Interview: Roque Rey from Coffee Powered Machine on Upcoming Game Okhlos - Article
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 15 July 2016 / 6,752 Views
While strategy games have had something of a comeback in recent years, most still utilise the tried and tested formula of controlling your troops from afar. Not so with Okhlos, a strategy game which puts you in the middle of the fray so you can indulge in some crazy and manic fun. With Okhlos due to be released sometime later this year, I caught up with Roque Rey, the artist and designer of the game, to find out a bit more about Coffee Powered Machine's weird and wonderful upcoming title.
Hi all at Coffee Powered Machine! Thank you for taking the time to talk about your latest creation, Okhlos.
So first off, Okhlos has an interesting and unusual name. Where did the title come from and what does it mean?
Thank you for the interest in Okhlos! Okhlos actually means 'mob' in Greek. We found out that it means mob in both classical and modern Greek. The word was used by Polybius as a modification of Aristotle's impure forms of government for demagogy. Basically ochlocracy means rule of the mob. So we know that it's not a word that's very commonly used, but that some people can get it from the given context. Actually, the project name started simply as Angry Mob, but we knew that we wanted something more powerful. The only small regret we have is that almost nobody knows where to put the H in Okhlos.
During my playtime I found that the game was truly manic; at times I was even unsure where my character was amongst the crowd. Is it hard developing gameplay based around so many elements on screen at once?
Yes it is! We spent most of the development time trying to figure out the gameplay and how to communicate it clearly to the player. As an artist, if I want to say, for example, a unit is healed, in most games I would throw out some green life + signs, or something like that, and it's very clear. But when you have more than 50 units on screen, you can’t simply throw effects and hope it works.
We have to be very economical in regards of how many effects we use at any given time. For example, the life gauges of the units are only displayed when their HP reaches 50% or less. You don't want to have tons of life gauges dancing on screen all the time. We had to cheat a little regarding the mob leader. We used some on-screen effects when the player is getting hit, and dramatic pauses when the current leader dies.
Mostly, all of this feedback comes from long playtesting sessions. We see a lot of people playing the game at expos, or we invite people that have never played the game before to our offices and see how they play. That can be tremendously enlightening for us.
Your mix of 2D and 3D sprites is a treasure to behold whilst playing. Was it a technical decision to go for 3D buildings, or an artistic one?
Thanks! It was mostly an artistic choice. When we started the project, I knew I wanted to mix 3D and 2D and see where it goes. In the end, it might have been a good choice! Adding new characters can be done relatively quickly, because most of the characters have animations with low fps count (like 0.2 seconds per frame). And doing environments in 3D works very well, giving you a sense of depth. All of the buildings are low poly, so we can have tons of structures on screen at relatively low performance cost. Adding small details to the buildings in pixel art also helps to reinforce the aesthetics.
Also, this way we can add fracturing systems to the structures and see the chunks running wild when the mob destroys them!
The ability to trade sets of units for one great person between areas was a good idea - one which reminds me a lot of The Binding of Isaac giving you an item on each floor. Where did this idea come from?
When we started the game, we didn't know exactly where we were going. We knew our game had a mob and it was a 3D/2D thing, but that was it. We started developing the core mechanics of the game, like attacking and defending, but we didn't have a main loop. We tried LOTS of things; we did an exercise once where we chose a genre and started explore it, to see what happened. For instance, at one point we tried to make a stealth game with the mob, where the bigger the mob, the more difficult it was! It was kinda elegant design wise, but we didn't really want to do a stealth game. We wanted visceral action and we discovered right from the start that destroying things simply clicks - it’s like we are wired to feel satisfaction when we destroy little virtual things!
We struggled a lot before having the main core of Okhlos, which is procedurally generated levels. Actually, the first prototypes were all procedurally generated, but then we switched to fixed, hand-made levels. We did all the experiments I mentioned before and then we came back to procedurally generated content but with another approach, which is the one we have in the game right now.
Having said this, The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky were our main inspirations at one point. We never looked to Pikmin or Wonderful 101 because we didn't want to get tainted by how they do things regarding flocking.
Heroes were another thing that we had almost since day one. We knew that it was probably one of the funniest things in the game, but we wanted to dosificate the amount of heroes you can grab. Also, we always had in mind that you should be able to choose how your mob feels and behaves, so instead of throwing you a random hero, you can choose from a small list which type of hero you want. You can focus on sheer numbers and always buy the ones that increase your mob size, or you can choose to increase stats, or have unique abilities.
The main inspiration we drew from TBoI is that every time you play, the game feels different because of how drastically items change your gameplay, and that's what we wanted for the mob (we might have started doing that even before playing TBoI).
The story and characters are rather charming and made me laugh a few times. Was it always your intention to make a funny and amusing game?
Yes! We love silly humor, and the concept of the game was to make something very anarchic and weird and quirky. From day one we relied on humor very heavily. We would have loved to add even more, and not rely only on text to do jokes. We might have slipped a few gags in here and there, but because of the way each level is generated, we couldn't really design around it. Some jokes in the game might not be some LOL moments, but if you smile a bit when we say something funny, we consider that we did a good job.
We drew a lot from Monty Python and British humour in general, where the whole situation is absurd and funny, but you don't get a punch line.
When we started adding text entries to the encyclopedia, we really tried to add as many jokes as we could and that was a challenge, considering how messed up Greek mythology can be!
There are small things that we love, like adding small random stats to every unit in the game. Besides normal stats like attack or HP, a unit might have a 9 on Photobombing. These are very subtle things that we don't throw on the player's face, but are there and make us smile.
