Declarations of Independents focuses on the most independent of game developers: Small teams or individuals whose games have little or no marketing, advertising, or outreach, yet which have extremely loyal and dedicated followings. These games are the hidden treasures of the game industry, and it is our pleasure to bring you the thoughts and experiences of their creators on what it means to be an independent developer.

It's been a while since we offered up a Declarations feature, but that hasn't slowed down the independent development community -- they've been hard at work creating exciting new games, sharing their work with the world, and making a name for themselves in the eyes of gamers everywhere. It always makes me smile when a small team with a great idea receives the recognition (and compensation) they richly deserve, and Wolfire Games, the subject of today's feature, is certainly an independent developer with much to be proud of. Wolfire has been around since 2003, formed by creator David Rosen as an outlet for the games he had developed for experimental game contests. Rosen drew significant attention for Black Shades, a short experiment with surreal violence, and Wolfire's first official game, Lugaru, became a cult hit.

Lugaru, an action-combat title pitting lepines against lupines, utilizes a homemade game engine to drive its fast-paced and highly dynamic fight mechanics. Placing players in control of Turner, a brown rabbit with a knack for close combat and a thirst for revenge, Lugaru centers entirely around rapid acrobatic movement and intense fighting. The fights tend to be highly variable, thanks to an unpredictable and aggressive AI, and the fluid moves made possible in the game engine: Lugaru uses only three buttons for its primary controls (attack/jump/crouch), but allows for several different attacks based around the current game context. With some practice, Turner can go from simple punches to throws, disarms, reversals, and spine-shattering leap-kicks. In addition, even the game's ragdoll physics can bring unpredictable variations to the fights: An enemy who is sent flying into the snow may well get back up to attack you again, but if a simple knockdown propels an enemy face-first into a stone wall, that may finish them.

The game received rave reviews from a number of shareware sites and communities. It also gave Wolfire enough clout as an indie developer that their upcoming sequel, Overgrowth, has been picked up for distribution on Steam, potentially giving Rosen and his team a massive, global audience.

We spoke with David Rosen about Lugaru and Overgrowth, and about Wolfire's own growth as an independent game studio.

GameCyte: When did you first decide you wanted to develop an independent game? How long before your first "serious" project had you been dabbling in game creation?

David Rosen: Oh, man, I created my first independent game long before I even knew what "independent games" were! When I was in Kindergarten, I started creating finger-games with stick figures walking around that took verbal commands from my friends and acted them out. When I was introduced to HyperCard in 1993, I was 7 years old, and I was quickly hooked on making my own animated choose-your-own-adventure computer games. They had stick figures at first, but gradually improved until they were in full 3D, painstakingly hand-animated. Unfortunately, none of these games exist today because of a dispute that resulted in my hard drive being erased, but they may still exist somewhere in the far corners of AOL's mac game archives, from back when "AOL" and "Internet" were synonymous.

GC: You've picked up some attention through your experimental games like Black Shades. Where did these ideas come from?

DR: Well, when I made Black Shades, I just wanted to take everything I liked about every FPS game I played and combine it into one game. However, my options were limited by several factors: First, I had just entered the 9th grade and had never taken a programming class before, and second, I was writing it for the uDevGames contest, so I couldn't spend more than two months on it. So, I decided to focus all of my efforts on the pure fun of shooting things! There are a great many weaknesses in the presentation and gameplay of Black Shades, but there were a few ideas that made it stand out enough to get some attention:

1. Instead of using crosshairs, you aim down the iron sights of the gun, and have some freedom to move it around the screen.
2. Enemies dynamically react to being shot, and then pass out in a physically plausible way (now called ragdoll).
3. Every gunshot is loud and lethal, with dramatic reactions if it hits anyone.
4. Your body is completely rendered in first-person, and you can physically interact with people by tackling them or disarming them with aikido moves.

Most of these points probably make you roll your eyes now, and say that everyone does those things, but that actually makes me happy, because it was one of the first to do them!

GC: Tell us about Lugaru. What inspired the project? How did the development process treat you?

DR: Rune and Oni are some of my favorite games, in that they combine the free movement of an FPS game with the intense combat of a 1v1 fighter. With Lugaru, I wanted to take that a step further, so I made the player an extremely mobile rabbit character who can run at superhuman speeds and jump high into the air. I have always really focused on the low-level tactile "feel" of my games, so, like the shooting in Black Shades, I really focused on making the movement feel fluid and fun, and the fighting really "hard" and visceral.

One way I tried to do that is by incorporating physics into the impacts. For example, a spin kick impact could be thought of in two parts: First, the foot hits and deals a fair amount of damage, knocking the character spinning into the air. Second, the character hits something. If it is a glancing impact on the snow, he slides along unharmed. However, if it is a tree, he can instantly break his neck, and a shower of leaves falls on his body from the shaking branches.

The development process was pretty fun, often distractingly so. Because I was focusing first and foremost on making the movement fun, I would end up spending a lot of time just jumping around in the world, and intentionally timing flips wrong so I would spin out of control. On the other hand, since I still hadn't taken any programming classes, my programming technique was sloppy, and it was difficult to hunt down bugs. I came close to giving up on the project a couple of times, but I always ended up coming back to it.

GC: Tell us about your upcoming project, Overgrowth. Are you finding the process similar to Lugaru's? What lessons have you learned from your last project that you're finding helpful for this one?

DR: My experience now is very different from Lugaru. I finished Lugaru just before I started college, and I started on Overgrowth immediately after, so now my big challenge is to unlearn a lot of the technical programming lessons from college, and to loosen up a bit so I can get back into practical development. In college, it was really important that my code was nice and pretty so I could write papers about it and my professors could read it and give me good grades, but now I am learning once more to focus on results. The players don't look at the code, they look at the screen! I somehow managed to twist all of my college coding projects to be about games, so my final projects were about things like 3D acoustics, intersection detail, and creating point-constraint physics engines.

The biggest lesson I learned from Lugaru is the importance of playtesters. Often, when I watched friends play Lugaru, I would give them some brief instructions on how to play. "Don't forget you can hold down the attack key and it will automatically target them when they get in range!" or "Rolling is just as quiet as sneaking but a lot faster!" When people download Lugaru from the internet and play it, I am not there to say those things! I need to focus a lot more on easing the players into the experience, rather than just developing for myself and assuming the player knows everything.

GC: Have you worked a part of a larger development team before? If so, how has it compared to directing your own project independently?

DR: I have never really worked on part of a large development team; I am still getting used to having even one or two other programmers working with the same code! I am working on developing the leadership skills I need to help direct the other developers to work on the most important parts of the project, but I still sometimes find myself just focusing on my own work.

GC: How have you managed to sustain your projects? Do you make money from sponsorships or pre-orders? What is your "Day Job?"

DR: This is my day job! I did some contract work during college, and from that, and Lugaru sales, and my brother Jeff's work, we have enough saved up to support ourselves for a while working full-time. We do make money from pre-orders, and all of that goes back into hardware, software, or content we will use to make Overgrowth better. So, please, pre-order if you would like to support us!

GC: How has word spread about your games? Has it all been word-of-mouth?

DR: Yes, I have no clue about marketing; all I did for Lugaru was send emails to some game news sites to say that it was done. However, the idevgames community helped beta test it from start to finish, and they must have done a great job telling people about it!

GC: How involved are your fans? Do you have an idea of how many gamers out there have played your games? Do you have an estimate of your sales?

DR: The fans are very involved; the Lugaru mod tools are not very user-friendly, but the fans reverse-engineered some of the file formats and made their own tools, and created two campaigns (Temple and Empire) that are probably better than the one I included with it! Also, in the recent video competition, they created videos that are much, much better than the ones I used on the Lugaru site!

GC: How much fan input are you receiving for Overgrowth? Has it helped or hindered the development process; how receptive are you to suggestions or demands from your community?

DR: I like to think that I am very receptive to suggestions from the community, but not so much to demands. I always read the comments to our blog posts to see what people think, and they often give useful feedback that may make its way into the game.

GC: What's the best part of being an independent developer?

DR: The best part of being an independent developer is having control over my time and my games. If the ESRB tells me that it is too violent or too disturbing, I really don't care! Nobody can tell us what to do. If, one day, I decide I want to make a video deconstructing the design of a game I like, I can take a day off and do that!

GC: What's the worst?

DR: The downside is that there is a lot of risk. If I am working on a huge team for a salary, I get paid whether the game is successful or not. However, here, if the game is unsuccessful, I can lose everything, and so can my teammates who are counting on me. It is worth it, though! I would rather fail at doing something I care about than succeed at something I don't care about. Ultimately it is up to the gamers to decide whether we will succeed or fail, so I hope you choose to support indie game developers!

GC: If you could share one valuable experience or piece of advice with ambitious game designers, what would it be?

DR: If you are still in school, pay attention and think about how your classes relate to game design. Ultimately, everything relates to game design somehow, and the more you learn about the world the more material you will have to work with to shape your designs.

GC: What's the ETA for Overgrowth?

DR: I can't tell you, because whatever date I give you, some irate fan will link me to this interview and ask me why it's not done yet.

GC: What can we expect to see from you next, after that?

DR: We have so many game ideas floating around that we don't even bother to write them down anymore. Possibly a dragon game (not some silly dragon rider thing, you are the dragon). Or maybe a realistic mech sim along the lines of Mechwarrior 2. Or maybe a more grounded reimagination of the futuristic bloodsports idea introduced in Unreal Tournament. Basically, we don't know yet!

We would like to thank David for taking the time to answer our questions. Lugaru can be downloaded and purchased here, and Wolfire is giving the game away for free for a limited time this Christmas. More information on Overgrowth is available here, along with a pre-order page.

Related posts

• Steam Offers Game Mods for Free
• Do Nothing, Win Games! Thanks, Spike TV!
• Ubisoft + Steam = You Can Play Beyond Good & Evil Now
• Phantom Gamestore Launched
• Learn Math With Steam’s New Europe Prices