Seraph Interview

Well, simply put, it’s the easiest game in the world. If you play it for one minute, you’ll play it for twenty.

Well it came from watching awesome films, I was itching to replicate the awesome choreography of films like The Matrix, Equilibrium, and Underworld. So it was about replicating those films in a playable form, that was by far the main driver.

Well there’s a lot of heaven and hell inspiration, alongside very angelic and demonic themes in the narrative of Seraph. I took a lot of inspiration from Constantine and also Supernatural. During Season 3 of Supernatural they introduced Angels and Demons, it was really impressive and honestly quite refreshing - which really resonated with me.

Whenever I watch one of those films that inspired Seraph, the characters usually aiming two guns at once and doing what they call gun-fu. When other games replicate that kind of cool combat, they usually slow everything down quite a lot and it ends up not feeling as fast and natural.

It came down to two things. Sony had already funded us, so the game was mostly finished, but we didn’t have the money for QA and focus testing. Balancing was important to our end product, so we felt we needed a really passionate group of people to help focus test the game, they could then tell us what needed to change. We didn’t want a scenario where we were launching the game and finding out people couldn’t get past the first boss, or were stuck on the first level. Early Access completely circumvents this by putting it in the hands of the people we are targeting this game at. It then becomes a natural progression to a finished product. The second thing is that Early Access allows us to add content, with money coming in we can keep adding features to the title, rather than releasing something half finished and then releasing incremental DLC.

Well, Twitch is a massive part of gaming culture now, I was skeptical to begin with but I’ve found myself watching a lot of streams just recently. So I wanted to find a way to engage with Twitch streamers as it offers us excellent exposure for us. After seeing the Twitch plays Pokémon stream I wondered how I could implement something similar like that into Seraph. I thought the chat itself would be a great way for people to vote on maps in the game, and going with the theme of heaven and hell I felt Good Vs Evil would be a great way to get Twitch viewers on board. Using the #good or #evil chat command, Twitch users will vote on an outcome for the streamer, meaning they might get a new weapon or double damage, but on the flipside the evil side can add an extra boss to a level. I wish I could say it was a really hard feature to implement, but it was actually very simple. The toughest challenge was taking the Twitch delay into consideration, so we purposely set a delay between rounds, giving chat users a chance to vote

It’s always got to be gameplay for me, I find narrative games are excellent at making me feel something, and they can make me relate to certain characters or situations, but I find myself rarely going back to them. Well designed games hook me, they are the games I play night in and night out. I still play League of Legends regularly because characters are so well designed that I want to keep coming back to play them.

We’ve got an enemy type that we’ve just started building, but it’s not quite right for launch, so once we get it right we’ll probably launch it. We really appreciate fan feedback, in the past we’ve stuck up polls with a few ideas that we’ve had and basically asked the community to vote for what they want, so we’d probably do that again.

Online co-op, but it’s super expensive, so it would probably warrant a sequel to be honest.

We’ve recently submitted the game to Sony, so when Seraph does release we’re hoping to launch on both PS4 and Steam. So it’s a case of when Sony are happy, and it meets all their format rules, but hopefully it will be the end of August.