Third day of the year, second indie dev interview of the year. I caught up with Gary Brafford, whose debut game release Rofaxan 2089AD has enjoyed a great deal of success already.
1/
So… it seems you like retro shoot-‘em-ups?!
I do and
that probably dates to UFO on the Odyssey2 from 1977. Later it was Life-force,
Gradius, Gyruss, Download2, Spriggan Mark 2, Browning, Rtype, Gate and Lords of
Thunder. Yeah I’ve played a lot of those games in 30 plus years! But there is a certain beauty to the retro
ones that the modern ones just seem to lack. Especially the PC Engine retro SEUs - they are
second to none. I don’t know exactly how to put my finger on it, but the more
modern SEUs seem to miss the mark by just inches.
2/
Any particular favourites of the genre? I know you told me a while back
that you were particularly fond of PC Engine games.
Lords and
Gates of Thunder, and Download2 - I still play those three down to this day.
Each of them is unique in its own way. But
the beauty to these three is that the massively powerful sound tracks they had
just blew me away and attached me right to those games - probably for life.
3/
You seem to have enjoyed a level of success with Rofaxan 2089AD that eludes
many indie devs… did the game’s popularity and sales figures take you by
surprise?
Completely.
No one goes in thinking “I am going to sell a truckload”. If they are thinking
that they just set themselves up for disaster. Not everyone like SEUs or heavy metal,
and both are in Rofaxan! Due to the
metal alone I have had a rather ugly review, but that’s just one out of very
many reviews and I hold nothing against the guy at all, although I felt that it
should have been more professional. Such
as, is the music clear, high quality, and suits the game? If not, then
say a negative comment about it.
To me I
don’t really care what others think about the game. I brought to the game what I took from the 16
Bit era SEUs, and that’s just my opinion and not everyone will agree with my
take on it. That’s what makes Indie
great, my vision brought to others when normally you’d have a publisher messing
the game up through the whole process.
4/
Just what does “Rofaxan” mean, anyway?!? (And why “2089AD”?)
Rofaxan is
taken from some of my childhood favourites. It’s nothing super cryptic! I just thought it sounded like a SEUs name
when I combined Robotron 2084, Faxanadu and Pac Man. The end result was a very unique name that I
am capable of copyrighting.
The one
thing I hate about some games like Zelda and others is the continuity of the
story is more of a mystery than playing the world in it. For example we know Zelda, Zelda II, but then
there are Gameboy versions etc that make Zelda III a little strange because
it’s pre-Zelda. So to avoid this kind of
poor story planning I made it simple by using the date the game took place. This unquestioningly removes any doubt to
story continuity and sounds cool too. It
lets you know without telling a story what year you are in and you can expect
that date to move forward. If it doesn’t
then you know where it will place in the scheme of the others without a 20
minute movie game trailers explaining to new and old players what order the
games go in. Simplicity!
That's
really at the heart of Rofaxan. When
it’s time for fun the game needs to be self explanatory and easy to understand.
Bad guys here, guns are here, the year
is 2089 Anno Domini, and A or RT shoots with either thumb pad or Thumb stick
steer. Simplifying so the player can just sit down and have fun and not waste
time trying to figure out why the wheel was reinvented.
5/
The X-Box launch Rofaxan 2089AD seemed to go pretty well too…
I was
shocked when I saw how well Xbox received Rofaxan. I figured it would be more difficult, but the
sales and many emails I’ve received indicate otherwise – in fact maybe I made a
mistake even bothering with the PC version, when I could have had twice the
reaction in 1 week on Xbox! So yeah –
both very happy and very surprised again.
6/
Tell us a little about the game creation package you used to create Rofaxan
2089AD.
I used IG
Maker, but with hindsight I would have gone down another direction. The
mediocre support for the engine pretty much meant I was learning an unknown
platform, where many people just didn’t even know how to do simple menus in
most cases. It didn’t slow down
development though. What it did cause
was with a lack of updates and constant work being done on the developers end.
When the
Evil Check List for MS changed on Xbox Live I had to crash course C# in a
weekend to fix the problem, so I lost a week getting kicked from peer review,
another week learning C#, and another 7 plus days going through peer review
again. So be careful when choosing your engine on console platforms as it can
really hurt you when you need help.
BTW I am
still awaiting an email from smile boom with the way to correct the issue where
I got kicked. No apologies, no help and
no response. Enterbrain the guys in the
US that distribute the engine did a great job of trying to help me get in touch
with them. It just never got answered
and no one even said sorry from smile boom. I was the only developer supporting their
engine, which you’d think would have counted for something, but not so much as
a phone call. Prometheus project is
going to Unity3D 4.x which uses 2D now.
7/
So what does the future hold for AngryGam3rs? More retro SEUs?
I will
revisit Rofaxan one day, just not now. The
attention Rofaxan earned us has us with many irons in the fire and no real
artist either. So we are rushing to get
an artist for our new game project we call “Prometheus” for now. The paperwork side of things is done and we
are working diligently to get the Kickstarter put together. We want to have a maximum production value for
this. In fact we were shooting our
presentation video for Prometheus when I got the call for this interview. So I couldn’t resist letting you know there’s
more in the works. We will try to touch
on all of the genres and not limit to just one genre of game. However what we
do will emphasize the gameplay and controls at the core and build the game
around it.
8/
If you could give aspiring indie devs one piece of advice, what would it
be?
Make sure
you are organized. Prepare for the tax man, he always wants his share. Whatever
you do, make sure the engine you choose has multiple platform support and good
support from its developer. IG Maker
seemed good at the time with it’s 80 USD price tag, but the headaches down the
road mean I am learning Unity now instead of having learnt it right at the
beginning.
Don’t give
up. Things will get tough and I mean
really tough. Reviewers won’t always
like your game and don’t take that personally – view it as constructive
criticism. Learn to accept that not
everyone will see your game the same way you do. I see Download2 and Lords of Thunder
in my game, many see R-Type and Gradius in there. But that's ok it means your game is speaking to
people on an individual level, and that's a good thing. Just don’t give up. Don’t think it’s all going to be easy, but
don’t make it harder than it needs to be either.
And whatever
you do, have fun doing what you’re doing - if you don’t, your heart wont be in
the game and that will show worse than a glitched NES game.
Particularly sound advice to new / aspiring devs there, I though. Thanks Gary and we look forward to seeing what "Prometheus" turns out to be!
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