We had a chance to talk with Hothead Games COO Joel DeYoung about the rigors of indie game development, the future of digital distribution, and Penny Arcade Adventures: Episode 2 at this year’s PAX. The following is this full-bodied Q&A, distilled from that fruitful conversation.

QS
About the involvement with the narrative between Mike Krahulik (Gabe), Jerry Holkins (Tycho), and you guys. Was there anything he wanted to get into Episode 1 that ended up being cut? Anything you wanted in there that they weren’t too fond of?

Joel
It’s their stuff, but they’re pretty deferential to us when it comes to gameplay and production costs because we’re basically making the game, building all the assets. There’s a lot of back-and-forth. When it comes to the dialogue in the game, the writing, there’s both the writing itself, which Jerry has complete control over–and that’s how we all want it. There’s also the structure of it and the adventure gameplay; how you navigate through the dialogue, how many hints you get and so forth. So in Episode 1, I think we pushed it over to him a little too much, and so we had a lot of back-and-forth to get that structure right to make sure someone felt like they always knew what they were supposed to be doing, so they felt challenged by the dialogue, they got the right amount of hints. With Episode 2 we took a different tact, where we built a lot of that structure out with placeholder dialogue–very dry stuff–so he could later come in and replace the lines. That went a lot smoother.

QS
Are you saying that this time you had all of this stock narrative that you needed to get across by way of dialogue?

Joel
What we’ll do is set it up for said encounter with said character: At this point in the game you have this object, and you need this object from them. By the end of the dialogue the player needs to understand this. This are the checkpoints that need to be gone over in the dialogue. We did that with episode one, but he would build the structure surrounding choices you have, it was a branching dialogue, totally non-linear. Since he’d never written in that non-linear fashion there was a lot of back-and-forth, whereas now we’ll tell him what the dialogue needs to contain, and here’s a rough branching structure. Now, he actually changes that up sometimes too, because now he’s experienced at it and that’s fine, but I think it’s easier for him to have that starting structure for the whole game laid out rather than having to come up with it himself.

QS
Can you talk about any other big differences between the two episodes?

Joel
One of the things we’ve got a lot of feedback on was wanting to add difficulty, so there are difficulty settings in Episode 2, and the insane mode that you can unlock. We’ve changed the combat a little bit; the way that health items and revives work: you used to be able to revive with health, but now you have to use an explicit revive potion to heal a dead party member. We actually changed up the special attack minigames, so they’re all completely different. Also, the prompt you get to block is much more explicit now, we got a lot of feedback on that. The other thing that’s different, I think, is that because this is our second go at it, and because of the way we approach the production of the dialogue with Jerry, it’s much more adventurey. You know? The adventure game quests in the game have much more depth to them. Episode 1 was pretty simple. You were guided really clearly. The puzzles you have to solve now are a lot more like Monkey Island’s.

QS
Meaning that it might be a little more environmental?



Joel
Just that it’s not so simple as “get this object, take it to this person.” Things fold in together, you have to get creative with how you solve some situations. It’s really satisfying, because when you solve these kind of puzzles you’re not just checking off a box. It makes you feel really clever, that “ohh, I get it now!” feeling.

QS
So, development for Episode 2 is basically wrapping up now?

Joel
Yeah, right now it’s in the stage where we’re submitting it to the console manufacturers for approval, which, especially with Live Arcade, is a long and drawn out process. That’s frankly why we can’t release them as fast as say, Sam and Max episodes. So we’re in that bug fixing mode now, and we’ve had a chance to start on Episode 3. At the end of Episode 1, there was that “next time in Episode 2″ thing, and we have to have the same thing at the end of Episode 2, and that means we need to have enough of the episode three cutscenes finished to include. In fact, just to get it done quick, when we first started we knew what the story was for episode three already, so we actually made little parts of each cutscene to put together the teaser, and we can fill out the rest from there.

QS
And so while Episode 1 and 2 were in development, DeathSpank has been going as well?

Joel
DeathSpank got started when Ron [Gilbert], who’d been helping us as a consultant, came on in January full-time as our creative director. That’s pretty well when we got started on it, we made a few hires to start building up the team, we have five or six people working on it full-time right now. All in all it’s well underway.

QS
What can you tell us about that game, gameplay-wise? I’ve been told “Monkey Island meets Diablo.”

Joel
It’s going to be hilarious. It’s really going to be a lampoon, you know? It’ll be episodic, and the RPG gameplay will be more action oriented, less JRPG than the Penny Arcade games. The other thing that will be different is that there is a larger narrative tying the stories together, but you can actually play DeathSpank episodes in any order. It’ll all still make sense. DeathSpank is the kind of hero that is so over-eager, he does more damage than good, he really just wants to help people… he can be placed in a all kinds of scenarios. Ron’s really happy with the character he’s come up with because he can be put in a lot of different situations. He’s got a lot of stories he can tell.

QS
Do you find that a lot of the atmosphere and attitudes you had at Radical were brought over to HotHead?

Joel
Radical was a great place to work; it was a really great studio. Certainly some of our practices we learned there, many of us built our careers there. It definitely has an influence. We have been very conscious as well to make sure we’re not just being Radical. HotHead was founded to do smaller games, we’re totally focused on digital distribution. So there are a lot of new lessons we’ve had to learn as well. It’s a different way of doing business, and a different way of making games, and with some of those things it’s been quite a challenge.

QS
Can you name any of those challenges?

Joel
Yeah, one of the biggest ones was that we’re going to make smaller games. With this round of consoles, it takes 10 million bucks minimum to make a game, and to spend 2-3 years on it is just too big of a risk. So we said “let’s make smaller games, and digitally distribute them ourselves.” Ok. Good. But it was really hard to make the game small. It’s in our nature; we’d spent our entire career making games of a certain size. The game just grew. When we were half way through episode one we had to step back and reshuffle some of the content because we were making too big of a game. Another example, once we’d finished and shipped episode one, we’re like “ok, it’s time to get going on episode 2.” We’d already started on it, but the way I heard the team talking about it was as though we were making a sequel. I had to keep telling them that it wasn’t a sequel and we needed to escape that mindset or it would take us a year to get it done.

QS
In an interview with Gamasutra you said that HotHead could be “the HBO of game development,” I guess meaning that the direction and quality of the games is very high, maybe also that you seem to be going episodic…

Joel
Yeah, saying HBO is kind of to evoke that quality, but also when you think of an HBO series it’s really critically acclaimed, it’s really well executed, but you may’ve never heard of any of the actors in there. They bring the right people together to make something really tight and really special. It’s also kind of niche, too, and then gets an expanded audience with the box sets and DVDs and such. Instead of just smaller games being digitally distributed, we think that digital distribution will quickly grow to include all kinds of things and we’re trying to be a part of it. A lot of people think of digital distribution as restricted to really simple, casual games, and frankly, the catalogue of Live Aracade games doesn’t help that.

When we announced the price of episode one for Live Arcade at 1600 Microsoft points, 20 dollars, everyone was saying “wow, that’s really expensive for a Live Arcade game.” No one was talking about the content or the length, or what they were actually getting for their twenty bucks! Some people would come in and say “it’s just a couple of coffees” and we’re with them. We think it’s a tremendous value. We like to think of the games we’re making as more than those casual games, but then again, they aren’t epic, 40 hour experiences that are too daunting to even starts. We all consider ourselves hardcore gamers, but we all have kids and busy lives, so these are games you can pick up and play and finish in a reasonable amount of time, while the quality is also top-notch. Like the Criterion collection, you know? A collection of really good games. Greenhouse is where we can bring other peoples games that are like that, made by indie developers, together in one place.

QS
One of the threats of digital distribution is bandwidth. Do you think that as you guys and other indie developers grow there will be a problem fitting your games onto the pipes to get them to the people?

Joel
I don’t really worry about that too much. Bandwidth is always growing. I think the bigger hurdle with digital distribution is one of expectation for the consumer. People want a box, and that’s understandable. Look at how fast the music industry changed. I mean, iTunes was this little thing, Apple was throwing music up, and they celebrated their 5 millionth download, and now they’ve had over a billion. It just exploded.

I was in Wal-Mart recently–I was on a road-trip, and decided I needed some music for the car. I went to the CD section and the selection was paltry. All the discs were six bucks. How fast that’s changed, right? The whole music industry’s been turned upside-down, and we think the video game industry’s going to follow a similar change. Retail’s not going to go away completely, but would you want to be a shareholder in Blockbuster right now? It’s not a good time. Obviously Wal-Mart, Target, those guys will be fine, they sell a lot of stuff, but for EB Games it’s a challenging time to be in the retail business. It’s tough, too, because it’s a hostile relationship between those retails and the publishers and developers. The developers get completely screwed because there are so many people in the middle taking the money, the developers are lucky if they ever earn out or see any of the royalties at all. It’s hard to get into a store. You have to buy space on the shelf, there are things like returns and exchanges and all these other issues. And of course, retailers like EB are pushing used copies because the margins are much higher for them. It makes sense for them. The developers don’t see a dime from any of that. You go in there and they’ll push a used copy on you, and why wouldn’t want it? It’s half the price.

QS
Do you see the Steam model, what with the client side IM and that stuff, as a direction you might take Greenhouse?

Joel
As we build up Greenhouse, we do think of it as a platform and not just a store. We have a lot of plans in that direction. I want to be clear: our approach with DRM to Greenhouse is to keep it simple. There isn’t going to be some client running in the background, no checklist for running a debugger… it’s not cool to treat the people who buy your programs like criminals, you know? We do have DRM in there to stop casual copying, but it’s not very onerous. It’s very straightforward, one-time authorization, that sort of thing. We want to build a client or extra features into Greenhouse purely as a way to make the experience better. Steam has achievements, and people really like that kind of stuff. So coming to Greenhouse, seeing a catalogue of games and past downloads, we want to build these features not only on the site, but possibly on a client.

QS
Has piracy made a considerable dent in your release of Episode 1?

Joel
It’s almost impossible to measure. I was actually surprised, we fully expected the game to be pirated, everything is, right? Turns out, I’m not even really sure if there are many cracked versions of our game running out there. I heard there was one with a virus, which is unfortunate as we don’t want people think our game messed up their computer. It’s a waste of time and energy to devote yourself to protecting from piracy. People want your game, they’re going to download it. We choose to spend our energy working on the game. How effective is our DRM? How complex is it? Are we maximizing our ability to stop piracy? It’s all really hard to know, but there are hardly enough hours in the day to worry about making a great game, and I’d rather not spend too much time on those negative things.

QS
Just to wrap up, do you think that there’s anything that the indie developers and the big guys can learn from each other?

Joel
Oh, absolutely. The indie developers that are in Vancouver, we all get together for dinners, we compare notes, stuff like that. We’re in this together. Digital distribution is going to explode. There’s a lot of stuff we can share.

We Quiksavers would like to again thank Joel and Hothead Games for their time!