Broken Brothers Deluxe
Developer Michael Todd’s Crazy Busy World
By Filipe Salgado - November 4th, 2009
When I meet up with Michael Todd, he’s quick to point out his rough, overgrown beard. “I’ve been crunch timing for two weeks,” he says. Besides working on his upcoming game, Broken Brothers Deluxe, he also recently delivered a talk at PAX about the virtues of working solo on small games. He’s been busy.
Prior to the development of Broken Brothers Deluxe, Todd realized traditional methods of game development didn’t work for smaller teams. It’s a lesson he learned while working on his game Engine of War.
“I worked as a team of two for three years before I really got into game design,” He reveals. “The problem was you had to verbalize everything and arguments do exist, and all the penalties of having a team. But then again you only get the benefit of two people. Where [with] ten people you get the same penalties, but, you know, five times the labour.”
After months of development, his enthusiasm for the project dimmed. Inspired by a talk at the Game Developers Conference by Petri Purho, creator of Crayon Physics Deluxe, Todd decided to try a different creative approach.
“The simple form is make games in seven days and then publish [them]. Don’t care whether its crap. Just put it out there,” he explains. His design philosophy has allowed him to create games quickly, some in as little as 15 hours. Todd worries that long development times don’t give enough immediate criticism, and when jumping into future projects, all that hard won knowledge is lost.
“In a week it doesn’t matter how bad the game is,” he says. “You get all this feedback and than you make another one. And suddenly it’s only 14 days since you started and now you have two lots of feedback and the second game is slightly better. 14 games later, games are starting to get much better.”
Todd’s latest game, Broken Brothers, was submitted to the Experimental Gameplay Project, a monthly competition for indie developers. Apart from its stark art style, Broken Brothers has the rare distinction of being a real-time strategy game coming from the indie scene, a community that’s overrun with platformers and shooters.
“I can name the number of good indie RTS [games] on one hand and bad ones on another. Really, there aren’t many,” Todd jokes before acknowledging that RTS games hold a special significance for him. “I didn’t grow up with side-scrollers or shooters as much as RTSes. My first game was Civ 2, and the first game I really wasted a year of my life on was Civ 2. Age of Empires, Warcraft 2 –I played these games many times. They were my Super Mario Bros., the ones that I could beat perfectly.”
Broken Brothers garnered some positive buzz and a few publishing offers. Todd decided to take all the lessons learned from designing smaller games and make Broken Brothers Deluxe, a fleshed-out version of Broken Brothers. “After a certain point you’re looking for quality, not quantity,” he explains. “I always really wanted to do an RTS.”
Todd isn’t aiming to tread old ground with Broken Brothers Deluxe. The game will revolve around psychic warfare as the protagonist battles against the minds of insane adversaries. Not bound to reality – the genre is already saturated with games striving for realism – Todd is able to play with many different ideas.
“Story in a screen of text, or in an audio voiceover in a block is not story, it’s stupid,” he says, “If I write down the same stuff on a page of paper and tape it over the screen and it’s roughly the same thing then I think they failed. I can read a book.” Partially inspired by Alpha Centauri’s contextual storytelling, Broken Brothers Deluxe has the main character’s thoughts on screen updating as the situation changes, creating a fluid progression instead of a “screen of text.” Broken Brothers Deluxe will also have perks that allow the player to customize his/her play style, allowing for the exploration of units and their abilities, which Todd believes is a key component to fun within the RTS genre. Todd hopes to carve out a niche that separates him from the Triple-A competition.
About the Toronto indie scene, Todd says, “It helps. It’s a great community.” He has taken part in T.O. Jam, a Toronto-based three-day game making extravaganza, and is a member of The Hand Eye Society, a collective of local indie developers. Despite his lone wolf status, he acknowledges that you only get as good as you give. When I last spoke to Todd he was still deep in crunch mode, busily finishing Deluxe’s public alpha (which you can check out on his site) for submission into the Independent Games Festival on November 1, 2009.
Talks of solo game design and seven day development times aside, perhaps Michael Todd’s lasting game design philosophy is “Don’t make dull games. Make crazy, amazing, weird shit.”
Michael Todd’s games can be downloaded and played at spyeart.com. He maintains a Twitter account and a dev blog for Broken Brothers Deluxe. His PAX talk, “Designing Indie Games with a Team of One,” can be watched here.
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Cool stuff.
Nice review.
I didn’t know there was such a thriving indie game community, nor that people could do this kind of thing solo.
Indie games can be pretty cool. The ones featured in The Hand Eye Society’s Torontotron arcade cabinet are all great.
Fantastic look at this game and at Todd. The skill to create a game, both from a coding side and an artist side is awesome to find all in one person. Great stuff.