Development of the game, Owl Boy

Adrian, Simon and Jo of DPadStudio talk about their game, Owl Boy

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

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me today are some special guests. How about you introduce yourself?

Adrian: Hi, I’m Adrian. I’m one of the designers and writers.

Simon: I’m Simon Anderson. I’m the artist and director of Owl Boy.

Jo: I’m Jo. I’m the games programmer for Owl Boy.

Interviewer: And so, what’s the game about?

Simon: Well, the game is about Otus. He is an owl who has a special cloud pad which changes his wings which allows him to fly anywhere he wants. His settlement is being attacked by some pirates, and he needs to chase them down in order for them not to hurt any more innocent people.

Interviewer: What inspired you guys to make the game?

Simon: Well, to me it was this whole idea that I wanted to create some kind of new experience using pixel art. I feel there is kind of a marketing thing that’s been done with 3D games where… The whole push for 3D gaming that it kind of made pixel art seem like an inferior art style. In my mind, that just doesn’t add up. So, I figured I should try to make something with 2D that hasn’t been explored much. What I figured was, well, I can make it completely vertical. You were asking about the art style?

Interviewer: Yeah.

Simon: Initially, the idea isn’t to woo the retro gamer in a sense. It was the best fit for what we were trying to do at the time. A lot of times when people make retrographics to play on nostalgia or because they just can’t do any better, they try to compensate with shaders or things like that. I didn’t feel that was enough. I felt like this should be the complete experience. I wanted to create a lush environment, great graphics, good animations.

Interviewer: OK. Were there any challenges as you were developing this art style?

Simon: Not necessarily, no.

Interviewer: Because you had a clear vision exactly how you wanted it to be from the get-go.

Simon: Yes and no. I had the basic idea that I wanted it to be about sort of flying islands and things like that, but the main character, he took months to develop because most of the game was just this whole island aspect. I wanted a character that could interact with things around this environment, but the rest of the idea developed once I found the character. I went through a flying insect. I went through a dog with wings. I went through a guy wearing a duck suit, but eventually when I hit the idea of an owl and this whole merging thing, the whole game and story kind of developed around that.

Interviewer: What were some of the other challenges you guys ran into as you’re developing the game? Anything interesting?

Adrian: It was mostly just our lack of people, our lack of resources. I’m a student still and it really gets hard to find time when you’ve got a job and school and everything together. Also, some of our tools are sometimes designed more for programmers than they were for people. So, it would sometimes slow things down or glitch them a little bit. Yeah, that’s more or less on my end.

Interviewer: Any other interesting aspects on the program?

Jo: Well, it’s pretty easy for us to add different content to it now because we’ve got all the levels added that the script editors have made for us. We just need to make it a bit more simple, and so we can continue to make the game as fast as possible so that we can get it out so people can play it.

Interviewer: Were you play testing this while you were developing the game?

Simon: Yes, we were. Now, the game has been in standing for about a year due to programmers jumping off the project. Our main programmer went and left for CCP a little while go. We had to go through several training phases to get people in before we got our final programmer right now.

During the first period of development we had a solid play testing team, but right now we’ve been putting that on hold. We’re going to start it up again once we get some new content in. We will be opening it up for play testing, but you’ll have to wait for an announcement for that.

Interviewer: With the initial play testing, were you also working on getting feedback on the art, or is that not the biggest concern since you had a clear direction of where you wanted to go?

Simon: That’s not a big concern to me. I check what people say about the art work, and it’s actually something that I have to take into consideration a lot. When we started on the project, we’d get comments like “It’s a copy of [?]” or “It’s a copy of Kay Story”. It’s a copy of whatever else you can think of.

We actually had several people compare it to Superman which is downright strange. So, whenever I design something for the game, I try to make sure that it’s not something you would try to link to something else because that kind of draws away from the experience we’re trying to create. In that case, you would be playing something that you wouldn’t start comparing it to everything else while you were playing it. Then, you start ignoring all the new stuff we’ll be putting into it.

Interviewer: Based now on this game experience or doing this project, what are you going to do differently on your future game development experiences?

Simon: I’ll definitely try to make something more original. Owl Boy, I tried to make an original game that had as many new elements into it as possible while still being reasonable, but it’s still a fairly basic platform in that sense. So, I’m thinking for my next game, if we get that far right now, then we’re going to do something a bit more wild. We’re going to try to do something that has never been tried before, kind of try to abstract things that people haven’t thought about, that have never really tried to execute. I can’t talk too much about that right now.

Interviewer: How about you? Anything different that you’re going to do in your future projects, based on what you’ve learned here?

Jo: Well, Owl Boy started out as kind of a small project, so it just turned huge in the end. So, we’re having huge difficulties actually making it complete. So, in the future I think we will make, maybe, a smaller type of games and keep them pretty basic. In the end I think we’re also going to concentrate on also making bigger games in the future after we’ve made some small projects and that. We’ve got hundreds of projects coming up. So, we just want to make as much as possible with it.

Interviewer: How about you?

Adrian: I’m a little more conservative with my design, but still as a writer I’d like to explore narrative and other elements of game design that really haven’t been explored, a mature theme in writing.

Interviewer: Sure.

Adrian: We talk about it, but we never actually do it. It’s always very weak morals, but I’d like to see better writing. I’d like to see better choices, ethics, morals, that sort of thing. Without being pretentious, actually having it integrated well into a familiar format like a [?]. So, you can polish off but push further.

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

Simon: That would be dpadstudio.com.

Interviewer: Let’s see. That’s D-P-A-D-S-T-U-D-I-O.com?

Simon: I think so, yes.

Interviewer: Great. Thank you very much.