Spyborgs Interview

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?

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.

VideoGamer.com: There’s a feeling that Japanese development is lagging behind Western development. Is Spyborgs part of Capcom’s overarching strategy of creating games that are more likely to appeal to Westerners?

DA: We hear that around the office all the time. Make games that will go global. That is Capcom Japan, I’m not sure if they’re making a statement on Japanese development as much as they’re recognising the fact that to grow the company bigger hits need to appeal to everyone, not just one culture. I believe that really is why you saw Dead Rising and Lost Planet come out of Japan. I can’t speak for them, but something like Onimusha, we haven’t seen that lately, probably because that isn’t as easily made global as a Lost Planet or a Dead Rising. I’m guessing that because it makes sense, they put their energy towards those brands. Not that they’ve given up on Onimusha, or anything like that, because actually Devil May Cry is probably a little less global than Lost Planet is, and we still came out with one recently. That is very much part of the strategy.

As far as working with Western developers, our group in San Francisco, we are Western developers. We are a publishing, production team that is almost exclusively ex-internal developers. I used to run internal projects, my boss used to run internal projects. Morgan (W. Gray), who’s on Dark Void, he was last on running the Tomb Raider projects internally, so we all have actual development experience. While Capcom Japan has the internal development teams, and they get to use MT Framework and hopefully one day we do to, we are exclusively an external development team. So I work with Bionic Games in LA. Morgan works with Airtight up in Seattle. Our goal is to try and build a family of Western developers that we oversee that can help grow Capcom. Capcom Japan, they are obviously making games themselves to go global, but they do look to us to try and bring in more of that Western development style and mentality and talent to produce additional games that can meet those goals. You’ve seen Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, now you’ve seen Marvel VS Capcom 2, they’re leaning on us a little bit to revive some of their older brands. But also where we do a new IP it’s to meet that same goal.

I guess to us it would be natural, right? Because we are Western, we have a better sense of how to make games for Americans and Europeans than they might. Whereas we don’t know how to make games for the Japanese market. I can say Spyborgs seems to be appealing from what I’m hearing, a little bit more to the Japanese. I hope that’s true, I heard a rumour about that! It doesn’t surprise me because Ratchet & Clank appealed to them and worked in that market. I can say that we’ve done nothing specifically for the Japanese market to make it appealing to them, I just think that naturally what these guys do with their art style and gameplay style, it has that Pixar quality. Everyone enjoys it. That would be my guess.

VideoGamer.com: The Wii is an interesting platform. Whenever a hardcore third-party game comes out for it it seems to struggle in terms of sales. How much of a risk is Spyborgs? How do you appeal to both hardcore gamers and typical Wii owners?

DA: To answer your first question about the risk, you guys wouldn’t be asking me if it wasn’t an obvious risk. The numbers say it’s a little more challenging to, as a third-party, break out and have a hit on the Wii. That’s a given. I guess you could say I’m not surprised that recent mature-rated games on the Nintendo platforms, of which I can think of two, I’m not going to name them because I don’t want to be offensive to anyone… it’s disappointing that they didn’t succeed, but I don’t think anyone expected them to. At least for the Wii, based on the market data, you can look on the games that sell for the Wii, there’s nothing anywhere close to mature-rated content that sells well. You could sit back and hope a hardcore game would release for the Wii and succeed and blaze that trail…

VideoGamer.com: Hardcore doesn’t necessarily mean mature, right?

DA: Correct. There is a difference between core game and mature content. That to me is the biggest distinction for where we’re headed with the Wii. Nintendo, not every one of their game games, I’m not talking about Wii Sports, that’s really a mini-game compilation, those succeed on the Wii so let’s push those aside. Mario, Zelda, those are games. Wario wasn’t the huge success that maybe they hoped. Not everything Nintendo first-party puts out, like Wii Music wasn’t a huge success. So just because the Nintendo first-party label’s on it does not guarantee millions of units sold. A quality game that’s appealing to that audience – so at its core, getting back to the Pixar quality – Mario and Zelda have that. They have that Disney feel to them, which is there’s an art style that is not offensive to anyone. It may feel a little younger but it most definitely doesn’t alienate anyone. Taking those same elements is where our art style is coming from. It’s a little younger. It’s not the for kids thing it was a year ago. The original Spyborgs was designed to be for the younger gamer. The latest version is designed to be appealing to all audiences. And then there’s the accessibility of the gameplay. Something like Zack & Wiki was younger and appealing but was a little too challenging, almost from the get-go. That is, for us, another reason why the development team we have is perfect, because their success with Ratchet & Clank, everyone of all styles can get into them. It’s fun to just go around the level bashing crates. Anyone can do that. There’s no challenge, the crate’s not jumping up and attacking you, you’re not threatened. It’s fun to use the Wii Motion pointer and explore, find stuff and pull it into the word or trigger something. The game interacts with a very simple motion. Frankly you can button mash and enough things happen. You’re not going to get high end combos, you’re not going to get a bunch of experience, you’re not going to be able to upgrade your character as fast, but you could just go around button mashing and have some fun and success.

In addition to that these guys also have experience with successfully building systems that tune themselves while you’re playing. Spyborgs already has under the hood a system that will recognise that you’re a skilled gamer and make it a little harder, a little more challenging. Not just to slow you down but to make sure it doesn’t feel too easy, so you don’t get bored, you’re challenged. Similarly it’ll track if you’re having a difficult time, it can tell you’re a button masher, you’re not making combos, you’re not blocking, you’re not using finishing moves, OK, we still want you to have fun so let’s tone it down a little bit and allow you to get through that experience. Kind of like if say a movie popped up and it was speaking in French and it could tell that you don’t understand that language, it might switch to English. So that appealing art style doesn’t alienate anyone, everyone can enjoy looking at it, the accessibility of the game so you can get into it, immediately have fun and it tunes itself so that regardless of the play style you have fun.

Take a fighting game, the super moves and the combos are extremely skilled, multiple input type moves. For ours it’s a simple motion. As you gain experience you can recognise combo of heroes versus enemy is going to be this attack style, it’s going to be this sequence of movements, but the idea of all you need to do is thrust, all you do is slam, that’s much simpler and much more accessible than, I need to press down, down forward, these three buttons, hold back, charge, we don’t need that. So even our special attacks are a little more accessible for anyone to come in to play. It’s really important that our HUD prompts for motion are very easily readable, that you know what you’re supposed to do by watching that icon on the screen. I’m confident that we’ve achieved that, pretty much within the last week really because we were iterating on it so many times to get ready for this event. So now we need to get all the various motions in. We need to get it presented better so it’s a little more stylish, but now at least the language of it communicating with you is clear.

So hitting all of those goals means we absolutely believe that this is the kind of game, not just because it’s a good game but because it’s a good game that meets that criteria, that can actually work on the Wii. There are real gamers on the Wii, they just need a game built for them. Like anyone, you spend money on that hardware and that hardware has specific features, you want the software for it to validate your purchase. The Wii gamer, especially a gamer, has expectations of, I want motion controls and I want it to be cool. That’s why I bought this system. I didn’t buy this system just so I could hold something that looks like a TV remote. I bought this system to have a different style of gameplay. We’re making sure to deliver that as well.

VideoGamer.com: One of the things that most impresses me about the game is the graphics. Is it pushing the Wii?

DA: Very much so. That boss battle has been the most challenging level because we are maximising RAM. There’s not only the effects, the textures, the models, everything in there, every time we weak and add one more thing, we have to go back and find something to optimise or find something to tear out. Anyone can throw a bunch of stuff at the Wii and slow it down. It’s how intelligent, how smart you’re using that time, that performance. Anyone can optimise something to be fast. What this team has done, and all the credit goes to them, is they have engineers that are so passionate about making this game look great that they spent a lot of time figuring out techniques to bring those high end graphics engine features to the Wii. If it’s not the actual technique then… I’m just going to throw out, let’s just say dynamic lighting. If there were a particular way that you would do it on 360 and PS3 and for whatever reason the Wii doesn’t do it, you don’t care about how the hardware is doing it, you care about the on screen effect looking a certain way. So what these guys have done is, I wouldn’t say reinvent the wheel with every special effect, but they’ve spent time finding techniques the artist can use to give you the impression that that effect is happening. So when it comes to pushing the Wii there’s a lot of that going on, that the engineering team has provided the art team a tool set that most Wii engines don’t have in them. Fortunately the art team is extremely good at what they’re doing in terms of defining a style. We were talking about the resolution still holding up on a HD screen – defining a style that takes advantage of those features and just looks good and is appealing and is sophisticated enough to hold up under those conditions.

VideoGamer.com: The easy option would be, and it seems a lot of developers take this option when making games on the Wii, is that graphics don’t really matter because the kind of person who has a Wii doesn’t care about that kind of thing.

DA: Bullshit. Yeah, maybe that stereotypical Wii gamer who just wants to play Wii Sports, sorry I shouldn’t say gamer, typical Wii user just wants to play those mini-games, but the gamers that are out there, that care about games just like anyone else, they care about a great experience.

VideoGamer.com: So there are a significant portion of Wii owners who are gamers then? It’s not just this machine that’s owned by everyone but gamers?

DA: Very much so. All of us who grew up on Nintendo platforms, those were gamers. Many of us bought the Nintendo Wii still as gamers, to play the next Marios, to play the next Zeldas, and those games are huge successes. Mario Kart came out on the previous Nintendo systems, we’re buying that on the Wii because it’s a great game, and it just happens that Nintendo’s damn good at doing that. Those people are out there. You don’t see them all that often because their expectations are higher and the crap that keeps getting shovelled at them, they’re not going to buy it. So self-fulfilling prophecy that third-party games aren’t going to work because they’re saying we’re not going to buy that crap you’re throwing our way. The Capcom fans are saying, Capcom, we know you provide quality, give us a game on the Wii. That’s where Capcom began this pursuit of finding a developer that could do this, build a great game, an appealing game and actually push the system. If you’re going to do a true action game and not a mini-game compilation, that’s going to hold up in the market against the God of Wars, or alongside the Devil May Crys and Lost Planets, it’s got to look good. That’s why we set that goal, and fortunately the team was able to come together and pull it off.

Spyborgs is due out exclusively for the Wii this year.