Topic: Rage of the Gladiator Interview with Ed Roman

[NWR_Neal]

Ghostfire Games' CEO Ed Roman talks to us about "casual core," their development process, and more.To celebrate today's release of Ghostfire Games' second WiiWare title, Rage of the Gladiator, we chatted with the company's CEO Ed Roman.

Rage of the Gladiator is a fantasy-based first-person fighting game that takes advantage of Wii MotionPlus. For more information, read our preview.


Nintendo World Report (NWR): How was Ghostfire Games started?

Ed Roman (ER): Our studio's goal is to make games that we really love, targeting the "casual core." Games that are simple to learn, but difficult to master. Games that we would play ourselves in our spare time. We also have quality of life in mind -- most game developers work crazy hours, and we wanted to have strong project management to avoid that, to reduce burn-out.

NWR:: How satisfied were you with the performance of your WiiWare debut, Helix? Would you agree with its categorization as "Dance Dance Revolution for your arms"?

ER: We can't speak to the actual sales numbers, but financially we made enough money to continue development and move on to our second project, Rage of the Gladiator. Given that this was our first venture on this platform, I think that's pretty good. It got us the experience we needed to make a game of even higher caliber.


For more, go here

[GoldenPhoenix]

I am really thinking of getting this game, looks like it has fantastic production values and is supposedly a blast to play. Nice to hear that their first game was successful enough to fund this title!

[Jonnyboy117]

We quantize the user's swings into one of four directions (up, down, left, right). We do this because we want realistic animations for the bosses (the bosses react in the direction they're hit). If we allowed arbitrary swings, then this wouldn't be possible unless we had an animation system that wasmuch more advanced, and that would be mostly impossible for a 40MB WiiWare download. The other advantage of quantizing moves into four swings is that it makes the user more easily able to "understand" how to solve a particular boss. Think of each boss as a mini-puzzle game where you need the righttiming, as well as the right sequence of input (dodge left, dodge right, jump, shield block, or one of four directional swings). By limiting the swing direction to one of four possibilities, the player has a much easier time trying out the various possibilities to solve the "boss puzzle."

I get all of that, and it sounds very well justified. However, why do you need MotionPlus for this? Plenty of Wii games can interpret up/down/left/right swings without MotionPlus. True, some of those are janky, but others do a very good job of that. If GhostFire really used MP to do these controls, and proper interpretation is required for these action-puzzle fights, the four motions better work perfectly.

[MegaByte]

I am really thinking of getting this game, looks like it has fantastic production values and is supposedly a blast to play.

It wasn't when I tried it.

[NWR_Neal]

I'm on the review for this, and so far I'm finding it fun, though I'm only two bosses in.

It feels like a lesser version of Punch-Out, which doesn't make it bad, it just doesn't make it great.

And I agree with Jonny, why is MotionPlus necessary?

The astute reader will notice that that question was also in the Red Steel 2 interview, and Jason Vandenberghe's response was completely different.