Interviews

Hothead Games on casual title Bunny the Zombie Slayer, new iPhone projects, and Cheerios

Kard Combat and a mystery shooter in the pipeline

Hothead Games on casual title Bunny the Zombie Slayer, new iPhone projects, and Cheerios
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iOS
| Bunny the Zombie Slayer

The App Store has been compared more than once to the Wild West, the mineral-rich and lawless region of America to which people flocked during the 19th century in search of sudden fortune.

More than any other part of the games industry the App Store (and its more recent imitators) is a place where established publishers like EA stand about the same chance of success as small developers like Rovio and completely anonymous developers like Andreas Illiger, who's currently swimming in coin thanks to his hit casual game Tiny Wings.

For that reason, virtually every publisher and developer has thrown its hat into the ring at some point, sometimes noisily and sometimes almost by stealth.

Hothead Games – developer of the rightly acclaimed DeathSpank series and once home to Monkey Island series co-creator Ron Gilbert – falls into this category, having quietly slipped castle defence title Bunny the Zombie Slayer onto the App Store with no fanfare other than a press release on the day it went live.

Given Hothead's credentials, we were curious to learn more about the studio's first experience developing for Apple's touchscreen wondergizmo, so we spoke with studio co-founder and Bunny the Zombie Slayer producer Joel DeYoung.

Pocket Gamer: How did Hothead come up with Bunny the Zombie Slayer? Joel DeYoung: A lot of guys in the studio have iPhones and iPads and when they have spare time in between the next round of coffee and the next bowl of Cheerios* we get to show off the latest games we are playing.

Some of the guys were playing around with some games that had a throwing action and liked the simplicity of the user interaction and the pleasure these games provided when you were accurate enough to hit the target.

Somebody then mentioned that it would be 100 times better if somehow these games included zombies (isn’t everything?) so we played around with a prototype and then added the most inoffensive hero that we could think of…and Bunny the Zombie Slayer was born!

*other circular oat-based cereals are available It's your first game for iOS – are you pleased with how it turned out?

We are really pleased with our first attempt at iOS and the reception we have received. Apple thought that Bunny the Zombie Slayer was good enough to be featured and we hit the top 50 overall apps in the first week of launch, which is pretty good going considering the other titles on promotion that week.

We really like the ability to easily update and improve our games once we have listened to the customer feedback. Reacting like this is really useful when trying to make the products the best they can be, which has always been one of the development goals here at Hothead.

We recently released our 1.2 update for Bunny the Zombie Slayer which now includes new modes with extra difficulty and time attack challenges and these new features are a direct result of acting on the customer feedback.

How does making and selling a game for the App Store differ from Xbox Live and PSN?

We always ask ourselves, “what is it that makes a Hothead game?” and I don’t think fundamentally our approach to making games therefore changes that much. To stand out on the App Store, quality is one of the key pillars that you need to aim for but for us this hasn’t suddenly been more or less of a focus.

The only real difference is that we know the iOS customer doesn’t always set aside their play time like the console audience does. They just play with their device in parallel with their everyday life activities.

This can change the way we think about creating the gameplay experience, because we want the customer to choose to play with our game rather than the others they have sitting on their device.

Would you consider porting any of your existing franchises (DeathSpank, Swarm, Precipice of Darkness) over to iPhone and iPad?

We are always trying to bring our games to as wide an audience as possible and so we always consider how we might be able to do this by working with other platforms. We want to develop new experiences too, but there are only so many hours (and bowls of Cheerios) that we can get through in one day.

Do you think those games would work as iOS games, or do you think the platform requires an entirely different approach?

There are some fundamental differences which make developing and creating these games for the format more challenging.

These games were originally designed with a controller in mind and the touch screen and user interface would need some rethinking although I’m sure the guys in the studio could work this out if we asked them to, but again it takes more time to do this.

Each game needs to be looked at separately. Look at World of Goo for example - you easily see how this game can be transported over to touchscreen. Controlling 50 Swarmites on a touchscreen might not be so easy!

Do you plan to add more content to Bunny the Zombie Slayer through updates?

Adding more content to the games we are working on is always appealing, but you need critical mass to make this worthwhile. However, we are thinking about how we can keep the experience fresh and up to date whenever possible.

Our 1.2 update already expands the game play for users so we will listen to the feedback on this and see what comes up then. At this point we would like to thank PG for reviewing this later version of Bunny the Zombie Slayer and giving us our first ever iOS game award…very cool!

Do you have any more original iOS games planned?

We are certainly thinking about it! In fact we can announce here that we have been working on a few projects for iOS.

For now we will just mention that we have been working with one of the creators of Magic the Gathering on a multiplayer strategy card game called Kard Combat, but we also have space arcade shooter close to release, too.

We haven’t set any targets and our console audience is very important to us, but we just like making games so the iOS platforms are a great opportunity.

Thanks to Joel for his time.
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.