Interview: Haunted Temple Talks Skulls of the Shogun
By Kyle Mann | July 7, 2011 | Interviews | No comments | Share
Haunted Temple Studios is an upstart independent game development studio, whose first game, turn-based strategy Skulls of the Shogun, is set to be released this year. We got the chance to ask lead designer Jake Kazdal about the game, going independent, and the future for Haunted Temple.
Classic turn-based strategy gameplay with–wait, living dead Samurai!? Where do you guys come up with this stuff?
I’m the artist, lead designer and director, and I lived in Japan for about 5 years altogether, most of it spent working at Sega in Tokyo (worked on Space Channel 5 and Rez, as well as a few others that didn’t make it out.)
I used to spend a lot of time hiking and camping, and my Japanese friends would always tell me we were sleeping on like the site of some huge battle 400 years ago or whatever, and I just couldn’t get these amazing battles in my imagination out of my mind. The very earliest versions of SOTS actually had living Samurai but I figured they’d be way cooler dead!
Skulls of the Shogun has been demoed publicly a few times; has the public’s reaction to the game been up to your expectations?
Public reaction to the game at this point is ridiculously predictable: They play a few rounds, start slobbering, then start attacking me for not being done with it yet because they can’t wait to buy it. I think it features a fresh enough, accessible enough play-style that even people who normally wouldn’t play a strategy game are easily hooked, and people who love strategy games but could do without some of the mind-wracking math and statistics tracking just love it too. And through all the blind testing we’ve done watching people play the game at various trade shows, we’ve been able to focus even more on making the interface as invisible as possible and the entire experience as streamlined and easy to learn as we possibly could.
The members of your team have worked on AAA titles before: why did you decide to leave that development environment to develop games independently?
I’ve had the pleasure of working on some very cool, very cutting edge games, but they are always someone else’s baby and you are always at the whim of the publisher deciding to just cut it or change things, I feel only in independent development (especially at our scale, only 3 full time developers) its a much more streamlined operation, we discuss things between the 3 of us and can execute new ideas almost immediately. It’s incredibly liberating, although its a ton more work because a team of 3 plus a few part time contractors is suddenly doing the work of 40-60 people, only at a smaller scale. Ben Vance and Borut Pfeifer are both engineers, and I’m an artist, and between the 3 of us we handle all the coding, art, gameplay design, most of the animation, PR, business development, marketing, trade shows, story, most of the level design, and manage the sound effects and music being done externally. Its crazy, but super addictive too.
The game has been favorably compared to Nintendo’s Advance Wars series. Would you say this is an apt comparison?
Absolutely. The Advance Wars games are among my very favorite games ever, in fact I would say they would have been my desert island game, until Skulls of the Shogun! When I started planning this game I played a ton of Advance Wars, Shining Force, Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics and more and made a huge list of all the things I loved and all I the things I didn’t like. Thats been my bible ever since. But playing Advance Wars with the animations turned off, on some of the smaller simpler maps, was definitely my biggest inspiration. They do all the basics just right. I wanted SOTS to feel like a spiritual sequel to that franchise, getting rid of some of the old conventions and reinventing as necessary.
What are your plans for post-release support? Is there anything in the cards for DLC or future updates that won’t make the launch date?
We honestly haven’t had time to think about it too much, we’re heads down buried in production right now, we’ve been talking a bit about it and have some pretty good ideas for some new gameplay types that we didn’t have time to incorporate into the main game that I think people will really enjoy and appreciate.
What’s your philosophy on game design? Is there a design rallying cry that’s pushing Skulls of the Shogun progress forward?
I’ve been involved in the games industry since 1989 when I was a Game Counselor at Nintendo during the NES days. I talked to thousands of people over my years there (and later at Irem and Enix) and I think the bottom line is that the game just has to be fun to play, and ideally offer an experience that you haven’t had before. The game needs to be super accessible and as easy for people to jump in and enjoy as humanly possible, while at the same time offering interesting challenges and organic gameplay that allows the player to express themselves, no “one way” to do it. All of the team feel that the big budget stuff is really risk-adverse these days and the experiences are getting harder and harder to tell from each other. I want to make games that make people remember what it was like during the NES, SNES, even Saturn, N64 and PS1 days when there were still a lot of chances being taken and a lot of new mechanics coming to the forefront, that were addictive and just fun to try to master.
Are you all personally fans of the TBS genre? Any favorite games?
As I mentioned above my favorites are Advance Wars and Shining Force. Advance Wars (the first one) is by far my favorite, it was the most streamlined and pure experience of all of them, I don’t agree with their philosophy of just adding more units and more complexity as the series went on.
Do you feel that experience at a AAA company is a must before one jumps into the indie scene, or should people interested in making their own games just dive right in?
I’ve seen huge success stories from both sides of the fence but we all feel our experience working on AAA titles for so long was a *HUGE* benefit for all of us. Understanding the pre-production and production processes and pipelines, design processes, ideation, character design, animation tool engineering, animation pipelines, there are a million lessons all of us learned on someone else’s dime and now its paying off hugely. I wouldn’t want to try to figure all that stuff out with my own money with all the additional stresses already placed on small teams with huge challenges already waiting! But it happens all the time and more power to those guys!
Have you thought about future projects for Haunted Temple, or are you totally focused on kicking SotS out the door at this point?
This project has sort of been my baby, the deal is for the next game we do Borut’s (the lead engineer) project which although has some similarities, is vastly different as well. Expect something very different from us next time! I have a ton of ideas I like to think about late at night, no art yet or anything but some very cool concepts that continue to build on the best of classic gaming mixing in the best of modern AI, animation and 2D visuals!
Thanks for your time, and good luck with Skulls of the Shogun and future projects!
Skulls of the Shogun is set to be released for Windows, Xbox Live Arcade, and mobile platforms this year. Be sure to stay tuned to DeltaGamer for ongoing coverage of the game.
