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Space Punks aims to turn top-down gaming into a hobby
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Brian Crecente
“It’s not going to be a game for five hours, let’s create a game that will sustain for years,” said Michal Kuk, developer Flying Wild Hogs creative director on the upcoming game Space Punks.
That desire to create a living, evolving online co-op action role-playing game helped to drive many of the design choices made in Space Punks’ early inception. But there was another desire as well.
The team at Flying Wild Hogs had been playing a lot of top-down games at the time–titles like HELLDIVERS–and they noticed that the genre didn’t seem to have many games that also included role-playing game elements and fast-paced action.
This growing desire to fill that void dovetailed nicely with the studio’s decision to try to diversify its library of games. Previous Flying Wild Hog games included third and first-person action titles and shooters like Evil West, and the run of Shadow Warrior titles. And even a side-view game. But nothing top-down.
“The idea for Hogs was to diversify our titles,” Kuk said. “One of the things that is really important for us is having a gaming laboratory. We're trying to figure out some awesome ways to create fun for players, it doesn't matter if it's top-down, if it's FTP, it's like, which will be the best for the players.”With the team locked into a specific sort of top-down adventure game, they decided to focus on a science-fiction title with a space setting to give the title and its creators the flexibility they were sure they were going to need to publish and then continue to run a fun game for years to come.
That’s also what drove the decision to create the game with its particular colorful aesthetic.
“We had to come up with an art style that would not require us to tweak it every year or two because it’s hyperrealistic,” he said. “We decided to create something that was stylish, with a bit of a comic book style, but that wasn’t too cartoonish. It’s fun. It’s light.”
The first big challenge the team ran into in creating Space Punks was adjusting to the literal shift in perspective and all the design issues that brought with that.
Kuk said that the team had to completely rethink how to design the game because of that shift from first or third-person to top-down.
“When you’re creating a game from a first-person perspective you’re focused on different aspects of things like the weapon, the sound, the feel, but in top-down it’s totally different,” he said.
“Because the camera hangs around 20 meters above the playable character, we couldn't use small details to tweak the weapon, like recoil, or small art changes in the weapon. You can see that from a first-person perspective, but it’s not as noticeable when you are top-down. So we needed to change players’ behavior when using this weapon to make sure that it is noticeable.”And the game’s endless arsenal is one of its big selling points. To make the armory of weapons a player has access to feel endless, the developers started by designing core archetypes for the weapons built around basic playstyles. Those base weapons are then tweaked depending on where a player is in their progression and to create hybrids between styles.
While the game is going into open beta with four playable characters, Kuk said the team has plans to create more as the game continues to evolve.
That evolution–at least initially–is being helped along by the game’s early access and soon its open beta.
Kuk said early access helped the team reshape certain zones to better accommodate what players were looking for in the game. It also helped the team reprioritize the roadmap for Space Punks' upcoming features and speed up the process of sending out updates. Now the plan is for the game to get free updates every month.
“But the most important thing for us with Early Access was being able to ask the players, ‘Hey, do you like the idea for the game?’ and the answer was clear: ‘Yes, we do like the idea. Of course, there are things here and there that you should improve, but yeah, we like the overall idea. Keep going.’ And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
The game’s open beta will be going live along with one of the game’s biggest updates to date: The Cracked One Update.“It will contain our first idea for an end game,” Kuk said. “So the crack, it’s a whole part of the game which we treat as the end game. That’s going to be our proposition for the players. ‘How do you like our idea for endgame?’”
The update also brings with it hundreds of small tweaks, game balancing, and changes to the in-game economy.
Space Punks open beta goes live today, and Kuk and the rest of the team at Flying Wild Hogs hope a lot of people hop into it not just to play, but to tell the developers what they think.
“I want to thank everyone who took the time to participate in Early Access because that helps us shape everything we’re doing right now,” he said. “We gathered a lot of awesome feedback, a lot of stuff that helped to develop the game into what it is today.
But I also would like to ask everyone who is joining the beta to leave some comments and feedback after they play. There will be a lot of communication channels on Discord and surveys. Because that will help us a lot.”