Oscar Jilsén is a 23-year old space marine from Gothenburg, Sweden. He is currently working at the newly started Coffee Stain Studios, creating awesome games and fighting off the orcish menace, but still finding enough time to answer a couple of questions from our pro-space, pro-coffee and pro-menace part-time interviewer (and full-time CEO), Jakub Riedel.


 

• Panzer Flakes (Jakub Riedel): Hi Oscar, thanks for the opportunity to ask you some questions. You’re a game designer at Coffee Stain Studios, an independent gamedesign studio based in Sweden… What do you do exactly, what are your responsibilities?
  

Oscar Jilsén: Hello. Since Coffee Stain Studios is a rather small studio my responibilities vary a lot between each project. On Sanctum for example I’ve mostly spent time building level-bound content – making sure the collision on the map is right, building the menus, taking care of scripted functionality, layout of the waves of monsters and so on. Other than that I and the other designers define how everything should work from a player perspective. I think you could say that I take care of everything that isn’t pure programming, graphics or sound. That includes building levels and defining gameplay.

• PF: Coolio, you’re a man of many talents then. How many people work at Coffee Stain Studios right now?
  

OJ: At the moment we’re eight people working here but we’ll most likely be bringing in an additional programmer soon. When Sanctum started as an UT3 mod we actually were eleven people, so we’ve gotten smaller as a group but I think we’re more focused now.

• PF: Is there a story behind your studio’s name, or was it just something you guys came up with spontaneously?
  

OJ: It’s a mystery, really. Our coffee pot seems to always be full and wherever we go there’s always coffe stains when we leave.

• PF: Either way, it has a nice ring to it. How did you start your gamedesigning career? And how did it bring you to Coffee Stain?
  

  OJ: My game designing career actually started long before I got to Coffee Stain. I’ve always been interested in games, ever since I got to play Microman on my fathers computer. After that I grew up with Duke Nukem – the good old 2d ones – and the NES. When I was around 14 me and two friends started up a game project in RPG-maker and worked on that for quite some time. That was my first taste of developing games and it was delicious. After that I noticed that I enjoyed figuring out how games work and designing my own systems more than actually playing the games. So when I saw I could get an education in game design in Skövde I didnt think twice and applied as fast as I could. When I had been studying for about two years I met most members of Coffee Stain and we banded together for the annual game project.

• PF: Your flag title, Sanctum, started off as a mod for Unreal Tournament, but was soon transformed into a full-fledged standalone game. How did that happen? What’s the story behind Sanctum’s origins?
  

  OJ: When I become a member of Coffee Stain we needed a game for a game project at the university. We wanted something that hadn’t been done before and after a while we had come up with a FPS-TD. We worked on the mod version of Sanctum for a good while and decided that, hey, we should start a company. When Epic released the UDK we took a look at it and decided that it looked nice and that we should remake Sanctum in the UDK. The plan was, however, not to do it directly. We decided to make some iPhone games in the meantime… until Epic contacted us and asked us to create a demo of Sanctum for their showcase. We’re very concerned about the gamers opinions, though, so we decided that we would wait a little while when the demo was released to gather feedback. The feedback will greatly affect the development of the full version, it’s only fair the players get to affect the outcome of the game. They’re the ones who will play it, after all.

• PF: That’s a great attitude towards your customers, I applaud. I’d love to hear more about this game. Could you throw some random details at us? Something about the gameplay?

OJ: Ok, I don’t know how much you know about the game so I’ll start from the beginning…

• PF: Sure, by all means.

OJ: Sanctum is a Tower Defence played in First person mode. The goal of the game is to stop all the waves of monsters before they get into the city. Elysion One. To stop them you have to build towers in a maze and utilize your own handheld weapons. You cannot win if you dont combine these two, especially the mazing. You need a big maze.

• PF: Do continue, kind sir.

OJ: We’ve tried to keep the player engaged by weak spots on the monsters or by pure enemy design. I’ll give you two examples of this. The bobble heads are impervious to damage on their bodies, where the turrets aim, so the player needs to shoot them in the head to take them out. These enemies arent very interesting on their own, but if you mix them with other types of enemies you create a more interesting problem. This is an example of an enemy explicitly designed to challenge the player, since he/she is the only one who can affect them. The small runners, on the other hand, work in a different way. They engage the player by turning up the pace, the player has to be very mobile and stay in front of them or he/she will have a very hard time catching up again. They are easily killed but they’re dangerous because they’re numerous and fast. They traverse the maze a lot faster than regular enemies, so if the player doesn’t have a decent sized maze he/she’ll have a really hard time. Story-wise nobody really knows why the monsters keep assaulting the city. Could it have something to do with the cries before each wave?

• PF: Your other title, I Love Strawberries, is an iPhone-centric puzzle platformer that’s most probably going to be both cute and fun. Actually, it seems that it’ll be a real cuteness overload, as it already has both „love” and „strawberries” in the title!
  

  OJ: I Love Strawberries is all about platform jumping. The goal of the game is to jump to the giant strawberry at the end of the level. On the way there the player has to collect wild strawberries to score points. The way is not all safe, though, the player has to travese and use a lot of different obstacles on the way. There will be two different types of highscores, one that records the amount of points you get and one that records the amount of jumps you needed to get to the end. We think I Love Strawberries will appeal to almost everybody since, deep down inside, we all love strawberries! ;D

• PF: Two of the game’s advertised features are the medal system and the Facebook-connectivity. Are our games becoming more social, or is it just me? How can gamedesigners benefit from this?
  

  OJ: In my opinion the games are not becoming more social. Sure, it’s easier to share your gaming information and set up games over the internet to play with friends and randoms. This is a great thing, it helps the games to expand a great deal. The reason I don’t think games are becoming more social is that the multiplayer is over internet. We’ve lost the golden days of split-screen gaming! Sure we have LAN but the majority of players don’t go to those. Even those that do go to LAN parties a lot spend most of their gaming time, well, not on LAN parties.

• PF: Ah, the good ol’ LAN-times, when everything was simpler and… Stop, you’re making me nostalgic! Let us get back to Facebook…
  

  OJ: The trend of connecting games to social sites is a great opportunity for developers, it is essentially free ads for your game. For example, if the fictional ”Mark” gets a highscore on a game and posts this on his facebook, all his friends will see this information. The cool thing about this is that it isn’t a company trying to sell this game to you, it’s your friend Mark. And since he has bought it and is playing it, that makes it a good game, right? Can’t hurt to test anyways. In the case of iPhone games, they’re often very cheap to boot. What things like facebook connectivity also does is it exposes potential customers that you normally wouldn’t reach because they’re not gamers, for instance. The pros for features like these are endless.

• PF: I Love Strawberries will be realesed at Apple’s AppStore, while Sanctum is going to hit Steam. Are modern, online forms of distribution a chance for indie gamedesigners?
  

  OJ: Short answer: yes! The way we look at it is it doesn’t cost as much from the outset – we don’t need to print out all those games. It also gives us a bigger share of the sales. If we go through the usual channels to get the game out to the stores we’ll end up with a very small percentage of the sales. I think virtual distribution is the future, not only for indie games.

• PF: I guess you’re a gamer yourself, right? How do your own experiences in gaming shape your work as a gamedesigner? How often do you seek inspirations in games you’ve played earlier in your life?
  

  OJ: Gamer forever, although it’s been hard finding time to play games lately. When I start out with a game idea I try to avoid other games as much as possible as they, to me, are very distracting. It’s very easy to unintentionally make the game very similiar to games used to reference in those early stages. That said I don’t seek inspiration from games very often, I Love Strawberries for example came from my unconditional love for strawberries (even though I’m allergic). When I’ve got the general idea down I can look at other games to see how they’ve implemented the features I’ve planned. I don’t think it’s a good idea to base a game off another game, that’s what sequels are for.

• PF: By the way, what’s your favorite game ever?
  

  OJ: Oh… Ehm… this has to be the hardest question out there. There are so many incredibly good games. I instinctively want to say Passage, as it is one of the smartest things out there. Problem is it’s not really a game, it’s more an experience. If I had to choose the choice has to be between Super Smash Bros. Melee and Pokémon Puzzle League. PPL is, hands down, the best puzzle game ever created but I think SSBM takes the prize. It’s just so good and it’s very easy to get into since its controls are so simple. Despite its simple appearance it’s actually very deep with things like SHFFL (short-hop fast-falled L-canceled) air attacks etc. It’s also the game I’ve played the most out of all games I’ve played, I think.

• PF: And what’s the game you wished you’ve never played?
  

  OJ: This is also a very hard question. I really want to designate No More Heroes, it’s a really horrible game but somehow I like it anyway. It’s an awesome horrible game. I think I’ll get a lot of FLAK for this but the game I wish I’ve never played is Final Fantasy VII. The game was a total letdown for me, probably because it had been over-hyped. Don’t kill me please.

• PF: I won’t, don’t worry, I never really jumped onto the whole Final Fantasy bandwagon myself… As for our readers… Quick, distract them, throw some useful advice on the stage or we’ll get ripped apart!
  

  OJ: The best advice is to work hard. The best way to get better as a game designer is by designing games, so keep those hobby projects active! Also make sure people get to know about your games, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best there is if nobody knows about you. Don’t be content with something that is only ok, it has to be at least good. This doesn’t mean you have to work like Blizzard, just don’t be afraid to redo something. Hope that helps, I’m not really a grizzled veteran yet.

• PF: If you could ask the next gamedev I will be interviewing a single question, what would it be?
  

  OJ: The most important question of course! Do you love strawberries?

• PF: Okay, before we wrap this up, I really need to know… Pirates or ninjas?
  

  OJ: Pirates! Ninjas lack the ‘ARR!’ and are all a bunch of landlubbers. If there’d be a Pirate vs. Ninja war I doubt the Pirates would even suffer a single casualty.

• PF: Landlubbers we may be, but hear us you shall not… Err, anyways, thanks for the interview, Oscar! Been a pleasure. Any last thoughts or advertising shout-outs you want to end this with?
  

  OJ: My pleasure! Keep an eye out for I Love Strawberries on the AppStore in about a month!

• PF: Oh, we will. There’s nothing better than a bowl of crunchy Panzer Flakes with some strawberries on top. Yummy. See you later, Oscar!

 
Oscar Jilsén is a great chap, working at Coffee Stain Studios, the gamedev studio behind I Love Strawberries and Sanctum. Take a look at their site, here, and be sure to buy a copy of I Love Strawberries as soon as it hits the AppStore’s shelves! It will be tasty!