They Came from Hollywood

Smashing through brick and mortar with a 400 foot tall monster is nothing short of exhilarating... especially if the player is the one in control of the massive beast. Octopus Motor, the company made of two very dedicated workers (Lars and Sparky) is working on a monster-vs-city, real-time strategy, action-adventure game. The name of game is They Came from Hollywood (TCFH). Following in the footsteps of Crush, King of Monsters, and other large lizard games, TCFH, originally announced for the PC before PCs even existed, is shaping up to be a really amazing looking title. Inspired by the works of visionaries such as Harold Haxton and Ed Wood, They Came From Hollywood borrows elements of B-movie monster flicks and classic arcade action. To get more insight into this intriguing title, GameTunnel got the low-down directly from Sparky and Lars.

[William Usher] - For those who don't know, how long has Octopus Motor been developing games and what sort of projects were you working on before They Came From Hollywood?

Lars : They Came From Hollywood is the first project for Octopus Motor as a company, but I've been working on games for a long time. I started programming games on the Commodore PET and Vic20 in the early 80s. My first professional game programming experience was with Spectrum Holobyte in 1989, where I worked on Stunt Driver, Falcon 3.0, etc. Since 1992 I've been doing a lot of work with interactive theme park attractions for Disney Imagineering. I also spent some time with the online game company TEN (which eventually became Pogo).

Sparky : I worked at Microleague for a bit back in the early 90's, and I've been a graphic designer of some sort for many years, and done web design/development for ten.

After seeing They Came From Hollywood, instantly it reminded me of an updated and better looking version of the isometric arcade title, King of Monsters. What actually prompted for the creation of They Came From Hollywood?

Sparky: Our inspiration goes back farther than King Of Monsters...although I've seen it, we're, uh, too old to have played that title in its heyday. YOU KIDS GET OFF MY LAWN! :) TCFH is inspired more by Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, an Epyx game from 1981. And "The Creature That Ate Sheboygan" board game by Greg Costikyan. But it's a well loved theme there have been lots of monster vs. city tabletop, pen & paper, computer and arcade games.

There have been some good monster vs city mediums. However, recently the video game monster-vs-city genre seems to be in a drought, with the exception of a graphically impressive and gameplay deficient Godzilla franchise. Do you think “They Came from Hollywood� will re-ignite the video game monster-vs-city genre?

Sparky: Whoa, that's a pretty tall order for an indie game. :) Honestly, I don't expect we'll get enough exposure to influence mainstream game development choices. We won't be in WalMart and we won't be on magazine covers. Our market share isn't the million plus units that set the "safe trends" for publishers. We're making TCFH because we think there's an undeveloped niche there, (and we like monsters). We'll be happy to fill that niche, but we don't think it's a big enough niche to evolve into a genre. Geez, "niche" looks funny when you type it out a lot. Niche. NICHE.

So, what sort of engine is the game running on?

Lars: Our own. All the code in the game & tools is written by me no engines, middleware, etc. except Direct X. It's a lot of code. TCFH is 3D internally, with isometric 2D rendering.

This method has been used in a lot of games, especially RPGs like Jagged Alliance 2, Baldur’s Gate, Dink Smallwood, etc. Is this method more effective than running everything in a realtime 3D environment? Or do you find that you have more control using 3D sprites in a 2D runtime environment?

Lars: To make the detail rich environment we wanted in 3D, it would need a pretty high end 3D card, and we didn't want to limit our potential audience to high end gamers. Our game has more appeal to less hard core gamers and we didn't want to exclude them. Rendering everything we've got going on in TCFH in real time 3D would require far more performance than most mortals can afford, and the asset demands would be impossible for a two person team. We've got well over 1,000 unique buildings (and growing), and doing those assets at the required level of detail, from all angles, for close up 3D cameras would be a Herculean task. 3D would also add a lot of extra effort on the programming side, with camera angle controls, skeletal animation system, texture management, mipmapping, etc. (and we don't have a lot of capital to buy a high quality, professional 3D engine).

Personally, we don't like the look of many 3D games, with their blurry textures smeared over oddly angular models. Only recently have we seen 3D improve to an acceptable point, and only with expensive cards, high end engines, and high budget titles. So we went with a 2D rendering system, with sprites rendered out from 3D models. That lets us use procedural textures, high res bitmaps, and near unlimited polygons to make our models. But unlike hand drawn 2D sprites, we can automate the rendering to provide our 16 core view angles, building collapses, tumble states, perspective, rapid changes, etc. as well as export meta data like 3D volumetric collision data, shadow maps, etc.

So rendering in 3D to 2D gave us the best balance of in game visual quality, effort, and system requirements.

A current trend is to use the 3D card for billboarding 2D sprites. There are a lot of good reasons to use that technique, and I considered it several times. But in the end, I decided against it because of the added overhead of texture management, and we would lose the specialized effects I implemented in my hand written graphics rendering: shadows, Z height clipping, tint, alpha blending, color shifting palettes, terrain scarring, etc.

I noted the ability to customize a monster. How in depth is this feature and will monsters have adjustable stats?

Lars: The monster stats, abilities, powers, weapons, defenses, armor and how & what they eat are all adjustable and customizable. But it's a 2D game so we're limited to our graphics sets we can't alter the appearance of the monsters, except to shift the colors. There are a few abilities that are associated only with certain monsters, mostly as a function of their graphics. For example, only the Giant Ant can dig and only the Giant Mantis can jump, because those animations only exist for those monsters. Only monsters with arms or tentacles can throw objects. But anything that's not directly tied to animations can be customized, like shooting rockets or beams, generating force fields). All the unit data, weapons, and parameters are also user editable.

Harold Haxton...what brought you to the decision to base the monsters on his creations?

Sparky: Well, we obviously couldn't use any real movies or monsters. :) And I wanted the fun of creating all those characters and their movies, their history (which you'll be able to read as part of Haxton's biography, which will be in the game manual).

Will the game follow a storyline similar to something from the campy minds of Ed Wood or Harold Haxton? Or will the game simply give gamers a premise, like Rampage or Crush, and just let them go crushing through cities?

Lars: A bit of both, but there isn't one linear storyline that we've made up. There are no cut scenes or anything. We offer the basic rampage style of play, and we also extend that with *optional* scenario scripts which guide the monster along a set of goals. The simpler, raw destruction mode of play is a casual action game, more kid friendly (with dance pad support) while the scenario scripts are more strategic in nature with more depth. Scripts can be ignored, but following them will result in more special events, higher scores, etc. because of the rewards that can only be achieved through completing scripts. Scripts are defined in Lua, and can be created and edited by end users.

I seen the “dance pad� support on the website and shrugged it off. But seriously, the game will support the dance pad? And how would it work?

Sparky: Yup, it will support the dance pad. We're not joking about that! The game supports two modes of play a strategic game mode and a simplified, action centric mode. The dance pad works with the simpler gameplay mode because of the limited interface. We've modeled the command structure of the dance pad footwork to mimic the monster's actions, so it's got something of a puppet feel to it.
Left Right Left Right Arrow lets you walk forward, Forward Arrow to stomp, etc. I think kids (of all ages) are going to have a smashing time with it. :)

In the FAQ, you mention that the game may feature multiplayer support as a future add on. Should us eagerly awaiting gamers expect to ready our finger work for deathmatch or cooperative play?

Lars: It's hard to see that far forward when we aren't done with the single player game yet. :) We have lots of ideas for things we would like to add to TCFH eventually, but that also depends on how successful the game is. Multiplayer would likely be in the form of letting one player control the human military, or a second monster for cooperative play. We want to avoid turning the game into a monster fighting game that's a very different type of game, one that's already been done several times on the consoles. TCFH is about monsters vs humans.

Not only has monster-vs-monster been done several times on the consoles, it seems like it’s the only thing done on the consoles when it comes to playing behemoth monsters. Originally, though, did you plan to have it setup where the game could be modified to support added gameplay, such as user created levels and multiplayer support?

Lars: I've always hacked game data formats, since I was a kid, and I've been impressed with what the mod community has been able to do lately. The modders are, in many ways, more free to explore unusual ideas than publishers or developers can be. I love the trend towards more open,data driven game systems and I think it adds value to the core product (as long there's a clear distinction between developer supplied and modded content, and it's not competing with the developer's official expansions and content). Since we're a small team and resource constrained, anything we can do to allow our fans
and users to add content to our game helps us create a richer game for everyone. So I've always planned to make as much of the system as open as possible.

Some stuff is right there in the open unit and weapon configurations, system variables, Lua scripts, etc. are all in plain text for anyone to explore. But there are limitations to our moddability: our asset pipeline is complex, long and uses a lot of undocumented custom tools, plug ins and scripts (closely tied to the outdated 3D modeling package we use). Our map editor is slow, requires 1GB of RAM and dual displays, and has a confusing interface.

Sparky: Lars is entirely responsible for the confusing interface.

Lars: Monster customization is limited to non graphical changes, unless someone can manage to work their way through our asset creation process. It's not as easy as we'd like, and we're still deciding how to provide a "mod kit" for those brave enough to try it.

Multiplayer support....that's a different issue. Besides the massive complexity that introduces to testing and game balance, it's fundamentally a code issue. There are a couple things in the game that don't really support that idea at the moment. Keeping a world with 20,000 unique active processed objects in sync across multiple PCs is not trivial! Much of the game engine would be OK with multiplayer, but there are pieces that would need rewriting, and multiplayer is not something we're planning on in the near term, so I have not been currently coding around the idea of multiplayer expandability. However, my code is very modular, so it wouldn't be impossible, if/when that time comes.

Percentage wise, how far along is the game?

Lars: We're around 80% complete. The core and the hard stuff is done a lot of what remains falls into the details, tweaking, bugs, assets, and testing categories. Also the final sounds and music. But there might be hidden tasks that pop up we still have do more gameplay & beta testing, which may teach us a few things. It's hard to predict if there will be any huge bugs or major changes that playtesting reveals. But the end is in sight.

Is there a release date planned or will we continue to get the Bungie/Remedy treatment? Because really, I think you could one up those guys simply by giving gamers a release date...really. :)

Sparky: We can't give a release date right now...it wouldn't be fair. There's only two of us. If we had a large team, there would be someone around to take up the slack if something went wrong, someone got sick or had to take other work that required more time, etc. But we don't have that luxury. So I'm not going to give a date until I'm absolutely certain we can make it.

We also don't want to rush something out there just to have it done (although we really, really, want it done). That's the whole point of indie development to be able to make something you love, something you did your way and feel confident about. Rushing some half assed game out would defeat the whole purpose.

Good point. Seriously this game already looks to be shaping up to be an award-winning title. On a final note, though, do you have any suggestions or comments for aspiring indie-developers?

Sparky: Please be patient and continue the wonderful support and encouragement...or at least refrain from emailing to tell me how much we suck. If you can't do that, at least try to cut back the hate mail to once or twice a week. Failing that, at least spell out the "YOU" in "U SUCK". I hate that "u" crap. Anyway, we do thank you for your understanding in that games take a LOT of work and we're just a two person team trying to make the best game we can. We've put a huge amount of time and effort into the project, and there's no way we'll abandon it now! Seriously, no one wants to see TCFH more than us. We are really looking forward to the day when we're selling, supporting, expanding, and otherwise promoting the finished game rather than endlessly slaving away in dark obscurity, losing money and living in perpetual embarrassment about NOT BEING DONE YET.