Everybody Was Castle Crashing: An Interview With The Behemoth

Do you love Castle Crashers?  How about Alien Hominid?  Yup, so do we!  That’s why we were uber-excited to see this trailer for The Behemoth’s as-yet untitled Game 3 on their dev blog.  We were SO excited, in fact, that it spurred us to ask a few questions, and guess what?  Turns out these folks are pretty much as cool as their games would lead you to expect.  Hit the jump to find out what they have to say.

1.  What companies and other influences have most affected the look and design of your games?

Tom: One of my biggest personal influences is Treasure, the creators of Gunstar Heroes and Radiant Silvergun. I love the way their games feel, so I try to capture that magic in my own work. It’s a lot to live up to, though!

2.  How has your experience developing each game helped with the next one?  Did you learn any valuable lessons that you were able to carry over?

Dan: Yeah. After Alien Hominid, we decided to make our designs a little more accessible in general. Taking it to tradeshows gave us an insight that we were headed in the right direction. Our latest game is super accessible but still provides a lot of challenge. We like to think that the challenge we provide is in a better spot than before.

3.  You’ve gone on record as being against paid DLC for your games.  What solutions have you come up with for that problem?

Kelly: Well, while we were hoping we could offer the King Pack DLC for free, ultimately setting the price is not our call.  One thing we did recently was buy thousands of our own DLC codes and gave them all away. We try to provide nice things for the nice people who bought our game as much as possible!

John:  I just wanted to note that for some DLC it makes sense to charge. If we were to make a little 3-part additional story stuff with new content like brand new characters and never seen before maps we’d probably want to charge something for it.

4.  How did you get your start as a company?  Did any of you know each other before you started?

Kelly: Dan worked with Tom on the original Alien Hominid Flash game. And John and Dan worked together at a game studio.  And one day the three of them got together and it was magical and they had a baby and it was a giant chicken baby and The Behemoth was born.

5.  Do you have any plans to expand the company?

Dan: sure, but not by a lot. We will always maintain a manageable size so we can roll with the punches.

6.  Do you prefer to work on disc-based games or downloadable ones?  Why did you decide to move from one to the other?

Dan: We like downloadable a lot because everybody wins. Gamers pay less, they get it instantly, there’s no real overhead other than development for us to pay. And it will be around forever (as long as the service is maintained).

Tom: It’s definitely great to cut out the middlemen. You don’t have to worry about what sort of creative accounting a publisher might be doing, and you don’t get taken for a ride by the retail market. If you walk into a store and ask to buy a game, they will try to sell you a used copy for a few bucks less. They have huge profit margins on used games so they try to flip them as much as possible, while the developer doesn’t see a dime from all the sales.

7.  What have you found to be the benefits of having a smaller team?  The limitations?

Dan: Benefits: Less communication is needed to keep everyone in the loop. It’s easier for everyone on the team to understand what everyone else is doing. The company is more agile in times of recession because there is a lower burn rate. And you don’t have to remember as many birthdays.

Limitations: It’s harder to create the sheer amount of content as you would with a bigger team, because everyone has to do more. But that’s not really a limitation; it just spreads people a little more thin.

8.  What are your thoughts on the OnLive model of gaming?

Kelly:  We don’t really have an opinion on OnLive just yet…

9.  Do you ever look at internet chatter about your games? If so, why, and does it help you?  If not, why not?

Dan: I like to look at everything, and I try to think of it as an overall picture, rather than individual messages.  It helps us keep in mind what everyone is thinking about what we are doing.

Kelly: I follow as much of this stuff as I can! We pay a lot of attention to what people are saying, and it helps us make better games, because we are more in touch with what people like (and dislike) about our previous titles, and what they are hoping for in the future from us.  We also have our own forums, where people can give us direct feedback and ask the development team about stuff.   It has been particularly interesting to see everyone’s speculations on Game 3…

10.  What games (aside from your own) do you all play?

Dan: Starcraft. I like Team Fortress 2 a lot. I like to play Burnout Paradise and race around on a motorcycle to classical music.

Tom: I like Gears of War and Street Fighter although I mostly just play web games nowadays.

John: Starcraft and wacky Japanese puzzle games.

11.  When you’re not playing games, what other hobbies do you like to pursue?

Dan: rockclimbing

Tom: Running, although I never get that good at it.

John: Recreational bronze casting and rockclimbing with Dan.

12.  Did you ever expect Castle Crashers to be the success that it has become?

Dan: I expected it to do ok, I don’t think anyone knew it would have this many players. I mean, we all wanted it to, but we didn’t really expect it. It’s a really nice feeling though, because after all the really hard work for three years, it’s validating, that we’ve been spending our time on the right thing.

John: With over 800,000 players on the Castle Crasher leaderboards, it’s a really hopeful sign that smaller developers can survive in this market.

13.  What are your feelings on violence in video games?  Given that your games are generally super-violent, but feature a more “cartoony” style, do you think that the rules are different, so to speak?

Dan: I don’t think of them as that violent because it is so stylized. I grew up with games where you chopped heads off, and beat people with swords on the Atari ST. and those games had blood man, blood everywhere. When I think about our games, they have this humor that a lot of those old games did not have. The violence that takes place in our games is more lighthearted and funny.

14.  Regarding Game 3, have you decided whether it will be multiplatform?  Are you planning to stick with the download only model?

Dan: We want it to be mutiplatform. But we really don’t have any official information on this yet.

John: We are licensed developers for Wii, PS3, and Xbox360 so we hope to see all of our products one day on all platforms. I suspect the new game will be download only, since small developers can’t really survive off retail games the way it works now.

15.  What else can you tell us about Game 3 at this point?

Dan: its fun!

16. How do you feel about the Microsoft certification process for downloadable content?  Did it impact your development cycle and the final product when you were working on Castle Crashers?  What is it like to deal with this while trying to get a patch out?

Dan: I just draw stuff.

John: We really like working with our direct contact points at Microsoft. The people on the ground that we have had the luck to work with really like making games, which makes it easier for us to do our work. There’s been a lot of talk in the community about certification, and certification for downloadable games is such a different animal than for retail titles. Throw in online multiplayer certification and things get a bit more complicated than a simple retail title. It just takes time. And patience. Lots of it. And coffee. Lots of it.

17. Any thoughts of making games in other genres?

Dan:  Every game we make is a different genre. We just randomly decide.

Tom: I have an itch to tackle the side scrolling shooter genre… Eventually.

18.  Why did you settle on working with Microsoft only for Castle Crashers?

Dan: We first put Castle on 360 because that is where most people are.

19.  What was different between your test cycle and eventual release play that caused the issues you saw in Castle Crashers online play?  How has this experience changed your development and testing cycle?

John: I’m sure Microsoft and their test vendor now have a series of new test cases which sprang from the development of Castle Crashers. It kind of makes us proud that our fans were doing stuff with our game that no one had ever thought of doing with their 360 in a test environment. The best example is one of the save game state problems. In a test environment, you don’t swap harddrives because there is no need to. But in the real world, reviewers would download the game to their work 360, then take the hard drive home with them at night to keep playing the game. And doing so they’d lose all their data.    So that type of new use of the hardware was challenging. For Castle, six months before the August launch of the game we hired our own group of testers independent from MS and their test vendor, a first for an independent developer. For the next game we’ll have a larger test group to complement all the other testing going on and we have a much better idea of how gamers use their 360’s. But I think if you look at retail and XLA games which look a lot longer to fix (or were never fixed) we did pretty well with Castle getting fixed in only four months.

20.  Related to that last question were you able to start working on Game 3 while Castle Crashers was still in development?

Dan: I was working on Game 3 on the weekends, before Castle was ever done.

John: We are always prototyping and thinking about ideas, it is hard not to.

21. Cake or Pie?

Dan:  Cake. Birthday Cake.

Tom: Cake!

John: Pecan pie.

Kelly: Rum! I mean.. cake. I mean rum-cake!