Interview: Roll7’s John Ribbins On OlliOlli, Not A Hero & Time Travelling BunnyLords

With the release of OlliOlli to critical and popular acclaim earlier this year, Roll7 got 2014 off to a great start. They’ve now announced that OlliOlli would me making the jump to PS3, PS4 and PC, but this comes alongside a new game, the 2¼D cover-based shooter Not A Hero, for PC and next-gen consoles.

In addition to spending some time with the game at Rezzed last week, we sat down with Roll7’s creative director, John Ribbins, for a chat about the project’s past, present and time travelling rabbit.

TSA: With Roll7, you’ve almost come out of nowhere with OlliOlli. How have you been enjoying the success of that game?

John Ribbins: It’s been really good! Kind of a dream to put something out and get really good feedback. It was nice getting those reviews and, I think we all agree, it was nice when normal gamers started actually tweeting that they were having fun with it.

We finished the game in November, and then the end of 2013 and early 2014 was just fixing stuff. Design and build wise, it was done, but we spent two months just tearing our game apart and looking at what could be better; what we could change and do differently. So by the time it came out, we thought everyone was going to hate it. So we were pleasantly surprised when it came out and did well.

TSA: And everyone was telling you it was really polished, and you’re like, “wait what?” Now in the last week, you’ve announced that it’s coming to PS3, PS4 and PC, do you think these might be at a slight advantage when it comes to controls, thanks to the bigger analogue sticks?

John: It’s difficult to say, because I’ve got so used to playing it on Vita now that I suck on all other platforms. Obviously I like the bigger analogue stick but, it sounds ridiculous, I was playing it for the first time today as well on PC with an Xbox controller and PS4, and I’m rubbish at it because it’s different.

You have a lot more control compared to the Vita where you could accidentally pull a bigger trick than you wanted because the stick is so tiny. So yeah, maybe you do have an advantage.

TSA: With Not A Hero, you’ve gone in quite a different direction. What was the inspiration behind this new game?

John: So, I quite like the challenge of doing stuff in 2D, like a skating game in 2D, and I’m a massive fan of Gears of War and always wanted to do a cover-based game. It seemed like something that hadn’t really been done a lot in 2D games.

Blizzard did a game called Blackthorne, which had a cover system in 2D, but I think came out the same year that they did the first Warcraft. So I assume, because Warcraft did how Warcraft did, they went, “We can forget about the cover-based game.”

TSA: Maybe they’re going to come back to it as part of some grand plan?

John: Yeah, 20 years later!

So I really loved that game and I always thought it was a really cool mechanic that then hadn’t been used again. The ability to duck back into the background and take cover during gunfights.

TSA: That’s an interesting point, because when you hear 2D, you think it’s all going to be on one plane, but your cover system is based on ducking back into the screen?

John: Well, you’ve also got cover which is low stuff that you crouch behind, but that’s a whole bunch more animation to draw and in order to get something ready for Rezzed we had to take out all of the cover you can duck behind!

So there will be stuff that you duck down low… I’m not on video, so I don’t know why I’m doing the animations…

TSA: Well, I’m just going to have to write out that you said that you did the motions, now.

John: At the moment, you’re only ducking into the background, but in the final version you’ll be running, if you can imagine, on three lanes. You can duck into the background or crouch into the foreground.

TSA: So something like LittleBigPlanet’s three planes?

John: Yeah, a similar method to that.

TSA: Despite the different genre, you’ve got another fast-paced form of gameplay, but it’s tied to a control system that, as I found with OlliOlli, it felt unintuitive to start of with. Is that something you recognise is there?

John: So, is that our thing? Do we like to make obtuse control systems? [laughs]

Um, that’s an interesting question. I think it’s a really tricky thing.

With OlliOlli, we did a lot of play testing, so there’s a balance between ten people play it one way and they say it isn’t really working, so then you change it, but then the next group suggest what the first lot said they hated.

So when we were at first playable with OlliOlli, we had land on one button, grind on another and switch stance on another button. When people were playing, they were like, “There’s too many buttons!” so we put everything onto one button, and people struggled with it and would say, “Have you thought about putting stuff on different buttons?” So you’re just like, “Dude, you could play it that way but you’ll hate it.”

So I guess the controls for Not A Hero are like that, and we’ve had a lot of feedback that it feels weird to leave cover with down and take cover with ‘Z’. But they were originally on the same button, and it annoys the crap out of you.

What you played today, controls-wise, is not actually what the final controls will end up being, and there’s that iterative process of finding what messes everyone up and thinking about it again.

At the same time, both OlliOlli and Not A Hero have weird movement mechanics, in many ways. OlliOlli has you hold everything before you launch while Not A Hero has the snap to cover, so because it’s not necessarily like something you’ve played before, it’s hard to build a control system that’s really familiar because it’s really quite different.

TSA: Yeah, and you don’t have an already existing genre to fall back on. I think that, years ago, John Carmack said that Rage was just going to use Call of Duty’s control system, because that’s what everyone’s used to.

John: Yeah, exactly. We can’t just go, “Yeah, WASD is your legs and mouse is your head, now off you go!”

TSA: It feels like you’ve got a challenging and short development period, planning for a summer release, I think it was… Actually, how long has Not A Hero been in development for?

John: On and off, it’s been in development for ages. It started as a pet project in 2012. We signed OlliOlli with Sony, but then had a gap between signing it and starting it. I was obviously really involved with prototyping OlliOlli, but then it was signed and I couldn’t work on it for a while, so I needed something to occupy my brain, so I started making Not A Hero.

Then we started making OlliOlli and stopped working on Not A Hero, and it’s only when we were finishing with OlliOlli at the end of last year that I jumped back on it and started playing around with it. January this is when it really kicked off. So it hasn’t been worked on for that long in total, but it’s been chopping and changing, and now this year is full time Not A Hero.

TSA: But that’s interesting that you juggled these two projects at the same time…

John: Well, it was nice having those gaps and coming back to it, because you can come back to it with fresh eyes, and see that this feature I thought was the best thing doesn’t work and I can get rid of that.

Ammo, for example. The whole ammo count and reloading mechanic only came in January this year, and before that you had infinite bullets and never had to stop shooting. It was only through people playing in the gap that we saw they could just spam shoot.

So it was a case of, “How do we stop people spamming shoot? Oh, limit their ammunition! That’s why people do that in games!”

TSA: You do also have quite a strange sense of humour running through this game. Compared to OlliOlli, where it’s more the humour of your flying corpse, here you have exploding cat bombs, ridiculously over the top explosions, and what exactly is going on with the giant purple bunny head…

John: So, BunnyLord is a time travelling purple rabbit from the future who’s come back in time and wants to become the mayor of the city.

TSA: Right, OK. So now it makes perfect sense!

John: Unfortunately, he’s come back in time because there’s a crisis in the future, but there really isn’t any time to explain why he has or what he’s doing there or why this needs to happen, but he really needs your help.

I think, to be honest, I kind of like the fact that pretty much every shooting game is the same – and I feel really bad for people who write scripts for these. A lot of the time it’s a cut and paste story, and it often doesn’t really make any sense, because all you’re really doing is shooting people in the face. Call of Duty is fun because you get to shoot people in the face.

So, by the same rationale, hopefully Not A Hero is fun because you get to shoot people in the face. I kind of feel that the metagame makes sense, has a story and things to do, but I want the whole game to poke fun at the idea of shooting games having a story. It doesn’t need one, you work for a giant purple rabbit, but you don’t really know why. The question is do you really care? You’re shooting people in the face and you’ve got exploding cats on your side.

TSA: It’s not just that it’s an exploding cat, though. It’s a cat which you set loose, and then when it encounters and enemy, it plants a landmine and blows itself up!

John: I think OlliOlli’s got, as you said, the humour of slamming into the ground, and there’s a lot of frustration there too, but I think that Not A Hero will make you laugh occasionally. If it was straight up murdering people, that’s quite serious and morbid, so it’s quite nice to get a big of slapstick in there. Like when you shoot a guy through a window…

TSA: There’s the humour of the unexpectedly awesome kills from a hopeless situation.

I want you to feel like a boss and this awesome gunfighter, but at the same time, hopefully stuff happens that just makes you go “Hahaha! The cat exploded!”

TSA: And you’ve got that just one more go aspect to it as well, where even as you’re dying repeatedly, you’re able to play with the mechanics.

John: I think that with OlliOlli, a lot of the time the slam catches you unaware, where hang up on the staircase and you miss the landing and – Bap! – you’re dead. Whereas I feel like Not A Hero is more about everything suddenly going out of control. You have to be quite controlled going through a level and strategic with your shooting, and sometimes you’ll press the wrong button or blow the wrong thing up and suddenly you get swamped by guys.

TSA: Last question, whose idea was it to jump in such an incredibly manly way for that photo?

John: Uh… I think it might have been mine…

We had someone taking pictures and taking really arty black and white photos, and it was we needed to do something that’s just so terrible, to take the edge off the seriousness of black and white photography. So we wanted to do the manliest thing we could think of,  which was going to be lumberjacks smoking pipes and eating beef jerky, but then just went with the “Hi guys!” jump.

Thanks to John for taking the time to chat with us, though deep down I think he really just wanted to be able to sit down for a few minutes having been stood up all day.