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Interview: Brett Hall, creator of Xbox Live Community title 'Joint Strike Future'
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Recently, we had a chance to sit down with developer Brett Hall, head of Hall Entertainment and creator of the Xbox Live Community Game Joint Strike Future.
The top-down shooter arrived late December of last year and brings a basic color coordination weapon system to create simple, solid gameplay, with good looking 2D and 3D scenery that still has that arcade feel to it. The game arrived in late December of last year and is currently available for download (along with the demo version) in the Xbox Live Marketplace.
Brett was nice enough to answer some questions about the title, the overall process of creating and publishing a Community game, and plans for Hall Entertainment going forward.
Gaming News Examiner: For starters, let's here about who you are...How did you got into developing games?
Brett Hall: I have been interested in game development since high school. I graduated from WWU with my BS in computer science in 2005. For my senior project me and 3 other students created a game called "Boshido Within". It was a simple ninja game from a 3/4 perspective. That was the first full game I was involved in.
I haven't made anything between then and Joint Strike Future because I was working on my education. Microsoft announced their XNA development platform back in 2006. I was in the middle of my Master's degree in CS so I wasn't able to pay much attention to it. After I graduated, I tinkered around with it but never had any ideas I wanted to put my full effort into.
Currently, I reside in Blaine, Washington and typically develop from my home office. A couple times a week I go with my wife to Everett where she is taking night classes. During that time I get a few nice, quiet hours to develop.
GNE: Take us through the process of getting a game approved via XNA, what advice can you give to those interested in creating a Community game?
BH: The Xbox Live Community Games Channel is organized to be a peer approval system. They give you the ability to create a game, submit it to a peer playtest, and finally to a peer submission. The final submission process consists of the creator making their game available to the community. The individual community members pass or fail the game based on show stopping bugs (as opposed to quality). Once you get enough passes, it is made public on the community channel.
I would definitely take advantage of the community playtest feature. The members of the XNA community are very helpful and offered constructive criticism and praise. I submitted JSF for playtest once before final submission. Microsoft is doing a good job listening to the community and making changes to the way submissions work.
For instance, you used to be able to submit a game for final submission, make a change, and resubmit the next day. When you resubmit it clears the progress you made toward approval. Now, there is a 7 day waiting period between submissions to keep the feature from being abused and wasting peoples time. They are also implementing sales reporting. Currently we are completely blind to how many people have downloaded our game. Soon, we will get reports on how many downloads occurred in each region and whether it was the demo or full game.
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GNE: What Inspired you to create Joint Strike Future? What were some of the influences for the game and did you acheive what you wanted as a final product?
BH: Well, I started it for two reasons. First, was the Dream-Build-Play competition that Microsoft holds every year. I heard about it from a gaming website and decided I wanted to develop something before the September deadline. Second, I had some free time going down to Everett weekly so I decided to fill that time with this project.
It was a very slow process. First getting the models to be displayed, then the camera, terrain, control input, etc. Each component was a learning experience.
I think Ikaruga and Raiden were the greatest influences, but i wanted each weapon to feel different and have to be used differently. I don't think I achieved the full potential of the game engine. I built in the ability to have ground enemies, and props to add detail to the levels (buildings and such) but didn't get around to making the art content to use. I only had a handful of enemy types but the engine could handle much more. The memory footprint for JSF is pretty small. The deadline pressure for the Dream-Build-Play competition kept me from adding in these additional features. I think I will revisit JSF in the future; I want to try some other genres first though.
GNE: Hands down, the best component of the game was the co-op, it added that extra layer of strategy to the game and made it engaging, what are your general thoughts on the co-op and did you find it to have any affect on how you developed the game?
BH: Co-op is definitely the way to play the game. Such a small feature as recording enemies destroyed and keeping track of that from one level to the next adds a competitive aspect to it. My brother-in-law actually beat me in overall kill count in his first play through the game! I don't change the difficulty in two player mode so it makes it possible to completely destroy every enemy.
GNE: Community games on Live aren't given the option to have achievements, but if you were to come up with a few for JSF, what would they be? (Bonus points for cool titles and brief, at times impossibly vague descriptions of what to do.)
BH: I never really thought about it. There would be the obvious ones for beating the game, beating the game with a friend. I think for the obsessive I would have one for shooting down every enemy on a level and collecting all the power ups. Then there would be the sadistic ones like beating a level without switching weapons (incorrect weapons still do 1/4 damage).
GNE: What else are you working on?
BH: I have two games in the planning phase, both are using XNA. First is a math puzzle game that would help players learn basic arithmetic. I am interested in this because there is a great void in what is called the edutainment genre. Second is an murder mystery adventure platformer that takes place in the future. It is a much more ambitious project that will require better planning and organization than JSF. I am hoping that Microsoft will expand their Live for windows service to include the ability to buy community games.
GNE: We look forward to both solving mysteries and solving arithmetic with your games, thanks for stopping by to chat.
BH: No problem at all, I want to thank you for taking interest in my game.
Check out Brett's site and Joint Strike Future's Xbox Live Marketplace page.
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