Affordable Space Adventures

Dajana Dimovska: I’m Dajana Dimovska, one of the owners of KnapNok Games, and Nifflas here is responsible for the creative direction of the project. We’re actually two different companies collaborating together: we’re a 10- or 12-person company, and Nifflas is a one-man company! He’d never done console development by himself, and that’s one of the reasons we’re doing this; we’re the console developer, with a history of local multiplayer games, and he’s got the niche of atmospheric puzzles, and that’s why we’re doing this together.

We always want to work with novel interfaces, and we saw the two screens of Wii U as a novel interface, but Nifflas was the one who had the brilliant idea of putting all the controls on the Wii U GamePad touch screen and creating that dual-screen play. The essence behind designing the interface for the touch screen has also been one of our key tasks.

NoE: For those people who perhaps aren’t familiar with the game yet, what should they know?

Nifflas: I suppose you could say it’s kind of like a 2D scrolling spaceship-fighting game about just staying alive in a hostile world. You’ve got this really wonky spaceship, which… well, it can fly nicely if you configure it well, but if you configure it wrongly, you can blow it up. And sometimes the game forces you to try to configure it badly, so you have to maintain the balance of a bad configuration that temporarily gives you enough boost to go fast, but you want to conserve that so you don’t blow up.

DD: The “affordable” bit is a big part of the game: we really wanted you to feel that this spaceship is affordable.

NoE: So you’ve got your first spaceship – what else can you tell us about the story behind the game?

Nifflas: Basically you’ve rented a spaceship from a company called Uexplore, which offers cheap space travel that’s actually a bit too cheap: their mothership crashes into this planet, so you end up on the planet you were not supposed to go to. And your main goal is to send a distress signal, but the problem is, when the game starts you don’t really have a connection to another ship to send a distress signal, so pretty much all you can do is explore.

DD: And stay alive as long as possible! (laughs)

So everything really is about feeling like an engineer. You have to think that it’s not really skill-based about how well you’re moving, it’s more about thinking. And then what we really like is something that’s really inspired by TV shows and movies like Star Trek: the game supports up to three players, so we split up the controls in multiplayer. One person can be the engineer, one takes care of movement, and the third one can use the scanner and flares and so on. It really gives you that “space team” atmosphere.

DD: But that doesn’t happen in the beginning. I just went to a local multiplayer event in Berlin before coming here, just to playtest the game with other developers who also make local multiplayer games, and the first time we played in three-player mode with three people who’d never played the game before, and one interesting part is that, of course… You collaborate, and that’s not the typical way to play local multiplayer: it’s usually competitive, or if you’re working together it’s in a shooter where you can do separate stuff, and in our game you just cannot survive without talking to each other. And what we see often is engineers just playing around, like a kid: “Oh my God, oh my God, I’m overheating the ship!” and the person controlling the ship is yelling, “What are you doing?! Stop it!” (laughs)

I also have one thing to add that we’re focusing on with the multiplayer but I didn’t mention yet. Because of the asymmetric play, whether you’re in two- or three-player, what works really well is playing with a mixture of experienced and non-experienced players, for example a parent and child. Because it’s asymmetric and you’re not on the same level, you can split up the controls and give some to the player who’s not so experienced.