Will Luton, Creative Producer at Mobile Pie
On Sunday, Mobile Pie will put a spin on the rhythm action genre with the release of B-Boy Beats. To pass the agonising few days between now and then, we spoke to Will Luton, Creative Producer at Mobile Pie, in order to bring you this mammoth three-page interview.
Before we get stuck into the intricacies of break dancing and hip-hop, can you spend a minute to introduce yourself and your role at Mobile Pie?
My name is Will Luton and I'm Creative Producer at Mobile Pie, which basically means that I'm a bit of a multi-disciplinarian as is often the case in cool young boutique studios like us! I come up with ideas, write design documentation and pitches, create assets such as art and sound and also project manage, which basically means ensuring quality and cost expectations are met on what we do. I also talk with publishers, such as Tag Games, looking for new opportunities, projects and collaborations. The whole team here is pretty creative, so we all muck in on design and coming up with ideas and it's a great atmosphere, but I am the elephant in room as everyone else is pretty tech focused.
Can you explain B-Boy Beats for anybody who’s been living under a rock and has not yet heard about the game? What does the game bring to the rhythm action genre?
It's a rhythm action game, which probably makes you think of Guitar Hero, right? Except it's not as dull and rehashed as what we've seen on the iPhone so far. B-Boy Beats turns your hand into a funky dancing machine - your fingers become your arms and legs as you break dance your way around New York City, meeting weird, sexy and outright cool characters and break dance against them to claim some turf. The way it works is totally different to the standard 'tap this circle, tap that circle' rubbish that's floating around on the App Store - you'll always need to keep your fingers down unless you're required to step, so it actually feels like you're dancing. It's a very weird sensation at first, but once you're in to it you get hooked really quickly.
If that seems a bit confusing then check the trailer or developer diary on our YouTube channel and all shall become clear. (embedded below)
B-Boy Beats couldn't be much different from your previous App Store offering, Oh, My Word! 2. How did the concept come to fruition?
Well, BBB was actually in development long before Oh, My Word! or Oh, My Word! 2 and I brought it with me to Mobile Pie. The idea initially came from a YouTube phenomena of videos of people break dancing with their hands - wearing little trainers on their fingers. I wanted to be able to teach people how to do that - initially it wasn't even a game, more a training device. We were working on another game, a sort of stock trading type of game based around real world data (not the stock market), but we had a lot of trouble finding the fun in it and so decided to shelve it for the time being. We then started talking about the idea of this finger break dancing training thing and it quickly became a game and we all got very excited about the possibilities of it.
The problem was that this game had never actually been done before in this way, so it was very difficult to envision how it would work. We went through loads of prototypes, all of which we thought were great, but that people couldn't even begin to play without lots of direction and hefty tutorials. We initially didn't want buttons, but in the end settled on an Elite Beat Agents / Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan style button and ring type of system - at first this was a little disappointing as we wanted to stay away from what other games had done, but when we played it we found that it was still very, very different to Ouendan (although we really love the game). But it has been kind of heartbreaking seeing people comment on the trailer that it's an Elite Beat Agents clone, which it really isn't, and I'm sure they'll see that once they play it.
I go in to more detail about the design process in a Gamasutra article I wrote last year, so if you're interested in seeing the evolution of the idea and the gameplay I highly suggest you check that out. It's pretty interesting as the game has been a real challenge, the hardest thing I've ever had to design, and we've had to put a lot of work in to making it as fun and polished as it is. Which I hope shines through in the final game.
Page 1 of 3 Next >>
