Editor’s note: Alex managed to corral The Behemoth co-founders John Baez and Dan Paladin for an interview at September’s Tokyo Game Show. Read on for insight on their development process, how the Japanese react to their games, and what’s up with that crying block of tofu teased for their third game. -Brett
At this year’s Tokyo Game Show, I had the opportunity to chat with John Baez and Dan Paladin from developer The Behemoth, makers of the color arcade-style games Alien Hominid, Castle Crashers, and the upcoming and not-yet-named “Game 3.” We discussed the success of Castle Crashers, Game 3’s development, and the company’s approach to community-focused PR.
Obviously Castle Crashers is your biggest game to date. How is that doing worldwide? I remember hearing reports of 1 million sales.
John Baez: That was a million users, so a million users on the leaderboard. I think we are at 1.2 million…
Dan Paladin: 1.25 million…
JB: Are we at 1.25 million now?
DP: Yes, which is awesome! I mean, nobody expected…
JB: THAT.
DP: …that many people to play the game. I mean, Alien Hominid did okay, but this is exponentially better. I think part of it is we made Castle Crashers more accessible than Alien Hominid. It doesn’t kick your butt as hard. And maybe it’s the genre as well. We’re not 100 percent sure. We are just making things that we like and we’re lucky enough that people agree with us that they are good.
Game 3 is even more accessible, so I guess there is a trend there. There is still a good amount of challenge involved, but you understand it right away. Then you just have to figure out your goals. I was showing you our online multiplayer mode, but we also have a story that can be played cooperatively or alone.
Can you tell me anything about the story? I saw a theatrical style. Does that play into the story?
DP: Yeah, the theater plays into it. I can’t tell you the details of why it’s a theater just yet, but I can tell you that guy you see with a hat who’s always crying: He’s the bad guy. He’s psychotic. He always has several different emotions going on and you are trying to systematically break down what he’s got going, which is bad stuff. But we haven’t revealed the beginnings of the story just yet, and I hope to do that soon, as I have a lot of that in place.
A lot of the game has gotten off to a great start. It’s solid. So a lot of what I am doing now is polish. I’m trying to figure some clarity, see how people respond at the shows, addressing things as they reveal themselves. Usually after just one day at a trade show, it’s obvious what we need to do. We love to take it to the trade shows and see what people think.
Has the reception been different in Japan? Have people taken to it differently?
JB: Partially. If they have, [it’s because] people have stumbled upon us. Like at the Tokyo Anime Fair, where we were one of the very few video games that were there, they didn’t know who we were. All they knew was that they really liked what they saw. Once we got them into the booth and everything, it was super.
Generally we go to PAX and Comic Con, so coming here for that has been really good. It has helped us grow our fan base because there are so few Western developers. I don’t think this year there are any Western developers besides us. EA isn’t even here this year. We actually got a lot of press from that last year at TGS because we were the only Xbox developer from the States in Japan. All the Japanese press would say, “What are you doing here?” And we would show them our game. This was right after Castle Crashers came out, and they were just blown away by it.
DP: People really seemed to love it. We first started coming out here to let people know we exist, but then we find out that they already know, so now we are just showing them what we’ve got. We know we are released worldwide, but we didn’t know that everyone walking by would be familiar with what we are doing.
My favorite game ever is Japanese, River City Ransom. That whole game was my inspiration for wanting to make a beat-em-up. Most of our inspiration just comes from the entire old-school genre that we are referencing.
But what I was saying was that the new game is referencing one of our old mini-games more than platformers in general. We kind of took each element of what we had already created and spruced it up. Just like the original version of Castle Crashers was thrown out, completely thrown out and redone, Game 3 is kind of like that.
[At this point Dan had to go to an appointment with Game Trailers, leaving me with John.]
Before when we were playing, you were talking about how in previous builds you could have four teams in Game 3. Why did you cut that back?
JB: Currently it’s two teams, and then four players on each team, but we are not sure about the final number. One of the reasons we do all these trade shows is to get player feedback from just watching them. We have had a lot of test cases where the technology can support so many more people, but the problem is the number of players onscreen at one time per team on one console, because the camera has to zoom out to the size of the furthest distance apart that two people are.
So if you have a big level and lots of people, you end up with lots of tiny little characters and it’s not that fun. So we have been working — for about a year, actually — just slowly working back to the optimum number of players per game, which is looking about eight or twelve.
It’s a little bit difficult, I guess, because on the Xbox you can have four people on the same console in the same room. So the four people there are possibly at a disadvantage, possibly at an advantage versus four guys all playing on their own systems. It has been a real challenge to find that balance between them.
Originally it was tempting to say like, “Let’s do a 32-player game,” and you know it was like the technology totally supports it. And it was like, “Man, this really sucks,” because it really did, it really was not fun.
Although still similar, the art style in Game 3 has changed from your previous games. What is the evolution there?
JB: It’s definitely much richer than the previous games. It revolves around the theater, and there is a desire to have more of a feeling of wealth. Where Alien Hominid was really basic, and Castle Crashers started to develop a different, more defined color palette, Game 3 took another step: lots of gold, lots of bling, lots of shiny things.
Then you can see how it’s all rendered. There is much more of an emphasis on the primary parts of a level, so you can see how everything works. For example, you have a block sitting next to another block, and another block, and another block… Whereas with Alien — well, both Alien and Castle — every single background was individually rendered.
I guess you kind of have an excuse this time, too, with the theater setting.
JB: Right, yeah, it’s all kind of playing out in this big proscenium.
I was going to say the difference in color palette kind of reminded me of the difference between like a box of chocolates and a box of… candy.
JB: Yeah, that’s kind of exactly where it is, kind of tasty and substantial.
Really? It was the first thing I thought of when I saw it. Actually, when I first saw shots it reminded me of The Phantom of the Opera, maybe because of the theatre setting, I suppose.
JB: Right.
But when I saw it here, I guess because I am surrounded by Japan, I thought, “It‘s a block of tofu. A crying block of tofu.”
JB: Well, you do have the tofu, horse, refrigerator for sure, a lot of it is subliminal.
It’s all mounted up. Will the story mode have cooperative play like your previous games?
JB: We still haven’t determined if you can play the story mode or the mission mode with multiple people.
So this would be the only game you‘ve made where the story mode would be single player?
JB: If we go down that route, yeah.
Is that why there is a heavy emphasis on the online team match aspect?
JB: Well, it has been designed from the outset as a venue to enjoy with a lot of people. Its ancient roots are the Alien Hominid PDA games. It has evolved a lot, so now there’s not a whole lot of comparison between them other than that both are platformers.
Many people enjoyed playing the PDA games and still enjoy playing them. That encouraged us to follow them as a point of exploration for our next game because we hadn’t made a strict platformer yet, and we like to do a different genre for every game that we do.
Right, so you‘ll have another “departure“ for “Game 4“?
JB: Well, there would never have been a Castle Crashers if we had done Alien Hominid 2, so the idea is, let’s keep doing that for as long as we can. Keep doing like Treasure does and never make sequels. Just: new franchise, new genre, push it as far as it goes, ship the game, start over.
You know, when you are a game developer that isn’t relying on a fixed revenue stream from a number of different titles in the same franchise, it just opens you up to explore so many ideas. That’s what we are doing. It’s all about having fun, exploring, and really trying to get as much out of it as we can for as long as we can.
You have also Castle Crashers coming out on PSN soon. Are you expecting that to hit bigger in Japan than the Xbox version did?
JB: Well yeah, the install base is bigger. But we are the number one Xbox Live Arcade game in Japan. There have been some other games in there, but since launch, which was a year ago, we are told we’ve been at number one. If we aren’t at number one, we are in the top three or five.
That said, there are only a million, million and a half Xboxes in Japan right now. So it will be interesting to see what kind of uptake we get on PSN in Japan when it launches.
Will you be able to communicate over PSN with headsets?
JB: I don’t know. Since it [the PS3] doesn’t ship with one, and because nobody ever buys the peripherals, ever, period. It’s not native to PSN either, but we do tend not to, or we try not to, remove features. But it depends on the programmers; perhaps they will need the bandwidth to ensure the online multiplayer is the best experience. You know, as fun as it is, it does take up a certain amount of bandwidth even on the Xbox, so… And mostly what’s said over the headset is: “You’re stupid!” “No, you’re stupid!”
That said, I can’t even imagine what the install base is for people with a headset. If you are going down that route, then those are gamers that may not be in our fan base. They are the hardcore kind of Call of Duty players, so it’s less than likely they are going to be picking up our game.
But you never know. Maybe our programmers will surprise me and turn around: “Yeah! Its been in since day one!” And then I can come back and say, “Of course we support that. Everyone go buy a headset!”
This year you seem to have a bigger footprint on the show floor. Last year you had this little corner, but this year you have a whole area.
JB: Yeah, we really used the first two days as our warm-up. Like yesterday, we didn’t have any fake grass at the booth, and that was something we had planned since from the Tokyo Anime Fair. That all happens at Tokyo Bigsite, not out here at Makuhari, so its much easier to get around Tokyo from there. And I happened to be in a department store, lost, and I looked down and there’s Astroturf. And I thought, “My God! That’s going to be the perfect booth thing!” And so yesterday when we arrived we spent all day walking around, trying to find a place that had enough for us to do our booth. We finally found it and last night jumped into a taxi and went and bought every piece they had.
Read my preview of Game 3 here. You can see more of my work at DoFuss.net and Gamespeople.co.uk or follow me at twitter.com/DoFuss.