GENOKIDS: INTERVIEW

1. WHAT WAS THE FIRST GAME THAT YOU'VE PLAYED THAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH GAMING?

Artist: Ocarina of Time, before that I had a Master System and a Megadrive but it wasn’t until I played Zelda where I truly fell in love with videogames.

Programmer: Either Sonic, Rayman 2 or one of the many Monkey Islands that there are. I’m not sure which one was the first one to make me see games as more than just something to play with. I played lots of Sonic and other games on a Megadrive before I could play on a computer, but it was either Rayman 2 or Monkey Island the ones that made me want to play more than just for fun. Now I don’t play as much as before even though I’m playing all day.

2. HOW DID YOU GET INTO GAME DEVELOPMENT?

Artist: I wanted to make videogames ever since playing Zelda in the N64 and some years later Kingdom Hearts 2, it’s hard for me to pinpoint the exact how as I remember trying to make videogames in Excel when I got my first computer… well more like moving poorly drawn sprites made in paint around the canvas and pretending it was a game! Then I tried actual game engines like RPGMaker, GameMaker, Entidad 3D, Reality Factory where I’d try to make very ambitious ideas for the skills that I currently had, I did learn a lot about the basics of 3d modelling, rigging and very fundamental level design with the old hammer editor.

Programmer: I think it was when I was 13 or so, I started playing around with Game Maker by dragging and dropping and just trying stuff. It was like a game, and I enjoyed the feeling of creating something new even if it was horrible in hindsight. From there I learned some sketchup and eventually moved to Unity3D and learning some programming by reading its documentation and trying lots of stuff on it.

3. ARE YOU SOLO DEV OR DO YOU OWN A STUDIO?

We are an artist and a programmer working together as the two members of the Nukefist studio, so you could say we own a studio. We are the only ones developing the game except for audio-related stuff (music and sound effects) which we commission, as it's the only stuff we can’t do for ourselves. We tried but it’s not that easy.

4.WHAT GAMES DID YOU WORK ON BEFORE THE ONE YOU ARE WORKING ON NOW?

A couple of them, some made by both of us together and others separately. They were either proof of concepts or games that lasted half an hour at most. Most of them can’t be downloaded from the internet anymore and we are happy that’s the case because they were really bad.

An exception to those is a game we are making together with Chibig called Mika and the Witch’s Mountain, which is quite different from Genokids but we are quite happy with how it looks and stuff like how the movement feels like.

5.WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE NAME OF THE GAME GENOKIDS?

Genokids has been a project that has gone through multiple iterations, each of them radically different in genre, story, graphics… they can very much be considered their own things. The name Genokids and the fact that the characters are color coded were established in the first iteration and the idea was flexible enough to fit anything in it that we just kept it all the way here. From genetically engineered teenagers to a rock band where the drummer and guitarist argue about naming the band “Genocyde” or “The Kids” until eventually settling for both.

6. WHERE DOES THE STORY TAKE PLACE IN THE GAME AND THE BACKSTORY?

The Earth in Genokids is a different version of our own, in this universe society works in quite a crazy and almost nonsensical ways. The actual story takes place in the fictional city of Las Divas, where the young band are playing their first ever concert right as an alien empire decides to invade Earth to liquify its inhabitants for reasons yet to be revealed.

7. WHO IS THE PROTAGONIST AND WHAT IS THE STORY BEHIND THE CHARACTERS?

The band is the protagonist of the story. As for their story, the game doesn’t delve much into their backstories, you will get to know them better as the campaign progresses, we want the player to feel like they just joined a group of friends they know nothing about and slowly get to meet them and warm up to them.

8. WITH THE GAMEPLAY IS THIS AN OPEN WORLD OR DOES THIS GAME GO BY CHAPTERS?

The game is linear and is structured in chapters, one level per chapter.

9. WHAT TYPE OF WEAPONS ARE IN THE GAME AND HOW MANY ARE THERE?

There are a total of 8 weapons with different movesets. Each character starts with 1 weapon but upgrading their abilities to the maximum will allow you to unlock a new one. In order to not spoil them we’ve only revealed 5 thus far.

10. WHAT ENGINE ARE YOU USING TO CREATE THIS GAME?

We are using Unity, with lots of code on top of it to customize its render pipeline and animation driving logic. We considered using Unreal a couple of times but we are way too used to Unity and have quite a lot of experience with it, so we won’t be changing to another engine anytime soon.

11. BACK TO THE GAMEPLAY SO WITH THE LETTER GRADE WITH THE COMBAT WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO USE THIS AND WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO USE IT?

It encourages the type of playstyle we like, which is allowing the players to express themselves through a variety of attacks to pull off cool stuff. At first we considered simply timing them but being as fast as possible usually looks repetitive, bland and uninteresting. A Style system makes you want to be stylish, even if it’s less effective.

12.DO EACH STAGE HAVE A BOSS BATTLE AND WHAT TYPES OF BOSSES ARE THERE TO FIGHT?

The game won’t be long so there aren’t many chapters. We want to have a big fight after each one, which should be done by a boss, but the rest is secret.

13. IT SEEMS LIKE YOU CAN UPGRADE YOUR WEAPONS AND ABILITIES IS THIS TRUE OR UNTRUE AND WHY?

You can unlock a weapon for each character for a total of two weapons per character, plus a set of four unlockable special attacks per weapon.

For now we only showed Blue’s unlockable weapon (a scythe) with its basic moveset, but we will stay silent about the other unlockable weapons maybe until the game is finished to avoid both spoiling them and to give ourselves room to make changes to those weapons.

14. WHY SHOULD PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME?

We believe we have a really interesting mechanic with our persistent tag system, allowing players to switch between characters even when they’re in the middle of an attack which creates an insane amount of possible combinations when you take all 8 movesets into consideration. Our top priority is to make players feel like an unstoppable force of nature as they stylishly blast through the levels.

We find the gameplay to be really fun and sometimes we “test” the game for more than necessary due to how much we’re enjoying ourselves so we’re very confident that fans of the genre will find something entertaining and refreshing with this project!

15. WHEN WILL THIS GAME RELEASE AND WHAT PLATFORMS WILL THIS GAME BE ON?

Unclear as at the moment we lack the funds to work on the game full time, we’re currently working multiple jobs to stay afloat, one of them making another whole game parallelly for Studio Chibig.
We’re planning on launching a second Kickstarter campaign soon, by the time we finish the demo we’ll have a clearer image of the remaining time to complete the project.