like to talk so I can get out of doing work.