Honeyslug Interview

Earlier this week, TGH reviewed Kahoots, part of the PS minis series that is available on the PlayStation store at a great price. In brief, it’s quirky, fun and easy to play, hence the brilliant four star rating it achieved on the site. We had a few questions we wished to asked Honeyslug, and here is what they had to say:

• Please tell us your names, and what is it you do at Honeyslug?

Ricky Haggett: I write all the code and tools. And sometimes come up with ideas for games and/or mechanics – though we operate a design meritocracy at Honeyslug..   and although we normally work with a freelance artists, for Kahoots I made all the ‘final’ graphics in Photoshop, once Nat had scanned or photographed the source images.

Nat Marco: I focus on ideas and design, including concepts/mechanics, level design, script writing and lua scripting. As we’re a small team our roles often merge so I can find myself doing anything from recording silly sound effects (like the Kahoots voices!) to plasticine modeling and animation!

Mark Inman: I focus more on the behind the scenes stuff making such as project management, website, finances, and general business affairs side of things. On top of that I occasionally dip my toe in the design side of things and handle a chunk of the internal testing.

Rob Haggett: Hello, I’m Rob and I make the music, SFX and all things noise based for Honeyslug. It’s a weird and wonderful world; it not often I get to make songs about Cardborgs, cannons and Pegbeasts! We laugh a lot!

• We loved Kahoots, it being one of the most popular PSP minis to date. Were you surprised at all by the reception from critics and gamers?

Ricky: Absolutely. We figured there’d be some degree of interest, given that Kahoots Minis was one of the launch titles for what is effectively a new ‘platform’, but yeah, we’ve been blown away by the critical reception, both to the game itself, and its personality – which is very much that of its creators. In particular, Pegbeast is becoming almost unbearably smug at all the love directed at him – we’ve had to threaten him with being sidelined in the next game..

Mark: It’s particularly warming when the feedback is from gamers. Obviously it’s great to have a critical hit on our hands, an 81 average on Metacritic has made it one of the 10 highest scoring PSP titles of 2009, but when I go on one of my vanity sorties around the forums, it’s brilliant to have the same praise thrust upon you by the punters.

• What was the inspiration behind Kahoots? Were there any titles that influenced the gameplay and aesthetic of the game?

Ricky: Actually, the initial inspiration was the game Braid. Without giving too much away, there’s one puzzle in that game where you have to do something vaguely similar to the gameplay in Kahoots and I was so taken by the solution that it set me off thinking ‘what about a whole game where you do this kind of stuff?’. So I spent a weekend making a little prototype in flash (you can see my original pixelart here: http://www.honeyslug.com/what-might-have-been) and showed to the others – in the prototype there were only Kahoots, Cardborgs, Spikes and Bounce Blocks.  We figured it was fun enough to take further, so Nat started thinking about new features..

Aesthetically, it was inspired by a number of things. The game is dedicated to Oliver Postgate and Tony Hart – two massive childhood heroes of mine (both of whom sadly died in the year or leading up to us starting Honeyslug and creating Kahoots). Then there was Nat’s background in plasticine animation, and if I’m honest, seeing the wonderfully homespun look of Little Big Planet and thinking ‘we can do that just with a digital camera!’. Once we set down ‘the rule’ that everything in the game had to be handmade, it became really fun scanning loads of stuff in and just seeing what you could make with it. Pegbeast was born this way – we’d made a trip down to the shops of Kentish Town High Stree – charity, poundstores and our amazingly well stocked haberdashery, and returned with bags of stuff, including a knitted ball I found in Oxfam and a pack of jumbo pegs from Poundland. Nat happened to put these two objects in the scanner together, and when I opened up the bitmap in Photoshop to start cutting them out, lo! The Pegbeast was born!

Nat: Ricky came in one morning with a new game prototype (as he often does!) and after playing it for a while I went away with a pad and pen (I’m old school like that) to design some levels.  This process allows us to determine what features would be cool to include without spending any time coding them.  Once I had a good idea of what would work, I gave Ricky my features wish list, and he added things like reverse blocks and cannons to the core block set.

In terms of aesthetics, Ricky’s already mentioned Postgate and Hart, but I was also very much inspired by the old Dreamworks game The Neverhood.  That game, along with 80s cartoon The Trap Door, were the reason I majored in stop-frame animation at university and have no doubt, influenced Kahoots.  The final characters were derived from Ricky’s original pixel art, but the Cardborg also took some inspiration from cardboard robot costumes.  In retrospect, this was possibly a silly move as, being covered in tinfoil, he wasn’t the easiest of models to animate!  We kept the animation very lo-fi, I did everything from my desk using a digital camera, desk lamp and make shift green screen.  The homespun nature of the game meant our art process was very quick.  If we thought something would look cool in the game, we scanned/shot it and 10 minutes later we could test it out!  That’s actually how the collectable cupcakes ended up in the game!  So far, Kahoots is the only game I’ve worked on where I could eat the art assets – definitely a bonus!

Mark: One of the comparisons a lot of people draw in terms of gameplay is with Lemmings, mainly because you’re dealing with a character in perpetual motion and it’s the environment rather than the protagonist that you have direct control over. It wasn’t something we consciously drew heavily from when creating the game, but it’s certainly a good comparison to have people make given it’s one of the iconic puzzle games of the early 90s. The level design was really dictated more by the game elements at our disposal rather than any external influence (apart from one level I made which tried really hard to look like Donkey Kong – it doesn’t look anything like it, but as a level it works), once Nat and I had come up with somewhere in the region of 70 levels, we did a cull and then ordered the remaining 50 into something approaching a decent difficulty curve. We tried hard to ensure that all gameplay elements had an even footing in terms of player exposure so that there was never a situation where something appeared in early levels and then 30-odd levels later reappeared and the player had to recall how to make that feature work for them.

Rob: A lot of the concept behind the music was to create a series of ‘skits’ which would help guide the player through the game. The guys created Pegbeast for this purpose, so we had a single “rasta-peg” focal point to start creating the songs from! It was pretty much an ‘anything goes’ approach, as long as the skits were short, explanative and fun. Ricky and I spent a while playing around with how Pegbeast would sound and I think we hit the nail on the head – he seems to be more popular than the Kahootz! For the in game music, I tried to create something that was very much fitting to the homegrown feel of Kahoots. I would record lots of noises (bottle hits, tearing up paper, pulling masking tape etc.) to create a soundscape from which I could then compose the theme. I guess my end aim was to create a lo-fi, homely feel musically for the game which hopefully I’ve achieved.

• Roughly, how long did it take to develop Kahoots?

Ricky: we made the initial Flash version for our pals at www.gimme5games.com, which took about a month, and we were just coming to the end of this period when Sony came to see us. The process of porting it to a Minis title took about six weeks – which was expedited considerably by the kind and patient guys at Sony Dev Support, who helped us enormously to get to grips with the PSP so quickly.

• As mentioned before, Kahoots was an obvious success, but does this mean we can expect any future PSP minis from Honeyslug, or more specifically, any more Kahoots?

Ricky: The answer to both questions is the same – we’d love to both release other Minis titles, and work on a new Kahoots game – we have loads of ideas for the sequel! Right now, we’re at that tipping point of deciding how and when to expand our team so we can build on our current success – but we’re a small team, and currently all mad busy working on a DS/PC title, which we hope to announce soon..  I suspect that sometime in late summer, we’ll start formalising our plans for ‘next things’.

Mark: We also realize there are a lot of people missing out on Pegbeast love, so we’re keen to make it available on more platforms. Given the mechanic of the game it seemed an ideal candidate to migrate over to the iPhone and we’re currently in the later stages of development with that version. We’re always looking at as many viable platforms for all our titles, as long as it they are a good fit and not just pumped out onto another platform to the detriment of the game brand.

• One last question, was it your intention to create a title so affordable, and would you advise other minis developers to follow suit?

Ricky: With regard to pricing, my personal marker flags are pub-related: I don’t want our games to be cheaper than a bag of crisps at launch – in particular I think this de facto 59p price point on the Appstore is really damaging to small developers trying to make something non-trivial (like Kahoots), as has been well documented elsewhere. We’ve poured a huge amount of time and love into making Kahoots – so I feel like, if someone doesn’t think it’s worth more than a bag of crisps, they probably aren’t the right kind of customer for us, at least not at launch (I have no problem with games dropping in price naturally over time until they eventually become very cheap / free).

At the other end of the scale, it felt like Kahoots should cost less than a pint of beer. Regardless of having a decent number of hours of gameplay in there, if you’re releasing a new IP – which also happens to have an idiosyncratic style and original gameplay, you definitely need to be hitting that impulse purchase pricepoint – which for me is always ‘ahh.. it’s less than a pint. Why not?’

I guess a big disclaimer here is that we all come from a development background, so we’re no particular experts in marketing – I’m not sure anyone is in this brave new world of of digital media snacking! We’re just trying to find our feet, test out different theories and see what works – so I dunno if I’d give other developers any particularly advice, other than to follow their instincts..

We would like to thank the team at Honeyslug for their time, and hear nothing but good things about their future projects.

Short URL: http://thegamershub.net/?p=4391

Posted by Teabags on Feb 25 2010. Filed under Other, Playstation 3, VITA/PSP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry