Interview with Cas from Puppy Games

Puppy Games

This is the blog’s first post in English. I recently emailed some questions to Cas from Puppy Games, creators of Revenge of the Titans, Titan Attacks, among other awesome retro-classics. Check their website for free demos of their games and the Ultrabundle: 3 awesome games for just U$S 9.97.

Here’s the interview (Spanish readers, I’ll have it translated into Spanish ASAP):

• How did you start with Puppy Games?

10 years ago I had this idea for a multiplayer RTS game, so I got in contact with Chaz (whom I knew from school) and we had a go at developing it. It turned out to be incredibly naive of us to attempt something quite so ambitious, so after burning a ton of money, we gave up, and then decided to have a go at making something rather more modest. This turned out to be Alien Flux in 2003, which was a colossal failure.

• When did you decide to leave your daily jobs and go full-time on Puppy Games? What advise can you give to other indie game developers regarding this important step on their careers?

When we had enough money to do so! Which was right after the Humble Indie Bundle #2, which set us up with enough money to last for a year or so. My advice to other indie game developers is not to go full time unless you are massively brilliant and talented (unlike us), or have a huge pile of cash you don’t mind simply throwing away.

• What development environment do you use for your games?

Both of us are on Windows (Vista64 for me, 7 for Chaz). Our machines are pretty hardcore. I develop in Java using Eclipse.

Droid Assault by Puppy Games

• What’s the development process like? How does an idea become a videogame at Puppy Games?

Very messily. Typically I copy an existing project, delete most of it, and there’s a basic skeleton. Chaz will be doing mockups of screenshots all the while, and animation movies sometimes. We talk a lot on Skype about the game and what might make it fun. Then we just sort of… start. The game is usually radically different by the end of the process than the one we originally set out to write. Revenge of the Titans started out based on a Flash game called Storm the House. Could you believe that?

• You say you’ve invented the coolest DRM (also known as Digital Restrictions Management) ever. What’s your stance on this issue?

Our DRM is all about just making it easy for customers to get what’s they’ve paid for and make it easy for us to administer and deploy our games as demos. As a side effect we realistically believe in treating people as we wish to be treated ourselves – so we encourage people to share their games with friends and family, because that’s what we’d want to do ourselves. So though we wholeheartedly condemn piracy, we’re all for proper fairness of use.

It is cool that if you Google for “the coolest DRM ever” we’re the top link 🙂

Alien Flux by Puppy Games

• Revenge of the Titans seems to be designed with a lot of balance and levels geometry in mind, making every scenario quite different according to the landscape and the Titan species attacking your base. This also gives way to many different strategies, which is awesome and fun to experiment with. Was this accomplished following any model, trial and error, or are you just geniuses?

We are so totally far from genius it’s not even funny. If I was properly talented in game design we’d have worked out the current design of the game a year ago! As it is it took 3 years just to get it to where it is now, with several total rewrites along the way, and a couple of major gameplay changes even after release. We do a lot of trial and error testing – I spend maybe half of my development time playtesting. And we get a lot of feedback on forums, via email, and through the Puppyblog. Believe it or not we read and listen to everything people say about the game. Obviously there are some limits to what we’re willing to do with it, but by and large, the game is as much a product of the feedback of our huge army of beta testers and demo players as our own design.

• Revenge Of Titans is releasing its code soon. What do you think of the free software development model? Do you think there’s a way it can be profitable to develop free software games? What would be an appropiate business model for videogames being free software?

LWJGL

Funny you should ask this, as I was just labouriously copying and pasting a BSD-style license into all 600-odd source code files for the game. I really haven’t got much of a clue about making money from open sourced games, but at one time or another, I’ve given away all the source code to all of our games (well, made it available to download at any rate) and 50% of any one of our games is already open source software anyway.

I started the LWJGL (http://lwjgl.org) project a long time ago with some Danes and that’s all open source, and it’s produced some proper gems of gaming – Minecraft being the latest and most well-known example. All our games are LWJGL-based (obviously, because that’s why we made LWJGL in the first place!)

• Revenge of Titans seems to be getting lots of popularity recently. With the Humble Indie Bundle and Steam, there’s been a big growth in it’s user base. There’s even an unofficial wiki around for TRoT. On January 2010 you wrote: “One of these days we’re going to have a game that sells enough that I don’t have to do contract work, but that day hasn’t happened yet. We have high hopes for Revenge of the Titans, though! Who knows, maybe we’ll even manage a retail deal, or Steam?” What can you say about a year and months later?

I can say that the stars were right, the tripes were heavy, and the riddle of the bones reads that Puppygames are now awesomely successful. Steam’s done really well for us and we have various other deals working out. We’re full time now and will be for a couple of years, hopefully enough time to get another really good game released, at least in alpha form.

• You make your games multiplatform. This is very welcome for GNU/Linux users like me, do you have an important GNU/Linux user base? How are the OS percentages divided?

I don’t really know – the vast majority of Linux customers arrived from the Humble Indie Bundle #2 which as I recall was something like about 25% or so of the total. So it turns out that Linux is actually a fairly significant and financially viable market – but extraordinarily difficult to reach. Before the Bundle, we made a slow trickle of Linux sales (maybe 5-10% of our total sales), and it wasn’t at all financially viable, but we did it anyway as it didn’t cost us much to do.

• How many Ultrabundles did you get to sell?

About 2,500 or so.

• Is there anything you can tell us about the upcoming new game? Are the Titans going to be back?

The Titans will most definitely want to get their own back! But the next game will be entirely unrelated to the Titans.

So there you go, the Titans will be back eventually. I want to thank Cas for his time in answering all these questions, and both Cas and Chaz for their excellent work at Puppy Games. Be sure to check out their website and don’t miss Revenge of The Titans and the Ultra Bundle with 3 awesome retro games for under ten bucks!