This week in Indie-Ana Co-Op we speak with Terry Welsh, the one man development team at Really Slick. His first game release, Retrobooster, is set to launch next year and is reminiscent of Asteroids and the classic cave shooters of old. We spoke with Terry about his upcoming game and his journey from NASA employee to indie game dev.
Co-Optimus: Tell us a little about yourself and your background. How did you end up going from a job working out space shuttle launches and rover landings to independent games developer?
Terry Welsh: My family had an Atari 800 and an Atari ST when I was a kid, so I played plenty of classic games. I also made lots of ultra-violent claymation movies, gaining a life-long love of anything animated. My professional background is in visual simulation and virtual reality (think flight simulators, head trackers, and giant terrain databases), which require programming skills almost identical to those of game development.
Retrobooster was a hobby project for years, and it was torturous working on it so slowly. Fed up with spinning my wheels and emboldened by enough positive feedback from testers, I did the only sane thing and made Retrobooster my full-time job. Making a successful indie game is a long shot, so I'm gambling that I'll still be employable in some high tech corporate job if things don't work out.
Co-Optimus: So then what inspired you to become a games developer and embark on this path?
Terry: There isn't just one thing. Games and computer animation have excited me my whole life. The main thing usually missing from the vis-sim world is creativity, so I have always found artistic outlets outside of work, such as painting or making screensavers. Computer games are just a natural fit for my computer skills and artistic nature.
I looked into jobs at game studios a couple times over the years, but the work situation usually looked bleak for various reasons (pigeonholing, insane crunch time, etc.), and other graphics programming jobs paid more. Being an indie developer just suits me better. I can set my own schedule and I get to work on every little detail of the game from designing levels to optimizing the physics. The risk, of course, is that there is much less chance of success making Retrobooster than working at an established studio.
Co-Optimus: Did you have any previous experience with games development? Any little demos or mods you worked on/created?
Terry: Almost none. However, all the graphics and vis-sim programming I have done require many of the same skills needed for making games. Game design is very new to me.
This is a mod I made for Doom II in 1995. Wow, I didn't think I could actually find that WAD file. The Internet remembers everything.
Co-Optimus: It's too bad those mods can't get ported to the Xbox! Tell us about your upcoming game, Retrobooster. What’s it about? What are some of its features?
Terry: Retrobooster is an old school survival shooter and cave-flyer. The idea was to build a game with classic thrust ship controls, realistic physics, obstacle navigation, and levels with lots of deadly, creepy, and disgusting enemies. I also wanted to make the game like a toy you can pick up and play with. To that end, once a level is unlocked you can go back and play it anytime you want, possibly to work on a new high score.
Most cave-flyers focus mainly on the shooting. I always thought really good thrust ship controls had a bit of poetry to them. I wanted a thrust ship so nimble that it could dance through crushing machinery and bullet hell scenarios and power slide through high-speed time challenges. This focus on ship controls solidifies it as a skill-based game, and I try to pace the levels so that players can keep improving at flying the ship while encountering these different types of challenges.
Some games in this genre try to neuter the physics to make their controls easier. They use a lot of drag or make it so thrusting forward reduces your sideways velocity. This is fine if you want to remove the skill component. Retrobooster, on the other hand, tries to be old school and skill-based. Inertia is always a factor and your ship will do exactly what you command it to do because it obeys realistic physics. A lot of testers have found this very refreshing.
Co-Optimus: Anything else that's different with your game from other shooters of this type?
Terry: To keep things interesting, I try to introduce something new on each level. It could be an enemy, a weapon, a type of force field that you interact with, etc. Or it might be a level design concept that combines multiple objects that you already discovered. The majority of cave-flyers are still built with 2D graphics. Retrobooster uses 3D graphics. It takes more effort, but it is a good complement to the 2D gameplay. It also allows for more voluminous explosions and other effects.
Co-Optimus: Is this a game you’ve been wanting to make for some time, or something that’s a starting point to another game you really want to make?
Terry: This is the game I always wanted to play. I had little ideas for it years before I started programming it and just got tired of waiting for someone else to make it. A few times I had a dream about this one level with creepy monsters, which you will encounter about halfway through the full game. I would say more about it, but I want to keep some surprises. It's now my favorite level.
Co-Optimus: What are some of the influences on the game’s overall design and story?
Terry: Plenty of classic thrust ship games. Asteroids and Oids were big favorites of mine. There is also influence from Protector, Protector 2, Choplifter, and even Doom. These games mainly influenced the mood and controls, but I am trying to come up with level designs and challenges people have not seen in a cave-flyer before.
The story is far from profound. It is the quintessential underdog story and mainly serves as an excuse to change the appearance of the levels and nature of the threats as you progress. I want to tell some of the story visually, to imply much of it with the settings and backgrounds. This should add atmosphere and leave room to expand on the story later if I want.
Co-Optimus: Is the game on course with what you had planned when you initially began its development, or have there been changes to some things or features you’ve had to put aside for another time?
Terry: It is mostly on course. The biggest addition to my original vision is the survival theme, which naturally fell out of the strong emphasis on skill-based flying. I should have seen that coming.
Plenty of other details have changed, but nothing that distorts the original vision. There are ten weapons instead of the original four, a handy laser pointer coming out of your ship, and I have had to generalize the physics more than expected to get some enemies to walk proficiently on other moving game entities.
Co-Optimus: From a co-op perspective, what all does the game have to offer? Will it be restricted to local co-op? Are other co-op modes, e.g., a “survival” mode, planned for the future? Can players help each other out in some way while playing?
Terry: Local co-op only. Networked multiplayer could be fun, but it would take much longer and be extremely difficult without another developer on the project. I decided to leave it out mainly to keep the scope of the project at a reasonable size.
Players in a co-op game of Retrobooster can be at very different levels of mastery of the controls. This makes much of the co-op fun come from one player nurturing another. There is also plenty of opportunity for players to gang up on swarms of enemies and defend one another from them. One time an enemy crawled onto my ship, and my pal shot it off.
The biggest problem with co-op right now is that it works best in games where you can't die, where there is always a partner around to help you out. If I am to remain true to the survival theme of Retrobooster, then your co-op partners die. A lot! There is a way to resurrect other players by giving a ship if you have an extra, but the levels must remain beatable by a single player. I'm still thinking of adding bonuses or extra sections to levels that can only be accessed during multiplayer games.
It would be good to design a separate co-op mode without death and levels that require at least two players to beat. That's a huge task and probably will not make it into the first release. If the game sells well enough it is definitely a future possibility.
Co-Optimus: What’s the one, or two, feature(s) of Retrobooster that you felt like you really had to get down? Like, “without ____” you knew you just would not be able to make the game the way you wanted.
Terry: You do two things constantly in Retrobooster: fly and shoot. The controls had to feel like butter and every explosion had to be a treat for the eyes and ears.
The controls turned out better than I hoped for, but they get mixed reactions. It seems like people who have played thrust ship games understand them immediately and can become competent quickly, while people who have missed out on thrust ship games are often daunted by the difficulty level. Some of the latter are patient enough to get the hang of it, but not all of them. I am still searching for ways to make the controls more approachable for everyone, such as more refined flight training tasks in the tutorial.
Retrobooster can be controlled with keyboard alone, mouse and keyboard, or any USB game controller. It was a wonderful to find that all these control methods are viable, so a player who doesn't like one method might like another. This, probably more than anything else, opens up the game to a wider audience.
The particle engine and lighting system are working out well, so everyone who sees the game seems to be pleased by the shooting, explosions, and other eye candy. Some decent sound effects help out too. I have had a great time learning to mix several sounds together to get just the right final effect.
Co-Optimus: What’s been the greatest success you have experienced thus far? How about the greatest disappointment?
Terry: The biggest success has been the marketing push that I did with my recent demo release. I tried to follow all the suggestions from the press about how to talk to [you guys]. As a result, I have met a lot of very welcoming members of the press who have helped me immeasurably in getting the word out about Retrobooster. This interview is a perfect example. There are a great many more eyeballs on my game now.
The biggest disappointment was seeing my Steam Greenlight rating remain the same, even after doing this marketing push. I guess very few indie games become popular overnight. If mine is to find its audience, it will probably require a long, slow-burn marketing effort.
Co-Optimus: Why make a cooperative game? What drew you to include that?
Terry: Honestly, my game was originally imagined as a single player experience. But this game is so much about how you move through the environments, it felt wrong to always do that alone. Split-screen multiplayer, both co-op and deathmatch, sounded like too much fun to pass up.
Co-Optimus: What are some of your favorite cooperative games to play?
Terry: Sadly, I do not find anywhere near enough time to play games... I'm sure other indie developers are as busy and know how this feels. The best co-op game I think I have ever seen is Portal 2. The level design simply oozes cooperation.
Co-Optimus: So once the game is released, what’s next? Where do you hope to go from here?
Terry: Business experts always say you need to know your next steps, but I have been mostly evading that responsibility. Right now I'm focused on finishing Retrobooster and learning a lot about the indie game scene and marketing along the way.
If Retrobooster is successful, the obvious next steps are to port it to OS X and maybe add some big new features, such as a co-op level pack or even a level editor. Features like that are hard to predict as they would be shaped by audience feedback.
We'd like to thank Terry for taking the time to talk with us and tell us about Retrobooster. If you're interested in checking the game out, a demo for it can be found here on the game's website. If you want to support the Steam Greenlight for Retrobooster, you can check out its page here.