Interview: Lonesome Dev Team
A third-person low-poly western-themed action RPG, Golden Axe Games’ Lonesome brings an eye-catching aesthetic to fast-paced gameplay. With a recent demo garnering well-deserved attention, I caught up with devs Tobias Schnackenberg and Dennis Dubiel and chatted them up on the creative thrust of their project.
Erik Meyer: Lonesome drops players into a hack-and-slash RPG in the wild west, so can you break down what drives each of those elements? What do you see as being fundamental to a fast-paced RPG, and how do you see a hack-and-slash RPG experience differing from an third-person shooter like Ruiner? Similarly, what elements make the west both unmistakable and intriguing?
Lonesome: First of all, thank you for interviewing us. We are very surprised by the public attention brought by our demo release and are happy that so many people are enjoying what we have built.
Hack-and-slash RPGs always have been one of our favorite genres, and that is the reason why we decided to make one. We don’t see Lonesome as a classic hack and slash RPG. It is not really as fast paced as other titles, such as the famous Diablo 3 for reference. In Lonesome, you often encounter only a very few enemies and focus on each alone. You are (currently) not slaying hordes of undead, and we do not have this planned in the near future. We called Lonesome “hack and slash” because of the controls it has. This may change in the future, since we are still not sure if the controls are in their final form.
EM: The game has a striking low-poly style, so when it comes to the visual assets, what directs your art creation? I see touches like having interactive objects project beams of light, so how do you see the look of the game complementing the playfeel?
Lonesome: Well, we often get complimented for the look and feel of Lonesome. It seems that this is where our game really stands out. The atmosphere seems to be unique. The hard fact remains, we chose this graphic style because we wanted to be able to create our own assets in an amount of time that worked for us. Dennis, our 3D artist, did not have any experience before this project, so he learned everything by himself, which was pretty impressive. We quickly found out that the abstract geometric forms that we use for our game make it somehow stand out. You are able to imagine the world as you want to see it in Lonesome, since not everything is modeled in detail.
The light and fog settings were heavily inspired by some pictures we found online. We wanted a very special look and feel for Lonesome, which led to this result.
EM: New areas appear as players near the edges of the tiled spaces; how, as developers, did you decide to construct the levels this way, and how do you see this level creation / level revealing method impacting the overall game experience?
Lonesome: Well, this idea of tiles popping out of nowhere is pretty new and was one of the last features we implemented before the release of the demo. Before we had this system, we had a normal map. During our play tests, we constantly figured out that the camera was not optimal. We increased the camera angle pretty much until we had something like a birds eye view. The problem was that for our style, we needed to restrict the edges of our world somehow. We used mountains for this. But these mountains were constantly in the line of sight of the camera. Despite a special renderer that we used to fade out these obstacles, we were not pleased with our solution.
That is where we thought outside of the box and just said: Hey, why don’t we just remove everything from the edges of the map and make it floating? That is where the idea of the tiles was born. The appearing and disappearing was a follow-up idea which just made sense in this case and fit with our low polygon graphic style pretty well.
EM: As compared with the RPGs of yesteryear, I note Lonesome has a much faster pace, and quests/interactions play into that considerably. What kinds of criteria do you hold for NPCs and the missions they send players on? Do you see your work as primarily plot driven (which I in no way intend as a negative), and in the areas of character development / storytelling, what writerly methods do you see working well in your larger narrative?
Lonesome: We have an idea in our minds that Lonesome will consist of multiple short missions or levels. We do not want our players to be stuck in some endless dungeons for hours and hours. We think our path for Lonesome is to create short maps with very few and quick quests. Each map (or mission) can be completed one after another and tells a little piece of the plot. We think that this mix of modern level-based games, combined with classic hack-and-slash RPG elements, is very cool and fits well.
EM: Simply put, you’re German, and having spent some time in Europe, I’m always curious about the environments in which games develop. How do you see your geographic location playing a role in your work, and how do you feel influenced by your larger community? Berlin has Saftladen; what’s the dev world like in Bremen?
Lonesome: Yes, we are both German. And here in Bremen, unfortunately we don’t have many contact points with the indie development scene. I am not really sure if here are many indie developers to be honest. From day one, we decided to publish our game worldwide, which is an excellent possibility that we have nowadays with the modern gaming platforms, such as itch.io or Steam. We think that the indie development scene in Germany is still very small, and there are only a very few people, which we also can see in the statistics of our followers on social media. Less than 10% of our followers actually are from Germany.
EM: To further focus the game, in terms of genre, it takes place during a plague that causes the dead to rise, blending magical items with a Weird West setting, so when it comes to world building, what do you see as essential inclusions in defining your universe? And when it comes to predecessors like Deadlands, how do you see yourselves building on or building away from earlier works?
Lonesome: Lonesome plays in a classic Wild West setting. We decided on this setting because we wanted to have a very different feel for our RPG. Most hack-and-slashes play in a classic medieval setting. After we decided on that, we thought it would be a really cool idea to combine it with zombies and skeletons. This was a little inspired by the Read Dead Redemption extension “Undead Nightmare”. So these two elements: Wild West and the dead walking on earth are pretty essential in our universe.
The difference between Lonesome and earlier works, such as “Deadlands”, is that we have this combination focused heavily on RPG elements, which is a little unusual for Wild West games and the modern level-based fast-paced gaming experience, which should address hardcore RPG gamers, as well as casual gamers.
EM: To my view, the biggest thing that makes or breaks games is the functional synergy of elements (visual assets, audio, UI/UX, controls, paced writing, satisfying challenges, etc); if a game has odd cutscenes or long dialogue chunks, some gamers check out. While some of my favorite games have been flawed, the creative spark that drives an experience has to translate into the playfeel, so as devs, how do you balance working on the individual parts (3D assets, for example) with a need to maintain perspective for the project as a whole?
Lonesome: Good question. I think that since we are such a small studio consisting of only two friends, this does not really apply to us. We both have a certain idea in our minds, which we brainstormed on one of the first evenings we started this project, and we try to push everything we do in this direction. On top of this, we communicate a lot, so there is not really the danger of doing something that does not fit the game at all.
EM: I realize you’re using Unity as your engine, but can you describe your environment by walking me through an asset creation and integration process? As devs, what does your decision-making process look like with regard to workflow, and what dominates your time, in terms of upcoming benchmarks?
Lonesome: Yes, we are using Unity as our game engine. Our assets are modeled and textured with Blender. Our working and idea process looks as following: We have a Trello board on which we both put and create new cards as “early ideas”. Sometimes we discuss those ideas together and decide which of those we will implement. We often have to postpone cool features until later, since they just take too much time with only one developer integrating the feature. After we decide on implementing an idea, we both work in parallel in creating the assets and animations in Blender and doing the integration in Unity. After something is done, we usually share it on our social media platforms. What we’ve learned so far is that feedback is really important. We generally have a good idea on which features the community likes and which not. There are a lot of people commenting and sharing our work. This is the most direct feedback we can get. And sometimes it leads to reverting an idea and putting it into the trash. But this is all part of the iterative process.
In case you missed it, here’s the trailer:
