Interview: Philippe Rapin, co-founder Press Start Studio
Interviews — By Jeffrey L. Wilson on December 30, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Twin Blades: The Reaping Vanguard has hacked and slashed its way into Xbox Live Indie Games to give gamers a taste of nun-with-gun action. The impressive anime-style visuals have gathered attention both here and abroad, so I thought it time to chat it up with Press Start Studio to discuss the creation of this eye-catching game.
Press Start Studio was founded in 2009, so your team is still relatively fresh. Tell us a bit about how your team came together.
Although Press Start Studio was founded in 2009 the team has actually been working together for quite a while: we are all ex-employees of The Mighty Troglodytes, a mobile game developer which bankrupted in 2008. When TMT shut down we decided to try our luck with the promise to set ourselves free from two things: J2ME and publishers’ ludicrous constraints.
Twin Blades is one of those games that instantly pulls you in thanks to the amazing 2D, anime-inspired character designs. Why did you decide to go that route–are you fans of the Japanese style?
Japanime is a big thing in France, and we’re no exception. We particularly liked Samurai Champloo because it mixed contemporary hip-hop music with a traditional medieval environment and we wanted the same kind of punchy feeling. We also liked Odin Sphere and Muramasa so when Doc our animator told us he could use the same animation technique we all jumped in and told him: “by all means please do!”
Mako our concept artist happens to be a comic book illustrator, as he particularly excels in the manga style and we’re all fans of his work there was no debate as to which route we should go –it pretty much came naturally as the artists had the freedom to express their talent and the whole team backed them up.
The lead character is an insanely cute, but badass, nun with a gun and blades. What was the inspiration to cast such a character in the lead role?
I probably shouldn’t tell you that, but the idea to use a cute nun came from an old Italian porn movie recorded at the end of a VHS I accidentally stumbled upon while excavating some old stuff. It is kind of taboo to admit watching VHS in 2009 and I have no excuse for that, but I immediately liked the idea of a sexy nun because it’s the most vibrant personification of the forbidden fruit – and then imagination kicked in and I shaped a nice background for the character which the team approved without any reserve.
Unfortunately the nun’s background isn’t reflected much in Twin Blades currently as we had to drop the storyline for production reasons, but I haven’t lost hope to get it back in the game to give the nun the deeper personality she deserves.
Twin Blades was originally an iPhone game that was then ported to the Xbox’ Indie Marketplace. How much development time went into creating the iPhone original? What was the process like in porting it the Xbox 360?
We created the iPhone version in slightly less than 3 months, but we had to build our own graphic engine and development pipelines from scratch. We could have been more productive if we had used a middleware such as Shiva 3D or Unity, but then that would have made the XBLIG port much tougher than it has been: only a fraction of the low-level code was in objective C, so we could keep most of the code for the Xbox version as is. As a result the XBLIG version barely took 6 weeks of work!
2009 was a banner year for 2D and 2.5D games such as Street Fighter IV, BlazBlue, King of Fighters XII, Shadow Complex and others. Why do you think it was such a banner year for that style of play?
I think you need to differentiate between 2D gameplay-wise and 2D graphic-wise: in SFIV for instance characters are modeled in 3D although the gameplay doesn’t use depth whilst in BlazBlue characters are only in 2D and it gives them a certain charm 3D models could never achieve.
There has been such a craze when the first 3D titles came out 15 years ago and it seemed like every man and his dog wanted 3D games and most publishers followed that trend. Unsurprisingly, history repeated itself on mobile devices: as soon as the newest hardware could support 3D we’ve witnessed a massive shift from pixel art to cheap 3D only because its supposed to be sharp.
Don’t get me wrong, there are very good-looking 3D models and games like Shadow Complex are pristine examples of attractive 3D, but if I’m given a choice between a low-poly 3D model and a not-so-detailed hand-drawn character I’ll personally go for the latter, not just because of nostalgeek but because I find it more appealing. When I see games like Spelunky or Pixel! I’m glad that there are still some devs who take that route.
What’s next for Press Start Studio? Are you planning on following up Twin Blades with another title in the near future?
We’re planning on following up with Twin Blades first. We are currently developing a number of updates for the game that will include additional content such as bosses, new environments, more animations and maybe even a storyline. We’ll offer these DLC for free to players who have bought the game as a reward to early fans who’ve been supporting since the beginning, but we’ll raise the price of the game once the new content is available.
Once we are done with Twin Blades and if we haven’t died of hunger we’ll switch onto another game, although we haven’t decided on any yet as we want to stay focused on the updates.
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