Spyborgs (Wii)

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At Captivate 09 Capcom took the lid off the new and improved Spyborgs, the Wii-exclusive co-op brawler due out sometime this year. It looks very different, and a lot better, than it did a year ago, when the Saturday morning TV-inspired mini-game fest puzzled as many people as it pleased. Our interest piqued, we sat down with senior producer Daryl Allison to find out just what developer Bionic Games has been up to in the last 12 months, and why this Wii game for gamers will be a success.

VideoGamer.com: Where did the original concept for Spyborgs come from?

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Daryl Allison: Capcom was looking to get into the Wii market. It wanted to make a game for the Wii. There was enough of an outcry from Capcom fans saying give us a real game on the Wii! So we were looking for developers and while we were searching Bionic Games were being founded. They saw the same opportunity, they wanted to make a real game on the Wii, based on their strengths. Because of their past success with Ratchet and Clank, they believed that that style of game, the accessibility of it, the appeal, would map well to the Wii market, particularly for a co-op game. So the two worlds collided perfectly. They wanted a publisher, we wanted a developer just like them. That's where the initial idea came to be for these three heroes, who are similar to their original versions, the core cooperative combat, melee system is still there from the very beginning.

Originally it was more of an interactive Saturday morning cartoon experience. We played with that for the first six to nine months of the concept/prototype phase, and that's when we unveiled at Captivate 08, just to gauge response to something that was different. We had our own take on what was working and what wasn't. My impression was that for the most part everyone liked the concept. I still personally really like a lot of the conceptual elements. But the game wasn't coming together. It wasn't fun. Something was missing. So we left Captivate 08 and focused in on the elements that were the most fun. So instead of fixing the things that aren't working and thrashing on those, let's start focusing on the elements that are fun and see if we can expand from those and see if we can build the game up from the positives.

While doing that the melee combat, the brawler, was becoming more and more fun and it was obvious that the opportunities we had, like these co-op attacks, like having more epic boss battles, was something we were heading towards. You wanted that brawler to be deeper, and obviously there's cool enemies to fight but then you need something epic every now and then to fight. A boss. And as that part of the game began to evolve, the other elements just didn't feel right. Some of those mini-game commercials were still fun, they were still funny, but they felt forced, they just didn't fit the game. We didn't quite want to cut them, so we kept them around for a while and played with it for a little bit, and on their own they were still fun, but in the experience of playing through the game they just didn't work. So we just accepted that fact and just said cut, let's redesign this game. Let's take the three best characters we love, let's take this brawler that we love and let's just focus on that. If we were to build a brawler from the ground up, what would it be like? Rightfully the team came to me and they were talking about what they believed would be best for the brawler. They wanted that classic 80's arcade feel. If someone were to build that kind of game now, what would that be like? At the core, that kind of game, that's what you see, but it's done on today's technology, done on the Wii Motion, and we're making a Capcom game. We don't want to rip off other Capcom games, but let's be inspired by them, let's feel like a Capcom game.

So those guys studied the Lost Planets, the Resident Evils, the Devil May Crys. The lead designer boiled it down to what he calls internally the four Cs: co-op, carnage, cinematic and Capcom. The carnage and cinematic are Capcom anyway. By carnage we don't directly mean blood and gore, we just mean lots of explosions, lots of breakables, lots of special effects. Cinematic doesn't just refer to cutscenes, it just means the presentation of things is beautiful to watch. So for example those co-op attacks could easily be just two guys doing something in the same space. We didn't have to cut away to the special effects room, but it's so much cooler to do so. So we tried to bring that to the most important part of the game, which is co-op, we tried to bring that to the boss battles. Very Devil May Cry, very Lost Planet. The boss battles you see out of Capcom Japan now are just f***ing huge! It was pretty obvious that God of War is an epic, cinematic game, so what can we borrow from them, what can we be inspired by? Already knowing that we were Wii exclusive, and it was important to do Wii Motion right, you see it now when you get into those co-op attacks and those cinematic sequences when you really have the opportunity to do the motions. Things just started to come together and we redesigned it.

It probably took three months from the last Captivate to settle in on that. And then the last nine months of building this up. So we went dark for a while because we knew we were heading in an altered direction and we wanted to make sure that we had something that would hopefully impress people when we showed it off. I'm quite proud of what the team's accomplished and pretty happy with the reception.

VideoGamer.com: It must be great to have the freedom to say, look, it's not working, let's almost start again.

DA: Absolutely! And I'm glad you brought it up because it sounds weird when I go around saying it because it sounds like I'm just yay Capcom! But it's true. Where I've worked before we've always wanted that opportunity and you always hear about the best companies, the ones that make the greatest games do do that. The Blizzards of the world, the Valves. We don't quite have that luxury, but at least it was obvious, this direction isn't going to meet our standards, this new direction sounds promising, don't take all the time in the world but take some extra time to develop it. Really, nine months ago our target was this event. You guys have Captivate 09 to unveil ourselves anew. I forget when we were originally supposed to release, those dates are long gone from my head. It's not as if they pressed reset and said here's a completely new budget and schedule but they gave that rare opportunity of spend some time, go back to the basics, build a new game, prove it's fun, prove it works, come back and impress the world and then we can talk from there. Certain things like Wii MotionPlus, if we get a reaction from this event, if everyone thinks it would be 10 times better if we support Wii MotionPlus then that might be enough to say, OK let's just go ahead and spend three extra months, get that stuff in, get it right, do the things we want to do with it, and let's settle on a later 2009 date. That's why we're just saying right now 2009, because there's some things we might play with, we might add in, or we might just polish up and finish what we have.

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