Co-Founder of PD Design Studios, KJ Poh, takes time away from coding to discuss his newly released 2D action platformer, Dusty Revenge.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of Dusty Revenge.
Hi! I am KJ, co-founder of the studio and lead designer for Dusty Revenge. I also double up as the producer for the game.
How did you get started in developing PC games?
I had a short stint at a games company before I came out and started my own studio. But when we first started out, we weren’t onto PC games specifically. We were a multimedia design studio. But over the years, we worked on plenty of Flash games for clients.
Where did the idea for Dusty Revenge come from?
I started having the idea of making a game with a trooper on the ground, but also with supporting characters from different vantage points. Sniper was the 1st idea. We think it would be cool if the trooper on the ground was fighting, but he could get help from his sniper to take out enemies out of his reach. We started to explore other roles and referenced from modern military strategy. The theme of the game was more random, with the co-founder of the studio, Ken, suggesting wild west. But we still wanted to have some fantasy element. In the end, it was a mish mash, wild west, fantasy, steampunk.
What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing Dusty Revenge?
I think having the right team was vital in our development. We are very lucky to have gathered a good team of people. Despite it being a new team with zero to little experience, I think we did fairly ok. I think our planning part could have been better. If a better plan had been structured, we could have shaved some time off the development.
In its current form, how close is Dusty Revenge to your initial vision?
I would say about 70 – 80%. Some of the wild ideas we had, we couldn’t implement due to technical limitations. But as we go along, we also implement some new ideas.
Some devs admitted their games were too hard upon release because they became experts as they developed the game. Talk about setting the difficulty levels for Dusty Revenge and if you faced a similar challenge.
I think it’s a really challenging aspect of the development that can only be solved by playtesting. Then again, with a small studio, we have limited resources. The sample size may not be large enough. I think that is the reason many games have difficulty settings for players to select. We have that too! We acknowledge that there’s probably no one difficulty level that can please all gamers, so difficulty settings is a good idea.
Were there any challenges you faced in ensuring Dusty Revenge would run on the various PC system configurations?
It’s a big challenge for us. We used Torque Game Builder. When we started to have more animations for the characters, we noticed significant lagging issues at specific points in the game. In Torque, we had to use sprite sheets. And when we started to design really big enemies, such as the Gorilla or the giant snake, we realized that no way sprite sheets are going to work. On top of that, the playable character has about 2500 frames of animations! imagine the amount of textures we have. We started to work on importing SWFs into the game for the animations. That really helped, but that took us quite some time. We also had to go into the source code and made modifications to suit our needs. It was needed to further optimize what we had.
It helped that we had quite a lot of different PC with different configurations, from the Core2Duo chip to AMD and then Sandy Bridge. But when we managed to get our hands on a Ultrabook with HD4000, it was quite late into the development. We found specific problems which we had to scramble to solve.
Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for Dusty Revenge.
The 2 founders of the studio are art-trained. So we place a lot of emphasis on our art. But the key is to give enough freedom to the artists handling. I think it’s important that artists have creative freedom to work with. The worst thing you can do is to stifle their style.
For level designs, we made a conscious effort to inject new elements and mechanics to each and every levels. Firstly, we decide what are the levels, should it be a cave, jungle, etc? Once we had the flow of the levels, we started to brainstorm about what mechanics are relevant in the respective settings. So in a mining cave, we have cart rides, in industrial complex we have machineries.
Music and sound effects are the only 2 things we outsourced. We have zero expertise in the studio when it comes to that. We listened to different composers and find one whose style of music is the one we envisioned the game to have.
How did you go about funding Dusty Revenge and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?
We were lucky enough to receive support from our local government agency. We submitted our GDD along with a mock up video. There was a panel from the industry who looked through the submissions. We were shortlisted. We went in to pitch and we got it. But that amounted only to a small percentage as the project grew in scope and size. We were lucky enough to have saved up during our days as a design studio. Along the way, we took 1 or 2 small jobs, those helped too.
Tell us about the process of submitting Dusty Revenge to the various digital distribution platforms and if you encountered resistance in doing so.
The most notable being Steam Greenlight. We missed the original submission method to Steam by a week or 2. After which, we had to go the Greenlight route. And to be frank, it’s not going well for us at all. Our game is just lost amongst the sea of games. I think the crowd that votes on Greenlight has certain preferences. And being able to gain popularity outside of Greenlight is very important. Sadly, we aren’t good with this aspect of the business. Being in Singapore doesn’t help too. It’s extremely costly for us to attend events such as PAX, GDC, etc. Desura contacted us shorlty after we showed our trailer online, so that was really good. We’ll be selling through them for sure. Funnily enough, consoles seem easier to get onto. We met up with Sony Asia twice and managed to convince them to give us the go ahead. Same goes for Nintendo, they are very pro indies now. And that is a really good thing.
Did you research similar titles when trying to come up with the launch price?
Of course we did. I think the market is now very different from when we started developing the game. There is an abundance of indie games now and pricing has became a lot more competitive.
Can you tell us why you chose to release a demo for Dusty Revenge?
Getting people to know about us is really difficult! We have no prior releases, much less a success story. The only way to let people know about us is through a demo.
How do you feel about the various indie bundle promotions and the “Pay What You Want” pricing methodology? Would you be interested in contributing to a project like that in the future?
I think they are really great. They helped to bring awareness to many of the smaller games. And that is a really good thing for the indie game community, gamers and developers alike.
What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?
I think piracy will always be there. There will be people who will never pay a single cent for the games they play. But I also believe that if it”s a good product and if it’s priced fairly and made accessible, there will be less people pirating the product.
How do you feel about individuals posting videos of Dusty Revenge?
We have a few people posting playthrough of demos. It’s unnerving to watch at first. But at an early stage, it almost feels like an extended playtest. Of course i hope when the game is released, more people will post videos. That will help get the word out.
How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?
I thiink DLC if done properly, is a great way to extend the lifespan of a game. But the fact that there are day 1 DLC reflects on the current state of worries about used games sales, piracy, etc.
What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?
I am not sure if I am qualified to give advise to them. But if I were to? Make a plan, stick to it, but don’t be afraid to adapt and improvise.
We would like to thank everyone at PD Design Studios. You can vote for Dusty Revenge on Steam Greenlight and read more on the official site. Also buy Dusty Revenge via Desura or Amazon.
-
Steven S
