Tribal Trouble is an up-coming game from Oddlabs.  We recently had the opportunity to chat with them about how things were going on the game, and where things were currently at.  Here is a little look into a very different looking RTS.

First off, can you give us a little background about Oddlabs and the team working on Tribal Trouble?

The team behind Oddlabs has actually existed for about three years, and it is only recently we went public and therefore needed a name. Initially, we wanted to do a MMOG in the Sims Online style, and we had 10 people on the team. Much has happened since then - most importantly, we are now four people and have simplified and changed our initial idea a lot. We're all Computer Science students from the University of Southern Denmark, and use all our spare time to develop Tribal Trouble. Right now, we're mostly focused on finding a replacement for our 3D artist that recently quit because of lack of time. Also, we're in the process of raising venture capital to complete the game and maybe even get paid doing so. A local government funded entity is showing some interest, but we haven't decided on anything yet.


With so many RTS games out there, and many people feeling that there is little life left in the genre, what made you decide to make Tribal Trouble an RTS?

From a retail point of view, there might not be that many opportunities left, but coming from the indie market we feel there's a lot of potential for indie RTS games. We consider ourselves former hardcore gamers with too little time for complex games and we're bored with the traditional indie puzzle games. That's why Oddlabs is creating an RTS with simplicity, humor and ease of use in mind. Only time will tell if we're correct of course.


What aspects of Tribal Trouble set it apart from other RTS games already available?

First of all it's simplicity and ease of use. For each race in the game, only a few crucial units will be available, namely the resource gatherer, the mass attack unit and the special chieftain. And for each unit, only the most needed actions will be available, removing the need for a complex in-game user interface. Also, the possible actions have been designed to operate automatically and affect areas instead of individual units.

Secondly, we have designed the individual units to be of lesser value than actual resource and land control. It's a bit like the board game Risk, really. Controlling a lot of territory gives more reinforcements and losing a few units here and there won't matter in the long run. That's different from the traditional RTS games like Warcraft III, where individual units and heroes are of great importance.

Thirdly, we will rely on humor as a central part of the game play. Too many games take their characters all too seriously, probably because it takes so long for the games to go from initial idea to reach the retail shelves.

Finally, we have created quite a few tools to enable us to auto create a lot of content, making the game potentially as small as regular indie games. Specifically, we would like the game to take up less than 20 MB.


Looking at the screenshots, it looks as though Tribal Trouble will rely a lot on humor, how has humor been worked into the game?

That's right, humor is a central part of the game. We want the players to have fun playing a game against the computer or online friends, and we think there are too few games of that attitude in the RTS genre. We will keep the blizzard and invisibility spells away from the game and replace them with more quirky ones like a massive attack from deadly and determined henchmen frogs. Also, keeping the characters themselves goofy and funny looking is very important for us. You won't see any elves a la LOTR in this game.


There is some concern that you are poking fun at ethnic groups. How do you respond to that criticism?

We're not really worried about it. After all, only one race and one unit is seen from the shots, and with the fun and quirky game style it's very easy to look discriminating. We are confident that once more units and races like Vikings, Chinese and Indians are in place, people won't feel that way.


This game is being programmed in Java, making it one of only a few games in that language, what made you decide to use Java?

The Java language itself primarily, and the Java API secondly. We like the Java language for the same reasons other java programmers like it: The lack of pointers and unchecked buffer overflows, the verbose stack traces from exceptions and the built in Unicode support are just a few. Furthermore, the API gives us platform independent access to the technologies Tribal Trouble needs: Networking, XML, security, auto update facilities and more. Contrary to what people might think, the execution speed of java is more than enough to write high performance games in OpenGL accelerated 3D.

Having said that, there are still a few thorny issues before Java is a no-brainer alternative to C++/DirectX. First of all, the Java Gaming community (http://javagaming.org) had to create it's own support for Java access to OpenGL/OpenAL and input devices in the form of LWJGL (http://lwjgl.org). Lately, alternatives have arrived in the form of Jogl/Joal/Jinput but they're still not as mature as LWJGL. Also, the size of the Java Runtime Environment is an issue for indie game programmers wanting to keep their games small. The 15 MB JRE is easily cut down to 3 MB leaving out the non game related stuff like AWT and Swing, but because of the runtime license, we're not legally allowed to distribute our games with that. On Linux and Mac OS X, up-to-date Java runtimes are preinstalled, but the win32 platform is still lagging behind partly because of a certain software company's aggressive refusal to let software from competitors gain a foothold.


A large portion of RTS games is making the individual units act intelligently, how much of a challenge has that been with Tribal Trouble?

We haven't implemented much in the way of computer controlled units, but we hope that with the simplicity of the game rules, it won't be too hard to create a convincing computer opponent. We also hope that all our players will find reason to join to the online community and compete for the highest ranking.


What has been the most ambitious aspect of creating Tribal Trouble?

Being four Computer Science students programming has never been the hard part of Tribal Trouble. Our problem is mostly that of over-ambitious goals and lack of talented graphics artists. The landscape and most of the textures are auto generated runtime, but we still need a real artist to create the characters, buildings and vegetation.


What aspect of Tribal Trouble do you think gamers will appreciate the most?

We think that the simple and fun gameplay will be most appreciated. Although Tribal Trouble has good looking graphics in our own opinion, we're not competing with the looks of retail games.


Who is your target audience for Tribal Trouble?

Hopefully a family member or two will buy the game... Other than that we hope for a few fellow gamers with a hunger for simple games differing from the traditional puzzles found on the internet these days.


Complete this sentence: I will be perfectly happy with the release of Tribal Trouble if...

our players like it enough to let us create more high quality games in the future. That would be really great.



A big thanks to the team at Oddlabs who was generous enough to take the time and answer a few of our questions.  If you haven't checked out the Tribal Trouble website, what are you waiting for?