TIGS loves the coc- Immortals!

Posted by Lorne Whiting Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:14:00 GMT

Interview with Rinkuhero of Immortal Defense fame, about Immortal Defense.

I'm kind of interested in who John Thornton is... perhaps, he and Rinku are mating partners!

1: The story is known as one of the best parts of Immortal Defense, where'dja get your inspiration for it and why did you put a story in a Tower Defense game?

The story was actually written by John Thornton, not me -- we did outline it together though. I decided to put a story in a tower defense game because games without a story seem hollow and pointless to me. I'm not saying the story is the most important aspect of a game, just that when it's absent or lacking, it brings down the rest of the game.

When I play a normal tower defense game I'm thinking: What am I defending? What are these things that I'm killing thousands upon thousands of? Why am I doing it? What's the point? Why aren't they fighting back, and just marching along like lemmings? Where are they coming from, why are they doing this? The story in Immortal Defense provides answers to those types of questions, so it doesn't leave a player wondering why they are doing what they are doing.

2: Did you intend to make me feel like a really bad person with the story of chapter 5?

Again, you're better off asking the writer of the story. I just asked him, and he replied "Hahaha, yes." If a person briefly felt that they were a bad person for killing things all day, even though they realized it was necessary, that's a bonus. I think violence in games can be fun, but I don't think that violence is accurately portrayed in games. It's accurate in terms of the methods of violence and sometimes even what violence looks like, but most games are inaccurate in terms of the results of violence. I'd like to see more games about the other aspects of violence.

3: The game seems, at least to those of us that did not know of you before, to have come out of nowhere. How much time did you spend making it?

We spent just under six months on it. I don't think it came out of nowhere though; a preview was posted on Indygamer (one of the largest independent game blogs) about halfway through its development. Six months is a record for me, most of my games take far longer (except for contest games that I intentionally made in 2 days).

4: What are your favorite points in the game or strategies? Personally, my favorite is a level 7 fear with a level 7 ortho nearby.

My favorite Point in the game is the Love Point, but that's solely because of the secret ending to the game (in Hellspace). Strategy-wise my favorite is the Strategist Point, especially at level 7, but I think they all work together and have their uses, none is underpowered over overpowered as far as I can see (people have said that, but it hasn't been consistent, there's no one Point that people universally feel is the best or the worst). But the Fear + Ortho combination you mention is really great, and works in most situations.

5: Where'd the designs for the points come from? Seems kind of odd, how we have a bunch of emotion based ones, ala Fear, Love, or Courage, then we have things like Lovecraftian squid beasts called Cut points or the all powerful brain in a jar Danmaku.

They came out of wanting to make each dissimilar to any tower type in any tower defense game, and distinct from each other. Cut is symbolic of decision-making (note the similarity between the words decision and incision), and Danmaku is symbolic of universal understanding, so I do think all the Points are aspects of the mind.

Roughly, their progression represents the progression of feelings we have when we are defending something: first we Fear what will happen to that which we defend, then we gain Courage, we think about what to do (Ortho), we decide to take action (Cut), and so on, and finally, at the end, we change our mind (Turning) and then gain understanding (Danmaku).

6: Were there any problems during development? Any show-stopping things that made you want to give up?

Yes and no. There were problems, there are going to be problems with any game that anyone makes. At one point there were random crashes that hard-crashed most of the computers in the world, except the ones I had access to, which was difficult to fix (though I finally did after a few weeks). There were also endless arguments within the team about my bizarre tastes (for instance, rejecting music or art which seemed great to the musician and artist but didn't sit well with me). That's probably the hardest part of being a director of a game, having to tell someone that something they worked on all day doesn't work and they have to redo it. But no, I never felt like giving up.

7: The game seems very abstract. Almost black background, random lines flying every which way, people speaking... The way they do. Was this all a conscious decision or was it more like "yeah, man, lets have some fuck'n LINES protruding out of this part"?

Yes. It's intentionally that way. If you look at the other games on our site, you'll see that we are capable of some pretty good pixel art too, so it's not just that we were lazy, it's that I felt that a game like this required the visual style it had. I spent over three weeks just on the "weather effects", those little floating things that fly around and look weird (you can see a variety of them on the title screen), trying to get them right. If you notice, there's some tie-in between those effects and the storyline; for instance, there are some protruding lines in a level called Sunlight, which point from all parts of the level to the corner of the level, and when you place down a Point, they instead point at that Point. The effects will go unnoticed by most people, but I think it has a subconscious effect.

8: I heard you're in favor of clinical immortality. That must be interesting. What do you think society (I guess your local society, if you think it's relative) would need before they would accept immortality on a whole?

Well, think about it this way: a hundred years ago the average age that people lived to was about 30. Now it's about 70. We more than doubled our lifespans in a very short amount of time, and nobody really had any problem accepting it, I'm not even sure most people think about how amazing it is that the average human lifespan doubled over the last hundred years. I think that if it were to double again or even increase by ten, the same thing will be true, people will just accept it and not even notice it.

It's not going to come all at once, you won't wake up and hear on the news "Okay, you don't have to die anymore," it's going to be far more gradual, people will live to 100 on average, then 200 on average, then 1000 on average. And people will always be able to be killed by accidents or murder, clinical immortality doesn't mean you can't die, it just means you won't get old. But this is best explained by people actually in the field, I recommend this video for those who are interested.

9: What's it like being (cough cough) rich and famous, now?

Well, my share of the game's earnings is only about $800 after three weeks, so it's still less than having a minimum wage job. And that's assuming it keeps up, which it may not (or it may go up, who knows). But it's pretty high as far as indie games go, and selling better than I thought it would.

As for fame, I'll have to say I'm used to people paying attention to me either positively or negatively online: I was one of the more famous people in the Ohrrpgce community (a game creation program), due to running a magazine for it, there's actually an entire LiveJournal community devoted to making fun of me that has existed for years, there's a page on Portal of Evil for a likewise purpose. A good-sized messageboard has been known to use my name as a curse word -- I am not kidding. Compared to those, a little more attention among a few independent game developers isn't too hard to handle.

10: Last but not least, when's the release date?

The release date of Immortal Defense? It was June 1, 2007. Or do you mean the release date of my next game? We don't know yet, optimistically it'll be early 2008.