Development of IGF Main Competition Finalist, Joe Danger

Sean of Hello Games talks about their game, Joe Danger

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/joe-danger-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

[wp_youtube]PEME6Z74h4c[/wp_youtube]

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

Sean: I’m Sean Murray.

Interviewer: What game did you work on?

Sean: Joe Danger.

Interviewer: What’s the game about?

Sean: So, the game is called Joe Danger. It’s coming out on VSN. Hello Games is like four of us. We just put this game together over the last 18 months and got nominated for a bunch of stuff for the IGF which brings us to GDC. It’s very cool.

Interviewer: What inspired you to make this game?

Sean: I think it was games when we were kids that we played solo, the Sega, Nintendo stuff. We were really big into things like Crazy Taxi, Monkey Bowl, those kind of games. We don’t really feel that there’s anything like that any more, you know, that is accessible but also has got some depth to it and got just some pure fun to it.

But I think what actually inspired us to put the game together was sitting around playing with a bunch of toys, actually. When we all got together we were just playing with toys. We were kind of setting up toys and demonstrating ideas using them. We just wanted something like that, something that was chunky, something that was kind of fun and tactile to just play with and not embarrassing to play with. You know what I mean?

I think a lot of games are more or less guilty pleasures for me whereas this, anyone can see it, anyone can look at it. It’s just fun and enjoyment. That’s what games are supposed to be about, I guess.

Interviewer: What were some of the challenges that you ran into while you were doing development?

Sean: I think, obviously, it’s really hard as a small group to try and make actually quite a large game, putting everything together and keeping, I guess, the vision consistent. You know, it’s a temptation to just bring in, you know, maybe, too many ideas trying to get a lot of our ideas to mesh together. Actually, our game is a lot of different types of games put together. It’s kind of a platformer. It’s a racer. It’s part of a combo based trip based game as well.

Interviewer: Did you run into any other issues while you were developing the game? How did you come up with the prototypes initially to develop the game?

Sean: We actually put together a very abstract prototype to begin with. It’s actually a motor bike game so we just had the back wheel of the motor bike actually up and running. We just played with that for months. We just sat there and had no graphics, nothing, and we just made that fun, just like a little wheel on springs.

Interviewer: What did you have to change to make it fun?

Sean: Everything. Everything. It’s amazing the impact that things have, you know, the speed, the size, the camera, pretty much everything. You just tweak and tweak and tweak and balance it, and that’s a really fun time of game development, but it’s also a really kind of abstract. It’s amazing the kind of things that you can change subtly, tweaking the field of graphic, the gravity, for instance. The rotation of the wheel suddenly gets more fun. It’s a crazy concept.

Interviewer: And this is developed for the PS3, so what inspired you to do that platform?

Sean: Well, actually we’re a really tiny group and we’ve always been into console games. I guess the type of game we’re making is a game really that’s kind of unadulterated fun, and maybe that sits better with the console market. I don’t know.

Interviewer: You guys were nominated for the Grand Prize Award in Technical Excellence. Why do you think that is?

Sean: I guess it’s hard to say, you know. I look at the range of games that are in the IGF, and it’s really a wide range of games. You know, it’s a weird kind of surreal concept actually to compare one game with another. I look at the kind of games that are there, take Trauma, take us, you know; two really, really different games. It just goes to show how wide the range of game play is, how wide the range of ideas are that are out there. We don’t know why we were nominated, but we’re glad that we were. We’re there with a lot of games that we really respect.

Interviewer: So, what’s next in store for you guys? Are you going to be pursuing this game some more? Are you working on another game?

Sean: We got some pretty big ideas that we’re working on in the background. We hope we get a chance to make them. We’re kind of a small team so we rely on the success of our game’s success so that we can keep doing what we’re doing.

Interviewer: Are you going to focus on the same genre, or are you going to branch of into other genres?

Sean: No. There’s loads of other ideas there that I think will surprise people that we want to work on.

Interviewer: Where can people find out more information about the game?

Sean: If they go to our website which is HelloGames.org, they can find out a little bit more about us. We’re also on Twitter, that kind of thing.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.