Interview with Hombre de Mundo of Digital Ballista

Yeah for sure. So it’s an arena blaster, similar to Bomberman, kind of in a way that Cities: Skylines is similar to SimCity. You have the same fundamentals, just with a lot of deeper gameplay differences. Mayhem Masters is made for Steam. Hopefully we can get it on consoles later, but we’re just going to have to see.

You can play up to eight players, and it really shines as a couch multiplayer game where you can play free-for-all, or in teams; you can run around the arena, gather power-ups, blow your friends up to smithereens and you have a good time! That’s the short of it.

In a bit more detail, I would say what really stands out and makes it fun to play is… I would say it’s a competitive party game. It sounds kind of contradictory but basically what it means is: You have these games like Smash Bros., for instance, where it’s really easy to get into and learn the basics but you need a bit more time and experience to really master it.

So the whole game has been designed to make it viable for more competitive play: it’s pretty fast-paced, most of the things in the game are designed to have both pros and cons. So, you have power-ups that are secondary abilities in addition to your bombs, for instance, that are good in some ways but not as good in others, and you kind of have to switch between those to adapt to other players. These abilities can be things like pushing blocks, you can construct your own blocks, you can place fake power-ups to lure enemies in—these sorts of things. They all have their own different pros and cons and you have to switch between these abilities to adapt to the arena as you empty it of bricks; and adapt to your opponent and what kind of powers they have.

We had a lot of beta testing, which was earlier this year. So we could regularly, like once a week, throw together four to six players and just kind of play through the game. Not just finding bugs, but for balancing and testing different abilities. Perhaps saying “hey, these power-ups are really good” and “these are not so good”.

I mean, we don’t want every single powerup to be equal in value, obviously, but at the same time you kind of have to make sure that everything in the game has some sort of value. Be it for balancing purposes or just because something is fun.

Yeah exactly. You have some items in Smash Bros: for instance, I’m not a fan of the beetle because you just throw it on someone, and unless they mash like crazy, they’re just dead. That’s just one example where it’s like “oh, you have THAT thing. Well that’s not really fun”.

Things like hammers in Smash Bros. can be fun because they’re very powerful, however you aren’t very mobile with the hammer and so there are ways of overcoming a very powerful opponent. We try to take a similar approach to items, especially the powerful ones.

Well, it was sort of a mix between the two. We wanted our characters to be a mix between, sort of stereotypical and archetypal characters. So you have the astronaut who’s kind of the adventurous explorer; he goes out and faces all kinds of danger and does it for the thrill of the adventure. There are people who can see themselves in that and kind of take on that persona. Likewise, we have the Ninja who’s very firm, a bit mysterious, skilful; and then we have some characters that are just silly, goofy fun.

Yeah, we have Sticky! Who’s just a crudely drawn stick figure. We also have Sharkman, who’s a guy in a shark suit. They’re all individually voice-acted, and that adds another layer of character to them, without them being ‘characters’ in their own right. So they’re a bit of an empty slate, but not too much.

I think we’ve hit a good balance because whenever we’ve beta tested and played, we found that there are many people who fairly quickly find a character they like the most; they find a favourite among the cast.

So, one of the guys who helped us out with the game. We worked together on Zelda Universe, one of the big Zelda sites out there. This guy, Alex Travino, he has done a lot of voice work and knows a lot of voice actors: he’s done casting projects for a Zelda fan project. So he basically put out a casting call; he got like over 60 applicants. I don’t know HOW he did it, but he did it and we’ve got a lot of people who wanted to cast these characters and they did a fantastic job of it.

I don’t know exactly what site he used but there are these sites where you can put on casting calls for voice actors. And these are mainly voice actors who do it as a fun side-hobby or something like that.

I had some loose thoughts to it, but nothing really; there’s no official head-canon. One idea was—and I soon decided “no, no that’s lame”—a bunch of aliens are throwing together a tournament and they just kidnap people from all across space and time. But I thought “nah, that’s been done. That’s not particularly fun”. So I’m more just taking a ‘Smash Bros.’ approach to it. I did actually interview Eji Aonuma once, the director of the Zelda franchise. And he described Smash Bros. as “a black hole that just spans space and time, and just sucks characters in to where this whole thing’s going on”. So it’s something similar here: people from different times just come together and drop bombs on each other for no real reason other than “let’s create a bunch of chaos”.

Yeah. We had, for instance, little character cards that we posted on Twitter that give just a TINY bit of detail and background into some of the characters. We had for ‘Kawaii’, the anime character: “She’s only 14, what is she doing blowing people up with bombs? Why is she handling explosives?” Obviously our game is not meant to be taken very seriously; it’s just a fun game and it’s self-aware in that respect. We’re not taking ourselves seriously at all.

I would say that we weren’t very much inspired by Bomberman other than just the ‘play’ of it. We’ve never been big into Bomberman. It was mainly me and my brothers who played games growing up together. We liked the mechanics but not so much many of the games. You mentioned Smash Bros. and (with that game) it’s mainly for how they deal with characters; how they deal with gameplay and all that.

As for other games? You have things like Ultimate Chicken Horse and Gang Beasts on Steam. Not so much for any particular mechanic or anything else, but these are games that we looked at and thought “these are local multiplayer games that are great fun to play on the couch with other people”. They’re really enjoyable, and that’s a feeling that we aim to capture in our game also. We did look at a fair variety and amount of games to see what they’re doing right.

Yeah. There’s actually one more game that I should mention, in terms of the characters, and that’s Punch-Out!!. I would say that our characters are similar to the characters in Punch-Out!! because—you know—you have the ‘cowardly Frenchman’ that’s a little bit stereotypical but it’s also a case of “here’s the coward, he’s not very talented” and everything. He’s kind of sympathetic in some sense though and i think I definitely had Punch-Out!! in mind when making our ensemble of characters.

So, me and my wife, we came up with the concept almost three years ago, but we were each working our individual jobs and things like that. Roughly a year and a half ago, we both got laid off—around the same time—due to company downsizing; this was different companies by the way.

Well, it was all good because it gave us the ‘push out the door’. We thought “okay, well, we have this game idea that we were gonna do anyway. So do you just want to go for it?” and we said “yeah, let’s just go for it!”. And roughly one year ago we had a working prototype. My wife, who’s the programmer, decided that: “you know what? This isn’t good enough. I’m gonna scrap it all and start from scratch”. We’d been in development since May, so that was roughly nine months of like ‘full-time’ development. The designs and stuff we worked up before that, but making sprites and stuff like that was all within those nine months.

As to hurdles and unexpected difficulties. Man… getting controllers to work the way they’re expected to work requires a lot more than we thought. I would say we probably spent around a month, like full-time, every day for a month in total just to get all the controllers to do the things they’re supposed to do.

Yep, yeah, you’d think right? But no. One of the messed-up things is different controller modes. So you have XInput which is the default thing that Windows uses. XInput is great: it’s compatible with a lot of controllers, but it’s hard-capped—on a Windows level—to like four players only. So if you want to have more than four players, you can’t use XInput.

Okay, so you can use DirectInput. That’s great, except DirectInput doesn’t really recognise individual controllers, it’s kind of weird. You don’t have “controller 1, 2, 3, 4” you just have generic “controller” four times—and that messes a couple things up too. Then you have Raw Input, which is great in every way except Steam Remote Play doesn’t support it.

Steam Remote Play is a big part of our game; it’s a big deal for us; it’s why we decided to launch on Steam. With Steam Remote Play, I can own the game and stream it to my friends, they don’t have to own it. It’s as if we were playing on my computer and you were all on my couch, but now you’re on your computers. So it’s not really online: it’s kind of ‘fake’ online. Which I think is very appreciated, especially in these times.

But, yeah, that doesn’t support Raw Input. So whichever input mode we choose, it’s not good. You’d think in the year 2020, we’d have just one great input where you can just hook up your game—eight controllers—and just plug ‘n’ play, but that’s not the case.

It’s really just coming from a consumer perspective because, really, we’ve been full-time developers for over a year now but we’re both gamers at our hearts. On a principle level you really want as little as possible to come between you and your game.

When it comes to things like DRMs, there’s some of them that are kind of harmless: they don’t do that much. Just make sure you have a real copy, not a pirated copy of the game, stuff like that. Okay, that’s not a big deal but there’s some of them that can track your data and treat you in a shitty way, let’s say. We don’t want to be part of that. From a financial standpoint, it would make a lot of sense for us to have DLC in our game. We could release different skins for our characters as DLC; we could do a lot of things and it would probably be financially beneficial to us. You can’t, especially as a small studio, just take that blatantly—right away—off the table and say “we’re never gonna do this”. It’s possible that we may not survive another year: we haven’t released our first game yet, we don’t know how it’s going to perform, we don’t know how well it’s going to sell. If we just take DLC off the table right away, that’s a lot of money that we might not get. But for us, we made a decision that that’s not how we want to make our money. We want consumers to come and say “hey, this is a good game and that’s why you should buy it”.

Oh for sure, and like you said: because there are people that appreciate that, a quality game is going to do well. That’s not to say I’m against DLC of any kind. Back in the day you had expansions like Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne for instance—one of the greatest expansions of all time. It’s perfectly acceptable, I think, to make additional content for a game and sell it either in big packages or piece-by-piece, but it’s when you’re doing the “hey, buy this skin for $2” thing that it just doesn’t feel right and it feels cheap. We don’t want to be cheap. If we make DLC at some point in the future, we want to make sure that it’s content that’s warranted.

Yeah, it’s releasing on Friday the 27th, so it’s very soon. At this point in development, it’s ready to go. We are still working on optional builds because we can’t update the build that’s on Steam, pretty much until the point of release. So we’re still working on just a few more pieces of polish: getting some of the animations to look just a little bit better, maybe just a bit of the text. A tiny bit of polish. That’s one thing that’s going on.

Second thing is marketing. You know, we’re posting on social media, two days ago we were on a YouTube stream and today I’m doing this interview with you. We’re sending out codes to different publications, YouTube channels, Steam curators. Posting about it on social media, and if we’re not posting, we’re coordinating posting with people like our voice actors, for instance. Trying to say: “hey, come Friday we’re gonna push the game out and we need you guys to be engaged, be proud of the work you’ve done, post about it on your Facebook and let people know”.

Yeah, with marketing definitely. When we launch—great—it’s out, but we still have to look for people to play the game; we still have to look for more exposure. We try to stay active on social media, as much as is possible—and tolerable. After Friday, programming-wise, unless there are any big bugs or glitches, there shouldn’t be, but you never know. Unless that happens, my wife, who’s programming, is going to take a well-deserved break for a week or two before we start thinking about what our next moves are. Because what our next move is, is going to be very much dependent on how well the launch goes from a financial point of view.

We’ve started talking to Nintendo about bringing the game onto Switch. We haven’t officially applied for it yet but at some point we’re gonna do that. And you know: how soon can we do it, when do we need to do it, how long would it take us? This is an evaluation that we’re going to have to do a week or so after launch when we have a rough idea of the financial outlook of the remainder of the year.