You mentioned that there are these creatures that kind of fuse, or create these objects for you to use.  That sort of seems to be the sort of biomechanical theme that seems to run throughout your games  Do you do your art yourself or do you have an artist?

I do all the art and all the design.  I am looking for new artists to help because we are requiring more bandwidth for our games at this point, so if anybody’s interested they can email me.  Just go to our site mommysbestgames.com.  But I love doing art; I actually studied oil painting and acrylics and sculpture and everything in school so I like doing the art.

You said biomechanical and I’m a huge R-Type fan, well Irem fan in general, I love all their games.  I love Irem, I love Toaplan, I love Konami older games, the R-Type thing is really cool: the biomechanical stuff is great.  I’m hoping the art and the design I’m creating has its own flavor to it and it doesn’t look like I’m just aping their stuff.  But I’m definitely inspired by their works.

You do a very good job of very colorful, monstrous creatures.  I almost feel like I’m very small and I’m inside some giant organism.  These creatures that might be microscopic but I’m even smaller so they’re humongous.

Yeah, I do get a lot of inspiration from nature as well, like microscopic photographs, electron microscope stuff, I like all that stuff. I look at magazines a lot, I go hiking, I like to look at photographs.

You mentioned looking for an artist, how big is Mommy’s Best Games at this point?  How many employees?

Well, employees it’s only two: myself and my wife.  I do the design, programming, art, sound effects and she does the production.  She keeps a tab on schedules, looks at the budget, keeps us in line that way.  But she looks for new artists, she’s looking on the other computer right now for artists.  I actually contract with Hamdija Ajanovic and he does the music.  So, he did the music for all three games so far and he does a great job in terms of different styles.  And then I also contract with some friends: AJ Johnson, he writes the story.  He writes science fiction on his own, so he was perfect.  I know I can’t write stories, the dialogue that well.  Well I like to think that I can, but he does a better job, so I got him.  Some other friends that I used to work with did a little bit of level design here, some programming there, that kind of thing.  It would be really neat to have another in-house person someday down the road.

Switching gears, talking about Shoot 1UP, I saw that there is an update that you said is coming out soon.

Yeah, that’s a good point.  I just was finishing that today. I put it for playtest on the Creators Club site tonight for other people to try out that are XNA developers.  The new update, well first of all it has a new animated intro, updated graphics for the menus so it looks spiffier, and it will be a free update.  The new update also allows for remappable buttons.  I heard people complaining about arcade stick this or other controller that, or they didn’t like the placement of the buttons so now you can remap shoot, expand, contract, and also the brakes.  The other big part is it now supports one-switch controls, which is British for saying that the game can be played with a single button.  So if you’re a disabled gamer or you have limited mobility or something like that, you can rig the game to work the motion off of one button and the game will set to auto-fire.

So you basically just navigate?

Yeah, all you do is navigate.  And actually I like playing it personally with auto-fire on a lot of times if I’m just chilling out because the shield is really powerful if you don’t use auto-fire.  That’s great, but if I’m looking to kind of enjoy it I’ll just play with auto-fire on.  On the one-switch mode, it automatically sets it, actually you can toggle it, but it sets it to auto-fire and you can actually choose the button it will be using for motion, and an arrow on screen will show you when you press the button what direction you will go.  Basically, all you do is go right, down, left, up, right, down, left, up and just keep moving like that.  And, the gameplay speed option, if you need to, you can scale it down to say like 50% speed or 25% speed and then you can definitely maneuver around and play the game pretty well like that.  Hopefully that will get it out to more people that can enjoy it.  It sucks that gamers that are disabled wouldn’t be able to have access to cool games when there are tons of possibilities, and they get shut out because of funky extra controls.

Is that something that’s easy for you to add in?

It wasn’t too bad.  It took about a week, off and on.  I was kinda going back between the one-switch functionality remapping.  All the new update stuff took about a week or so, so it wasn’t too bad.  I got turned onto it by the guys that run oneswitch.co.uk [ablegamers.com.  They had written me about some ideas about how to make the game better that way, and I thought “why not?”  Why wouldn’t I try to let the game be played by more people?

Is there any way you could implement that feature into Grapple Buggy?

Well, that’s the thing.  It fits really well in Shoot 1UP.  Grapple Buggy would be pretty tough.  That’s kind of like when I said “why not?”  It just makes perfect sense in a shoot ‘em up.  You can set the game to auto-fire and they can control the motion.

How long was Shoot 1UP in development?

It was in development for two full-time months and two half-time months.  So, you could call that three months.  I liked doing it and I’d love to put in like eight months on a massive sequel, just blow it out and do 15 levels or something crazy, something like that with branching levels: that would be great.  I love branching options for players a lot.  Giving the control of what they want to do in a game, I think that’s fun.

Is that something you might be working on after Grapple Buggy?

Maybe.  We have at least one top-secret project that might get revealed here in another couple months.  So, that might be one of them.  It might be a whole another surprise.

Where did you get the idea for the phalanx: the idea of controlling multiple ships?

I wish I had some really cool answer like “I saw birds flying” or something like that.  It was more like I was just eating a bowl of ice cream and thought, “Hey, why not control a bunch of ships?” It just popped up in my head like all at once.  I play a ton of shoot ‘em ups.  I think at the time I was just playing a buttload of Space Megaforce on my Super NES,  Well the first level of Shoot 1UP is definitely inspired by the first level of Super Megaforce, more like an homage at that point but with a combination of anime robots for Shoot 1UP.

But, one of the power-ups has you tag along like a ton of options, and obviously options were in Gradius and like a ton of games, but in Space Megaforce, you get these little green eggs that follow you around.  The more I thought about it, I would like to represent, kind of from a story standpoint, all these ships and they’ve got people in them.  If you had a ship with a guy, it wouldn’t just be this one guy in a ship and a bunch of other guys in little crappy ships.  It would actually be like a group of jetfighters and how would they act?  Well they would have to kind of coordinate, so that’s how the phalanx kind of came out.  And I constantly call it a “phalanx” as a tip of the hat for Phalanx for the Super NES.

Was that your impetus for creating a shoot ‘em up or did you already want to create one and then you had this idea?

Oh gosh.  I’ve got about fifteen designs for a shoot ‘em up.  It’s just being paranoid that I wouldn’t be able to do the genre well, you know, like I just dream about it constantly and then I was worried that my contribution wouldn’t be worthy or something.

So what’s your favorite?

Well, it kinda depends on my mood.  I’ve been really riffing on Lords of Thunder recently.  I played it on Virtual Console/WiiWare.

That’s a Sega CD game too, no?

Originally I think it was on Turbografx, the CD-version of that.  I’m not sure if they released it, they might have released it on Sega CD.

Yeah, I think I played it on Sega CD.

Oh, yeah, you’re right.  So I’ve been liking that one.  Probably one of my favorites is Lightning Force: Thunder Force IV on the Sega Genesis.  I like that game because you get a lot of choice at the beginning, it has really nice graphics, it has just outrageous bosses that are totally insane.  So I like that game a lot.  Another one I like is Biohazard Battle on the Genesis.  It’s not super tight but it has some really cool bosses and really freaky enemies so I like that game too.

What other genre would you like to tackle next?

You know it’s funny: there’s an indie game developer making Breath of Death 7, which is obviously inspired by Breath of Fire 7.  I think an RPG would be really fun, but I don’t know if I’ve got the time for it.

Like an old-fashioned JRPG from the 16-bit era?

I think it would have to be something more original: something with bigger sprites, almost.  It would have to be some sort of strange combination.  It wouldn’t be a traditional JRPG and it would definitely be story heavy, obviously, but I would want a lot of choice in it.  I’m kind of turned off by the graphics in those, so I would have to do some kind of different perspective or bigger sprites or something like that.

Maybe you could play as one of your creatures instead of as a human?

That would be neat.  I’d definitely want a lot of options, you know like human characters and different weird aliens or something like that.  Like with any genre, there’s an infinite amount of creative room, it’s just a matter of coming up with it.  I’ve got tons of new ideas I’d like to do in shoot ‘em ups as well, so I’m very excited about making some new shoot ‘em ups.

Okay great, so when can we hope to be playing Grapple Buggy?

It all comes down to publisher deals and if something comes up before that.  If something else came up before that we’d also still be working on Grapple Buggy because I’d hopefully be hiring some people in the meantime to help with the new project and Grapple Buggy, but I would say it’s possible in 2011.  I just don’t think it’s going to happen this year.  That’s my guess, but who knows?  Maybe it will come out in December of this year.

So, end of this year, beginning of next year, hopefully?

Yeah, they’ll be news if that’s not the case, if you check our site.  We’re trying to expand some, so if you can make a deal with a publisher and get money up front, you go for it basically.  You get to stay independent but now you’re getting money, which is pretty sweet.

Right now you are self-financed?

Oh yes, we’re 100% self-financed right now.  If we were to ever take some money, I’m working on it to make sure we get full-IP control and pretty much all the creative control.  We’re financed by your listeners buying copies of our games.

So go buy Shoot 1UP!

Exactly, there you go

Well I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today.

Absolutely.

And hopefully we’ll be playing Grapple Buggy pretty soon.

Cool, and if not I’ll come back on your show down the road and tell you the next new game to drool on in addition to Grapple Buggy.

Grapple Buggy is basically an action-adventure, well an action-exploration game in which the player drives a buggy around: a space buggy.  But, it’s equipped with these two different types of grappling hooks and you can get even more stuff.  But the buggy is really agile: it can drive up walls, you almost have like sticky tires, it can swing from the grappling hook, it can grab enemies and stab things with them, and it can do all kinds of neat stuff.   And there’s a cool story with it.  So we’re working hard to improve the art, to get the story rolling for Grapple Buggy, and we’re courting some publishers for that.  So that’s in the works.  We think it’s going to happen for XBLA, it’s just not officially announced yet or anything like that.

So the major hurdle there is finding a publisher and getting certified by Microsoft?

The main part is attracting a publisher essentially, and getting Grapple Buggy to the point where it’s attractive enough where they would want to publish it.  We were recently exhibiting our first booth at PAX East in March over there in Boston, PAX East 2010, the first (east coast) PAX, so that was very exciting.  And, we had Grapple Buggy on display there and people could play it and the press could play it and everyone was very impressed.  So, we got some attention from that press wise, but we also got some good attention from publishers.  So, it’s definitely not an overnight kind of thing.  These kinds of gears turn slowly.  The good news is that it’s started.  So, we’re seeing how it’s going to go.  It’s pretty exciting, but also pretty scary.

It seems like it’s sort of a Blaster Master meets Bionic Commando with the vehicle and the swinging of the, well the grappling and the tethering of objects.

Yeah, It’s got a lot of inspiration from all around.  It’s funny, a lot of people say Blaster Master, but I came at it more from a Bionic Commando direction.  So, I think it’s great that they like Blaster Master too, which I obviously like Blaster Master a lot, it’s just, I was thinking more Bionic Commando at the time.  But it obviously makes sense that they were thinking Blaster Master.  Actually, in Grapple Buggy though, there’s two characters within the buggy, and they have conversations and through those conversations you learn tricks, and you also learn the story and you kind of get involved that way.  It’s definitely a lot more story-heavy than Blaster Master, Blaster Master Overdrive, more so even than Bionic Commando Rearmed or anything like that.

Will there be distinct levels, or will it be a Metroidvania sort of open world?

It’s definitely more open world.  It definitely has a Metroid feel to it.  The areas are connected and you can go between them.  I’m working right now on essentially cutting down the backtracking issues and just trying to make sure that the game is fun, you know what I mean?  I like that aspect of seeing a spot where you can’t go and kind of unlocking that with your power-ups and that kind of thing, but also trying to balance the storytelling and also just not making it like a chore.  Because I played Blaster Master Overdrive and it wasn’t bad; it was okay.  But I kind of waffled on that one: whether I actually enjoyed it or not.  So I’m taking cues from old games but also new 2D games as well.  So, trying to figure out exactly where it’s going to land.

So as the game progresses your buggy will get new powers and upgrades?

Oh yeah, definitely.  The interesting part is you’re on this alien planet.  So basically, the story revolves around this fuel that’s on the planet.  It’s kinda this jelly-like fuel that you’re scouting for your government.  The two different governments are represented by the characters inside your buggy.  Well, the planet didn’t have contact with your two races yet.  So, why would you get power-ups on this planet?  It doesn’t make any sense.  Why is there a new grappling hook sitting in a cave somewhere?  Well on the planet there’s actually these different creatures that essentially synthesize equipment for you.  They almost mind-meld with the buggy.  All of this is tied into the story which kinda has a Gaia Mother Earth feel to it that kind of explains, but also deepens the weirdness of the planet itself and the story that the characters are getting themselves into.  So, there’s a lot of power-ups.

So there are two main characters inside the buggy?

Uh-huh.  Yes, there’s a female character that represents the humans and there’s a male character, a male voice that represents the Drozo, one of the alien races, and they’re the ones that you’re dealing with in terms of kind of deciding who has the rights to the fuel on the planet.  So, it also has some definite influence from current events dealing with oil, holy wars and all the giant kind of political thoughts.  But it kind of abstracts them a little, so it doesn’t get heavy handed, hopefully.

Do you ever get out of the buggy and walk around?

No, I have been thinking about that a lot, but currently, you are not allowed to get out.  Hopefully that is going to focus the fun and the gameplay kind of weight on the buggy and the grappling.