OR: How long do you expect the final game to be?
BC: Somewhere in the ballpark [of] twelve-to-fifteen hours.
OR: And you mentioned that there were multiple endings that were defined by morality. How many endings are you looking at including in the game?
BC: I haven’t decided…[at least] five-plus.
OR: Is this the first video game you’ve made?
BC: No, I’ve made flash games. This will be the first commercial release where I’ve built it out and put it out on Stream or GOG [as] a non-browser game.
OR: What lessons did you learn from creating these flash games that you are now applying to Guardians of the Rose?
BC: Oh, man. I’ve learned a lot about how long it actually takes to do stuff. That’s a pretty big lesson. It took a couple of years for me to figure out ‘ok, this is going to take a couple months’ and then it to [instead] take three times that much. Another thing- I don’t know if I learned it from making games- but I’ve learned to work a lot harder than I used to.
I guess a good thing that I’ve learned is to pick the right game engine. That’s definitely a good lesson. I’ve messed with a lot of flash engines and you really have to have the right one, and the one that is the least buggy and is actually debuggable. Like, you really have to go through a long process of finding the right game engine for your game if you don’t want to just spend a ton of time on doing things that the original person who made the engine did.
“[T]he overall response from actual [Kickstarter] backers has been amazing…
It’s just amazing to me that there are 102 people who want to buy my product.”
OR: What engine are you using with this game?
BC: Game Maker Studios…I ended up getting Game Maker Studios on Humble Bundle for ten bucks. So I downloaded that and downloaded a ton of the free engines on the forums and the marketplace, and they were all amazing.
These people are putting out these free engines and actually understand – you would think people programming in C-Sharp and C+ in Unity [OR Note: Unity is a prior engine that Mr. Copeland previously discarded due to how poorly he found it was to use] would know how to make code right and separate it all properly and use proper object-oriented programming, but [here] it’s the opposite – it’s called Game Maker language. It’s their own object-oriented programming language. They are really vigorous and make really great engines. There are a ton of great engines you can find on the forums for Game Maker. There’s even better ones on the marketplace. Just stuff that’s out of the box awesome. You can look at it and just ‘wow, this is properly done’. So that’s why I went with Game Maker.
OR: It sounds like that with the availability of the free engines and downloadable materials, it has really made creating a game from scratch easier for people that may not have done it before.
BC: Oh, yes. There’s no way that that isn’t true. It used to be where you’d have to program your own engine. You couldn’t start on Game Maker or Unity. If you wanted the Unreal Engine, you had to pay 50 grand to get a license. Back in the day, I wouldn’t have been able to do this, probably. I’d still be doing web development.
OR: Why did you choose to make this game a retro-style [title]?
BC: ‘Cause it’s my favorite. I love chiptunes and I love pixel art.
OR: How far along in development are you with this game?
BC: We’re in alpha. What alpha means is that pretty much you could not develop the engine any [further] and just develop assets, and still release the game ‘as-is’ and it would be a decent game.
OR: You turned to Kickstarter to help fund the beta-version of this game. How has your crowdfunding experience been so far?
BC: It’s been really encouraging. Pretty difficult to get media coverage. I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails saying “Please stop sending me e-mails”, stuff like that. *laughter*
You’d be surprised at how many people are mad at me for spamming them with sending them one e-mail. But the overall response from actual backers has been amazing. It’s really [a] big deal, we’ve got 102 backers right now and $4,500 [OR Note: As of June 7, 2016]. It’s just amazing to me that there are 102 people who want to buy my product. I was worried that ‘I really hope people like this’, and then these 102 people like it enough, at least. *laughter*
OR: Assuming that this project gets funded, do you have any plans to have the backers, regardless of tier, be involved in the subsequent game development?
BC: Oh yeah. I’ve been doing that since I started developing games. A big part of game development for me is throwing polls out on Twitter. I wish I could do polls on other social media – I just looked, I can do polls on Facebook now, so I have to start doing them on Facebook [now] too. Anyways, a big part of the game development for me, since I started making games, has been throwing my ideas out onto polls on Twitter and then getting feedback and reworking that idea [and then] putting it back onto a poll.
A big example could be [that] the main character from this game, his whole appearance, was decided on Kickstarter polls [over the course of three months]. I would post two different images and be like ‘Which hat do you like more?’, ‘Which hair do you like more?’, ‘Which eyes do you like more?’.
Something we just did that we threw up [online]: the guy who did the audio for Mother 4 [OR Note: Mother 4 is an unofficial, fan-made sequel to the Mother series that is currently in development] re-did our music trailer and he’s joining the team for our audio. I posted [it] up and asked if people liked it. I didn’t want to make a mistake and be like ‘Let me hire this guy for audio, and then him not produce as good of work as I could do for audio.’ And it looks like a pretty good majority is liking his music than mine. So we went ahead and we added a new team member based on Kickstarter backers’ opinions.
OR: You’re talking about Dani Person?
BC: Yes, sir.
OR: How did you get him to come on board?
BC: It was actually his initiative. He approached me [and] said that he really liked the game. He really, really wanted to work on a chiptunes game and he thought that [Guardians of the Rose] would be a pretty good game. I was like ‘Thanks, I don’t know, I like doing the music a lot.’ And he kept just taking the initiative, [and said] ‘I really want to do this.’ Yesterday [OR Note: June 6, 2016], he sent me the audio and was like ‘Hey, I re-did the audio for your trailer, could you check it out and see if you like it?’ And I checked it out and I loved it. I told him ‘If everybody else likes it, we’ll add you to the team.’
OR: On your Kickstarter page, you also said you were releasing this on Xbox One and PS4 in addition to Steam and as a DRM-free download. Do you have any plan to implement trophies and achievements for those versions?
BC: Yeah, I definitely want to do that. I’ll have to talk to Xbox and PlayStation about how to do that though. I really have no idea how to do that. I can do it on Steam and there’s a couple other sites that I know how to do it on. I used to do it on Flash, it’s really not that difficult [there]. But I’ll have to ask PlayStation and Xbox how to do it.
OR: How is it developing for several different platforms at one time?
BC: It’s a lot simpler than you would think. You only have to develop for one native platform. Right now, I’m developing for PC-only. And then when I get done with the PC version of the game, [when] it’s all debugged and everything’s working great, I’ll then port all of that code into a PlayStation engine and run it on the PlayStation, get some testers to run it also and send me information about the bugs, and then I’ll debug those bugs. For each port for Mac, Linux, PC, PS4, and Xbox One, it will all run off the basic same code. It just acts a little differently natively.
OR: Do you have an estimated release date?
BC: Yeah, May of 2017.
OR: Is that going to be on all platforms [simultaneously], or is that a staggered release?
BC: No, it’ll be [a] staggered [release]. It’ll be PC/Mac/Linux/Steam first, then PlayStation 4, and then Xbox One.
OR: Is there anything else you would like to add about your game?
BC: Just that if anybody has any questions, please ask away. Ask questions until your fingers can’t type anymore, I’d love to answer ’em.
OR: Thank you.
All Guardians of the Rose images were provided courtesy of, and are the property of, Broc Copeland. They are used here with permission.
Have you tried to create your own game before? What do you think of pixel-art and chiptune video games? Please sound off in the comments below!
