Interview: Repelling The Invasion In Titan Attacks! With Caspian Prince

One of Curve’s latest wave of indie games being brought across to PlayStation is Titan Attacks! On the surface, it’s a fairly simple Space Invaders-styled game, but as I sat down to play the game, I was able to chat about it with Caspian Prince – yes, that is his name, and yes, he’s surely heard it all before – who makes up one half of Puppy Games.

Releasing on PS3, PS4 and PS Vita today as a Cross-Buy title on PSN, you can read more of my thoughts here. If, however, you’d like to take a peek behind the curtain, keep reading this formalised rendition of a rather relaxed and convivial chat that we had.

TSA: So, Titan Attacks! has been around for quite a few years now, and you’ve had several games released since then. Why did you go back to Titan Attacks! for your first console game?

Caspian Prince: It’s just got this really broad mainstream appeal to ordinary people. We find that a lot of our customers are what they call ‘Soccer Moms’, which is rather non-politically correct now, but just mums and other people who you just don’t expect to be playing games.

It’s a genuine casual game and anyone can pick it up and play it. Even my five year old daughter can play it, which is really good because the only other game she can play is ‘Plants vs. Ombies’, as she calls it!

She loves this game because you can only go left, right, shoot. I can even play with my three year old daughter, if I do the left and right bit. She just mashes the fire button! [laughs]

TSA: I guess it must be like having a turbo fire! [laughs]

Cas: This was the fifth game that we wrote, preceeded by four relative flops, though I guess you could call them complete flops, really. I think one of them sold seven copies. So Titan Attacks! was the first game to actually do well, enough to make us soldier on and do some other games after it.

TSA: You do have a running theme with the Titans, don’t you?

Cas: Titans, Basingstoke… Basingstoke in particular. We like to make sure that Basingstoke gets attacked first in any alien invasions. At the time, just before I became an independent developer, I was just a contract programmer doing boring stuff, stuck in Basingstoke making censorship software. So I was really bloody miserable, and I thought that was why we should get in invaded first.

When we released Revenge of the Titans, the invasion starts off in Basingstoke there too. It’s got cities of the world, but Basingstoke’s the first one. Nobody outside of the South of England really understands the joke!

It’s around this point that I pick up the controller and start to play the game.

Cas: I’d start on Earth, if I was you, just to get used to it. The game checkpoints every 20 levels, saving your ship configuration and your score, so you don’t have to just keep wading through all of the things. It’s really just about the score attack, but also just about relaxing gameplay… to start with.

We’ve also got a shop between the levels, which is one of those funny little things that just makes games, for some reason, quite compelling. You’re shooting aliens for cash, and there’s a balance to be had in the shop, whether you decide to spend your money on shields just to stay alive – you haven’t got lives, just shields – or whether you want to spend them on the upgrades to make your shots more powerful.

TSA: One of those options in the shop is for more bullets. How’s that actually affecting the rate of fire in the game?

Cas: Well, with the original Space Invaders you only had one bullet in flight at any time. So when you actually hit something, your bullet resets and you can fire again.

However, in this game, one of the first things you might think about upgrading is extra bullets! This just means you can double tap and so forth, and you can buy up to four extra bullets.

You can also by add-ons, which are four huge guns that you can buy to stick on the side of the ship to basically make it a bit more of a lethal killing machine. It does have the side effect that you’ll usually end up killing the little parachute guys, unfortunately.

TSA: How have you gone about balancing the difficulty curve with all of this?

Cas: It’s a very slow build of up very simple, mesmerising and straightforward easy gameplay that anyone can play, but by the time you’re on level 100, you’ll be pretty frantic…

As I hit an alien ship, the soldier within manages to eject and slowly parachutes down to the ground. Aiming to catch him for a slight monetary reward, I position my ship underneath him, but not quite well enough…

Cas: There’s actually a very generous collision box around you for catching the aliens…

TSA: And I still managed to miss it!

Cas: It’s alright, it happens to me too. I’m rubbish at my own games. I’ve never actually completed any of my own games… I always cheat.

The first couple of games I made were actually really difficult, and consequently nobody actually bought them. Eventually we discovered that when you make games easier, they sell more. So we just kept making them easier and they’d sell even more!

TSA: So you’re not going after the Dark Souls crowd, then?

Well, I’ve seen Dark Souls and thought that was a bit too difficult for me, though I understand that’s exactly the point of it. There’s obviously some masochists out there, but I can’t help thinking that they’d sell more if it was a bit easier!

TSA: I keep seeing the “Recharge” thing in the shop. What does it do? Is it worth getting?

Cas: Well, the recharge power up, which costs loads of money, just didn’t do anything in the original game. You’d spend loads and loads of money on it, and all it did was increase a number somewhere.

We would get people writing in asking “What does the recharge thing do?” and we’d reply that it’s supposed to increase the first rate of the add-ons, and they’d go “Oh! That’s alright then.” and believe that’s what it did, even though it didn’t do anything at all and just costs loads of money.

It’s only when Curve were looking at porting it that we actually discovered this bug that we’d had for seven years or something! They’ve left a couple of the other bugs in, though, because they’re quite entertaining.

It’s at this stage, having got used to the game – I may have died here –  that it seemed like a good idea to move along.

TSA: Should we look at the special saves from later in the game?

Cas: Yeah, of course. It’s got a feature where you can save the game and pick up where you left off overnight, for example, or you have to go to work and come back a day later.

TSA: And that’s in addition to the checkpoint system?

Cas: Yeah, so if you highlight the Moon, say, or Mars, you’ll see underneath it there’s a score and this actually checkpoints your entire game at that point. You can overwrite it, of course, by playing that planet again and defeating the boss, but it just means that you don’t have to play through all the levels again just to see the last level.

Basically, that’s how you were doing when you completed the world, so you can iteratively eventually complete the game this way. one problem we find with computer games is that 90% of the customers don’t see 90% of the content, because they never get that far, and I thought that was a bit of a shame.

TSA: I’ve found it’s fascinating that you’ve now got the trophy percentages, so you can see what percentage of people that bought you have got to certain trophies.

Cas: Yeah, and it’s a really useful stat. As PlayStation developers, you get to see all of the stats anyway. It used to be that to see what level people got to, you’d just stick an achievement in every 10 levels and you know how far people get, and all sorts of things like that. It’s really subtle, but highly important to know what people do.

For years and years we actually resisted putting in this checkpoint screen into the game, and I think we only put it in a few years ago in the original. We said, “No it’s an arcade game, you’re playing for scores and to see how far you can get. That’s what it was like in the old days!” But of course, we’re not making games for the old days anymore.

People don’t play games like that, so we thought we were just being stupid and should make games that let people play how they want to in their own time. It’s not a pro competition or anything like that, and the high score table is not something people win money for. Just let them have fun.

TSA: If people want to go for the ridiculously high scores, they can.

Cas: It doesn’t stop people doing it, of course. You can’t checkpoint past the first 100 levels and we get people who wrap through the game three times round, because every time you complete 100 levels, it doubles your score and you start again from the beginning. People do that and we were really surprised, I mean, I’ve never completed any of my games even once!

And with that, our time started to come to a close. Thanks to Cas for taking the time to chat with us and show us Titan Attacks!