Have Fun Making Your Game: The Girl and The Robot

Conducted By – Adam Ames

Representing Flying Carpets Games, Salim Larochelle, takes TPG behind the scenes of their upcoming indie game, The Girl and The Robot.

 

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of The Girl and The Robot.

My name is Salim, I’m an independent game designer. I used to work at Gameloft Montreal, for about 4 years as a level designer, and then as a game designer, working mostly on iPhone hits such as Asphalt 7 and Modern Combat 1 and 2. I learned a lot there, but I wanted to make the type of games that are meaningful to me even if they are niche games that don’t always maximize profits.  And so I made the decision to leave Gameloft and start The Girl and The Robot.

 

How did you get started in developing PC games?

I think the first little PC games I made were back in 2004 with the game engine Game Maker. Then in 2008, I made a survival horror game in 3D for the first time with 3D Gamestudio called Sambatra (http://www.salimnoatelier.com/sambatra/). That game actually helped me get a job as a level designer at Gameloft. And today, I love making games with Unity.

 

Where did the idea for The Girl and the Robot come from?

I think the first inspiration (among many) was the old Japanese anime Gigantor.  From there, I thought of a gameplay mechanic where a boy controls a robot remotely and how this could open a lot of possibilities in terms of level design. The theme of friendship was the perfect one to emphasize that mechanic, and so the story had to be based on that as well. I then changed the boy to a girl to create even more contrast between the two heroes.

 

What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing The Girl and the Robot?

It’s hard to say at this point since the game is not complete yet, but so far we didn’t have any big failures and development has been rather pleasant. One of the more memorable experiences was showing our game for the first time at the Mont Royal Game Society (our indie game community here in Montreal) earlier this year.

 

In its current form, how close is The Girl and The Robot to your initial vision?

I would say that it will be pretty close. Of course, since we are working on a budget there are some things that we can’t do, especially in terms of visual art and storytelling. But as far as gameplay and level design, I’m pretty sure that the game will be close to my vision, based on how things are going.

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 The Girl and the Robot and if you faced a similar challenge.

I noticed recently that The Girl and The Robot also appeals to people that are not familiar with playing with a gamepad or mouse and keyboard. So I think the big challenge for us will be to make it easy for those people to transition to those devices by keeping the controls simple and fun. As far as the difficulty in the game, we try to make the levels challenging but not frustrating.  We are also planning to do small playtest sessions to help us get a more objective view of the difficulty.

 

Were there any challenges you faced in ensuring The Girl and The Robot would run on the various PC system configurations?

Not a lot; the Unity engine makes it fairly easy to support various machines. Also, our game uses an art style that doesn’t require a lot of polygons, making it relatively easy to keep a good frame rate on older machines.

 

Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for The Girl and The Robot.

For the art, we choose a hand-painted style since it fits well with the fairy tale setting and it is also a style that doesn’t grow old very fast. For the levels, the geometry is designed to create engaging situations but we also tried to bring in influences from European castle architecture. The music is composed by the talented Eiko Ishiwata Nichols, a master in making orchestral fantasy music.

 

Outside of creating the game itself, what is the toughest aspect of being an indie developer?

I’m convinced that it is the business side. This is very deep field and it is absolutely crucial to the commercial success of your game. Right now, I’m doing most of the business work, but every day I wish I had a good producer by my side.

 

How did you go about funding The Girl and The Robot and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?

The initial funding for The Girl and The Robot came mostly from my personal saving and also two Canadian government programs aimed to help young entrepreneurs. Right now, I’m looking for a second stage of funding with our Kickstarter campaign. As for the emotional support, I simply could not have come this far without the support of friends and family. At the start, the only thing you have is a vision of the game and absolutely nothing to show; so when those people decide to just trust you and support you, it’s a wonderful feeling.

 

Tell us about the process of submitting The Girl and The Robot to the various digital distribution platforms and if you encountered resistance in doing so.

So far, we have only submitted our game to the Humble Store and Desura and they showed little to no resistance. People from both platforms were extremely friendly with us. So if you are an indie, I strongly recommend doing business with them first. Aside from them, we are planning to be on Steam Greenlight soon and maybe open a dialogue with Sony. We’ll see how that goes.

Did you research similar titles when trying to come up with the launch price?

Yes, I mostly looked at games with a similar scope, like Fez and Antichamber. Games like that usually range from $10 to $15. Expect the same with our game.

 

Can you tell us why you chose to release a demo for The Girl and The Robot?

You must mean the alpha version. To be honest, alpha funding was originally part of the condition imposed on us to get some funding from a particular government program. While it’s true that the alpha version may spoil the final experience for some players (we do warn them), having an alpha also helped us get very valuable feedback about our game.

 

How important is it to get instant feedback about The Girl and The Robot from users through online message boards and other social networking sites?

Very important; when you’re so close to the game, you can often overlook obvious design flaws. Having a forum and being on social media helps us gather extremely valuable information. We then can decide to act upon that information if we think it will improve the game.

 

How much value do you place on the opinions of those who review The Girl and The Robot professionally?

A lot of value; it remains valuable data for me to examine and reflect upon even if I can disagree with the review. I think any feedback, good or bad, can help us make better games in the future.

 

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 like the idea of indie bundles very much. This is a great way to get your game noticed even if it means getting less money per unit sold. I would also like to think that it can discourage piracy.

What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole is dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?

I think we can live in a world where games have no DRM, we just have to implement methods that discourage piracy. Indie bundles are one solution; making the player contribute in some way to the development process (forums, Kickstarter, etc.) might be another. It’s hard to pirate a game that you helped create.

 

How do you feel about individuals posting videos and receiving monetization off of The Girl and The Robot?

That’s cool; hey thanks for showing our game!

 

How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?

DLC is something that is hard to be totally against since it always adds value to a game. That being said, I usually prefer for the developers of my favorite games to start working on their next game instead of DLCs.

 

How do you feel about the online modding community in general and specifically if mods were created for The Girl and The Robot?

I would totally embrace it, as long as the content is in good taste, of course.

 

What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?

I would say to never underestimate the business side, to embrace feedback, and most importantly to have fun making your game.

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