Date: 2007-07-29
Title: Poke53280, developers of Hurrican.
How We Survived the Five Year Hurrican.
After more than five years of blood, sweat and tears, a team by the name of Poke53280 released their pet project, Hurrican. For those who can't guess from the name, it was strongly influenced by the ever-popular Turrican. There were those that doubted it would ever be released. Fortunately for those that had faith, the doubters were wrong. Was it worth the wait? Hell yes. But who are the members of Poke53280 and why spend such a long time on a completely free game? Was it worth it for THEM? I managed to sit down, have a chat with them and find out these questions and more. Don't change channels.
Mosh: So.. first thing's first.. names, ages and occupations?
Eiswuxe: Jörg Winterstein, 26, Programmer / Musician / Level Designer at Spielkind, a German video game development company. Spielkind.
Turri: My name is Thomas Schreiter. I am 32 years old and I am a freelancer cg-artist. I also work for Spielkind.
ScHlAuChi: Gerhard Weihrauch - 29 - Level Designer at Chemistry (formerly Kuju Sheffield).
Turri: Jörg's hobbies are bike riding, cooking and ironing ;)
Eiswuxe: Especially ironing! ;)
Mosh: How did you all meet?
Eiswuxe: Let me think... Thomas is not a founding member of our Poke53280 crew. It was founded back in 2001 when a guy named Heiko Kalista and I met in a chat for German
game developers and decided to remake 'Katakis'. This was our first game. After that, I started to work on Hurrican. Turri found his way to our website and read about the fact that I was doing a Turrican remake so he spammed our guest book, promising that he would do EVERY graphical art necessary for the game if he was able to join forces with us. And so we did. And of course, he wanted to help with the ironing ;)
Turri: When I was surfing around one day, I found the Poke website and saw that Eiswuxe had started a Turrican clone. I was immediately hot for this and wrote in the guest book that I would do everything I could to help with that project - especially in the graphics department.
ScHlAuChi: I had been following the Turrican fan scene for a while and at one point I did read about a remake that was supposed to come out – it was T2002 by Pekaro. I was immediately interested in it and wrote the developers that I wanted to help them. I had high hopes that it would work out, but unfortunately Pekaro wasn’t interested and didn't really want to continue development.
Eiswuxe: ..because of ScHlAuChi.. ;)
ScHlAuChi: Hehe. So I was looking around for another Turrican clone and discovered Hurrican. I saw a lot of potential in it so I just contacted Eiswuxe and bugged the hell out of him ;)
Eiswuxe: "Bugged the hell out of him" is an understatement ;)
Mosh: Best way to get on a dev team.
ScHlAuChi: It was a lot of effort to convince Eiswuxe about certain things - but in the end it was worth it I hope :)
Mosh: And where did the name Poke53280 come from?
Eiswuxe: It comes from the C64. "53280" is the part of the memory where the c64 stores the color for the screen-border and with "poke 53280,x" you could change the color to x. This is the first "woohoo" effect ever that every beginning programmer was able to perform and it is something that all of our team members did when we were younger.
ScHlAuChi: Not me - but then again I was never a coder. I only coded stuff like endless “Hello World” loops in Basic.
Eiswuxe: So poke53280 is something that reminds us of the good old days AND is a link between the team members as well.
Mosh: Was it always a plan to remake Turrican?
Eiswuxe: Of course :)
Mosh: You knew even before you made your first game that it would be something you would do some day?
Eiswuxe: Since my first contact with Turrican on the C64 back in 199x (1993 or something like that).
ScHlAuChi: The term “remake” might be a bit too limiting. More like an "evolution" in the series.
Mosh: I didn't like the term 'remake' fitted this either but it's hard to come up with a proper term though because clone sounds like an insult.
Eiswuxe: Ok. Let's call it an evolution ;)
ScHlAuChi: The early versions of Hurrican were pretty much a one-to-one remake - as you can see with the old demo from 2001.
Eiswuxe: It was not a remake either. It had its own graphics, sounds and levels.
ScHlAuChi: Gameplay wise I meant :)
Turri: I often wanted to do a Turrican clone. Back in the C64 era, I coded one myself. I ripped the Turrican player sprite and tried to code a jump'n'run, even though my programming skills were bad. It never ended up anywhere ;)
Originally Hurrican was planned as a simple remake, although we wanted to do everything on our own, including levels and enemies (and not just copy them from Turrican). Piece after piece, Hurrican transformed into its own game - and we realised that we could do more than the original formula and expand it. We invested a lot of work in the original content so the word remake might not really fit anymore - more like a tribute. I think Hurrican is its own game but with roots in the Turrican series.
Mosh: Heavily-Turrican-inspired but not Turrican.
Eiswuxe: Sorta like that ;)
Mosh: Do you think you've improved on the originals or is it more like 'what would have been done if Turrican was made today'?
Eiswuxe: Turrican today would have to be improved in order to be successful. We kept some features that are not very common anymore among games, like the time limit but that's something that is closely connected to exploring the Turrican levels. But I think if we ever did another "Turrican-like" game in the future, we would improve the gameplay even more.
ScHlAuChi: Improve as in offer more variety I guess.
Eiswuxe: That's one part but I am also thinking about reducing the "lives" to one life, like common in other games.
Turri: I think that when Manfred Trenz did the game he didn't have any other choices (like no diagonal shots for example) due to the hardware limitations - and due to the limited controller (1 button, 1 stick). So in that sense Hurrican is more modern - we were inspired by Super Probotector when it comes to diagonal shooting. Personally I prefer Hurrican's solution with the diagonal shot over the original, where you could only shoot straight.
Mosh: How many more versions of Hurrican do you have planned before it becomes 'the official final version'?
Eiswuxe: I don't think that we will improve Hurrican much more than "fixing bugs" and "supporting the community". All the improvements would be made in our next game if we decide to do one.
ScHlAuChi: As for improving the original formula - the reason why I pushed Eiswuxe to include things like Wheel Bomb Jumps etc, was to give the original Turrican formula a bit more depth. Basically the way Super Mario World does it by rewarding higher skilled players with hidden areas and places to reach that normal players can't.
Mosh: Hurrican has been labeled as being fairly difficult. Do you think games today are too easy?
Eiswuxe: I think this cannot be answered generally. First of all you must think about your target audience, what type of gamer your game should be focused on. Everyone wants to aim at "as many people as possible" so they make games that can be played by "most of the people". The hardcore gamer has no real challenge. Best example at the moment is "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess". The boss battles are way too easy. I never battled the same boss twice, I always won on the first try and Zelda has no "skill level" to choose from.
We wanted to reach as many people as possible with Hurrican, so we implemented 4 different skill levels. Many people have said that even "easy" is too hard.
In general, YES, many games are way too easy to make them appeal to more people, but it always depends on the skills of the developer if this succeeds or not – but you can't do a game that fits EVERYONE. I think that this situation won’t improve much over the next years (of course, some series' do stay challenging, like the Contra series for example).
Turri: I think its different from game to game - there's a lot of games that are really difficult - our game has a steep learning curve and you get better and further every time. Training will be rewarded. All the people who initially said that Hurrican was too hard are now saying the game is too easy because they have played it so much that they can beat every boss easily.
ScHlAuChi: I think that the reason why games in the old days were harder, is because of the shorter playtime – so making the game difficult was a way to extend the playtime. Also in the 80s, gaming was still a “hardcore players only” thing. Nowadays with broad new audiences you can't make a game too difficult if you want it to sell, but you can always do selectable difficulties, something we also did with Hurrican. Since it is geared towards the old school gamer - it might be too hard for today’s' audiences ;)
Mosh: Was Hurrican the first name you thought of, or were any other names considered before this?
Eiswuxe: Hurrican was indeed the very first name that came to my mind when I started with the project.
Mosh: It does seem quite natural.
Eiswuxe: The first demo was called Hurrican - and Turrican on the C64 is regarded by me as the "Father” of all Turricans, so as you said, it is completely natural to choose and keep this name. If you asked me now what I would name the game if it wasn't named Hurrican, I don't have any idea ;)
Turri: Gussicco. It was the only other name, although we also had a few secret names for the project - the reason for this was the "T9" system on our cell phones changed "Hurrican" into gussicco, husgabbo or other weird words ;)
Eiswuxe: We used these names during the development. There was never the thought to rename the game but it was an "insider joke" for us ;)
Mosh: Were there any other influences that entered into the development of this game aside from Turrican?
Eiswuxe: A little bit of Contra when it comes to shooting. I played lots of platform games up till now, so it is possible that some of the games influenced me in a subliminal way but no game in particular that I can think of at the moment. Many things that were added to Hurrican are common among games today like the "end of level statistics" or the "hints while loading" screen.
Turri: A lot of ideas came from Contra and the time boss was based on Baron von Bubba in Bubble Bobble.
Eiswuxe: Ah I forgot about this :)
Turri: Many enemies were built in a way so that they would work in the game - I checked some attack moves of the enemies in Metal Slug ;)
ScHlAuChi: The bomb jump was obviously inspired by Super Metroid - but there are also a lot of ideas from Super Mario World in the game, especially the whole concept of skill layers. The more skilled a player, the more places he can reach.
Mosh: A wide range of influences then.
Eiswuxe: This is what I meant with "subliminal" :)
Mosh: This project has taken you guys over 5 years, which puts you in the same category as Cave Story and the currently in development Ruff'n'Tumble. Did you ever imagine it would even remotely take this long?
Eiswuxe: Did Cave Story take that long too?
Mosh: From what I've heard it took 5 years.
Eiswuxe: Well it was done by only one guy if I remember correctly.
Mosh: Yes. That is true.
Eiswuxe: Of course I never thought that Hurrican would take so long. We always posted "release dates" on our page but that was more like "the date when we would love to see it finished" rather than "the date we expect it to be ready for release". I thought a game like Hurrican could be finished in 1 - 2 years and of course it could, but we did not have that much free time, and some things in life are not predictable ;)
Another fact is, that you can work a lifetime on a game like this. There is ALWAYS something to improve, to fix or to change. You just have to stop working on the game in order to release it. It is never "finished". As soon as it was "content complete" we fixed the known bugs and released it. I will never again make a game that will take 5 years to make ;)
ScHlAuChi: It's worth noting that the content (the levels) changed multiple times…
Eiswuxe: ...as well as some graphics. The player sprite needed three versions before we were satisfied.
ScHlAuChi: Some levels went through 5 to 6 iterations - like the temple for example.
Turri: I did never think it would take that long - at max 2 years - but over the time we recognised that it will take much longer than expected. We motivated ourselves by saying that it will be worth it - Hurrican will shine, there is a light at the end of the tunnel ;) In the end it was only 9 big levels instead of 18 medium sized ones - but the quality of them is very good. We even had a half finished underwater and alien level but they were not the same quality as the others - so that's why they never got finished.
ScHlAuChi: Due to my previous mod experiences (I was an active modder in the Unreal community), I already knew how long projects like this can take, so I knew that it wouldn't get done that soon ;) For projects like this, people need to be more patient :)
There was a lot of flaming, and many people said we were fooling them - because it took so long, but I think a project like Hurrican could be done in 5 to 6 months, at least if you work on it full time.
Turri: …if you have a good plan ;)
Eiswuxe: "From scratch" as Hurrican was done, I would say 8 - 10 months.
Mosh: Pity about the income problem.
ScHlAuChi: Luckily it recently got a lot better for small developers like us, with opportunities like XBLA, PSN and WiiWare. Introversion shows perfectly how it can work.
Mosh: Were there any points at which you did think about throwing in the towel?
Eiswuxe: Of course there were points where I had little to no motivation in going on, so I paused for a while but the question if we would ever completely stop and can the game was not raised a single time. It was always clear to us that we wanted to finish and release the game, no matter how long it would take, or how much it would cost us. We sacrificed a lot of blood, sweat and tears for the project but we always knew that we had a goal and we were working on something that would turn out to be a good game. Thus we always knew that we would keep it up :)
After having invested so much time in the game we would have been real dumb-asses to throw it all away ;)
Turri: At some points I really had enough of the project and I wanted to puke ;) Sometimes we had some big quarrels - almost like in a marriage ;) However I never even thought of kicking the project into the bin because of the personal involvement and heart that was involved - you don't want to throw that away :)
The hardest part was the bug fixing at the end - and finishing off the game - as the saying goes: After the first 90% is done, the other 90% of work will start ;)
ScHlAuChi: It wasn't that bad for me - most likely due to the fact that I joined the project after it was already half done - so I still had a lot more motivation. I always pushed Eiswuxe for new things - and I probably was getting on his nerves from time to time - but it ended well ;) For example, the UFO boss wasn't planned in the game - he got a complete graphical overhaul (as the old version was quite ugly ;) and was added only like 1 month before the actual release :)
There are still a lot of other enemies and bosses that didn't make it into the game - but the Hurrican community will be able to use them once the overworked editor is out :)
Mosh: What was the development schedule like? Was there some development every day or just whenever anyone had spare time?
Eiswuxe: I just worked on the project whenever I had some time: sometimes every day, sometimes only once a week and some sessions were just an hour of playing around and doing nothing at all" up to "coding the whole night to get that damn boss done" ;) Some evenings started like a promising "night shift" but were interrupted by my girlfriend shouting "you don't want to sit another night in front of that damn game, do you? When did we go out for the last time? It was like two weeks ago???" ;)
Luckily, our relationship survived the game.
Turri: Whenever I had time, I tried to do something - at least every week, sometimes every evening, and at other times 2 weeks in a row. On weekends we usually spent the time with girlfriends or parties and got drunk - we didn't do much then ;)
ScHlAuChi: The above doesn’t count for me as I don't drink alcohol ;) I just worked on Hurrican whenever there was time - pretty much the same way as the others.
Eiswuxe: Thomas and I work together at one company and some evenings we worked late at night at the office and devoured two Chinese meals (everyone of us) and litres of soda or Coke ;)
Mosh: So you didn't have an air tight plan but did you have a loose idea of what order things were going to be done?
Eiswuxe: The engine was very advanced after a short time so the main focus on code was implementing new enemies and bosses. Sounds and music were also done really fast and for the last 2 years of development, I only focused on level design, enemies and bug fixing. There was no real plan, the only thing that "emerged" after a while was "Ok, we'll do 9 levels. That's enough”. And “there are jungle, temple etc". After that was decided, we finished off level after level, so that way we always did enemy graphics, level design and enemy code for each level. When the level was done more or less, we did the same for the next level and so on.
Of course we had to change some things from time to time in levels that were already "more or less done" but in general we focused on one level and did all the stuff for it and moved on to the next.
Turri: We did think about it - like “which levels” – “what order” and then we started. First we did the jungle and did think - ok what enemies can we put in there - we wanted to have 2 unique enemies per level to add more variety. Slowly the levels progressed. There was no plan that specified what we needed and where it ends. Our next project will most likely have better pre-planning ;)
Eiswuxe: As you can see, everything was very "loose" ;)
Turri: We constantly played our own levels and saw what was fun, what still needed to be integrated, and what should be killed off.
ScHlAuChi: Personally I think one of the major advantages of small teams and indie devs in general is, that the games can evolve. There is no strict plan - the game just slowly evolves and gets better and better. In big companies you usually have a strict plan you need to follow - this adds a lot of inflexibility. Things that might be good, will never get into the game. So having a general plan might be a good idea - but sticking too strictly to it might hinder creativity.
Turri: I see it the same way - planning is required but too much planning can hinder creativity - in my opinion this is a common mistake within bigger companies, where everything is being planned down to the smallest detail. In the end it turns out that it might not be fun - because of the lack of development time.
Mosh: Were there any major challenges that had to be overcome to complete the project?
Eiswuxe: One challenge was "calming down the community" by offering new screenshots and other proof that the game is still in development ;)
Turri: There were some bigger hurdles - the biggest hurdle was to satisfy ourselves. You want to make everything perfect down to the smallest detail and create the best game ever - but at some point you realise that you have to finish the game and therefore you have to force yourself to make unwanted compromises - which is hard ;) Also after a while some bugs drive you crazy ;)
Mosh: I can only imagine.
Eiswuxe: Since the first line of code was written five years ago, I had learned a lot in my free time and would have done many things very differently if I could have started all over again. That would have taken too much time so we used "a bit crappy code" to build on ;) That was not the best way to code a game but it worked ;)
In hindsight it is a pity that we did not keep the project more generic, because it is hard to change something (except for graphics, sound and level content) in the game without having to change the code too.
ScHlAuChi: The biggest hurdle for me was the communication - the time difference was quite big to Germany (I was working at UbiSoft in Montreal/Canada at that time) so communicating only online did lead to some misunderstandings but that was pretty much the only thing.
Eiswuxe: We will do it better with the next game :)
Mosh: What was the general feeling as soon as you had released Hurrican?
Eiswuxe: It was a mixture of relief, satisfaction and pride. I was more relieved than nervous because I was sure that it would be a good game - after having spent so much time with it :)
Turri: I was incredibly happy after it was released - I couldn't wait anymore - Eiswuxe wanted to fix a few more small bugs but I told him: fucking release it, we can fix that with a patch. I was totally convinced that Hurrican would be a hit.
Eiswuxe: After the first comments were posted on our website and we got the first fan mails that wanted to thank us for the game, it confirmed that I was right :)
ScHlAuChi: I was also pretty sure that it was a winner :)
Eiswuxe: In fact it was a really cool feeling to see the download counter increase every second and the best part is the feeling of "having done something" in your life that brings joy to other people, just like when I had fun playing Turrican back in the 90s :)
Mosh: How many downloads has there been to date?
Eiswuxe: 35,000 on our poke53280 site. I think there are about 100,000 if you count all the servers that list Hurrican at the moment.
ScHlAuChi: It's probably more like 250,000 overall :)
Mosh: What are your plans for the future? Do you already have your next project in mind?
Eiswuxe: First of all we will support Hurrican and try to build up a community with it. We hope that many people will contribute their own levels and graphics / sounds to help the game grow and keep it alive :) What we will do afterwards isn’t quite clear yet ;)
Mosh: I guess you haven't had time to bounce any new ideas off each other yet.
Eiswuxe: I have some ideas about a "generic" 2D engine that you can do lots of stuff with but at first I will do a bit of research and test some stuff until I plan to make a new game. And remember what I said about my girlfriend? ;)
We have also thought about, what we could achieve, if we port Hurrican to other platforms. There is a lot of potential in having the game on Xbox, GC, PS2 or PSP to get some more attention :)
ScHlAuChi: Those platforms might be ideal for Hurrican. I played Cave Story on the PSP yesterday (after having already finished it on PC years before) and it was really awesome being able to play this game on the go :)
Eiswuxe: It's not clear if WE will do the ports or if someone else will do them but there are no plans about other games yet. Hurrican 2 with more content would be a good idea I think….. ;)
ScHlAuChi: It's probably what the fans would want ;)
Eiswuxe: We will see ;)
Visit the Developer's website.
Title: Poke53280, developers of Hurrican.
How We Survived the Five Year Hurrican.
After more than five years of blood, sweat and tears, a team by the name of Poke53280 released their pet project, Hurrican. For those who can't guess from the name, it was strongly influenced by the ever-popular Turrican. There were those that doubted it would ever be released. Fortunately for those that had faith, the doubters were wrong. Was it worth the wait? Hell yes. But who are the members of Poke53280 and why spend such a long time on a completely free game? Was it worth it for THEM? I managed to sit down, have a chat with them and find out these questions and more. Don't change channels.
Mosh: So.. first thing's first.. names, ages and occupations?
Eiswuxe: Jörg Winterstein, 26, Programmer / Musician / Level Designer at Spielkind, a German video game development company. Spielkind.
Turri: My name is Thomas Schreiter. I am 32 years old and I am a freelancer cg-artist. I also work for Spielkind.
ScHlAuChi: Gerhard Weihrauch - 29 - Level Designer at Chemistry (formerly Kuju Sheffield).
Turri: Jörg's hobbies are bike riding, cooking and ironing ;)
Eiswuxe: Especially ironing! ;)
Mosh: How did you all meet?
Eiswuxe: Let me think... Thomas is not a founding member of our Poke53280 crew. It was founded back in 2001 when a guy named Heiko Kalista and I met in a chat for German
game developers and decided to remake 'Katakis'. This was our first game. After that, I started to work on Hurrican. Turri found his way to our website and read about the fact that I was doing a Turrican remake so he spammed our guest book, promising that he would do EVERY graphical art necessary for the game if he was able to join forces with us. And so we did. And of course, he wanted to help with the ironing ;)
Turri: When I was surfing around one day, I found the Poke website and saw that Eiswuxe had started a Turrican clone. I was immediately hot for this and wrote in the guest book that I would do everything I could to help with that project - especially in the graphics department.
ScHlAuChi: I had been following the Turrican fan scene for a while and at one point I did read about a remake that was supposed to come out – it was T2002 by Pekaro. I was immediately interested in it and wrote the developers that I wanted to help them. I had high hopes that it would work out, but unfortunately Pekaro wasn’t interested and didn't really want to continue development.
Eiswuxe: ..because of ScHlAuChi.. ;)
ScHlAuChi: Hehe. So I was looking around for another Turrican clone and discovered Hurrican. I saw a lot of potential in it so I just contacted Eiswuxe and bugged the hell out of him ;)
Eiswuxe: "Bugged the hell out of him" is an understatement ;)
Mosh: Best way to get on a dev team.
ScHlAuChi: It was a lot of effort to convince Eiswuxe about certain things - but in the end it was worth it I hope :)
Mosh: And where did the name Poke53280 come from?
Eiswuxe: It comes from the C64. "53280" is the part of the memory where the c64 stores the color for the screen-border and with "poke 53280,x" you could change the color to x. This is the first "woohoo" effect ever that every beginning programmer was able to perform and it is something that all of our team members did when we were younger.
ScHlAuChi: Not me - but then again I was never a coder. I only coded stuff like endless “Hello World” loops in Basic.
Eiswuxe: So poke53280 is something that reminds us of the good old days AND is a link between the team members as well.
Mosh: Was it always a plan to remake Turrican?
Eiswuxe: Of course :)
Mosh: You knew even before you made your first game that it would be something you would do some day?
Eiswuxe: Since my first contact with Turrican on the C64 back in 199x (1993 or something like that).
ScHlAuChi: The term “remake” might be a bit too limiting. More like an "evolution" in the series.
Mosh: I didn't like the term 'remake' fitted this either but it's hard to come up with a proper term though because clone sounds like an insult.
Eiswuxe: Ok. Let's call it an evolution ;)
ScHlAuChi: The early versions of Hurrican were pretty much a one-to-one remake - as you can see with the old demo from 2001.
Eiswuxe: It was not a remake either. It had its own graphics, sounds and levels.
ScHlAuChi: Gameplay wise I meant :)
Turri: I often wanted to do a Turrican clone. Back in the C64 era, I coded one myself. I ripped the Turrican player sprite and tried to code a jump'n'run, even though my programming skills were bad. It never ended up anywhere ;)
Originally Hurrican was planned as a simple remake, although we wanted to do everything on our own, including levels and enemies (and not just copy them from Turrican). Piece after piece, Hurrican transformed into its own game - and we realised that we could do more than the original formula and expand it. We invested a lot of work in the original content so the word remake might not really fit anymore - more like a tribute. I think Hurrican is its own game but with roots in the Turrican series.
Mosh: Heavily-Turrican-inspired but not Turrican.
Eiswuxe: Sorta like that ;)
Mosh: Do you think you've improved on the originals or is it more like 'what would have been done if Turrican was made today'?
Eiswuxe: Turrican today would have to be improved in order to be successful. We kept some features that are not very common anymore among games, like the time limit but that's something that is closely connected to exploring the Turrican levels. But I think if we ever did another "Turrican-like" game in the future, we would improve the gameplay even more.
ScHlAuChi: Improve as in offer more variety I guess.
Eiswuxe: That's one part but I am also thinking about reducing the "lives" to one life, like common in other games.
Turri: I think that when Manfred Trenz did the game he didn't have any other choices (like no diagonal shots for example) due to the hardware limitations - and due to the limited controller (1 button, 1 stick). So in that sense Hurrican is more modern - we were inspired by Super Probotector when it comes to diagonal shooting. Personally I prefer Hurrican's solution with the diagonal shot over the original, where you could only shoot straight.
Mosh: How many more versions of Hurrican do you have planned before it becomes 'the official final version'?
Eiswuxe: I don't think that we will improve Hurrican much more than "fixing bugs" and "supporting the community". All the improvements would be made in our next game if we decide to do one.
ScHlAuChi: As for improving the original formula - the reason why I pushed Eiswuxe to include things like Wheel Bomb Jumps etc, was to give the original Turrican formula a bit more depth. Basically the way Super Mario World does it by rewarding higher skilled players with hidden areas and places to reach that normal players can't.
Mosh: Hurrican has been labeled as being fairly difficult. Do you think games today are too easy?
Eiswuxe: I think this cannot be answered generally. First of all you must think about your target audience, what type of gamer your game should be focused on. Everyone wants to aim at "as many people as possible" so they make games that can be played by "most of the people". The hardcore gamer has no real challenge. Best example at the moment is "Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess". The boss battles are way too easy. I never battled the same boss twice, I always won on the first try and Zelda has no "skill level" to choose from.
We wanted to reach as many people as possible with Hurrican, so we implemented 4 different skill levels. Many people have said that even "easy" is too hard.
In general, YES, many games are way too easy to make them appeal to more people, but it always depends on the skills of the developer if this succeeds or not – but you can't do a game that fits EVERYONE. I think that this situation won’t improve much over the next years (of course, some series' do stay challenging, like the Contra series for example).
Turri: I think its different from game to game - there's a lot of games that are really difficult - our game has a steep learning curve and you get better and further every time. Training will be rewarded. All the people who initially said that Hurrican was too hard are now saying the game is too easy because they have played it so much that they can beat every boss easily.
ScHlAuChi: I think that the reason why games in the old days were harder, is because of the shorter playtime – so making the game difficult was a way to extend the playtime. Also in the 80s, gaming was still a “hardcore players only” thing. Nowadays with broad new audiences you can't make a game too difficult if you want it to sell, but you can always do selectable difficulties, something we also did with Hurrican. Since it is geared towards the old school gamer - it might be too hard for today’s' audiences ;)
Mosh: Was Hurrican the first name you thought of, or were any other names considered before this?
Eiswuxe: Hurrican was indeed the very first name that came to my mind when I started with the project.
Mosh: It does seem quite natural.
Eiswuxe: The first demo was called Hurrican - and Turrican on the C64 is regarded by me as the "Father” of all Turricans, so as you said, it is completely natural to choose and keep this name. If you asked me now what I would name the game if it wasn't named Hurrican, I don't have any idea ;)
Turri: Gussicco. It was the only other name, although we also had a few secret names for the project - the reason for this was the "T9" system on our cell phones changed "Hurrican" into gussicco, husgabbo or other weird words ;)
Eiswuxe: We used these names during the development. There was never the thought to rename the game but it was an "insider joke" for us ;)
Mosh: Were there any other influences that entered into the development of this game aside from Turrican?
Eiswuxe: A little bit of Contra when it comes to shooting. I played lots of platform games up till now, so it is possible that some of the games influenced me in a subliminal way but no game in particular that I can think of at the moment. Many things that were added to Hurrican are common among games today like the "end of level statistics" or the "hints while loading" screen.
Turri: A lot of ideas came from Contra and the time boss was based on Baron von Bubba in Bubble Bobble.
Eiswuxe: Ah I forgot about this :)
Turri: Many enemies were built in a way so that they would work in the game - I checked some attack moves of the enemies in Metal Slug ;)
ScHlAuChi: The bomb jump was obviously inspired by Super Metroid - but there are also a lot of ideas from Super Mario World in the game, especially the whole concept of skill layers. The more skilled a player, the more places he can reach.
Mosh: A wide range of influences then.
Eiswuxe: This is what I meant with "subliminal" :)
Mosh: This project has taken you guys over 5 years, which puts you in the same category as Cave Story and the currently in development Ruff'n'Tumble. Did you ever imagine it would even remotely take this long?
Eiswuxe: Did Cave Story take that long too?
Mosh: From what I've heard it took 5 years.
Eiswuxe: Well it was done by only one guy if I remember correctly.
Mosh: Yes. That is true.
Eiswuxe: Of course I never thought that Hurrican would take so long. We always posted "release dates" on our page but that was more like "the date when we would love to see it finished" rather than "the date we expect it to be ready for release". I thought a game like Hurrican could be finished in 1 - 2 years and of course it could, but we did not have that much free time, and some things in life are not predictable ;)
Another fact is, that you can work a lifetime on a game like this. There is ALWAYS something to improve, to fix or to change. You just have to stop working on the game in order to release it. It is never "finished". As soon as it was "content complete" we fixed the known bugs and released it. I will never again make a game that will take 5 years to make ;)
ScHlAuChi: It's worth noting that the content (the levels) changed multiple times…
Eiswuxe: ...as well as some graphics. The player sprite needed three versions before we were satisfied.
ScHlAuChi: Some levels went through 5 to 6 iterations - like the temple for example.
Turri: I did never think it would take that long - at max 2 years - but over the time we recognised that it will take much longer than expected. We motivated ourselves by saying that it will be worth it - Hurrican will shine, there is a light at the end of the tunnel ;) In the end it was only 9 big levels instead of 18 medium sized ones - but the quality of them is very good. We even had a half finished underwater and alien level but they were not the same quality as the others - so that's why they never got finished.
ScHlAuChi: Due to my previous mod experiences (I was an active modder in the Unreal community), I already knew how long projects like this can take, so I knew that it wouldn't get done that soon ;) For projects like this, people need to be more patient :)
There was a lot of flaming, and many people said we were fooling them - because it took so long, but I think a project like Hurrican could be done in 5 to 6 months, at least if you work on it full time.
Turri: …if you have a good plan ;)
Eiswuxe: "From scratch" as Hurrican was done, I would say 8 - 10 months.
Mosh: Pity about the income problem.
ScHlAuChi: Luckily it recently got a lot better for small developers like us, with opportunities like XBLA, PSN and WiiWare. Introversion shows perfectly how it can work.
Mosh: Were there any points at which you did think about throwing in the towel?
Eiswuxe: Of course there were points where I had little to no motivation in going on, so I paused for a while but the question if we would ever completely stop and can the game was not raised a single time. It was always clear to us that we wanted to finish and release the game, no matter how long it would take, or how much it would cost us. We sacrificed a lot of blood, sweat and tears for the project but we always knew that we had a goal and we were working on something that would turn out to be a good game. Thus we always knew that we would keep it up :)
After having invested so much time in the game we would have been real dumb-asses to throw it all away ;)
Turri: At some points I really had enough of the project and I wanted to puke ;) Sometimes we had some big quarrels - almost like in a marriage ;) However I never even thought of kicking the project into the bin because of the personal involvement and heart that was involved - you don't want to throw that away :)
The hardest part was the bug fixing at the end - and finishing off the game - as the saying goes: After the first 90% is done, the other 90% of work will start ;)
ScHlAuChi: It wasn't that bad for me - most likely due to the fact that I joined the project after it was already half done - so I still had a lot more motivation. I always pushed Eiswuxe for new things - and I probably was getting on his nerves from time to time - but it ended well ;) For example, the UFO boss wasn't planned in the game - he got a complete graphical overhaul (as the old version was quite ugly ;) and was added only like 1 month before the actual release :)
There are still a lot of other enemies and bosses that didn't make it into the game - but the Hurrican community will be able to use them once the overworked editor is out :)
Mosh: What was the development schedule like? Was there some development every day or just whenever anyone had spare time?
Eiswuxe: I just worked on the project whenever I had some time: sometimes every day, sometimes only once a week and some sessions were just an hour of playing around and doing nothing at all" up to "coding the whole night to get that damn boss done" ;) Some evenings started like a promising "night shift" but were interrupted by my girlfriend shouting "you don't want to sit another night in front of that damn game, do you? When did we go out for the last time? It was like two weeks ago???" ;)
Luckily, our relationship survived the game.
Turri: Whenever I had time, I tried to do something - at least every week, sometimes every evening, and at other times 2 weeks in a row. On weekends we usually spent the time with girlfriends or parties and got drunk - we didn't do much then ;)
ScHlAuChi: The above doesn’t count for me as I don't drink alcohol ;) I just worked on Hurrican whenever there was time - pretty much the same way as the others.
Eiswuxe: Thomas and I work together at one company and some evenings we worked late at night at the office and devoured two Chinese meals (everyone of us) and litres of soda or Coke ;)
Mosh: So you didn't have an air tight plan but did you have a loose idea of what order things were going to be done?
Eiswuxe: The engine was very advanced after a short time so the main focus on code was implementing new enemies and bosses. Sounds and music were also done really fast and for the last 2 years of development, I only focused on level design, enemies and bug fixing. There was no real plan, the only thing that "emerged" after a while was "Ok, we'll do 9 levels. That's enough”. And “there are jungle, temple etc". After that was decided, we finished off level after level, so that way we always did enemy graphics, level design and enemy code for each level. When the level was done more or less, we did the same for the next level and so on.
Of course we had to change some things from time to time in levels that were already "more or less done" but in general we focused on one level and did all the stuff for it and moved on to the next.
Turri: We did think about it - like “which levels” – “what order” and then we started. First we did the jungle and did think - ok what enemies can we put in there - we wanted to have 2 unique enemies per level to add more variety. Slowly the levels progressed. There was no plan that specified what we needed and where it ends. Our next project will most likely have better pre-planning ;)
Eiswuxe: As you can see, everything was very "loose" ;)
Turri: We constantly played our own levels and saw what was fun, what still needed to be integrated, and what should be killed off.
ScHlAuChi: Personally I think one of the major advantages of small teams and indie devs in general is, that the games can evolve. There is no strict plan - the game just slowly evolves and gets better and better. In big companies you usually have a strict plan you need to follow - this adds a lot of inflexibility. Things that might be good, will never get into the game. So having a general plan might be a good idea - but sticking too strictly to it might hinder creativity.
Turri: I see it the same way - planning is required but too much planning can hinder creativity - in my opinion this is a common mistake within bigger companies, where everything is being planned down to the smallest detail. In the end it turns out that it might not be fun - because of the lack of development time.
Mosh: Were there any major challenges that had to be overcome to complete the project?
Eiswuxe: One challenge was "calming down the community" by offering new screenshots and other proof that the game is still in development ;)
Turri: There were some bigger hurdles - the biggest hurdle was to satisfy ourselves. You want to make everything perfect down to the smallest detail and create the best game ever - but at some point you realise that you have to finish the game and therefore you have to force yourself to make unwanted compromises - which is hard ;) Also after a while some bugs drive you crazy ;)
Mosh: I can only imagine.
Eiswuxe: Since the first line of code was written five years ago, I had learned a lot in my free time and would have done many things very differently if I could have started all over again. That would have taken too much time so we used "a bit crappy code" to build on ;) That was not the best way to code a game but it worked ;)
In hindsight it is a pity that we did not keep the project more generic, because it is hard to change something (except for graphics, sound and level content) in the game without having to change the code too.
ScHlAuChi: The biggest hurdle for me was the communication - the time difference was quite big to Germany (I was working at UbiSoft in Montreal/Canada at that time) so communicating only online did lead to some misunderstandings but that was pretty much the only thing.
Eiswuxe: We will do it better with the next game :)
Mosh: What was the general feeling as soon as you had released Hurrican?
Eiswuxe: It was a mixture of relief, satisfaction and pride. I was more relieved than nervous because I was sure that it would be a good game - after having spent so much time with it :)
Turri: I was incredibly happy after it was released - I couldn't wait anymore - Eiswuxe wanted to fix a few more small bugs but I told him: fucking release it, we can fix that with a patch. I was totally convinced that Hurrican would be a hit.
Eiswuxe: After the first comments were posted on our website and we got the first fan mails that wanted to thank us for the game, it confirmed that I was right :)
ScHlAuChi: I was also pretty sure that it was a winner :)
Eiswuxe: In fact it was a really cool feeling to see the download counter increase every second and the best part is the feeling of "having done something" in your life that brings joy to other people, just like when I had fun playing Turrican back in the 90s :)
Mosh: How many downloads has there been to date?
Eiswuxe: 35,000 on our poke53280 site. I think there are about 100,000 if you count all the servers that list Hurrican at the moment.
ScHlAuChi: It's probably more like 250,000 overall :)
Mosh: What are your plans for the future? Do you already have your next project in mind?
Eiswuxe: First of all we will support Hurrican and try to build up a community with it. We hope that many people will contribute their own levels and graphics / sounds to help the game grow and keep it alive :) What we will do afterwards isn’t quite clear yet ;)
Mosh: I guess you haven't had time to bounce any new ideas off each other yet.
Eiswuxe: I have some ideas about a "generic" 2D engine that you can do lots of stuff with but at first I will do a bit of research and test some stuff until I plan to make a new game. And remember what I said about my girlfriend? ;)
We have also thought about, what we could achieve, if we port Hurrican to other platforms. There is a lot of potential in having the game on Xbox, GC, PS2 or PSP to get some more attention :)
ScHlAuChi: Those platforms might be ideal for Hurrican. I played Cave Story on the PSP yesterday (after having already finished it on PC years before) and it was really awesome being able to play this game on the go :)
Eiswuxe: It's not clear if WE will do the ports or if someone else will do them but there are no plans about other games yet. Hurrican 2 with more content would be a good idea I think….. ;)
ScHlAuChi: It's probably what the fans would want ;)
Eiswuxe: We will see ;)
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