Spurna Games (Interview)

 1. WHAT WAS THE FIRST GAME THAT YOU PLAYED THAT MADE YOU FALL IN LOVE

WITH GAMING?

I've been playing video games since my first console, the MasterSystem II with Alex Kid,

through to the Amstrad CPC6128 and my first PC. The games that I remember the most and

that marked my love for video games were Monkey Island, Alone in the Dark and Outcast,

among many others.

2. HOW DID YOU GET INTO GAME DEVELOPMENT?

I was attracted to computers and programming from a very young age. In the 80s, when I

was about 11 years old, I took my first programming course in Basic and started making my

little games at home. I've been programming video games ever since.

3. WHAT WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR COMING UP WITH THE NAME SPURNA GAMES?

I am from Barcelona, I wanted the name of the studio to be something related to Catalan

culture, in Catalan there is a word that I like a lot, it is "espurna", its translation in English is

"spark", I left off the first "e" because it is pronounced the same way and it is more

international.

4. WHO WERE SOME OF THE GAME DEVELOPERS THAT INFLUENCE YOU TO

CREATE GAMES?

Especially John Carmack in the early days of id Software, at that time both Wolfenstein 3D

and Doom seemed to me a technical revolution and something to learn.

5. WHAT TYPE OF GAMES HAVE YOU CREATED BEFORE THE ONE YOU ARE

WORKING ON NOW?

I made RTS games, car games, football games, shoot 'em up games and some adventure

games. Some of them were published in OK PC GAMER magazine, all in the 90s. Then I

started working for a gaming company where I continued to develop game engines and

casino games.

6. TELL US THE IDEA BEHIND THE NAME OF YOUR NEW GAME DEEP LOOP?

The project has evolved over the last few months, it started as a continuous story, where

every time you died, you as a player would relive it from the beginning, using everything you

had learned or achieved up to that point.

This mechanic gave the game its name, DeepLoop. After a lot of thought, the idea was to

keep the essence of the original game, but to make the stories shorter and with a greater

variety of styles and mechanics, all tied together by a common thread that makes sense and

justifies everything.

7. I SEE YOU ARE TAKING SOMEWHAT OF INSPIRATION FROM RESIDENT EVIL AND

SILENT HILL WITH THE MOVEMENT OF THE GAME SO TELL US HOW THE IDEA

OF THE MACHINES COME TOGETHER?

I've always liked the setting of those games and the way the camera is handled, and my

inspiration is really Alone in the Dark, which had fixed cameras for most of the adventure. I

wanted to give it a more cinematic style and have the player experience the story, but from a

more distant level.

8. WHAT ENGINE ARE YOU USING FOR DEEP LOOP AND WHY?

I have never used third party engines, I have always used my own engine to make all my

games. When I decided to start this project, it was clear to me that I couldn't use my own

engine if I wanted to spend more time making the game and less time making or modifying

my own engine.

I started with UNITY because it seemed the easiest to use, but after a few months I realised

that the way Unity worked was not for me and I decided to switch to UNREAL 5. I have been

programming in C++ for almost 30 years and Unreal works in C++ so it was very easy for me

to get started. I have been a programmer all my life and Unreal fits the way I work perfectly.

It goes without saying how powerful it is now, which allows me to focus on the game and get

the best quality for a game made by one person.

9. WHERE DOES DEEP LOOP TAKES PLACE?

As I said before, the game is made up of several stories that are completely different from

each other, even with different mechanics, linked to a main story that you have to discover

as you progress and that justifies the design of the game in small stories. So we have

neither a specific place or a specific time in which the game takes place as such.

To give you some examples, one of the stories takes place in an underground laboratory in

the 1980s, another in a bank in the United States in 1935, where we will be part of a robbery,

or even in a purgatory plagued by hellish creatures.

10. WHO IS THE PROTAGONIST IN DEEP LOOP?

In DeepLoop, we don't just control one character. Because of the way the game is designed,

we will be able to control all the characters in each of the stories. The idea behind this is that

the player is the protagonist and not the one who controls the protagonist. All of this makes

sense as the main story unfolds.

11. WHAT TYPE OF WEAPONS CAN YOU GET INTO THE GAME?

It is true that during some stories we will be able to use different types of weapons, but it all

depends on the world in which each story takes place. DeepLoop is not a killing game, it is

an adventure where you will have to use different mechanics, including the use of a weapon.

12. I SEE THERE IS CHARACTER SELECTION SO TELL US ABOUT THAT?

One of the basic mechanics of the game is that you can control any character you find, and

once you control them, they become part of you and you can control them again whenever

you want. This is where the character selector comes in, where all the characters already

known from the current story appear.

13. WHAT TYPE OF WORLD CAN YOU EXPLORE WITHIN DEEP LOOP?

Well, in DeepLoop you will get to know several worlds, both in historical periods of the world

we know, and other worlds or planets yet to be known. As I explained, each story takes

place in a different era or world.

14. WILL THERE BE ANY DLC IN THE FUTURE FOR THIS GAME?

I don't have any DLC in mind, the whole game will consist of 7 different stories that are

necessary to complete the main story.

15. WHY SHOULD WE WANT TO PLAY THIS GAME ON DAY ONE?

I try to make a game that's fun, that's varied, and where the story plays an important role.

Personally, games with repetitive and very long mechanics bore me and I never manage to

finish them, because when you've been playing the same game for several hours, no matter

how good the story or mechanics are, I get tired of it.

In DeepLoop you will have completely different mechanics depending on the story you

choose to play, and each of the stories will last between 30 and 60 minutes.

I hope it's a good game for people who like a variety of styles and narratives, where you

don't have to do the same thing for hours and hours to progress through the story.

16. WHEN WILL DEEP LOOP RELEASE AND WHAT PLATFORMS WILL IT BE ON?

Initially DeepLoop will be released on Steam and I would love to release it on the next

generation consoles XBOX Series X and PS5.

The release date is not clear yet, but I hope to be able to release it by the end of 2023.

17. WHERE CAN THEY FIND YOU ON SOCIAL MEDIA?

Mainly on Twitter @SpurnaGames and on https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepLoopGame where I

post information about the game but it's still under construction.

I'll create the Steam page once the game is a bit more advanced.