At Gamescom 2015, Daan chatted with various game developers about their upcoming games. He began his jouney with Brjann of Image & Form, who are currently working on SteamWorld Heist. The two of them talk about the game's newest build and what has been changed in past year.

Nintendo World Report (NWR): I'm here with Brjánn (Sigurgeirsson) from Image & Form, how are you doing?

Brjánn Sigurgeirsson: I'm doing great, it's those first hours of Gamescom and I couldn't be happier.

NWR: It's still the early beginnings of Gamescom, the big stuff still needs to happen tomorrow and Friday. But we're here together to talk about SteamWorld Heist again, for the... third time, I think?

Brjann: I wish the game would come out already so we don't have to talk about it. But I'm happy to talk about SteamWorld Heist with you at any point.

NWR: We've talked for the millionth time, but there's people, I think, who don't know who you are. So why not do a quick introduction and we'll jump right in.

Brjann: Of course. I'm Brjánn Sigurgeirsson, the CEO of Image & Form, and we made a small game called Steamworld Dig, that fortunately got really popular on a lot of platforms. We're making the follow-up called Steamworld Heist, and it's coming to every current generation platform including mobile.

NWR: INCLUDING mobile?

Brjann: Yes, but it starts out on the Nintendo 3DS.

NWR: That's good, because that's why we're here. I've seen it played two times, and just played it the 3rd time, which is great. The first time was over a year ago, and it was the first time anyone's seen it. How's your confidence been throughout the project so far?

Brjann: There's been nothing wrong with the confidence so far. Image & Form is such a strong team now that I'm pretty confident in our ability to make great games. The thing is, since Steamworld Dig was such a hit, we can't make anything smaller. We have to make something bigger than SteamWorld Dig. SteamWorld Heist is bigger in every direction and it's a lot more polished than SteamWorld Dig.

NWR: The focus of the game is strategy gameplay. What makes the strategy genre so appealing, and where did you pull inspiration from?

Brjann: SteamWorld Heist is very very different from SteamWorld Dig. SteamWorld Dig was a mining platform adventure, SteamWorld Heist is like you said, a strategic combat game with the same steam-driven robots but set in space. The inspiration comes from a lot of games that we like to play. In the office, we have a lot of XCom players, and we were always talking about the possibility of making a 2D turn-based combat game. We put together a game design document for it, and I only had one condition: "We have to make it into a SteamWorld game". So the confidence is there, it comes from the secure knowledge that we can make really great games.

NWR: The strategy action is sideways and the paths are highlighted, which makes it easy to spot the way to go next. How will you surprise the player every step of the way?

Brjann: We'll surprise people by upgrading... The upgrade loop is something we learned from SteamWorld Dig, it's very tasty to have a game where you're upgrading your abilities just as you need these abilities. So SteamWorld Heist gets more difficult along the way, the characters will be stronger. You have to play well because if the character dies during the mission, they don't get the XP that time. But I think we have a few suprises along the way.

NWR: Next to playing it safe and pushing forward ever so slightly ahead, your main mechanic is shooting all over the place. What I felt playing is that every mistake could leave you more vulnerable. Was it intentional?

Brjann: It's intentional. You're supposed to be vulnerable the whole time, it is. We want people to play well, we don't want to make a casual game, we want to make a game that's not impossibly hard. Although in SteamWorld Heist, we have difficulty levels so you can play Easy, Medium, Hard, Elite and Impossible... that's the name of the difficulty levels today. So that's the thing - you have to play it well, or you won't complete it. I think that's good, you're supposed to put your soul and body into playing a game. It's going to be as tough as you want it to be, but the game's not going to give you anything. You'll have to take it.

NWR: Good, very good. You talk about various difficulties, how will every difficulty then differ? It becomes more difficult, the loot is less, how will you make the distinction between the various difficulty levels?

Brjann: I might be missing a few things here, but there are various aspects that make it more difficult. We can introduce more enemies, but also the terrible notion of having better enemies. Like suddenly their aim is right on target. Like you say, less loot, you have weaker guns... there'll only be a few people on the planet who can complete the game on the hardest difficulty.

NWR: So you want to challenge everyone to beat it on Impossible?

Brjann: Impossible sounds impossible, right? It's going to be extremely hard for the lead designers at Image & Form to complete that hardest of levels. So that's how we want to keep it.

NWR: Has someone completed it during development yet? (laughs)

Brjann: I have an interesting parallel there actually Daan, we released a game called SteamWorld Tower Defense. Very few people have actually completed that game. Our lead designer in the office, he's completed it, so we know you can complete it. But it's extremely hard to do it. And that only had one difficulty setting. This time, we really want to have the range. We want people to be able to adjust the game so it fits their skill level.

NWR: That's a new challenge for everyone: Complete SteamWorld Tower Defense right now.

Brjann: If you can do it, I'll make you a SteamWorld ambassador.

NWR: Back to the questions at hand... you've mentioned a while back the characters will have different guns to choose from. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Brjann: Sure. Characters are going to be good at different things, it'd be boring if we only had two or three types of characters. We have a wide variety, meaning you can recruit a lot of robots into your crew, but in each mission you can only bring a limited number. So for each mission, you'll do a trial and error run to see who's suited for that type of mission, and it's really exciting to play it that way. Some characters you think they're just not good for anything, but then their special abilities work perfectly for that mission. It's like running a football team, you need to keep them exercised by leveling them up a little bit so they can take on harder and harder tasks. Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United, he made a huge point of rotating the team the whole time, have all the players play so if someone gets injured, you have someone else to play.

NWR: Absolutely. At E3, you put a lot of attention on the hats of the characters. What's the significance of the headwear?

Brjann: Robots are crazy about hats, you didn't know that? (laughs)

NWR: I didn't know that.

Brjann: A robot with a big hat collection is a really fearsome robot. It actually affects the gameplay - if you have collected a lot of hats, you're a better robot than the rest and the enemies know it. It's like a gunslinger in the West, if you killed a lot of people you'd get a reputation. So hats are really good to collect.

NWR: One thing I didn't see at E3 was the map screen. I saw it today and it's changed a lot since then - what was your mentality behind the changes? When I saw the game for the first time, it looked like you had a big world to explore - what made you decide the map was the better way to go?

Brjann: We were always going to have a map screen on the lower screen of the 3DS.

NWR: I was talking about the map screen between levels.

Brjann: Ah, I see. We have a big world, and you can go from point A to point B in any fashion, but it develops the whole time. You get new destinations you can go to, we want to keep it that way so you can sort of follow the story. But all of the new destinations come with sub-destinations as well, so you can take different routes from A to B, or you can decide to go from A to C instead of A to B. You can play it in a lot of different ways.

NWR: That's good. Visually, I think the game looks fantastic, so what lessons have you learned from SteamWorld Dig to make the new game better?

Brjann: The biggest lesson is "Finish the game" - don't cut corners. I don't know if you knew this, but we had more content coming to SteamWorld Dig that we cut because of money constraints, we had to start selling the game. Originally SteamWorld Dig was bigger. We promised ourselves that the next game, we're not going to compromise that way, so that was the biggest lesson. Make sure the game is what we want it to be before we release it. And that's why we've pushed the game forward a few times - we want this game to be excellent from day one. We don't want to apologize for it, and we want the players to be happy with it. It's like a relationship, there should never be a reason for your partner to get tired of you, you should be your best at all times.

NWR: I think people still love you for SteamWorld Dig, but that's my opinion. We know the game is coming to the 3DS first, how is your release schedule for other platforms? Is it on track?

Brjann: It's on track, but we decided not to disclose the order we're going to release in. I'd say we know what order we're going to put it out in, but we're keeping it to ourselves.

NWR: That's good. Is there anything you really deeply want to mention before we wrap this up?

Brjann: At Image & Form we're interested in this idea to take a set of characters and a world and do anything with 'em, any kind of game. There's SteamWorld Tower Defense, SteamWorld Dig and now SteamWorld Heist, they're radically different from each other and we want to continue doing that. I'm really excited to see how SteamWorld Heist does, because it will either prove we were wrong or damn right. I also want to say that SteamWorld Heist is going to be a great game. Don't be hesitant if you're not usually into turn based combat games, because it doesn't apply to it. There's so many interesting things about SteamWorld Heist, so just get it. And get it day one. (smiles)

NWR: So when is it coming to the 3DS?

Brjann: It's coming to the Nintendo 3DS this fall.

NWR: Thank you very much.

Brjann: Thank you, Daan. Always a pleasure.