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Rocket Riot is available on Xbox LIVE Arcade, but not many know that it’s built using XNA Game Studio. We chat with Peter de Jong, of Codeglue B.V., about their game Rocket Riot, and their experience using XNA Game Studio.
Could you describe Rocket Riot for anyone who hasn’t seen or played it, yet?
Ok, let me try: "Rocket Riot is a hilarious and fast-paced dual stick multiplayer shooter, with charming retro aesthetics". That should about summarize the game.
Some of the media have come up with much nicer descriptions. I especially like how the guys at Giant Bomb describe the game; they call it "a faux-retro jet-pack game with multiplayer modes". How awesome is that!?
Anyway, instead of legs you have a jetpack screwed onto your behind and you carry a bazooka. You fly around in totally destructible pixilated landscapes and have to kill (a lot of) foes and complete various missions. There is an 80 mission single player campaign, four multiplayer modes, and a frantic endurance mode.
What made you want to make Rocket Riot?
We wanted to create a multiplayer arcade game that would feel like Unreal Tournament or Smash Bros., but would look totally different. For the visual style we really looked back at the time that we started playing games ourselves. We really wanted to capture that 8-bit retro look, but it had to be contemporary and show the power of the Xbox 360. Otherwise people wouldn't pay 800 Microsoft Points for it. So we came up with the 3D pixel and created some awesome explosions, so that there could be no mistake that you are playing on your Xbox 360.
Rocket Riot also has a death match mode which in principle isn't any different than the one found in Unreal Tournament. Rocket Riot has a Rugby Riot mode, which was clearly inspired by the Unreal Tournament series’ capture the flag mode, etc. The visual style though, that's a different matter. For this the lead designer of the game was inspired by a game called BreakQuest (which is a cool BreakOut-style game). It had one level with these pixilated blocks you could break, which became our starting point. From then on it was very much an organic process.
After having finished a prototype version of Rocket Riot where you could fly around and destroy the landscape, the real potential became clear to us and started to add more game play elements. The combination of the explosiveness and the colorful pixilated landscapes resulted in a fun party game we think.
What made you want to use XNA Game Studio to make Rocket Riot?
There are three reasons why we have chosen XNA Game Studio. First is that we, as a company, are very eager to use new technologies. It's just great to be the first to use it and show what you can do with it!
The second reason was simplicity. This was going to be our first console game, and we wanted to focus on game play and not so much system programming, and XNA Game Studio was the perfect technology for that. The last reason was the cross platform nature. By developing Rocket Riot with XNA Game Studio we also have a PC version.
What other tools/programs do you use to help you make your games?
Our programmers are mainly using XNA Game Studio or Visual Studio Express, but also XCode for iPhone development and some various other ANT based pipelines. So our programmers need to be very flexible in switching between different development platforms.
Our artists and designers are working with 2D paint programs and 3D modeling software, like Autodesk Maya to create their artwork. Next to these first and third party tools we also create our own tools. Every game project has its specific needs, so you have to create some tools for it. We always create our tools using XNA Game Studio. With Rocket Riot we created a level editor in XNA Game Studio. With this editor we could place the enemy spawn points, fill in the enemy count, etc, so that the game designers could tweak the difficulty easily.
Any plans for downloadable content for Rocket Riot?
Whether we are going to do downloadable content for Rocket Riot largely depends on the success of the game. If it does really well we might choose to go that route and offer new maps as downloadable content.
How long did it take you to make Rocket Riot?
The total "real" development time of Rocket Riot has been about 13 months. Sure, that was a bit longer than expected. But the total time from start to finish was actually 9 months longer. 22 months is a long development time for an Xbox LIVE Arcade game!
We started the Rocket Riot project at the same time when XNA Game Studio 1.0 was released. We knew we were taking a risk when choosing this technology, as it hadn’t been fully developed yet and certainly wasn't ready for the Xbox LIVE Arcade platform yet.
During development, Rocket Riot was migrated to the latest version of XNA Game Studio each time a new version [of the program] was released - up to version 2.0. That’s the version the game finally shipped with. Our game uses all the Xbox 360 features so extensively, especially the networking layers, we had to wait from time to time for the XNA team to fix some of issues we came across. That said, the XNA team has done a great job in our opinion and has always been very responsive to our requests and we’ve always had their full support during the development of Rocket Riot. It just took a bit longer.
The good news is that now most of the issues will have been resolved and other developers can see they can use XNA Game Studio to create Xbox LIVE Arcade games.
Can you tell us more about the other things you’ve worked on?
Rocket Riot is our first console game, but not the first game we've made. As a company, Codeglue has been developing mobile games for quite a few years now. We have created various branded games for mobile phones, like Love a Lemming and Monkeyball Minigolf. We've also ported the popular game Worms World Party to the Nokia N-Gage twice. More recently we have developed some iPhone games, like HydroTilt XL and the upcoming Happy Tree Friends game SlapHappy! But our long-term goal is to create more great games for the Xbox LIVE Arcade Marketplace, of course!
How many people make up Codeglue?
The Codeglue team is about 10 people. There's Maurice Sibrandi, my business partner and who is the CTO of the company. In daily life he acts as the technical director for Codeglue’s game projects and manages our programmers. I take care of the business side of things and occasionally do some project management. Next to that we have two game programmers, one lead designer, two artists and most of the time we have three interns running around the office.
Can you walk us through a usual day for the team at Codeglue?
Our office opens at 8:30, but most of our employees arrive between 9:00 and 9:30 (we have flexible working times). The day starts at the coffee machine. Here we have a chat and prepare ourselves for the day. Then it's obviously time to go to work. We have an open plan office and communication is very easy and direct. Around 12:00 we get some lunch, which we eat together at a big lunch table. If the weather allows it, we move the lunch table outside into our garden. After lunch, we play some games, mostly Guitar Hero, Rocket Riot or some old-fashioned table foosball. Then comes the hard part again, more work. At 17:30 we call it a day and play some more games. (We play our games to do research of course! Yes, definitely for research…)
Any desire to submit a game to Xbox LIVE Indie Games?
We are definitely keeping an eye on the Xbox LIVE Indie Games platform to see if we can develop games for it. The threshold to develop games for this platform is much lower than Xbox LIVE Arcade, so if the sales are good and there is a solid business case that makes sense, you can expect Codeglue to start developing games for Xbox LIVE Indie Games!
What games are you playing now (other than your game!)?
Although we do play a lot of Rocket Riot at the moment, we are still playing a lot of Guitar Hero: Metallica and Rock Band as well. That [music party] genre of games we enjoy most. But there are more games we play, like Prototype, BioShock, the Call of Duty series and Evil Aliens.
What’s next for Codeglue?
We feel the digital download space offers us a great opportunity to develop the cool and fun games we want to create. It’s here where we can experiment with new game design ideas and new visual ideas. So after we have finished the iPhone projects we are currently working on, we'll start on our new Xbox LIVE Arcade project. I cannot say much about it, other than it's a true arcade game again and that there will be a lot of silly humor and a lot of explosions!
Want to download the game and check it out yourself? You can do that through the Xbox LIVE Arcade channel on Xbox.com or through the Xbox LIVE Marketplace on your Xbox 360! To read more about Codeglue visit their website!
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