Old CAN be new again which is immediately evident when looking at the indie game qrth-phyl from studio hermitgames. This uniquely-named title was chosen to lead off the Indie Games Uprising III event and it’s certainly made a splash among the press sites covering this event. Matt James, the creative force behind qrth-phyl, was able to answer a few questions for us regarding where the inspiration for this arcade reimagination comes from.

Hello Matt. Thanks for agreeing to talk to us today. Can you tell us a bit about hermitgames and your role within the studio?

Hello. I started releasing stuff as hermitgames in 2002 ish, as a label for just my own stuff, that I was solely in control of. If I’ve made something I want to release to the public I’ll do it through hermitgames.

You have an interesting backlog of games you’ve created. One of the things I noticed is that unlike a lot of the other XBLIG developers taking part in the Uprising, your history seems to be very PC-centric. Is there a particular reason you’ve always targeted PC, and why go to XBLIG now?

I’ve not really actively chosen to concentrate on PC. It’s only recently there have been options to distribute on xbox or iPhone or whatever without signing to a publisher. My previous game Leave Home was on XBLIG before PC.

I stand corrected! What do you feel are the strengths of each platform, and do you have a preferred platform to develop for?

Mostly I want something with easy distribution, getting stuff ready for public release is a right pain so anything that makes it easier to give a game out to people and it work is good. That and lack of interference from the platform owner, or anyone else, is what I want.

Let’s jump back for a minute to the game we just mentioned, Leave Home which I recently had a chance to play. For a lot of indie developers, the side-scroller SHMUP seems to be a go-to genre for learning the ropes of development. However, you took something commonplace and made it unique. Leave Home rewards or punishes players depending on how well they’re doing. Stages not only scroll, they also rotate. It’s also an intentionally short game. What are some of the elements – design or otherwise – that you’re most proud of in Leave Home?

I’m pleased to have finished it. It ended up feeling how I wanted it to feel which is good.

What have you been able to take from your time and experience developing Leave Home that has helped you with qrth-phyl?

Loads of the algorithmic generation stuff was useful. qrth-phyl takes some of that a step further by mutating the generation algorithms themselves.

Let’s dig into qrth-phyl. In your words, tell us what this game is all about.

It’s an arcade game. It’s about BLOCKADE, the 1976 first snake/maze style game. It’s about what gets left behind. It’s about spacial navigation. It’s about old computers. It’s about progression. It’s a videogame.

qrth-phyl is taking Snake into three dimensions

Why BLOCKADE though? Was there something appealing about taking a classic game and putting a big twist on it?

Initially with the prototype I did in 2004 I didn’t even know about Blockade. I was just fiddling with the challenge of making a 3D snake type thing. It wasn’t until 2010 ish that I discovered the Blockade and Lane Hauck story and thought I could bring that and my prototype together.

What do you find to be the most interesting or enjoyable aspect of the game?

Feel/Atmosphere. The really difficult small 3d levels where it feels like everything is going off and you’re just surviving.

What’s been the most difficult part of development for you?

Just getting stuff finished for release, all the little edge polishing. Also it was quite tricky doing both PC and XBLIG versions for release at the same time.

Well, qrth-phyl is already garnering some positive attention. It was named one of the finalists for this year’s Dream.Build.Play competition. Are you surprised, excited, or some other response?

I try not to look at the response. I want it to do OK, mostly so I can make another game.

What’s next for hermitgames?

I have like 3 things on the go that might release next. A 2D arcade style game, a 3D game built from some of the same code as qrth-phyl and a slower PC type release. Depends which ones I lose interest in.

For our readers who are curious about qrth-phyl, can you give us a pitch on why they should try it?

It’ll do your head in.

For more information on hermitgames and the studio’s catalog of titles, be sure to check out their official site.

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

For those unfamiliar with Snake, it had the player steering a snake around a 2D stage running over pellets to earn points, but caused the snake to grow longer. The snake never stopped moving and the player had to avoid running it into walls or itself. This game evolves from the long-standing classic by adding in a 3rd dimension. The game alternates between two different kind of stages. Half of the stages are cubes with 2 dimensional faces which players slide along the outside of. By collecting enough little cubes on the stage, a section of it opens up and allows players to pass inside to a 3D stage that allows complete freedom of movement. It is these areas where the game really shines. Players can weave in and out of tight turns and through their own growing snake tail in a tense race against time within an ever-shrinking environment.

One of the most interesting design choices of qrth-phyl also builds upon an older game. hermitgames’ previous title Leave Home had the difficulty automatically ramp up or down based on how the player performed. That design has been carried over meaning no two playthroughs of the game will be exactly alike. Players breezing through the stages will suddenly have tighter confines to work within as walls form and move, and placement of the collectible cubes gets sparser and closer to walls. I think this is a really solid decision by the developer. Although boosting the difficulty often shortens the length of the game, it also means players won’t have to play through dozens of levels to try to surpass their previous records.

Getting a handle on spacial recognition in terms of how far the snake is from a wall or obstacle is difficult. Eventually players can ‘get a feel’ for when to turn away, but ultimately it’s a guessing game. For a game with finite lives that rewards players for extending their current run, it can be a frustrating turn of events for a poor camera angle to cause the loss of a long snake chain or a last life. The same can be said during the stage transitions as the snake enters an outside area. Often I found myself aimed straight at a wall with too little time to react and save myself. The fact that the stages are randomized means that memorization isn’t even a possibility to save you in those situations.

The 3D areas of the game are a lot of fun, but the controls take some practice

This game really wants for a leaderboard. Although qrth-phyl  is a modernization of the classic Snake game, arcade classics were popular in large part because of high score rankings and the bragging rights that come with it. Though there’s something to be said for bettering oneself, it’s arguably more satisfying to topple a friend’s records. I did continually come back to the game to see if I could improve (which I did), but I really wanted to see how I was stacking up against other press reviewing the game and other early purchasers. Although many XBLIG developers complain about the difficulty of including leaderboards in their indie titles, some have done it including fellow Uprising developer Smudged Cat Games in their past title Growing Pains.

I really wanted to love qrth-phyl as not only a nod to gaming history, but as the first title out of the gate for an event aimed at reigniting interest in a gaming service woefully unappreciated. I know the game is fun because I kept coming back to try to better my performance. It’s also frustrating in that the camera can’t show the player everything they need to see in order to succeed. While it falls short of greatness because of a few design flaws, there’s enough solid gaming enjoyment here to recommend players pick it up for the 80MSP ($1) price tag.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Additional Coverage:

The Indie Ocean qrth-phyl review

Clearance Bin Review qrth-phyl review

Indie Theory qrth-phyl review

VVGTV’s Indie Spotlight of qrth-phyl

IndieGamerChick qrth-phyl review

the XBLIG qrth-phyl review

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

As video games have evolved from generation to generation, they have taught a sort of language along the way – not just of jargon, but of mechanics and muscle-memory.  Usually, this works to the long-time gamer’s benefit, as new titles build upon the “rules” established by their predecessors.  It’s why you can pick up a side-scrolling platformer and trust your impulse to start moving to the right, or start a bullet-hell shooter and – well, hope, at least – that a safe haven is hiding somewherewithin the screenfull of ammunition.  It’s why you can sit down to a new PC game and find your left hand settling on the WASD keys, or why you can pick up a console shooter and expect the left analog stick to move your character while the right aims your weapon.  Conventions are invented, then refined, then repeated, until they become instinct.

As a result, there is an uneasy tension between gaming’s past and present.  The savvy game designer can take advantage of historical conventions, either to rely upon them or subvert them.  But invoking the past always carries with it certain risks.  A game that stays too close to what has come before comes off as a soulless copy, while a game that changes a historical model too much forces players to fight against their own expectations.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Octopede, a recent title from British developer Orbital Games.

Visually, Octopede is far more active than Snake ever was, thanks to the introduction of an array of enemy viruses that riddle the system.  The enemy AI is very straightforward – some move along set paths, other shoot you from afar, still others chase you across the screen – but such simple adversaries are threatening when thrown at you by the handful.  Fortunately, you’re offered a variety of tricks to use against them, ranging from the ability to shoot in the direction you are moving to traps you can leave in your wake.  There are also special weapons to collect and use, each of which can be counted on for mass destruction when you find yourself in a pinch.  Darting around the screen, trying to collect data packets and ammo while dodging and dogfighting your enemies certainly makes for an exciting, arcade-inspired experience – albeit one that feels more akin to retro shooter like Geometry Wars than a traditional game of Snake.  Clean, pixellated graphics and chiptune music/SFX complement both this gameplay and the framing story, although I found myself wishing the different enemy types were more visually distinct and that the debris effects that occasionally clutter the screen were less invasive.

This experience is enhanced by the game’s central scoring mechanic, which is perhaps its best element.  Whenever you pick up data packets and extend your worm’s length, you are building up your health reserves as well as earning points – you lose segments when your worm’s head is damaged, and you die when you have nothing left to lose.  However, whenever you have more than eight segments trailing you, you can choose to “cache” them, permanently giving up their utility as health in exchange for increasing your score multiplier.   Judicious caching is a must if you want to climb the leaderboards, but it always comes at the cost of permanently ceding part of your safety – a classy implementation of risk versus reward.  Building an arcade game around the tension between survivability and score is a great idea, and Orbital has executed it well.

Yet, perhaps to make room for all these new additions that are demanding part of your screen’s limited real estate, Octopede abandons the defining element of Snake’s gameplay: the idea that colliding with your own tail is fatal.  The potential for self-destruction informs every instinct I have when playing Snake, not to mention popular culture’s most enduring image of the genre – the iconic visuals of Tron’s lightcycle racing.  But, in Octopede, your tail is mostly cosmetic: aside from one enemy that targets the end of your tail, the game would play rather the same without it.  Any Snake veteran will probably find this a little disorienting.  In my case, I found myself constantly fighting my instinctual self-avoidance, and I’m sure I died a few needless deaths that I could have survived had I remembered that my own tail wasn’t lethal.  Taking the game on its own merits, this is a wholly acceptable design choice – indeed, the game would probably be unplayable if you had to avoid your tail and all the other hazards of the mainframe – and I adapted to the change fairly quickly.  But when so much of the game’s backbone is derived from the Snake tradition, I was thrown for a moment when I realized what had been lost along the way.

Less forgivable is the game’s awkward control scheme.  Orbital boasts that Octopede lets you move in eight directions, giving you an edge over the strict up-down-left-right movement of your enemies.   I liked this idea in theory, but in practice Orbital has made it nigh-unworkable.  On the keyboard, cardinal movement is controlled by the directional arrow keys, but diagonal movement is inexplicably assigned to the WASD keys rather than to the more-conventional combinations of the arrow keys.  (In other words, rather than pressing both up and left to move in the up-left diagonal, you press the A key.)  If there is a logic underlying the mapping of diagonals-to-letters then I never found it, and all the while I struggled to master two-handed movement while also trying to trigger weapons and cache excess data.  Frustrated, I switched to using an Xbox controller, only to find a new iteration of the same problem – rather than assigning eight-directional movement to a single analog stick, the game parcels movement across them both.  Granted, you can control everything with a single hand via your keyboard’s numpad, an option that might help those familiar with such a movement array, but unfortunately that’s a gaming language I’ve never learned.

Using both hands to control the worm’s movement was so alien to me that I ultimately abandoned hope.   Rather than struggling further with the eight-directional options with which I was presented, I just trusted my years of four-directional intuition to keep me safe and ignored the diagonals entirely.  I acknowledge that part of the problem here was my own fault, my own inability to adapt.  But when making a game that holds itself out as an evolution of a video game classic, I would have expected Octopede to default to something closer to more conventional, instinctual controls, to let players like me take advantage of behavior honed over decades rather than forcing us to resist our mental conditioning.  Is this irony, then—that Octopede abandoned the Snake tradition of making my body my worst enemy, only to make me fight myself in order to play it?  (Orbital has, to their credit, stated elsewhere that they rejected single-stick control during the design process but that it will be added via the next update.  I may not agree with the former decision, but I commend them for the latter.)

In the end, once I got myself into the mindset of playing a score-driven shooter rather than a direct Snake homage, learned how to best use my offensive and defensive items, and accepted that eight-directional movement was going to remain an unrealized dream for me, I had a good time with Octopede.   The action is fast-paced, the atmosphere is invitingly old-school, and the caching mechanic is surprisingly intelligent – in my opinion, the game’s biggest strength.  Fans of the genre will find a lot to like, and anyone who tries the demo and finds themselves wanting more should find the game well worth the three-dollar cost.  But I can’t help but feel that the game might have been better if Orbital had been a little more confident in their game’s ability to stand on its own, designing and framing it as an independent experience rather than as the “evolution” of a classic.  Invocations of gaming history carry with them a certain amount of baggage; here, the specter of Snake weighs down an otherwise-well-made arcade experience.

Octopede, by Orbital Games, is available via Desura for the PC and will be coming soon to Xbox Live, Steam, and a number of other gaming providers.  Reviewed for 3+ hours, including two successful trips to the system’s core and many adventures along the way—all without moving diagonally. 

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.