Wik: The Fable of Lost Souls - Simon Hallam and Brian Fisher

Added 05/03/2006 by TalkXbox Staff

When the Xbox 360 first released last November everyone dove right into the launch library. Games like Perfect Dark Zero, King Kong, and Need for Speed. But, as the days went by, people began to tire of them. And, when they did, they looked at a little something called the Xbox Live Arcade. Once there they discovered a whole library of high quality, fun, and challenging titles for just 5-10 dollars. One of the standout titles on the service has been Wik, a wildly original game that has you controlling a half man/half frog critter spitting and swinging your way along a vast menagerie of levels.

Talk Xbox recently had the opportunity to speak with the developer of Wik about the development of Wik, their next title, and the Xbox Live Arcade itself. Read on.

TX: To start us off, what are your names and positions at Reflexive?

Brian: Brian Fisher, Game Programmer & Reflexive Arcade Architect.

Simon: My name is Simon Hallam, Producer/Programmer.

TX: Thanks. Coming off of the success of Wik (Three Independent Game Festival wins!), how did you go about planning your next title? Did the scope of the game widen as Wik’s success grew, or did the plan remain the same?

Brian: haha

Simon: Well...

Brian: It's always a challenge to keep scopes in control I think. The natural thing is for a game to get bigger and wider, etc. But it's important for them to stay tight & polished, to be a better game, and it's important for them to stay small to not be too expensive. I don't think that IGF wins changed our perspective about that. Simon?

Simon: In the grand scheme of things Wik was considerably bigger than we had initially planned for, so moving on to the next project we knew going in that we wanted the scope to be much smaller. I would say that the IGF win's did not really change our perspective on that.

Brian: I do think however, the Xbox version gave us an opportunity to grow Wik's scope a bit.

Simon: Absolutely.

Brian: With the local console multiplayer and the bonus levels. So in a way, the IGF success did ultimately let us grow Wik a bit.

Simon: Oh yes - definitely.

Brian: But it's more an adaptation for the console & live arcade, in my mind.


TX: How long did it take to get the multiplayer implemented?

Simon: Several weeks, but Brian had already been experimenting at home on ideas for Wik multiplayer.

Brian: Just enough to prove it would be worth it, the levels were all made from scratch in a short period.

Simon: We looked at some of the work Brian had done and it seemed so obvious that multiplayer belonged in this game, so we spent a couple of weeks prototyping up as many multiplayer level ideas as we could come up with... and then we spent another few weeks polishing the best of the bunch.

TX: What were some of the rejected prototypes?

Brian: Fire-breathing wiks.... shoving a giant ball back and forth...

Simon: And the acorn spit fest!

Brian: Something called "Salvage King", based on levels from Zax, an older reflexive game. Salvage king is basically collecting a bunch of coins, and trying to get them to your base. If you get pegged, you drop your coins and others can steal them.

Simon: We had 9 multiplayer levels at various stages of completion, and then we picked the 3 best.

Brian: It was really fun to put that together... a little stressful, because we were worried about scope... but it was one of those times when a lot of people were all focusing on one thing.

Simon: Yes, but it all worked out in the end, we have 3 really tight and very different multiplayer games! I think everybody should try them!

TX: Totally, Fire Pit is a blast! Any chance of seeing some of those adversarial gametypes show up as Premium Downloads sometime down the road?

Simon: Currently there are no plans for new levels, but it is something we would love to do in the future. We really REALLY enjoy Wik multiplayer and we had a total blast developing it, and since passion seems to drive much of what we get to work on you never know…


TX: For what it's worth, I'd download it. Going along with that issue of scope, have you found the memory cap on XBLA games to be a hindrance or does it help keep projects more focused?

Brian: If you mean download size cap, we are used to worrying about download size from the PC downloadable market.

Simon: We knew what the limitations were from the get go and we worked hard to come in under budget.

Brian: In a way, size is something that is its own problem...adding better compression, efficient use of resources, etc… which doesn't necessarily have to mean you are making less of a game, to fit. Wik's levels were designed in a way to have a lot of variety, but keep the file size low.

Brian: By reusing 2d art assets to composite the levels.

Simon: Getting everything to fit is an art in itself!

Brian: We call the tech for that (compositing the levels) the prop engine, Simon developed it for the PC version of Wik..

Simon: Brian is right, we do an awful lot of work in the back end to try to create interesting environments from as few assets as possible.

TX: What’s it like running a publishing business with the Reflexive Arcade while at the same time acting as the developer for the Live Arcade? Is it strange to be answering emails of companies trying to get listed on your service while at the same time working with Microsoft in a developer capacity? Is there any disconnect there in managing both sides of the business at once?

Brian: That's a bit of a tough question to answer...

Simon: We have people who work on different sides of that fence, there is crossover here and there - Brian suffers the most in this respect - but in general we have a pretty good handle on it.

Brian: I want to add one thing in particular - if doing both those things was something that split our company, we'd drop one of them in order to provider better focus and quality on the other aspect. The reason why we are both a developer and a distributor is that we are in a stronger place as a developer because we maintain our independence, in that we can distribute our own stuff. Having control over distribution of your own product is important to making the most of your investments. I think it's important that developers don't sign away their IP.

You described us as running a "publishing" business. We don't really act as a publisher, in that we don't buy other IP, or negotiate development for hire - basically because it's not important for us to do that to be a great developer and because we want the developers who distribute through us to keep all the rights to their IP.

Xbox Live Arcade is really great, in that it lets us keep our independence but still take advantage of the benefits of having a great business relationship with Microsoft. I really think Microsoft is doing a great thing there, and I applaud them for it.


TX: As the volume of games being released on the Live Arcade increases do you worry about how you can get new Reflexive titles into spotlight? Both EA and Ubisoft have been listed as developers for the XBLA, when larger companies like that start releasing titles how do you, as an independent developer, compete against the marketing muscle they can put behind their releases?

Simon: Well, our plan it to continue to keep developing innovative content. We work really hard on creating the highest quality assets as we can, there is a wonderfully talented team of artists, musicians, sound engineers and designers who work to create the best player experience possible. But you don't need a huge amount of content to create a great game...something which many larger developers seem to have lost sight of. Geometry Wars is a great example of this, it doesn't have nearly as many assets as most games in XBLA, and yet it is the best selling.

Brian: And Geometry Wars' "marketing" was really word of mouth... I think in the try before you buy marketplace, marketing muscle, publisher rep, etc. won't have the same impact that they might have in retail. We like try-before-you buy.

Simon: Yes, nothing says as much about your product as the product itself.

Brian: Also, in terms of competition as opposed to the marketing muscle aspect, I think being in a platform with a lot of other great games is ultimately best for every product out there because there's more for the market to appreciate, so the total market grows I trust Microsoft to get great games out there and I think it will only be a good thing for all Live developers.

Simon: Our best approach to ensuring that our games are the most visible in the XBLA Marketplace is to simply be the best game that's available.

TX: A lot has been made of the Xbox 360's sheer horsepower, in what ways can that horsepower be utilized to create gameplay that wasn't possible last-generation? Do you think the 360's horsepower can compete against Wii's controller from a gameplay perspective?

Brian: Well in our next game we are trying to bring more physics into the gameplay and that's something that you can do with more horses under the hood. In terms of Wii's controller, I think what's really exciting about it to me is that new gameplay types can be discovered which can appeal to non-gamers.

Live arcade is working to help to appeal to non-gamers too, just in a different way. I think there's room for both of them to coexist even though there are ways they are going in the same direction. We definitely want to take advantage of the unique opportunities that both platforms may afford us as a developer.

Simon: What an amazing device for controlling a videogame though?! I can't wait to try some of the amazing games that are going to be available on Wii. It will be interesting to see if Nintendo will have an online digital distribution system that's as powerful and "wired in" as XBLA is on the Xbox 360.

TX: In Wik’s Gamasutra postmortem it was mentioned that you prototyped around six different games and then wound up picking the prototype that would become Wik. Did you use this method when deciding on your next title, and, if so, what were some of the concepts that were decided against? Why did you decide to go with the prototype you did?

Simon: Even though we chose to make Wik from the list of prototypes we had developed, that doesn't mean that the other prototypes are dead and buried, there were some great ideas that we were experimenting with and we hope to capitalize on them as much as possible over the coming years. We have developed other prototypes since the Wik post-mortem, so moving forward we have an even larger palette of interesting ideas to pick from, but each and every one of them is a contender for a future project, so hopefully you'll understand that we don't want to talk about the specifics of any one of them.

Brian: Sometimes pieces from one prototype make it into another game. Having a variety of games and tech that you are working on often helps to cross-pollinate the other titles in ways you couldn't have predicted, so most prototypes live on one way or another...

Simon: Our current project is based on one of the earliest prototypes we put together, one that we decided needed more time and thought, so we developed Wik first.

TX: What is the primary development platform of your next title? Do you plan on releasing it on the PC as well as the 360?

Simon: Our current project is code named "Hailey", it is being developed for next-gen consoles, but we do not have any official announcements we can make about which one at this time.

Brian: In terms of releasing on other platforms, we want to release all of our games on the platforms that make sense it's part of the benefit of keeping our independence and owning our own IP.

TX: Alright guys, thanks a million for taking the time for this interview, and best of luck with Hailey!

Simon: Thank you - it was great chatting.

Brian: Thanks, I enjoyed it.