The Design Behind A Ninja Rabbit Fighting Game, Part I

The Design Behind A Ninja Rabbit Fighting Game…from Wolfire Games, Part I

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/wolf-fire-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

John: Hi, I’m John Graham from Wolfire Games. Thanks a lot for having me on the show.

Interviewer: What kind of game did you work on?

John: We’re making a Ninja rabbit fighting game called Overgrowth with procedural animation and awesome physics and huge mods.

Interviewer: When is it going to be released, and where can people find it?

John: We don’t have an official release date yet before we want to take enough time to get the game done right, but it’s probably going to be about six months. We should have a playable that is pretty solid by IGF.

Interviewer: Do you have like a blog or any YouTube videos that kind of covers your development?

John: Yes, please say it’s blog.wolffire.com. There’s a whole bunch of media content. We’re really open with our development. We always show off new videos of our awesome map editor tools, and soon we’ll have some stuff about our new fighting system. So, it’s a really cool thing to do just blog.wolffire.com or the Overgrowth Facebook page.

Interviewer: Do you already have fans or other people who are just already following you because of your blog and how did you do that?

John: Basically, David and Jeffrey Rosen, our co-founders, have done a great job of maintaining the activity on the site. David’s original game that he made five years ago in high school all by himself was Lugaru. That was the original Ninja rabbit fighting game, and despite no major efforts to publicize it, it’s still accumulated a pretty big following.

Those guys have stayed with the site and David has kept the blog very active because he’s always developing new assets for the engine and stuff. We actually have a whole bunch of pre-orders for using the Overgrowth engine to make their own houses and cities and levels. Soon, they’ll be able to do the whole thing once we get the game play on iPhone.

Interviewer: Are you guys doing this as a student project, or is going to be a separate studio?

John: Lugaru could have been considered a student project, but now we have graduated from college and we’re doing this full time. So, this is a serious development, but we’re still indie. We don’t have anything other than the funding that David and Jeff got off of Lugaru orders, like sales.

Interviewer: Awesome. Since you’re trying to fund this all on your own, how are you guys managing actually trying to get it to the site as soon as possible versus doing a good job?

John: Yeah, well we have enough to float for awhile, and right now we are on the Subway diet. We can switch to the ramen noodle diet if we need to, but we’re basically committed to get this thing done and done right. If it’s going to take a lot of time, it’s going to take a lot of time. We’re on it and we’re committed.

Interviewer: How many people are on your team?

John: Well, we have five people on the Wolfire team right now.

Interviewer: How do you manage then, like five people, going pure indie? I think it’s just, having two people to go pure indie is difficult. How do you do five?

John: Well, you know, Lugaru was fairly successful so that gives us a good cushion.

Interviewer: Sure.

John: And we also have a little bit of savings that we’re floating on, We