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Indie Interview is a new weekly column devoted to the hard-working men and women out there that slave over miles and miles of code to bring you the latest and greatest indie games on XBox Live.  This week lets us explore the behind-the-scenes world of Gnomic Studio’s twin-stick survival shooter Square Off.  We’ve got a healthy dose of questions and answers with us supplying the nagging questions and Aranda of Gnomic Studios bringing the replies.

Q:  Twin stick shooters are all over the place now, but yours definitely stands out on XBLIG with its own charm and pace.  Did you have any specific inspirations for Square Off?

A:  Not from the twin stick shooter department, I suppose we’re lucky that it stands out from the crowd in that respect. We never set out to make a “twin stick shooter”, but I have always been a fan of being able shoot one way and move another. It was really just the only control scheme that made the most sense for the game. Myself and the artists are fans of first person shooters and we particularly enjoyed zombie survival ones like Left 4 Dead and CoD5 Nazi Zombies, so most of the inspiration came from that area. You just have to compare Square Off’s alien attracting bomb with L4D’s pipe bomb and CoD5′s monkey bomb to see what I mean there, not to mention the fact that it’s essentially a round based survival shooter like those games.

Q:  How large was the development team for the game and how long did it take?

A:  A total of 5 people directly contributed to Square Off. Scott Millar and Adam Matera did the artwork, Joel Taylor the music, Jeremy Prestwood the sound FX and myself the coding. It’s really difficult to quantify the total time spent on it. Coding the framework and gameplay took nearly a year of consistent but sometimes sporadic work in my spare time with condensed chunks before the Dream Build Play submission and final release. The final art assets weren’t started until about 6 weeks before DBP, and then another 3 months were spent finishing and polishing them before release.

Q:  I gotta ask.  Who came up with the idea of making goofy noises by pressing the face buttons?  Such an awesome little extra.

A:  Good question. Probably Scott, the guy who draws the goofy characters. He is an ideas machine (and some of them are alright too!). Since we weren’t using those buttons for anything important, taunts seemed like a good addition. I suppose they’re not like your traditional game taunts. Fun fact: you probably already guessed, but those goofy noises are our own voices with lots of effects applied.

Q:  Were there any features added or taken away during development?

A:  When we started the project with the idea of entering it into Dream Build Play 2009, it was going to be a run and gun zombie survival puzzle platformer, also with twin stick style control. We eventually realised it was a little too (OK, make that way too) ambitious for the tight schedule so we drastically redesigned the game. You could say the biggest feature removed during development was gravity. We had some inspiration from an article by David Sirlin about minimalist game design. We stripped back all the graphics and had the players as squares and the enemies as circles in a grey box environment (fun fact – the players are still squares and the enemies are still circles because, well, why not?). Once we were satisfied that the core gameplay was fun, we began to add features. Luckily the artists and myself work at the same company so we could discuss ideas at lunch time and playtest after work, which really helped keep the creative juices flowing.

Q:  Looking back on the finished game, was there anything you would’ve done differently or added?  I know online play was a common thing mentioned in reviews.

A:  Absolutely. We’re happy with the final product but really we wanted more levels, more weapons, more enemies, more bosses. More game modes would be nice too. Online play was considered but I pretty much dismissed it as too hard. In the interest of getting the game on the market, I think I was right. That said, after reading the reviews, I now realise that the days of local multiplayer are rapidly dwindling. Perhaps I overlooked this because I remember with such nostalgia playing C64 and Amiga games with and against my friends. We won’t make that mistake again – any future Gnomic games of this type will have network play.

Q:  What games do you enjoy playing when you’re not creating them?

A:  I grew up on platformers but these days I’m a sucker for first person shooters such as Counterstrike, Call of Duty, Half Life etc. I’ve always had a soft spot for the real time strategy games too, particularly Age of Mythology, Warcraft II and Starcraft. I’ve also recently picked up some of the top Indie games and World of Goo is incredible. To be honest though, between a family, a full time job and a hobby making indie games, the actual playing of games doesn’t get much of a look in lately.

Q:  Are you going for a sequel for the game next, or are you going to develop something else?

A:  Right now we’re working on a free update for Square Off on XBLIG, which will hopefully be available in the next month. The PC version is also making good progress. Our next major project will almost certainly be a sequel, but we do have plans for a couple of smaller projects that might get done first. Eventually we’d also like to go full circle and complete the zombie-survival-puzzle-platformer (code name Throng) that it all started out with.

Q:  Any chance you’ll spoil the surprise and let us know what the title update holds?

A:  I’m sure the team won’t mind if I reveal that we are currently adding two extra death match levels, challenges to enhance single player lastability (aka poor man’s Achievements) and a new co-op / single player game mode. I can’t guarantee this is the final list as we’re still working on it and we have a couple of other potential surprises too.

Q:  How was it developing for the 360?  Anything about XBLIG that you’d improve on?

A:  Overall, wonderful. It’s amazing to be able to develop for a console so easily and the tools that Microsoft provide are top notch. The community playtest and peer review systems of XBLIG work well, but being such an open platform does lead to a lot of fairly poor offerings, which drag the whole service down in the eyes of gamers. All we can do is try to make better games that counter those opinions. There are also many tweaks that Microsoft could make to the system, such as improved dashboard visibility and marketing, the ability to see more than the top 20 games in the dashboard lists, a dedicated apps channel, but I really can’t complain.

Q:  Any words for the budding indie developers that might be reading?

A:  Concentrate firstly on the fun factor. This is the whole reason we play games so don’t overlook it! If you can’t draw, find someone who can. Fun gameplay is more important than presentation, but most people won’t look twice at your game if it looks like “programmer art”. The same goes for sound effects and music, they are such important aspects of the whole game experience. As a programmer it’s easy to assign less importance to these details, but nobody is a master of all trades so go out and find some like minded masters to help build your dream game. Don’t forget to get as much outside playtesting and feedback as possible during development. Fresh eyes will help massively not just in finding bugs but coming up with ideas that will make your game stand out. Lastly, don’t give up. The hardest thing is seeing a project right through to completion. Don’t be afraid to cut features if they’re not essential to the gameplay. Setting yourself a goal such as entering a competition is helpful to keep the motivation alive.

You can check out Gnomic Studio’s website here and, if you’re on Live, you can set your phasers to download here.  Thanks to Aranda for the time and answers and to all of Gnomic Studios for a great game.