Last week, we shared some hands-on impressions of Rocket City Studios' first title, Second Chance Heroes. This cooperative action/arcade game places you in the shoes of historical figures to bring down the evils of a modern world. We wanted to learn more how this whole thing came about and went straight to the source. Dana Massey, Lead Game Designer at Rocket City Studios, was kind enough to humor our barrage of questions.
Co-Optimus: Tell us about Rocket City Studios and how you got started in games development. You’re based in the U.S. and Canada?
Dana Massey: Years before, the core of the team had worked together at another company called Mutable Realms on an MMORPG called Wish. Unfortunately, we never released that game – it was an MMORPG set to launch alongside a glut of MMOs including World of Warcraft – but the passion remained. So, in late 2009 we came back together with the goal of doing something more focused: a funny, cooperative game. From that, Second Chance Heroes was born.
The majority of development takes place in Canada, with some key contributors working from the US.
Co-Optimus: Tell us about your first title, Second Chance Heroes.
Dana: [It's] a cooperative arcade action adventure where four players work together through a world of strange monsters. As you move through that world you collect new historical characters to play and long lost relics that provide new abilities when used; like Oppenheimer’s Vile, which sets off a mini nuke and sends people flying.
But the bottom line is that we’re a game that just doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Too many games in this genre are somber marches through the underworld to save the world from an apocalypse. We’re also saving the world from an apocalypse, of course, but in the most preposterous way possible: clones of historical figures fighting sentient cheeseburgers in an ancient underground hobo colony (among other places).
Second Chance Heroes is meant to be a fun escape not only from everyday life, but also from a genre of games that always has you considering epic and weighty matters. Our primary concern? Do you want to shoot people with Napoleon’s ride-on-cannon or mow them down with Queen Elizabeth I’s mini-gun as she chomps down on her cigar.
Co-Optimus: What was the inspiration for this game? There is definitely an arcade feel/vibe to it, coming just short of a “Insert Coin” graphic. Any particular games from that venue that influenced its development?
Dana: I think it was more the general sensibility of that era that really touched home for us. Mario, for example, really makes no sense whatsoever. You’re a plumber jumping on turtle shells to save a princess. Why can you turn into a raccoon and fly? Because it adds something really fun to the game.
We’re much the same way. Of course, it makes no sense when you walk over a power up and suddenly you can make a disco ball come from the sky, float over your head and distract all of the enemies as they stop fighting and start dancing. It’s still just an amazing moment when you first discover it. So clearly, we had to include it.
We wanted to make everything do something. Power Ups are used in lots of games, and we chose them over traditional level loot because they can have an instant effect on the level.
Swapping is another thing that really gives us that arcade feel. To be honest, the idea came from pro wrestling tag teams. We let you swap back and forth (TAB key) between two characters on the fly and it’s not something I really have not seen in quite some time.
Co-Optimus: Why historical figures as the protagonists and how did you determine which ones to use?
Dana: Back in the era of arcade games there was also of course no character creation. The technology didn’t allow for it. To me, most of the games I love have strong characters that you play. In our genre, that’s almost non-existent these days. Everyone spends 20 minutes customizing the length of their nose then never looks at it again. I’d bet you anything my Skyrim character looks exactly like my Fallout 3 character… and I couldn’t even begin to guess what either one looks like despite the hundreds of hours I spent in those games.
We decided a stronger route for us was to focus on collecting bigger, functional things, rather than just “set of gloves 2” as so many other games do. What’s more important than the actual characters you play and abilities you perform?
Once committed, it was a bit of a nightmare to pick the roster. Our goal is fun, not to offend people, so given how we subvert and poke fun at these people, we immediately crossed off unequivocally evil characters (although there are debates to be made all over, no doubt). We also have no urge to offend anyone on religious grounds, so that eliminates another group of people. The final restriction, of course, is legal. That’s why all of the characters are long dead.
With those things in mind, we developed a list of several hundred people and started arguing. We wanted a good mix of ethnicities, genders and time periods (doing Queen Elizabeth I took Henry VIII off the table). We also wanted comedy. Christopher Columbus would have been a great character, for example, but for whatever reason we never came up with a good joke for him.
We finally settled on the mix we have today. Cleopatra, Leonardo da Vinci, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon are names that universally known, while slightly less famous people like Queen Elizabeth I, Marie Curie, Montezuma, Blackbeard and Nikola Tesla each bring something to the table that we just had to include. We just wouldn’t be proper gamers if we didn’t have Tesla, for example.
It took a lot of debate, but I think that as a group we’re very happy with the 12 we settled on and we really look forward to adding more over time. It’s limitless.
Co-Optimus: The relics that you collect at the end of the levels provide a nice way to customize your character, along with the purchasable upgrades. Why stop short of customizable/upgradeable skills? Was there a particular vibe you wanted, or one you wanted to avoid? I suppose the other way to ask that is, “Why not make another Diablo clone?”
Dana: We made a very explicit choice to provide our options through collection, not customization. Ultimately, I would argue you have access to as many skills and abilities at any time in our game as you do in any other game, you just need to recalibrate your expectations of where you’re getting them from. A new character gives you two more abilities, a new relic gives you one. At any time, a player can do up to seven different abilities available to them (two characters with two abilities each and three relics) and then can totally swap them 15 minutes later.
Traditional dungeon crawlers give you lots of abilities, but they’re much more restrictive. You pick your class and you usually have a “best” thing to be doing at any given level. As our game goes on, you gain more and more options, all of which are viable depending on how you want to play, your mood, or the challenge you face.
Co-Optimus: What’s been the greatest challenge in developing this game? Has there been any feature that you thought would be easy to implement, or that you wanted to add in, and just couldn’t get it to work quite right?
Dana: There was a lot of trial and error. Any developer who tells you they had a perfect plan on day one and executed it to the letter is probably telling you tall tales. We’ve tried lots of different things before we finally settled on what the game is.
Far and away the toughest thing has been making the abilities “feel right.” It’s an intangible thing, but there’s a lot of voodoo that goes on to make a mace to the face feel like a mace to the face. No one seemed eager to do any real world field tests, so we just kept iterating until everyone thought it felt right… in the game. It’s something we’re constantly working on and includes everything from animators and FX artists all the way to server programmers.
Co-Optimus: So how did you decide upon the different character abilities? Was there something about Abraham Lincoln with a chainsaw that screamed "well he needs to spin around with that"? What does "feel right" mean?
Dana: There are two different parts to that. First there is the design element of what we wanted to accomplish with each character, which I think is what you're getting at here. With Lincoln, we knew he'd be laying into hordes of monsters and easily surrounded, we also wanted a character that could easily "clear a path" so to speak. Functionally, a whirlwind that sends all enemies flying accomplished those design goals. It's also just pretty cool.
The second part is to make each one "feel right" and comes later. Once we were happy with what Lincoln did and how he played, we had to make sure it wasn't just mechanically correct, but also gave you that visceral enjoyment of whatever it was you're doing. It's tough to explain, but it's important that each time you fire a gun or swing a sword that it feel like it has the proper weight behind it. It's one of those things you don't realize when its done right and feels horrible when it's done wrong. There's a lot of art iteration that goes into making every ability have the same impact and it's something we're still working on to this day. With 12 characters, we have a lot of abilities to polish and make sure each feels as good as the next.
Co-Optimus: There’s a lot of humor in the writing/overall setup of the game. How do you know when a joke or piece of writing “works”?
Dana: We set up a lab in our office long before we announced the game and had people come in to play. It was nerve-wracking to watch strangers try and understand your game, but you learn a lot and one of the easiest things to pull out of it was: “Did anyone laugh at our jokes?”
Thankfully, people have generally reacted well to the game’s strange sense of humor and over-reliance on bad puns, so we just kept on keeping on.
Co-Optimus: How did you go about balancing the characters? I noticed that my “go to” picks are often the melee based classes while I keep the ranged ones in reserve as a quick swap out only when needed.
Dana: Again, we did a lot of testing here. We’ve noticed a lot of people tend to gravitate towards favorites, but statistically everyone seems to have a different idea of what their favorite characters are. That’s exactly what we wanted to achieve. This is one of the funniest areas we receive Beta feedback on and probably a lesson in why it’s more important to look at stats over specific comments. Often, in one session, we’ll get two people who proclaim Queen Elizabeth I ridiculously overpowered, while the other two think she’s beyond useless.
The data tends to show the more famous people get a bit more play time, but they’re all within a reasonable range of each other. When we notice that one guy is really lagging behind – Napoleon for example in our earlier Betas – we check up on him. Sure enough, Napoleon was at one point just statistically inferior. We corrected that and things evened out.
At this stage, I think we’ve got a pretty good balance and preference seems to be driven by how each person wants to play, not a feeling that one specific character is so good that they have to play them.
Co-Optimus: What lead to the decision to make a co-op game?
Dana: Fundamentally, that was our goal as a company from day one. A huge chunk of the team has experience in online games and services, so it was a natural fit for us as a group.
From this basis, Second Chance Heroes came about and what we’ve created is a fun game that is infinitely more entertaining with friends. We are actively working on an offline mode, but that’s for the convenience of our users. The best possible experience is with three other people online. It’s a pretty frantic game, but with four characters on the go, it becomes something magically chaotic.
Co-Optimus: The game is currently in beta phase and going through testing and updates. How close is the game to actually being complete and ready for release?
Dana: We have a few more features we want to add. As mentioned, we are working to support an offline mode. The current Beta is “always on,” which is logical for an online game, but we believe that it’s important to give people the freedom to play how they want. That is, after all, how we came to the core idea of collecting and changing characters as you will. So it makes sense to extend that to how you play.
As to release? When it’s ready is so used as to be a cliché, but it’s the truth. Sometime this year, for sure, though.
Co-Optimus: What’s been your experience so far with the Steam Greenlight program? Has it proven to be a good way to get the word out about your game? Are you still planning on releasing the game no matter what?
Dana: Steam Greenlight has been interesting. Obviously, the problems with it have been well documented. It has provided us exposure to thousands of people who may not otherwise know we exist, which has been wonderful, but we also need lots and lots of votes to work our way through that process.
We’ll release the game when it’s ready and whether or not that means on Steam is, to some extent, out of our hands. Our hope is that we can be there at launch, but if it takes some time beyond that, that’s fine too.
Co-Optimus: Once the game is released, do you already have plans in place for what’s next? More characters, new relics, etc?
Dana: We have plenty of ideas, but we also want to see what our users really want. Characters, levels, relics and new gameplay modes are all obvious ways to go that we’d be very interested in, but first we need to get the thing finished and into everyone’s hands, then we’ll worry about DLC.