Interview With Scott Merriam (Rage of the Gladiator)

 I want to thank you for joining us today to talk about Rage of the Gladiator.  Before we get into the game can you tell us a little about yourself and Ghostfire Games?
   

Well, my name is Scott and I am one of the developers here at Ghostfire Games. I have been involved with the company since its inception, working on our first game Helix as a level editor and creative director. Our first project was a lot of fun, and in many ways a great success. For our second game, I am responsible for the special effects design, marketing as well as having a strong influence over the creative design of the game.

  

Ghostfire Games is based out of Austin TX, and we benefit from the gaming culture here in the city. As such, we are able to tap into a thriving industry and put forth a great product for our customer. We have a very talented and diverse team over here at Ghostfire, and our team has experience making games on many different platforms. As far as our team goes, we focus on a core inner group of developers to steer the game design, and for things such as voice acting and UI-Art we use contractors.

  

What can you tell us about Rage of the Gladiator?  What different game modes can we expect to see?
 

Rage of the Gladiator is a fantasy-based fighting game. You play the role of Gracius, battling for his life in the arena against 11 unique enemies.

 Your equipment consists of a magical war-hammer and a trusty shield. Wait for the right moment, then dodge, jump, or block your enemy's attacks. Next, unleash your rage by brutally pounding your enemy with your war-hammer and bashing them with your shield.

 Each opponent has a unique style and pattern that you need to pay close attention to. Learn to exploit the weakness of each enemy with the proper timing and agility, and you will triumph.

As you advance past each battle, you will gain access to devastating combos. Early on, you may learn how to leap into the skies and plunge your war-hammer into the ground, creating a pillar of fire that burns your enemy to a crisp. As you progress you may learn more deadly combos, such as conjuring an ancient tornado to lay the ground asunder.

There are is only one game “mode”, but after you defeat the first ten bosses, you must face them all again in challenge mode, and this time they have a whole new set of powers! In addition, your last opponent is revealed to you only after you have defeated the first ten in challenge mode.
  
Beyond this, you have the ability to customize your character in a few ways. Each time you defeat a boss, you gain skill points to customize your character in the three skill trees, defense, magic and offense. That’s how you acquire new powers, such as conjuring a raging tornado or summoning a fiery meteor.  That is one cool way to replay the game: you can build your character in different ways to try out new spells and take a different approach. Once you beat the game you get to fight all of the bosses over again in Challenge Mode, where they get new powers and feel like completely different fights.  Your skills DO carry over to challenge mode and you can continue to build your character in Challenge Mode. 

What was the inspiration behind the decision to use gladiators as the basis for the characters?

We in the development team are all fascinated with the gladiator concept. Being put into a situation where you have to fight for your life is quite compelling, and we thought this would be an engaging way to really get the player to feel like they are part of the action. 

Did you play any other fighting games or talk to fighting game fans to get a sense of what should be included in this game?  If so, can you talk about what elements you’ve borrowed from other games and how you’ve gone about making them unique to this game? 

I personally have been playing fighting games as long as I can remember, starting with Street Fighter (one). I know that our CEO Ed Roman is also a huge fan of fighting games, so we collectively have a lot of experience with this genre.

There were many games that served as inspiration for our game. Specifically:

• The combat system was inspired by some of the best ideas from games such as Punch-Out!
• The theme was inspired by games such as God of War
• The cutscenes (such as conjuring a meteor, tornado, or lightning storm) were inspired by games such as Final Fantasy
• The tech-tree was inspired by games such as Diablo or World of Warcraft
• The music was inspired from movies such as 300

Something that we feel makes our game unique is that we included realistic “get-hit” animations. When you make impact with the enemy, they respond in the direction that makes sense. If you hit them from the left, the will fall to the right, adding a very smooth flowing feel to the game, and helping the player feel like they really did just beat the living daylights out of their enemy. 

Rage of the Gladiator is unique to the fighting genre in that it uses a first-person perspective.  Where did the idea for that come about and how has it been different than developing a traditional fighting game?

The first-person perspective was inspired by a lesser-known NEO-GEO game called Crossed Swords. It’s a bit different than developing a traditional fighting game since you need to almost solve a “puzzle” as you fight each boss.  Each opponent has its own series of unique “tells” before they perform each attack.  You need to learn each tell and either dodge left, jump, dodge right, block, or counterattack appropriately.

When RotG was first announced it did not support Motion Plus.  It was recently announced, though, that the title would in fact have support for the peripheral.  What brought about the change and how has the game changed since that announcement?

We listened to you guys, our fans!  We realized after talking to the community that many people want to play a game like this and get exercise.  The MotionPlus control mode is great for that.  As you swing, you really feel like you are in the arena, pounding the boss into submission.

Can you discuss the controls in depth a little bit for us?

We have 3 different modes:

Traditional Horizontal Wii Remote: You hold the Wii Remote sideways, NES-style. This is great for old-school gamers that love quick responsiveness of buttons.

Wii Remote + Nunchuk: You hold the Wii Remote in your right hand, and Nunchuk in your left hand. You swing the Nunchuk or Wii Remote to perform attacks. By holding down a button, you can aim low when you swing.

Wii Remote + Nunchuk with Wii MotionPlus: The motion controls are enhanced here. You can swing up, down, left, and right when you swing by aiming the controller in that direction.

How many different characters will be playable in the game?  How will you be making those characters unique since players won’t actually see them on the screen?

There is one character, Gracius, and you follow his story as the game progresses.  Gracius is a noble prince who was born into a life of privilege, and one day it was all taken away from him, forced to fight for his very life in the arena.

Playing the game, you have the ability to customize your character in many different ways using the skill-tree, and that really adds a ton of replay-value.

Most of the fighting games like Street Fighter IV and Soul Caliber have big online followings and it seems to be a must for that type of game.  Will Rage of the Gladiator have any online support?

No, there will be no online support.  Mostly we didn't include any sort of multiplayer in this game because we wanted to focus on having a badass single player experience, and we'd rather do something simple as well as possible and do it well, rather than make a game that’s OK at everything.

     

You’ve been releasing some samples of the soundtrack.  I know I’m a huge fan of video game music.  Will you be making these available for people in some form of compilation if they’ve missed the first few pieces or just want all of it together?

All the music tracks will be available for download on our site  (www.ghostfiregames.com), so you can download any you’ve missed.  The music was composed by Sean Beeson, one of the most fantastic musicians we’ve had the privilege to work with. 

This is not Ghostfire’s first WiiWare title, that distinction belongs to Helix.  How was the reception to that game and what have you learned in the time since that game’s release?

We really benefited a lot from the experience of making our first game Helix, and learned creative ways to cram a ton of content into a 40MB download. Since making Helix, we have improved our staff quality as well, keeping the best quality employees and adding some strong new talent as well.

This game is a huge undertaking compared to Helix. The sheer challenge of making a game of this scope for WiiWare was daunting, and that made this project much more challenging than Helix. Our goal from the start was to push the limits of what people expect from WiiWare, and we think we have hit a bulls-eye with Rage of the Gladiator.

Do you think it would have benefited from the addition of Motion Plus?

It’s quite possible that Helix would have benefitted from MotionPlus, and if we ever make a sequel to the game, it is something we will definitely consider.

Does Ghostfire have any plans for the future after RotG?  Possibly support for other platforms or maybe a full retail release with even more features in the future?

To be honest we are focusing all of our efforts on polishing up this game and delivering a very high quality product to our customers. We take the Blizzard approach of not releasing a game until it is completely finished. Once we do release the game, we will take some time to gauge the response it gets.

If this game is successful would it be possible to see expansions to it later down the road?

If you’re referring to downloadable content (DLC), then the answer is no.  DLC requires that customers keep paying over and over again.  We’d rather do our best to cram the best experience possible into 40MB and only have you pay once.

With that said, assuming that the game is profitable, then a standalone sequel becomes very probable.

I have to ask the obligatory when can we expect to see this and can you tell us how much it will cost?

  

We hope to have this game out by the end of the year, and as far as price goes that is up to Nintendo to decide.