Cletus Clay

Anthony Flack - Project Director, lead designer and lead artist.

Alex Amsel – Project Producer and gameplay programmer.

Anthony: I owned an Amstrad CPC at a time when everyone else had a Commodore 64. Since I couldn’t pirate games like everyone else (I had trouble even finding shops that stocked CPC games, let alone people I could swap games with), I started programming my own ones instead. I’d go into an arcade and spend my two dollars, then go home and hack together some nonsense on the computer that was loosely inspired by what I’d seen. I used to draw up sprites on bits of graph paper and code them in. This was back in the ‘80s, when games magazines had programming features and code listings in the back. I collected all the feature articles that showed you how to do nifty things like raster splits and fast sprite blitting and speech sampling from the datacassette input, and put them to use making stupid little games. Programming resources were a lot harder to come by in the days before the internet so those magazines were really my only source of information.

Alex: I grew up with the BBC Micro, a somewhat peculiar British 8-bit machine. It wasn’t great for games but did spawn the wonderful Elite from David Braben. It was a wonderful machine to learn to program on and games were much more interesting to write than whatever we learned in school. A few years later I persuaded my dad to buy an Amiga because, “it will be educational.” Of course, what I actually meant was, “I can play lots of games.” The Amiga was inspirational but not just because of some great games; there was no better way to learn to code than to write demo scene effects.

Alex: Most publishers are retreating into a world of retail and licenses more than ever before. Some have tried to innovate with mixed success, but the truth is that they overspend on new products then act surprised when they don't usually go on to be a major hit.

Indies can afford to try new things, to grow more organically. Platforms like Xbox LIVE Arcade, WiiWare and PlayStation Network, for all their faults, are still good for commercially minded independents. The large publishers are backing away from them because they don't understand how to make games for these audiences.

Outside of console the PC and web environment will continue to be an amazing area for innovation in 2009.

Anthony: To me, the most vital element of indie game development isn't innovation per se, it's the ability to be idiosyncratic; to express the individual personalities and proclivities of their creators. I think we're now moving beyond the point where game evolution is principally defined by technological advances, it's becoming much more about what you choose to do with the medium. And there are now so many more games to choose from, being blatantly individualistic is a good way to differentiate your games from everybody else's. As well as being a good thing in general.

This is the point in games' evolution where games go off to university, get a funny haircut and start experimenting with drugs and reading philosophy paperbacks. And some of them will get terribly pretentious, but that's part of the process of figuring out what games in the 21st century are supposed to be like. I don't know how the economic situation will impact on any of that, but I feel like that is where we are at, artistically. Indie games will continue to be provocative and challenge our assumptions.

Anthony: Actually I did create something vaguely similar on the CPC many, many years ago. Well, I say similar, but it wasn’t really a proper game – it was just this animated sprite of an old farmer with a shotgun and he was going to be shooting aliens but I never got that far – back in those days I’d just start and stop things on a whim; it didn’t really matter since nobody else ever got to see any of it. And then years later, when I was kicking around ideas for my next game, for some reason he came to mind and I just decided to go with it. I guess I still do things on a whim, but these days I try to see them through to completion. It takes forever though… a spur-of-the-moment decision that leads to years of commitment. It could have just as easily been something else. I’m not really a “big concept” designer, for me it’s more about the craft.

Alex: Other than the obvious - how to create an action game using stop-frame animation, it’s actually been very tricky technically. Anthony wanted to give the visuals some depth so we’ve spent a lot of time working out how to achieve that without taking away from the gameplay or the photos which are essentially used for all the artwork. Somehow we have to keep the visuals in sync and this has been tremendously difficult, particularly where many background elements are meshed. For example, games use real time shadowing and lighting but we have a combination of this and the shadows naturally found on the model photos.

Anthony: I always liked the look of it. I did a bit of stop-motion animation while I was at university, and later I worked freelance for a while, doing stop-motion TV commercials on ludicrously tight budgets and deadlines. It was pretty dispiriting work. I also had an interest in game development, so I decided I would rather use animation to make games than crummy TV ads.

Anthony: The animation process itself is pretty much the same as making stop-motion animation for film, although you have a few extra things to consider: the animation is non-linear, for example, which means that you have to make sure that all the different animation sequences you make for a character link into each other smoothly. There are a few key frames in the animation of any character, like the standing frame and crouching frame, that the other animation sequences branch out from and must return to again at the end. Since everything is shot separately, we also have to make sure that all the elements look unified when we assemble them together - keeping the lighting consistent is particularly important.

However, shooting everything separately also means that I only have to deal with one element at a time, and I don't have to worry about the background. When doing animation for film, you creep around in constant fear of accidentally bumping something in the background that's not supposed to move - or worst of all, the camera itself. A single careless elbow could ruin a whole day's work. Shooting every element individually isn't quite as scary, although it still feels like a high-wire act at times.

Anthony: I would have spent more time looking into ways to get the 2d photographs extruded into 3d. I probably should have learned to use proper 3d modeling software to build the assets, instead of just going with the ratty little editor I built to test the concept with. But time was short and I was scared that Alex was going to insist we do the sensible thing and make it a more conventional 2d sprite game. I really wanted to take it further than that, so I was all like, “We can’t not do this. We’ll fix any problems as we go along and make it work”. And of course there have been problems, and extra stress and extra work, but it looks so much better than it would have done in flat planes, so I’m not sorry.

Alex: Sticking to a flat 2d game would definitely have been much easier and quicker, that’s for sure. I love the look we have now, but I think the audience will have to decide if it was the right thing to do. If we get an audience that is! It has certainly made development of an already long-due project even longer.

Anthony: I started the game in my spare time as a hobby project, and I chipped away at it for about four years. It got to the point where people were starting to take an interest in it, although by then the market had changed, and it was apparent that the game’s natural home was as a downloadable console game. But it wasn’t multiplayer, it wasn’t high-definition, it wasn’t coded in a language that could easily be ported across to other systems, and it was going to require some major remodeling. I teamed up with the Tuna people and we re-worked the whole design and basically started again from scratch. It was a hell of a lot of work, spending years polishing what turned out to be just a prototype, but I guess it proved that I was capable of doing the job.

Alex: I’ve been working at it in one form or another for 2 years. We still have a few months left but we’ve got the core work behind us. Most of what we’re doing now is about gameplay and polish.

Alex: Clay, clay, and more clay. Other than that, we’ve used various custom tools and a custom level editor. The game is written using C++, tools sometimes in C# or Blitz Basic, and Anthony’s original work was all Blitz Basic.

Anthony: I wanted to make a platform game that was really fast-paced, straightforward, and with lots of action. One with a freewheeling quality, where you are forced to improvise with whatever is on hand, picking up, using and discarding weapons as you go. A proper arcade game that encourages score-attack and time-attack. A funny game with a ridiculous scenario and over-the-top cartoon violence. Beautifully polished, but also deeply stupid as only a video game can be. The game is kind of at the assembly stage right now, and you can never be completely sure if it will fire on all cylinders until you can really get in there and play it properly, but with any luck it’s going to be one big, anarchic pie fight.

Alex: I’ve worked on a lot of similar games before, some good and some not so good. The best one was Alien Hominid; it was a real pleasure to work with Behemoth on that. Like their awesome follow up Castle Crashers, I’d like to think that Cletus is a game for almost anyone; a game that you can just have fun with, laugh out loud at the visuals or that you can go for broke on. Also, as Anthony knows, I’m enjoying the two player action on Cletus immensely. I’m quite intent on Cletus and Emmett not seeing eye to eye on everything. Even co-op mode can be competitive…

Anthony: This is my first time developing a game as part of a team. When you're working alone you can pretty much get away with making it up as you go along; you can work on whatever part of the game you feel like, and follow it wherever it leads you. Working as part of a commercial team I've had to take a much more structured approach, and that's no bad thing. I could probably do with more of it. But I think I'll have a much better idea of how that process works next time I try to write a design document.

Alex: Yes. Making games out of clay is ridiculously hard and takes far too long. Don’t do it! Although, I must say that it is a lot of fun too.

Anthony: Some money, with any luck. And then I’ll get to pick a new stupid idea to dedicate myself to.

Alex: Sleep followed by a long overdue holiday. Then another ridiculous clay project I hope ?