Shoot 'em up development experience on the example of Creepy Road

In early September, Moscow indie studio Groovy Milk has started beta testing of its first project – Creepy Road. In an interview with App2Top.ru She shared her experience of creating levels for shoot ’em up, launching a Kickstarter campaign and getting development permission for Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru : Please tell us about the team. What did you do before Groovy Milk and how did you get together to take up the development of the dream game?

Ilya Polutis, art director and artist of Groovy Milk: There are five people in our team:

• Ilya – art director and artist;
• Arkady is a programmer and game architect responsible for backend development;
• Misha is a programmer responsible for frontend development;
• Volodya – producer and screenwriter;
• Kirill is a composer and sound designer.

In addition, several people work with us on outsourcing.

Chance helped us to get together, as it usually happens.

We have almost all known each other since childhood, studied at the same school, but then everyone went about their business.

Ilya (that is, I) organized the StrangeBrain design studio, where most of the team now works. Arkasha and Misha participated together as developers in many large companies. Volodya worked as a brand manager in various fields and simultaneously wrote children’s books. Kirill got a job as a sound engineer on the radio and played in a musical group.

We kept in touch, saw each other, talked, but we still didn’t get around to a joint project.

And then, imagine, we got there. Volodya and I once met in a bar, I showed the visual concept of the game from my phone, which I sketched. By the way, then it wasn’t Flint (the main character of Creepy Road) and even the genre of the game was supposed to be somewhat different, but nevertheless it served as a starting point.

You’ve been doing Creepy Road since the beginning of 2015. Did you initially lay out two and a half years?

Vladimir Sarafanov, producer and screenwriter of Groovy Milk:Initially, we planned to meet it in a year and a half. But in the course of development, we had new ideas, and some of the previous solutions seemed to us not so successful, which led to constant alterations. And besides that, there were many factors that influenced the timing.

Not all of us, being busy at other jobs, could afford to develop a game full-time.

We planned a huge amount of content, which in the end even had to be somewhat reduced. For example, the work on creating one location (rendering, slicing, assembling, visual effects) took about a month, and we have more than 15 such locations in the game, and each of them with a unique setting drawn manually.

In addition, the game has 30 types of enemies, 5 bosses, 10 types of weapons, a lot of frame-by-frame animations and visual effects…

In general, everything turned out to be not so fast.

Periodic problems with outsourcing also played a big role in increasing the development period.

As it turned out, there are not so many good animators working at Spine in Russia, and, like many creative people, they sometimes tend to delay deadlines (especially when the next season of Game of Thrones comes out).

The decision to make the game multiplatform was also not easy and also added its contribution to the piggy bank of the overall development timing.

Well, at the end of last year, many of us had personal problems, which led to another negative progress in the release date.

The project itself is a classic shoot ’em up, the main feature of which, as I understand it, is humor. From the outside, it may seem that this is not the most difficult type of games in terms of development. What pitfalls can you run into by taking up the creation of such a project?

Vladimir: We thought so too! In fact, everything turned out to be more complicated.

Compared, for example, with a puzzle platformer (a genre that we also initially considered for the game), there are significantly more types of enemies in shoot ’em up, respectively, they also have more actions, behavior algorithms are more complex, weapons and animations are more, and so on.

In addition, the genre obliges to the constant dynamics of gameplay, which results in its own features of game design. Even the simplest, at first glance, location requires careful calculation both in the landscape and in the placement of enemies, so that the overall picture is balanced and maintains a uniform rhythm.

By the way, how does the process of creating levels for the game usually go?

Ilya: First of all, a general scheme of the landscape of the future level is created. We determine its length, the location of stop screens, obstacles, as well as the birthplace of waves of enemies.

Then, according to this scheme, a sketch is prepared, on which the general elements of the visual design of the location are indicated.

Then we proceed to the final rendering. First, these are the main reproducible tiles (such as earth, grass, sky, etc.), and then individual graphic elements (trees, houses, statues, lampposts, cars, and everything else).

After the work with the rendering is completed, all the elements are cut and assembled in accordance with the initial scheme of the level into a full–fledged location, after which we add cosmetic touches – fire, smoke, blinking lanterns and other details.

Last of all, we place enemies, bonuses, obstacles, test the result and make adjustments to the overall game balance.

The game has a great hand-drawn style. How expensive is such a drawing in terms of forces and resources?

Ilya: Thank you, we are pleased that the visual style of the game evokes positive emotions!

Yes, graphics take up a large share of our total timing. As we have already said, the average time to create a location from the scheme to the final assembly in Unity takes us about a month. So, from this month, the net timing for rendering is about three weeks. This is certainly a lot, but the result is worth it.

With the characters, things are more cheerful – it takes a couple of days to draw, but for its subsequent animation in Spine – for about a week. Iterations, of course, are also not uncommon, but to a greater extent it concerns, rather, not drawing, but animation, although it happens that we replace graphics somewhere.

Sometimes we look at some element or animation, and it seems great to us, and then we insert it into the project, look at it in the game, and now it no longer seems so great to us. Then we start making changes until everything suits us. The resulting product should first of all please ourselves.

How, in general, is your work on the project structured?

Ilya: We work on the project according to the principle “from idea to implementation”.

We regularly arrange brainstorming sessions, where each of us sketches his thoughts and wishes. Then we discuss it all. As a result, some ideas fall away, something is transformed.

Naturally, each of our team has its own area of responsibility, and if some question or another idea concerns its “jurisdiction”, then we leave the last word in solving the problem for it.

Then, from everything that we discussed and decided, we start a checklist in Trello, which we close as we complete.

Then again, a flyer, new tasks and a new checklist…

In general, here we are probably not too original in the organization of the workflow, but this order helps to better understand what has already been done and what tasks still need to be implemented, so this is probably optimal for us.

You are making a game on Unity. And a year ago we switched to a new version of it. When it comes to projects with three-dimensional graphics, the transition is clear: a new render, a new particle system, and any other gadgets… But you have two-dimensional graphics, everything is rendered, so why switch?

Vladimir: In fact, Unity actively supports 2d projects and regularly adds new features. Perhaps no less than for 3d.

For example, when creating a game, we use two types of animations: frame-by-frame for effects and skeletal animation for characters, which we do in Spine. So, the last version of Spine, where a lot of necessary and useful things appeared, was not supported by the previous version of Unity.

And here are the arguments in favor of the new version of Unity from our developers, which the creative half of the team does not understand, but does not dispute their significance: state machines, transit bland, profiler have appeared …

By the way, what do you think about the engine now? Is there any desire to switch to other solutions after the release?

Ilya: In general, we are satisfied with Unity and, most likely, we will stay on this platform for our future projects. Our developers are closely monitoring updates, and there are more and more new and useful features. In the latest release, for example, a lot of useful things have been added on physics, particles. We want to apply all this already in new projects.

You managed to agree on the release of the game on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U. Please share your experience, how did it happen and how did you manage to get the “green light”?

Vladimir: It was pretty simple… But not really.

Since this is our first project, we did not fully know the rules of the market.

Initially, we thought that they would pay attention to us, for example, at some exhibition, and therefore immediately decided to participate in… Igromire! And this is after only four months of development.

In general, it is said and done. We were very lucky then, because we got into the indie zone, which appeared that year on Igromir for the first time, and we took a small stand on very favorable terms.

A huge number of visitors to the exhibition saw our game, but despite this, none of the platforms paid attention to us, because, as it turned out, this is not how it is done.

Later we found information that each platform has its own program for attracting indie developers: you need to fill out an application and if the platform is interested in the game, it is given the green light. Then it’s a matter of a little bureaucratic red tape – you need to sign several electronic documents, and after that your game will be waiting on the console.

Some platforms did not immediately accept us. For example, Sony had to wait for a response for quite a long time, when they finally answered, they asked for additional information about the project. But after a long correspondence, we were given the green light there too.

In 2016, you went to Kickstarter, but then withdrew the project. Can you tell me about it in detail?

Ilya: We have an interesting story with Kickstarter.

We had an initial investment, and we considered Kickstarter as a tool for PR and attracting investments for the finalizing of the game.

We decided that we should find a team specializing in crowdfunding campaigns that will help us with registration, PR, and generally advise what and how to do.

They consulted us well, registered us without any problems, but as soon as the matter got to the most important thing, PR, and everything became quite sad.

We were promised a lot of articles in major publications, active support, and so on. But on the day of the campaign launch, five 5-6 posts on Twitter and a few more notes on unknown portals were waiting for us.

As a result, we went almost unnoticed during the hottest days [for a set of funds].

Despite this, we received several offers from companies that followed the development even before we went on Kickstarter. They offered to invest the necessary money to complete the project.

Then we joined the promotion of the project on our own, collected a certain amount, but at some point our original investor contacted us and offered to finance the completion of the development independently, and not to continue the Kickstarter campaign.

In turn, we would like to advise young teams entering Kickstarter to try to rely more on their own strength, since attracting PR people does not always help, and sometimes, on the contrary, harms the project with a missed moment or little publicity.

Will you publish the game yourself?

Vladimir: Most likely, yes, if in the coming months there are not suddenly very interesting offers from publishers interesting to us.

What are your plans for promotion?

Vladimir: We have ideas for non-standard videos and images for sowing. There is also one idiotic, but interesting concept, which we will not talk about yet.

If we talk about the promotion tools themselves, then everything is pretty standard here: SMM, YouTube, Twitch, journalists + platform support with their favorable location to our game.

You are a very good and stable leader of the group in VK, do you see any benefit from it?

Vladimir: Thank you for such a review!

To be honest, we would have liked more stability, but at some point we didn’t have enough time to regularly post updates.

VK is probably our most loyal and interested audience, although the game group is twice as numerous in FB.

In VK, we get a lot of feedback, fresh ideas, and we are developing the base of the most loyal audience, which, if they like the product, will help develop Creepy Road.

There is, however, something that recently upset us a little:

We conducted a closed beta test of the game and invited our subscribers to participate in it by leaving a request. We received a great response in person, and in just two days we scored the required number of testers. But in the end, on the first day of the beta test, only 10% of the total list of those who signed up came. But we could have taken other people instead of them if we had been warned…

The reason for this, of course, was the sunny weather in Moscow, because of which everyone rushed to dachas and kebabs.

The last question is about the game again. Now everyone is hearing a scandal related to the fact that a journalist of a leading Western gaming publication barely passed the Cuphead platformer tutorial. Will the journalists be able to pass your game?

Ilya: If the same journalist who played in Cuphead, then we are afraid not. Well, he will most likely pass the training faster, but starting from the second level it will be quite difficult for him.