TSA: One of the other things you’ve done, is you’ve got procedurally generated levels, but in a slightly different way to how an average game treats it, where you’re doing room scale procedural generation?
Dan: Yeah, that’s right! Procedural generation is, on the one hand, a really awesome tool for indie developers like us, because we can produce whole games without having a team of six designers, but at the same time, some people go “Procedural generation? It’s all going to be the same,” or “How can we know it’s going to be well designed?”
So what we did instead, is we’ve gone through and I’ve built, by hand – well by mouse actually – I’ve mouse built about a hundred and fifty different room layouts. And inside each room layout is a collection of different things like walkways and crates and other stuff which is given a chance to appear.
And then we have an algorithm that basically links all these things together, about twenty to twenty-five per level, in different ways. It removes walls, attaches floors to different floors, and just gives such a variety of different level layouts, but they’re always designed. They’re always hand designed, and I know that in each part you’re going to have a good experience because I built it. So that’s how we handmade that, instead of making it just purely procedural like something like Minecraft would do or a bunch of other games like that.
TSA: It’s a really nice idea, and like you say, lets you have more control to ensure that the player is always having a good time, because I imagine that’s a very difficult problem when you’re going with procedural generation.
Dan: Yeah, and it’s also about making sure that players can navigate everywhere, because sometimes you can make a procedurally generated game and then they’ve suddenly got a lift shaft that’s so deep that you can’t possibly navigate it. So we also had to make sure that Seraph, the main character, has lots of ways of navigating at all times, so you’re never stuck.
So she can climb vertical walls by jumping up them for holy reasons – holy magic! – and she can jump off a wall and get a lot more horizontal motion from jumping off a wall so she can clear massive gaps, and she’s got the usual double jumps and dashes. So, we’ve made it so that it feels kind of parkour like when you’re navigating a level, and there’s never a level environment that you can’t navigate.
It’s kind of like cheating, but because of the angelic character setting and theme it works, because players know she’s an angel, she can do whatever she wants.
TSA: Yeah it makes perfect sense really, you can get with whatever you want.
Dan: Pretty much! [Laughs]
TSA: You spoke to me at Rezzed about how heavily you have integrated Twitch into this game, and I saw the other day that you’ve opened up chat or something as well?
Dan: Absolutely. I was just testing that on PS4 this morning and you’ll be pleased to know that it works.
Basically what happens is, if you’re a Twitch streamer and you want to really give your fans loads of control over your game, you can play the game in Twitch mode instead of just standard mode. And what that means is, every time you kill a boss or finish a level, the chat is given the option of voting either #good or #evil. And they’ll just vote in their droves, as they do; they’ll spam it. Depending which one wins, the game is actually modified in real time based upon the result of the vote.
So if more people voted good, you might get a super powered shotgun that you didn’t have access to before, or you might get a double damage orb that you pick up and it lasts for two minutes, or something like that, which is really cool. But if they vote evil, we’ll give you a bunch of nasty stuff. So it might be two bosses instead of one in the next level, or it might be an increase in your difficulty rating of one, of a whole number or something similar.
What we’ve made sure we’ve done is that even the evil ones are just entertaining to watch. So it’s not like you have half health, because that’s not fun to watch! It’s more fun that people go “There’s the two bosses that I voted for, and they’re both together. Good luck!” The banter between streamers and their fans is something I hadn’t seen much before, because it’s usually a very one way system. They talk to their fans and the fans chat back, but they never get to be involved. So we thought it was perfect timing to do that.
TSA: Obviously Twitch have added this functionality, but it’s not something a lot of games have taken advantage of outside of modified games like Twitch Plays Pokémon, etc… But I haven’t really seen it integrated into a game as a core idea. It’s lovely and it really bolsters the appeal of it, not just for people who stream constantly, but even for people who just casually stream, because it just lets your friends mess with you, which is always fun.
Dan: That’s what generally what we’ve been seeing actually, because we’re relatively unknown. As we’re finishing the game we’re going to start ramping up our visibility, we’re going to start spotting streamers with more than a few thousand followers.
At the moment, when you’ve got a few thousand followers, it’s your regulars getting to screw with you in ways that they’ve never been able to before. It’s really fun to watch, because they’re like “Oh, Jimbob17, you again!” Now they’re able to vote on this and remove your special weapon or whatever. That’s really magic to watch that.
I wonder how it’ll work when we’ve got a streamer with something like, you know, a thousand people watching at once? I’m just interested to see what happens because it’ll be votes in the thousands as opposed to votes in the dozens.
TSA: As you were saying before, you haven’t quite got the PC release out, you’re still in Early Access. How are you finding that as a feedback mechanism?
Dan: Yeah, I have to say that Early Access is probably the best thing we’ve ever done as a studio. This is probably not a popular sentiment, not a common sentiment, but it’s been so fantastic for us.
There’s been three awesome things from it. The first is that we now have a 100% recommended rating on Steam, which you can’t really go much higher than! I don’t know, my maths isn’t my strong point, but you can’t really go much higher than that. So that’s good, and leading up to our actual launch we’ve got a really good rating for new people to come in and see.
The second is that we’re able to get tons of really awesome feedback. So, for example, I put up a poll a few days after we launched and said “Right, now you’ve all played the game and absorbed what there is, what is the one thing you’d like to see before we launched the game?” People voted, it was about a hundred and something votes, and it turns out they really wanted a survival mode and more enemies.
Now, I hadn’t even considered a survival mode, other than just from a few people saying “Ah, survival mode would be quite cool.” But that was the top voted one, and the more enemies was the second voted one. And that’s two things we’ve put in the game that we simply would not have had, and you know what? That might have actually affected our reviews or the longevity of the game. So now we’ve got those things, that’s something we just wouldn’t have thought to do without Early Access, so that’s really cool.
The third thing is that people are actually sending us bug reports. You know if you get a crash or something they’ll send you the output log, and we go, “Oh look at that, that’s a weird crash. If you do x and y in a really strange way…” We’ve had access to hundreds, thousands of really dedicated player who are, in their own way, little testers, which is really great. And you can’t put a price on that. It’s so expensive to have hundreds of testers.
TSA: Finally, you’ve got it coming to PS4 as well, later this year. I assume it’s going to be pretty much exactly the same, you’re not going to have any PS4 exclusive content coming?
Dan: No, it’s going to be the same game because… Well, long story short it is the same game. We’ll leave early access the same day it comes out PlayStation 4, and it’s basically the same build other than there’s not keyboard controls on the PS4 version.
There’s no exclusive content, but it’s brand new.
TSA: Have you got a release date yet?
Dan: I would say, near the end of August, but I’m being really cagey.
TSA: That’s ok, you’ve got to go through cert?
Dan: That’s right. We’re going through it right now, and it could change, but I’m aiming for end of August, basically.
Thanks to Dan for taking the time to talk to us. Keep an eye out for more news on Seraph, and particularly that rough end of August release date.
TSBonyman
That looks very cool indeed!