Development of the game, Shatter

Corey, lead artist, talks about their game, Shatter

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

Or listen to it here…

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?

Corey: I’m Corey Ginnis. I was the lead artist on Shatter for PSN.

Interviewer: What’s Shatter about?

Corey: Shatter is essentially a sort of taking the classic games and just trying to give a fresh crafted take on the genre, just really trying to solve some of the key problems that were in the original and make it a more engaging experience for the players.

Interviewer: So, what did you change to make that happen?

Corey: Well, one of the key mechanics that we added in to make it more engaging was we added the physical force that you get from your pedal which is something we call suck and blow which is actually like a push and pull mechanic that affects all the free floating physical objects, including the bull. So, this really allows you to steer the bull around and place it where you want to go. Once you get really comfortable with that, you can really have some awesome power over the bull [?].

Interviewer: As you’re developing this, did you run into any challenges or surprises?

Corey: Yeah. I think we were mainly surprised by, probably, initially, by – our initial memories of like Breakout, how much we loved those games when we were younger. We played pretty much all of them again in our recent pre-production and how many problems often you are sort of sitting there waiting for the bull to return so that you could actually do something about it. So, yeah, our first real task was to try and figure out what to do about that. Also, the last great problem [?]

Interviewer: So, how do you deal with the last [?]

Corey: Well, that’s the way the xx or the suck and blow mechanic or push and pull comes into play because it really means you can nail that last [?]. Yeah, that’s pretty much where a lot of it sprung from. Once we got that in there, it was pretty obvious. Yeah, that solved most of those problems. It just makes it a more engaging experience through the whole thing.

Interviewer: You guys were nominated for Excellent in Audio. Can you talk about the audio design process for this game and what you guys did?

Corey: Sure. We had a really great musician come on board. We worked with him before on our first piece entitled Grip Shift, and we’re really impressed with the way he’d done all that. So, we got him pretty much under contract for a year through the whole development in sync with what we were trying to do. He took the whole thing very seriously and set away and came in and brought us some obstacles and tricks he had done for us. We got this really great feedback going through iterations and giving him all our ideas on what we thought he was doing.

Yeah, it really evolved through the course of development into what it is now. We started off taking quite a different approach and ended up really leaving the module go away and just do his own thing the way that he knew how to make music. He’s never done anything like this before. This is his first full game that he’s actually scored. He was really into it. He really jumped at the opportunity to come and make something that he felt like it was really for the themes of this game. He says he’s always wanted to make like a [?] retro soundtrack which is kind of what this ended up being.

Interviewer: Nice. And where can folks find out more information about the game?

Corey: They can go to shattergame.com, I think. So, it’s up on PSN now since July. It’s at $10.00, and we’re also releasing it on Steam on Monday. So, the PC players can get out there and play that with some new modes as well.

Interviewer: What’s next in store for your studio?

Corey: Well, nothing I can talk about right now. But we’re definitely really keen to do more of this type of game, like the downloadable space is something we really enjoy working in. Doing these types of games is really cool. It’s definitely the most enjoyable project I’ve work on in a long time.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.