tERRORbane - Interview with BitNine Studios

Clearly, you don’t possess an incredibly sharp naming sense like m- uh, no sorry that was the Dev speaking. Don’t believe that guy, he’s a fictional character we purposely wrote as an irritating villain you should oppose! He really doesn’t represent BitNine Studio’s opinion, at all. But it is pretty funny when he gets angry, right? The game actually really cares about your player chosen name, so don’t let appearances be deceiving.

The story is, like most things in life, equal parts embarrassing and funny. Back in sunny 2014, we as a team were just starting out and developing free little games for mobile platforms. We were still testing our limits and bugs were plenty during development; some would be so hilarious that they would become recurrent jokes and memes around the office. Thus, inspired by our experience, Luca (our Lead Programmer) came up with the idea of designing our next project after the concept of using bugs and comedy in tandem.

Long and very unconventional. We decided early on we would not compromise much in terms of variety of gameplay. Much like a comedy show, we wanted to shock the player with novelty around every corner and never employ the same trick twice. That made for a very intense development cycle that would not let us reiterate much on any gameplay concept, but instead devise new ways to let the player jump from genre to genre.

It was a gruelling process design-wise, but it was worth it if we managed to instil into the game a sense of genuine discovery and of never knowing what to expect next.

tERRORbane is surprisingly true to our initial vision. Sure, we’re not a big AAA studio and we had to contend with limited resources and many other problems [that] other indie studios out there can probably relate to, but we were committed to spending our best resource — time — to let our creativity run free with this project. It wasn’t always easy, but we believe it was the right answer for the game, ultimately.

Uhm, I guess the answer would differ depending on who of us three you’re asking.

The scroll was designed, rather than calling out something we feel is not appropriate, as a tool to teach the player the opposite: that tERRORbane would adapt and react to their preference. Barring the funny interaction with the Dev, which does contain some well-meaning fun poked at gaming norms, the scrolls reward you whether you skip them or not, with something appropriate to what you tried to convey to us. If you skip it twice, for instance, we get that you don’t want to waste more time reading and we propose you a very action oriented mini-game, instead. This is the kind of interaction we based our design upon for the rest of the game, too.

Oh no, the bugs we’ve designed for the game are left burned into our brain, so many times we’ve tested them out to make sure they were fun and consistent, contrary to real bugs. But we did incorporate some real bugs into our design, when they happened and were hilarious enough. Not before testing them thoroughly, though.

While most bugs are designed to be casually discoverable, some of them are designed to be trickier to pose a bit of a challenge to those who wish to complete their Bug-List to 100%. We don’t think, however, that anything will pose much of a challenge if players pass around some information and collaborate. That doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t any easter eggs to find. Since these are not really content, we’ve really hidden these deep in the bowels of TB. Who knows if they’ll ever be found!

Ooooh, tough one. Especially considering the absolute requirement for all bugs in the game was that it had to make us laugh. There are some that are so very tERRORbane, however, that they deserve a mention: picking up the pear crate as a companion and it having its own stats like “lvl: ripe”, having the only vehicle in the game be incredibly slower than walking, redeeming a hidden code for a DLC only to find out it applies random exaggerated hairdos to specific characters even retroactively throughout the game, using the “run” command while in “limit break” status making it exit the fight, close the application and shut the Dev’s computer down - and so many, many more.

tERRORbane has a normal ending and two “true” endings to find. What does it mean? Find out in tERRORbane!

Well, I guess we’ll see what our players will enjoy the most. Hopefully they would like to see more tERRORbane. We certainly would wish to expand its glitchy world and we have plenty of ideas its unique premise could help us accommodate. Our studio takes pride in never refusing to explore fresh concepts and trying out new ideas, so please look forward to what we’ll come up with next.