Developer Interview: Kepa of Rocketcat Games, developers of Hook Champ!

 I recently were very fortunate to have an opportunity to interview Kepa of Rocketcat Games. We spoke with Kepa about his recent release Hook Champ, the Yakuza, and hats. Enjoy!  – Robert

The Current Gamer: First off can you tell me a bit about yourself, and how you got into gaming development, and what led you into the development of Hook Champ?

Kepa: A couple of friends and I were kind of disappointed with PC games coming out at the time, so we decided to make some.  We made Hook Champ in our spare time over the course of several months.  None of us have any game development experience whatsoever, except for a game we made for the iPhone right before Hook Champ.  Except for the programmer, who sometimes makes Flash Mahjong games to work off a debt he has with the Yakuza.
 

The Current Gamer: Hook Champ has a very nostalgic feel, the art and music definitely seem to be a throwback to a simpler time in gaming history that I remember quite fondly. What made you decide to go this route with Hook Champ?

Kepa: There’s two reasons we went with a nostalgic feel.  One is that is we grew up in the NES/SNES/Sega Genesis heyday.  The other: pixel graphics actually let your game load quickly.  I hate iPhone games with loading screens that take over 5 seconds, personally.  On my 2G iPod Touch, Hook Champ doesn’t have any loading screen to speak of.

The Current Gamer: Can you tell me how you came up with the idea for Hook Champ, and what you were looking to accomplish in the development of your game?

Kepa: I think I was playing Dino Run over and over again at the time.  I then thought about how poorly other iPhone games at the time handled jumping.  Then I thought about Bionic Commando’s grappling hook mechanic.  That formed the basic idea of Hook Champ, originally called Grappling Hook Chase.

Originally Hook Champ was going to be a very simple 99 cent game. There’d be a randomly generated very simple tunnel, and you’d swing as fast as you could as the Monster gained speed.  We looked around and noticed that the iPhone was already completely flooded with 99 cent games that consisted of a single randomly generated level.  At this point, we decided to instead make Hook Champ the most fully-featured game we possibly could.  Multiple hand-crafted levels, a story, unlockables, a light RPG-like character upgrade system, free content patches, hats, the works.

The Current Gamer: What made you decide on the iPhone as the platform for your game?

Kepa: The iPhone has no barriers for entry, besides getting the SDK for it. Anyone that has the SDK can make a game then submit it to the app store, no references or business meetings required.  As an unknown team with no real game development experience, this seemed like the way to go.

The Current Gamer: If you could get Apple to change one thing about the development and submission process, what would that be?

Kepa: The wait after submitting something is a little scary.  Then again, the no-barriers-for-entry thing might make any sort of change to that difficult.  I’m sure they’re flooded with submissions.

The Current Gamer: I have tried the expert controls, (with little success I am ashamed to say) and am curious what the story is behind that option. How did that option get put into the game?

Kepa: The expert controls are just the original controls of the game.  We got really used to them, and it’s a better name than “old controls”, though the “expert” name is a little misleading.  They were designed with being able to perform gestures to retract or detach your rope in mind.  We got rid of the retraction and gestures system, but the controls stuck well into beta.

I’d actually mostly recommend the default controls for everyone. “Expert” is worth playing once for a secret hat, though.  Maybe we should rename “expert” to “old”, after all.

The Current Gamer:  The music in Hook Champ is really well done, and fits well with the overall theme of the game. Can you talk about how you came up with the music for Hook Champ?

Kepa: I paid Amon26 to make the music.  He’s the guy behind All Our Friends are Dead and Au Sable.  He also has a music page up at http://www.myspace.com/amon26hud

The Current Gamer: Lets talk about the hats for a moment. Hats are obviously a big part of the game (my personal fave is the elf hat) Whats with all the cranial accesories?

Kepa: Everyone loves hats.  I love hats.  Whenever I play a game I usually rate it based on how many hats there are.  More hats = higher quality game, no exceptions.

The Current Gamer: Are you planning future support and updates for Hook Champ?

Kepa: Yes.  We’re actually going to start trickling out information about the first update starting October 26th.  I think people are going to be very happy with our free updates.
The Current Gamer: Can you give us some details about the next update?

Kepa: No.  Well, maybe.  I’m sending some exclusives out.  Slidetoplay.com already covered one, (exclusive new Hook Champ Character Revealed) involving an all new playable character.  I’ll link to more exclusives on the blog (http://www.rocketcat-games.com/blog/ ) as they’re released.  Next one should be in a week or so.  There’s still two major features to cover.

There’s lots of little features, too.  I can talk about those.  Off the top of my head, some are: New special item for Jake only to save you from Lava, new art for some parts of the game, setting the phone to mute/vibrate mutes the game automatically, that pesky break-through-ceiling bug is finally fixed, and there’s new functions in the pause menu to quickly restart your level or enter a zoomed-in mode to check out your hat.  All of those are player requests, except for the new art and zoomed-in hat mode.  Those two we came up with by ourselves.

 The Current Gamer:  Do you have any projects planned beyond Hook Champ?
Kepa: Yes.  But it’s a secret.