An Interview with Caley and Jesse of Slick Entertainment

Lou “herobyclicking” Adducci chats with Caley Charchuk and Jesse Turner with Slick Entertainment’s Viking Squad. We talk about being an independent developer and the making of Viking Squad.

Herobyclicking: Why did you decide to make a brawler?

Caley: We have always been a fan of brawlers. Jesse and I have been friends for awhile and we always played brawlers together, Golden Axe was our go to in our Arcade days, along with the X-men beat'em up. Castle Crashers was such a huge influence on our lives. I grew up being a huge Newgrounds fan when they came out with that and had all of the Newgrounds memes and when it came out on the Xbox 360 I just jumped on it. I know Jesse has been a part of Newgrounds as well, its just kind of been a part of lives. We wanted to figure out what (designing a brawler) it was about, take our shot at it.

Jesse: It’s a celebration of good times, sit down, blast through some content with your pals, I remember when I met Dan Paladin back in 2007 and it was at a comic book convention. I had big doe-eyes, I thought, “he made my favorite game and in my favorite genre ever.” I always wanted to be in the position to bring that to the masses. Luckily I am working with two of the most skilled guys I have ever worked with and we are doing it.

Caley: We also wanted to bring our own little spin to it. Right now there are a lot of skill l;eve games are really popular, like roguelike style of games. We looked at that and thought how could we bring that to a brawler? The excitement you get running around with friends In a trials based system. You do die a fair amount in our game a bit in our, you’ll face different enemies and challenges each time you enter dungeons or regions of the game world. We just wanted to take our childhood enjoyment and mash it with what we enjoy playing nowadays. So far we have got some really good feedback. Everyone is loving Jesse’s art, because he’s a mad artist.

Herobyclicking: How many of you are there at Slick Entertainment?

Jesse: There are three of us but we also work with POwer-Up Audio. So six? Seven?

Caley: Yeah, we also have a composer as well. He composed the music for Rogue Legacy, and those Chinese Jaguar commercials? <laughs> Those guys have been great to work with. The Power-Up people just bring this energy to the project they have worked on a bunch of different titles recently like Darkest Dungeon and Towerfall.

Jesse: The cool thing about that is that we play a lot of games and the POwer-Up guys play a TON of games. it’s great to be on the same page at the start of the project. They have been with us from the beginning. We have had an open development so they often streaming “hey this is us making Viking Squad sounds,” that has been really, really positive, community wise.

Herobyclicking: The term “indie developer” has taken on a different meaning over this last even. How do you all identify with being independent. WHat does that mean to you?

Jesse: Do you mean the Rockstar dev thing? I think that was something about this generation. I want to be an Indie developer but I think what means to some is “I want to be really rich and famous for the game that I make and not for the company I work for.” It’s not that we are rich and famous, its about making what you want to be making and making for yourself.

Caley: We are self funded. That is what being independent means. We only answer to ourselves and to our fans, and those are the harshest critics I think you’ll find in the world. There is also no other job like it. You do come into work and say, “we can do anything” and that is a scary process. We try to feed off of our past experiences as developers and try to make something to us and other people. We are not unique snowflakes.

Jesse: Me and Caley have a background in AAA development, Caley more so. While I was there I love talking to people and interacting with people but the bottom line of that is the grunts, the people hammering out that park bench for that level, or building the sidewalk, or doing whatever I was doing a 3D artist, we don’t get to go an talk to people (in AAA development). When your overhead is three people and you can grab your stuff, go to convention and start talking to people. I have never been to so many places career wise as I have with an independent company.

Herobyclicking: So is that where Slick Entertainment came from?

Jesse: My story is little bit shorter than Caley’s so I’ll just jump in here <laughs>. I was in film, moving lights around and I would come home and draw monsters all day and people were like “what are you doing that’s dumb, you should not do that.” Then I got into games, in post-secondary I went to school, where I met Caley. From there I worked in games for a little bit, and then I dive in cartoons for a little bit, and then I went to gathering called Full Indie a monthly gathering we do here in Vancouver. Through social net-drinking I met Nick Waanders the founder of Slick Entertainment and he saw my stuff and we made Shellrazer. That’s my background in a nutshell.

Caley: A little bit of history of the company. It started out with Nick Waanders working on the Xbox 360 version of N+. They launched that and he started working Scrap Metal for 360 as well, then Jesse came on board and they did Shellrazer, which an iOS game. Then Viking Squad.

My whole life I was fascinated with games. In high school I began modding Unreal, Duke Nukem 3D and Starcraft. Through that I decided to go to school and made some really great connections there.

Herobyclicking: Which school?

Caley: Art Institute in Vancouver. Which was CDIS right when we started.

Jesse: It was in the middle of this hilarious transition. You know postsecondary already gets this huge bad rep. You know you got to be autodidactic, you have to be able to teach yourself and work with what you got. Sure schools can hand you a pile of nothing but you’re working with like minded people. It’s definitely a controversial point. For a while there people were blacklisted who went to AI in Vancouver. If you’re good, you’re good and you’re going to make it, hopefully.

Caley: It’s like any school you get out of it what you want. We were just really gung-ho, worked really hard on different projects and came out with careers I guess.

I started at a mod company, Threewave Software. They did a bunch of mods for Quake originally and ended up becoming a company. I went to Ubisoft, then Slant Six Games, then Microsoft, Black Tusk just before they got Gears. Then I came here, Nick’s allure pulled me over to Slick.

He’s a very handsome man. <laughs> Especially after a few beers.

Herobyclicking: More of that social-net drinking?

Jesse: That’s right, that’s what its all about. <laughs>

Herobyclicking: Let’s talk about the game. How do you balance out the different classes in your brawler?

Caley: There is a little bit of worry, but not too much. There are four different classes. There is an archer (ranged), a berserker (melee), a shield guy (tank) and the female hammer maiden who is the all-arounder. You can level up your characters and crawl down certain skill trees to level up stats and unlock new abilities. You also find gear in the game that can adjust your abilities. If you go offense you might want to pick up equipment that boosts your defense or you can be a glass cannon with high offensive stats and gear and play with a higher skill base. It lets you experiment with some of those things.

Jesse: We get to show our game a lot. We take our game to bars and set it up on tvs. What we found is that it's about player expectation. For example: for our hatchet, our bow and our hammermaiden we put an icon to tell them what weapon they would be using, but that was confusing for some people so we used something else. We used the atypical Streets of Rage power meter that told them that this character is good at stamina based abilities, this guy has the most health. That seemed to resonate a bit more with people.

It turns out the less you innovate with the more trope-y stuff people feel comfortable and familiar. We fall into comfort gaming, and I think player class falls into that.

Caley: Each character has a specific move that brings a particular flavor into the combat. Once you get into multiplayer they start to play off of each other.

Herobyclicking: You’ve talked about Viking Squad having roguelike elements? What things carry through?

Caley: All your gear is permanent when you find it. It appears in town and you have to get your blacksmith to make it. You also find treasures in each area that add as currency that you can use in town. Or you can use it for the personal trainer to progress the skill trees. The items start off relatively cheap then starts to get more and more expensive, encouraging players to try to get further. We have four different levels and they each have a different theme. It’s almost like a dungeon with different levels that get progressively harder as you go ending with bosses.

Herobyclicking: What do you feel that you have done differently with Viking Squad?

Jesse: Probably the lane system

Caley: So basically when you are playing a brawler you can move across the screen. Viking Squad is not as granular. You actually snap to planes on the vertical screen. You line up perfectly with your targets. There is never a question who you are going to be hitting or what attacks you have to dodge. You can be guaranteed that jumping out of the way at a certain point in time is going to escape that attack. That plays into the players skill a little higher. It lets people make informed decisions. They can feel not so ripped off if something hits them.

Jesse: We all have thrown a knife in Final Fight and it just whiffs by everybody, because the Z access is a little bit wishy-washy. We tried to bring a little bit of stability and precision to that aspect of brawlers.

It also when our boss attacks and bigger area attacks hit an entire lane, you know you can just shuck out of the way. Whats really cool is to watch people struggle with it at first and then it just clicks. I think that’s the best possible feeling you can have when you make a game, is when somebody just gets what you’re doing. You think, oh good, I’m not just a crazy person.

Herobyclicking: What’s you favorite point of the development process on Viking Squad?

Caley: It’s definitely when you get the controller into people’s hands and you see them mentally trying break the game down and figure out all of the components. It starts to click, you see them figure out how to dodge. You see them learn how to knockdown the enemy and get the control aspect of the combat system. THey might die once, but then it starts to click. They get a little more animated and they start gasping when they dodge a move. It’s this process that starts to build up in them.

We were at PAX East earlier this year. One of the game’s bosses was getting a lot of attention and crowd began forming. People were waiting in line trying to beat the boss and get back in line when they couldn’t. The crowd was getting involved. The boss was this big Yeti who has his fists up in the air and slams them around the battlefield and people were just gasping and cheering when they avoided attacks. The precision is there so they know that it’s up to the player’s skill, the bar is raised. It get really intense.

Jesse: It’s totally something else when see someone light up. We just showed it recently at a local watering hole. There is a picture a friend of ours snapped, there’s me and I am just kind of in the background, put of focus. But there is the two players playing the game, and the happy looks on their face it looks staged. But man, we helped make that how fucking amazing is that?

I think a lot of it is that being this close to the community, we dev stream every week. We draw pictures and joke around with people. When you are this deep into something, it's hard. E3 comes around and these Battlefront trailers come out and we think, “oh my god, what are we doing?” You feel totally crushed. But then you get a chance to talk to your community, people show up and are say, “hey guys, this is great. It’s looking good, it feels good. I want to play this!” You think, “yeah, it is good, isn’t it?” I reinforces it. We are all human and man, it feels good to get good feedback from the people who we are making the game for.

Cayley: In the end it’s a game and we are trying to make some kind of exciting experience. We want people to walk away feel like they have accomplished something, they have overcome one little obstacle.

Jesse: And they are going to be a part of something a lot of people put a lot of work into and are very passionate about. We want them to feel just as good about it playing as we did making it.

Caley: One crazy thing at PAX East there was this group of guys dressed as scouts from Team Fortress and they hung out at the booth for like four hours. They are actually coming out to Vancouver to hang out and see how the game is doing. It’s just wild to have someone interested in what you do.

Jesse: It always comes down to like, we can take for granted what we are creating and what we are working on, because it’s all the time, everyday, all day. To an outsider, what we do is pretty special. I can really appreciate that. I can go watch a rock show and be blown away at how good the guitarist is. But for some reason I can’t figure why people are interested in watching me draw or enjoying the combat mechanics of Viking Squad. It’s humbling and sobering to know people are that into what we are doing. It makes us just want to work harder.

Day 21 | Slick Entertainment