Our first Indie Interviews article is with the creators of Rumble Box, a simple, yet highly addictive fighting game, where your goal is to build enough height by piling up the bodies of your box-like foes in order to get out of a box.

Sound’s interesting, no? Well, in this interview we’ll not only get to see how the idea came about, but also their take on cheats within games, as well as what setbacks this small project faced.

As with every interview, our questions are in bold. Patrick and Joe’s names are also in bold to make things a bit more readable.

So who are you and how did you get into the game industry?

Patrick: I grew up playing games, couldn’t see myself doing anything else, so I went to school for it. I graduated from The DigiPen Institute of Technology in May, 2005, and now work for Rainbow Studios in Phoenix, AZ.

Joe: I have been making games in some form or another for as long as I can remember. Ever since I got my first Atari 5200 at 4 years old I knew that I wanted to make video games for a living. When I was a kid, I spent way too much time making mazes and designing levels for imaginary games on paper. As soon as I got my first computer in 7th grade (a TI-94A from a local school auction) I started learning to program in BASIC. In high school I taught myself C++ and DirectX, and finished my education at DigiPen Institute of Technology. So while some people might call me a newbie, I’d call it my life’s work! :)

What was your part in Rumble Box?

P: I did half the design for the game, the physics engine, the animation engine, all animations, all level scripts, and miscellaneous other programming.

J: Having such a small team (only two people) meant that nearly every part of Rumble Box was touched by both of us at one point or another. However, my major jobs with Rumble Box were in the game design (along with Patrick), the graphics engine (and all of the culling/optimizing hell that comes with putting 7500 tiny blocks on the screen), the enemy AI, and the context-sensitive combat system. I also organized focus tests and pulled various marketing stunts in the hopes that word would spread about our game (such as assembling and distributing hundreds of copies to GDC attendees).

Rumble Box is a very interesting game, what was the inspiration behind it?

P: I was watching a friend of mine play a Lord of the Rings game for the PS2 and we were discussing how the game would be better if dead enemies didn’t disappear This would create a real sense of battling through a major war and slaying hundreds of enemies. I made a comment on how a game could display hundreds of dead enemies if they were created with simple enough objects so that the processor could handle drawing them all. That’s about it; the idea was there, all I needed to do was create a game out of it.

How many people worked on Rumble Box and for how long?

J: From concept to completion, Rumble Box was nearly 16 months in the making. It was only the two of us (Patrick and myself), so there was a lot of work to be done. At one point in preproduction we had a third team member but he had to leave for medical reasons.Though to give credit where credit is due, we had over 60 focus testers at all levels of development, and I give their feedback much of the credit for the game being as fun as it is.

Where do you want to take this next?

J: Rumble Box was a school project, so all of the rights are owned by DigiPen; however, this game was never designed with “commercial success” in mind. My goal with Rumble Box was to create a game that showcased our talents as game developers and to make a name for ourselves as game designers. Currently, we are running a Rumble Box High Score Tournament to try and get the name out there. I think the next step for Rumble Box is the Slamdance and IGF festivals. We are currently working on a few unannounced projects that will be our foray into the commercial indie market.

How long did Rumble Box take to produce (from concept to finished product)?

P: Even though Joe said we’ve been working on it for the past 16 months, the concept to finished product was really more in the range of a year. We’ve taken time off here an there.

What setbacks did you encounter in the project, and how did you overcome them?

J: Due to careful planning and organizing, there were few major setbacks during development. The first setback was when we lost a team member; however, this was still during the design phase, and he hadn’t written any code yet. We went back through our design and pared it down to the essentials to decrease the amount of work needed. Looking back, I feel that most of what was cut at that point would have been cut later in development anyway after spending significant time developing it. Also, early in the project we decided that OpenGL wasn’t going to give us what we needed for the rendering pipeline, so I had to port the entire engine to DirectX (about a week and a half of work), but in the end this may have saved time because of how easy it is to optimize DirectX code. Also, we learned about the Slamdance festival a week before the deadline, and we chose to rush the game to an alpha state in order to submit. This caused some dirty hacks in the UI system, some of which are still haunting us. Finally, one of the most time consuming (yet rewarding) setbacks was during our Beta focus test, when the majority of people had the response “this just doesn’t have any lasting appeal.” The final month was spent adding the new level progression scheme and the bonus levels, and another month was spent on challenge mode. The bonus levels became many players’ favorite part of the game, and hopefully with the recent release of challenge mode the games life will be extended even further.

P: Talk, talk, talk. I’ve got nothing more to add. :)

Are there any other cheats, aside from the cape and bonus levels (like, oh, infinite health)?

J: I’m not a big fan of cheats that make the game easier (such as infinite health). I believe that a well balanced difficulty curve will keep anyone from getting frustrated enough to have to use a cheat. Therefore, we spent a lot of time making sure that the game was never too easy or too difficult for the player, instead of just allowing them to cheat. The cape was just a fun addition that Patrick did one day while he was waiting on my code. The bonus level cheat was actually added for testing, but I wanted to leave it in because the game was meant to be a showpiece and some of the best gameplay and graphics were in the bonus stages.

P: I disagree with Joe’s first line 100%. I believe it’s up to the player to decide how to play a game, and any cheats make a game more fun. Nothing you haven’t mentioned is coded into Rumble Box (as far as infinite health), but you can have a great time messing around with our data files.

Finally, what was the final Sobe/Pizza consumption rate for producing the game? :)

J: Sobe and Pizza? Students don’t have the money for food that fancy :) I would like to think, though, that my hot dog/Coke purchases singlehandedly kept the local 7-11 from going belly-up.

P: Agreed.

Thanks again to Patrick and Joe. And, if you have not, go check out Rumble Box, it’s a great game made by two very talented people.

Provided by Geekstreak, but we’d really like to thank Joe for the verabge ;)