In the fourth Gamescom interview, Zoink Games discusses the recent announcement of Zombie Vikings on the Wii U. The founder, Klaus Lyngeled, tells us what the game is all about and how it differs from their work on Stick It To The Man.

Nintendo World Report (NWR): I'm here with Klaus (Lyngeled) from Zoink, how are you doing?

Klaus Lyngeled (K): Good. How are you?

NWR: I'm very good. We're here to talk about Zombie Vikings, which is coming to the Wii U which you announced today?

K: That's right, the real official announcement is today, Nintendo is publishing some videos with it, kind of some teaser videos for Wii U.

NWR: All right, so can you introduce yourself to the public and what you do at Zoink Games?

K: My name is Klaus, I'm creative director and founder of Zoink Games, so I run the company but also try to direct the games. Our previous game, Stick It To The Man, I was director on, I direct Zombie Vikings togther with Andreas Beyer at our company. Zombie Vikings is a 1-4 player co-op game, it's important to say it's a co-op game, you can plays 4 players but it's also a one player game which a lot of people miss sometimes. They liked our last game Stick It To The Man, which was a single player game, but this can be played as a single player. It's fun to play it with two players, four players, but a 1-4 player co-op game about zombie vikings. Like our previous games, we're into story and storytelling. This game is a game about... if you know a little bit about Norse mythology, we're making fun of it, because it's kind of goofy, it's really crazy. It's almost like that religion was made by a five year old, which it probably was.

NWR: I don't know...

K: Anyway, in this story Odin only has one eye because he gave the other eye away to become very wise. Loki as a fun joke steals his last eye as a joke, so he's blind. He tries to get help from the other gods, but they're turned into these brats and don't want to help him. So what he does is raise this army of Vikings that used to be kind of famous, and they become these zombie vikings that helps him out, and he sends them out on this mission to get this famous eye. On this road trip are four characters who don't know each other very well, they're not only trying to find the eye or where Loki is, but also something about themselves.

NWR: So people might know Zoink from their previous game, Stick It To The Man. It was one of my favourite Wii U eShop games because of how creative funny it was, is it safe to say people who like that game will like your new game?

K: Yes. Basically we found a way to create games... I've been writing parts of this game, and Andreas who wrote Stick It To The Man. This time, we found an American writer named Zach Weiner, who wrote something called Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, which is an online comic, it's really funny. He helped us out with the script to make it really funny. That's what we did previously on Stick It To The Man, we get script writers to help us out, the humour is the same, kind of goofy, funny humour, some Futurama/Simpsons humor. We have no restrictions at all, we can go totally crazy with it since we're an indie developer. It's good fun, and we like to have a lot of story and background and character design in our games. This game has more than 100 cutscenes, and that's crazy. Compared to Stick It To The Man where the game is interrupted by cutscenes and some people didn't like that, we spread it out more. The game is twice as big as Stick It To The Man, about 8-10 hours of gameplay. You can play the story mode itself and get the whole story, or you can play versus levels and just fight each other. If you liked Stick It To The Man, you'll definitely like this.

NWR: Is the cutscenes spread out in a way that feels more natural, more at the beginning or end of a level? Please tell me more about that... how does the story progress this time around?

K: We don't like to just have a cutscene at the beginning or end of a level, for us it's more about integrating it into what you do in a level. So you know, if you come to a monster you have to fight, you need more information about it and there's a funny cutscene there. One of the things we incorporated into was these sidequests, there's a lot of cute, funny cutscenes there. For example, you get to help a blind witch, and the blind witch has lost her cat. So of course, you take a mission to find her cat. But of course, what you find out is because she's blind, it's not really a cat - I won't tell you what it is, because it's a spoiler. There's a lot of funny little cutscenes like that, it gives more characters, we really want the world to look alive and it's living and there's people inside the world with their own stories. I think that's how we naturally try to have the cutscenes in there, when it's time to have it but we also want to have more hardcore gameplay compared to Stick It To The Man. Stick It To The Man was more of an exploring game, finding what everyone wants, more calm, whereas this game is more of a brawler. Between the story elements... it's more of a hack-and-slash. How would you describe it?

NWR: I'd call it a hack-and-slash, but there's more intricacies involved, there's a lot more cutscenes, more talking, but with how the story is it's really important.

K: I think it's important for us to, we have so much things to talk about for each character, and since you're playing these characters each one has their own background. Like, why does Sigird have a squid inside his stomach, why does it end up like that? There's a lot of background stories about the characters that you find as you journey through the world.

NWR: What makes a brawler stand out are the controls and the special moves you do to complete your tasks. How will the playable differ and how does the game play? Is it welcoming to newcomers of the genre?

K: I have a son and I used to play a lot of Castle Crashers with him, but it was hard for him to do the special button combinations. Instead of focusing on individual special moves, we wanted to find a way to incorporate each other into moves. That's why we added the ability to pick up and throw each other, that way we force the people to co-operate. "Oh, you're hacking away in this corner and I'm hacking away in this corner, if you pick me up you can throw me and we can do a special move and that's much better." So the buttons are simple, but if you work together they're more complex that way.

NWR: Unlike your last game which was a solo experience, this is more of a co-op experience. Was this something that felt right to do after finishing up Stick It To The Man?

K: What we needed to do was give ourselves a new challenge, we know the story part, we're good at telling stories, creating characters and art. Can we create gameplay that's more complicated, Nintendo hardcore, tough gameplay that everyone knows? "Is this the perfect feeling?" We wanted to challenge ourselves to do that, and that's what we did with this game. We wanted to level up in gameplay design.

NWR: What I like about Zoink is that you put a lot of effort into making your style tick, the voice acting and the look of the game just appears right. How important is that to you as a developer?

K: I think it's very important for me. One of the things I like is coming up with the characters, the story and the humour in games. It's very hard to have humour that's not very simple, but if you have to have more complicated humour, you need to have a story, a character talking, saying something, doing something - it can't be you just acting out actions in the game. The game has to give you something back that's pre-recorded or pre setup somehow. It's very important and it's super fun to work with, and I've found a way for us to do this in a Disney/Hollywood way that doesn't cost a ton of money. We only use amateur actors who we find on the web, they record themselves at home, we send them the script but don't send them into sound studios, they record it in the closet and send it to our sound studio. We couldn't do that if we didn't have their support, so it's very important.

NWR: What made you decide to bring it to Wii U to begin with? When are you expecting to see it on the console?

K: Every time we're out on the social media, and we mention Nintendo, there's a huge following and they're so devoted. I feel like we have to do a Nintendo console too, they're supporting the game community and care about gameplay. With this game, since we're doing hardcore gameplay, I want to make sure these guys try it and see if they like it since they know their s**t. That's why I'm releasing it on Wii U, but I'd like to release it on the 3DS as well, but unfortunately our engine doesn't support the 3DS yet. Now that the New 3DS supports Unity, we might be able to do something in the future, we've talked about Stick It To The Man for the New 3DS which I'd love to do. We'd love to release it this year in December, and we want to focus on playing it on the normal Wii Remote so four people can play it simultaneously. I'm not sure we're going to support the GamePad because it may not make sense, it's more important to play it with four players.

NWR: It's important that it just works. Is there anything else you left out about Zombie Vikings before we wrap it up?

K: You can play versus games, there's five levels that you can play against each other, for these versions we have online multiplayer and we want to get it working on Wii U. Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

NWR: Thank you very much!