Interview | tinyBuild Games Talk JetGetters, Wii U and Aerial Combat

Cubed3: Please introduce the team working on JetGetters.
 
Tom Brien: I'm Tom, the lead design on JetGetters! I coded the prototype and did all the concept art.

Alex is producer, he's making sure this game gets finished and released on Steam, along with all the other games coming out of tinyBuild!
 
Luke is in Seattle handling our GDC, PAX booths and press coverage.
 
Doug is coming over from Killzone at Guerrilla to bang the multiplayer design into good, clean shape.
 
Wytze's on the port of No Time right now, coding the final version of JetGetters as soon as the Kickstarter's done and Matthijs is our 3D art intern who we'd like to hire, fingers crossed!

Cubed3: What projects have tinyBuild Games worked on previously?
 
Tom: Our first release as a studio was No Time to Explain in 2012, and we've all had careers for a few years before that. SpeedRunners was our first multiplayer game, and the first cross-developer team-up with DoubleDutch Games! It's a fantastic gem of a multiplayer game, and I hope the same enthusiasm shines through in this one.

Cubed3: JetGetters sounds and looks intense from what we've seen so far! Please explain the concept and how it came about.
 
Tom: It started in June 2013, Unity was picking up speed in the browser space, so you've got all these 3D browser games coming out. Tiny developers getting these awesome tools, it's great right? No, it's driving me crazy! They're all Counter-Strike and Call of Duty clones!

You can have so much fun with a quick deathmatch. Why not Tribes? Why not Team Fortress? We've all seen the crazy stunt videos of people swapping jets and sky-jacking in Battlefield, right? Why not support that niche, and build on that? So we started designing a prototype of a multiplayer shooter where skydiving around like a maniac is tied to a mouse button, and all this boring sniping and crouching around is thrown out the window.

Cubed3: What would a typical match/session look like and how many players would you expect on screen at one time?
 
Tom: Number of players is still up in the air right now, and that's how often wordplay comes up in interviews for this game.
 
In a match of JetGetters, a red team and a blue team fly out of their base in fighter-jets. You might shoot down the other players; you might steal their vehicles in mid-air. Someone could be chasing and you might eject, fire on them, and land back in your own cockpit for a sharp 180. Maybe you'll fire a rocket and hijack that to surf it across the map for a blazing shortcut, but don't stay on too long, because rockets explode.
 
What happens if you're a medic, and hijack a heavy jet? What kind of bonus do you get from that? We'll figure it out this week!

Cubed3: Will there be a storyline and protagonist, or is it intended to remain more of a multiplayer experience?
 
Tom: This is a multiplayer game, there's so much of the design that supports how people play together online, and how to get people to play nice together and make friends. No kill-streaks, no snipers, the way you get better at this game is by helping your team! This is the same philosophy that Valve's using in DOTA 2 and Left4Dead. Other players, and your online experience, are a part of the fun. Half the design decisions wouldn't apply if we took out the people. There are bots though, you can beat those up.

Cubed3: How did the art style and direction come about? Will there be a dynamic camera as with the trailer, or a more fixed approach?
 
Tom: Oh the camera is your mouse, we're a shooter. I'm writing an article on the aesthetics right now.  The short version is that it's super-tropical scumbag pirates who've come upon this giant hording stash of billion-dollar fighter jets. What do pirates do with fighter-jets? They wreck 'em and steal 'em. The personality here is that it's confident, positive, charismatic dirtbags. Like Bad Company, or Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or Jackass! When you're bailing out of aeroplanes at each other, then how can it not be?

And when you're stealing vehicles out at sea with grappling hooks then how can it not be pirates?

Cubed3: Battlefield 3 and Just Cause 2 are said to be strong influences - what aspects of these games have fed through to JetGetters?
 
Tom: It took about an hour after coming up with the core concept before we decided that we'll need grappling hooks. You cannot land on a jet without one, it's ridiculous. How to aim and shoot and comfortably ride on the back of a plane are solved problems in Just Cause.

Battlefield is still, with Battlefield  4, producing weird bugs and exploits that are only fuel for what we're doing. There's some kind of insane speedboat thing right now where you can fly a boat into a jet. I couldn't come up with that if I tried. It's so fun pulling it off, though!

Cubed3: Are there any other franchises - like animé and films that have inspired JetGetters?
 
Tom: God I could sit here all day - we were going over animations for hours until we finally realized that the answer to "How do you whip towards something in mid-air?" is "Spider-Man does that every day". Spider-Man answered so many animation questions for us, and I'm completely in-love with this posing. His poses are amazing and perfect.
 
I love the Gainax animation style of how completely over-done and stretched out everything is. It's hard pulling that off in a game, but if you look at the footage we've got coming up, you can see how it informed the camera and jet movement.
 
The character and personality of the game is based on lovable low-life thieves, gypsies and scoundrels like I said. Did you ever notice how often that pops up in children's movies? Aladdin, Robin Hood, Jack Sparrow, Road to El Dorado, Lady and the Tramp, even the dog in Oliver and Company stole those hotdogs. How do people not hate Scrooge McDuck? Rooting for the bad guys is a funny phenomenon, and that's the heart in JetGetters.
 
Game-wise, don't even start.

Cubed3: If the Wii U stretch goal was met, how do you think the Wii U GamePad controller could come into play?
 
Tom: I can't believe this Wii U enthusiasm came up as much as it did. I think asymmetrical multiplayer is really interesting and unexplored; I'd like to do something unique. We know that everyone playing on a Wii U has one of these screens, so why give it a back-seat?
 
Let's do something special. What if one player in the match could see the map as a whole? Or what if you could track your own jet after somebody stole it? What if you could pick one player as a target, and see their screen? Or just an in-cockpit view would at least be novel. We'll come up with something, and we're small and nimble enough that it can be something fun.

Cubed3: Would you consider portable platforms like Nintendo 3DS for a port?
 
Tom: We are a licensed Nintendo developer, so that's not outside the realm of possibility, but I'd be very surprised on that one, as much as I'd like to see it.

Cubed3: What hurdles have you had going at it as part of an independent team?
 
Tom: We don't have a character designer, voice director and an in-house orchestra. We're a bunch of guys doing the best we can, and if somebody's busy on another project then something else can't progress.
 
It does give us the opportunity to do new and radical things. We decided to give away 10 copies of JetGetters in the $50 tier in one conversation. A small team is more often a help than a hindrance, and we're confident about staying smaller than 10 people.

Cubed3: What are your thoughts on Nintendo's approach to indie developers in recent years?
 
Tom: It's been very hard to understand where they're going with indie developers, and how to efficiently communicate with them, but now we have a direct US-based contact which makes things easier.

Cubed3: If you could both work on any Nintendo franchise, what would it be any why?
 
Tom: Advance Wars. I am in love with the Advance Wars commanding officers. All of them. What a bright, fun, exciting game, what an amazing soundtrack, what a smart idea. Advance Wars is such a strong design to go back to and analyse, and such an uplifting world to be in.
 
Luke: Legend of Zelda for me. It was one of the initial games on the NES that opened my eyes up to the RPG elements in video games.  The music, the levels, everything about it was fantastic back then, and even the music has stood the test of time.

Cubed3: What are your plans for the future? Could JetGetters see sequels or in-game-purchases?
 
Tom: We're more into the idea of expanding and building upon an existing release than starting up work on a sequel. We added so much to SpeedRunners post-release. JetGetters will likely have more maps and interesting twists and game-modes a little while after the initial launch, which will all be rolled in for free, as is customary on Steam.
 
In-game purchases is something we're looking at, but we're more excited in the potential of the Steam Workshop, and letting people make their own fan creations, and build a market from that yourself. If I had that in games when I was growing up I'd go crazy, that's brand new. Freemium purchase stuff is a dirty word nowadays anyway; we'd like to try out something new like this.
 
That's JetGetters! We still need support on the Kickstarter, go grab a code for some hot sky-swappin'!
 
JetGetters on Kickstarter
 
What are your thoughts on the concept, will you pledge support?