ContributionsDevelopmentGame DevelopmentIndieOnline

The Breakout: Planning a Great Escape (Game)

April 22, 2014 — by Mariia Lototska

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ContributionsDevelopmentGame DevelopmentIndieOnline

The Breakout: Planning a Great Escape (Game)

April 22, 2014 — by Mariia Lototska

Pixel Trip Studios is an indie development studio focused on delivering exciting, story-driven games with great character. Founded in October 2013 by Adam Jeffcoat and Vincent Kamp, their first game, The Breakout, is currently in development. Adam shares what inspired him to create the game and the journey since then.


A Fascination for Escape

Where was the idea for The Breakout born? I get asked that a lot and I remember it well… It all started when I was eight years old, full of that childlike imagination. I was at my friend’s house playing Great Escape on his Spectrum ZX. This simple little isometric game where you have to sneak around a POW camp finding tools and concocting an escape plan absolutely fascinated me. Maybe it was because you were breaking the rules under the guards noses, or because you were a prisoner and the potential sense of elation if you managed to break free seemed like the best reward ever.




I’m not sure if I ever actually completed the game but, either way, I was hooked and that concept has stayed in my head ever since. “One day, I will escape from that camp,” I silently promised myself.

“One day, I will escape from that camp,” I silently promised myself.

About four years later, I was watching another influential movie, The Great Escape, which seemed to be on TV every Christmas, and I loved it. The classic storytelling, the ways that supercool Steve McQueen taunted the guards with his audacious attempts to escape, and the ingenuity and planning of the British troops. Surprisingly, when I watched the film more recently for research, I had actually forgotten, or shut out, the part where they shoot them all at the end. I think, as a child, I liked to think of them just digging another tunnel and eventually getting out with a nice, happy ending.

Then came my first brush with a point-and-click adventure, The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga. This was probably the first time I had experienced true addiction as a child, other than Sherbert Dib Dabs, of course. I was hooked and believed I really WAS Guybrush Threepwood, determined to become a pirate and win the heart of Elaine. Even though I got horribly stuck many times, I pushed on. With my younger sister as my wingman, we would rush home from school and sit there impatiently waiting for the next disc to load. I simply HAD to finish that game. If I hadn’t, it would have felt like a part of myself was stuck in Monkey Island, forever.

Starting Out and Thinking Back

Around 10 years later, with a degree in classical animation under my belt, I founded StudioNX and produced commercial animation for clients like Nickelodeon and CBBC. Business was good, but then along came the recession around 2008, so animation budgets were among the first to go. This also coincided with the rise of mobile gaming, and I felt it was an amazing opportunity to get your work direct to the audience on the Appstore without a middle man making the decisions for you. I decided to move StudioNX into the app and games market and, together with Imaginism Studios, we Kickstarted and directed the fully animated, 2D interactive comic book Niko and the Sword of Light for tablets. It was a critical success and is now being made into a pilot for a kids’ TV show. With the business heading in a new direction, I sat at my desk one evening and pondered the question: what if I were to revisit that POW camp, the one I never escaped from as a kid?

3 niko
StudioNX and Imaginism Studios directed the fully animated, 2D interactive comic book Niko and the Sword of Light for tablets.

After flushing the idea out with several friends who were avid games, what I knew for sure is I wanted to treat the game itself as a vehicle for telling a story, so the first thing I needed to do was write it. I wanted to pay homage to classic escape movies such as The Shawshank Redemption and, of course, The Great Escape, but also to get that sense of adventure and classic villains like in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I also realized that the premise of this game could be quite limited in that the whole story took place in a POW camp, so I introduced some supernatural elements to spice it up, whereby the evil Colonel is found to have a fascination with devil worship and the occult.

The Beginning of Pixel Trip Studios

Through my time working on Niko and the Sword of Light I met Vincent Kamp, a successful business owner who had also written and created an animated comic book for kids called RobotSlayer. At the time, he approached us about animating on his project, but as we were currently busy making our own, we agreed to get together at a later date to talk ideas. As soon as I met with Vince, we clicked and I ended up pitching him the concept for my game over lunch. Vince loved it and shared a similar passion for the era and basically agreed to fund the development and act as creative producer for the game, utilizing his business knowledge and contacts. We set up Pixel Trip Studios in October 2013, put together a schedule, and decided to run a Kickstarter for the game for which we would need a trailer, a demo, and enough artwork and assets to run a crowd-funding campaign. Only thing we needed was a name as “The Great Escape” had already been done. One day, Vince emailed me, saying, “What about The Breakout?” It was perfect!

4 First logo
The Breakout was the perfect name for this game.

I had also been developing pixel art characters for the isometric game, as the style had been going through a resurgence of late. I got a great response from my early Facebook fan page, as a lot of people connected with the nostalgia of the pixel look which reminded them of their own childhood games.

5 pixelcharDev
I had also been developing pixel art characters for the isometric game, as the style had been going through a resurgence of late.

Building the Team

6 pixelTrip logo
With a solid plan in place, we now needed someone to code this into a playable game.

With style and story in place, Vince then connected me with James Allsopp, whom he had met at a games conference. James had started his career at Sega and was now working as a game designer at a company called Playgen. I showed him my concept, story, and design for the game, and he essentially told me what would work, what wouldn’t and whether our plans were realistic and within budget. With a solid plan in place, we now needed someone to make this into a game. Having worked with numerous flaky coders in the past, I knew I would need a a candidate who was young, hungry, and passionate for indie games.

Enter Alex Hedberg. He contacted me after I posted in a Unity forum, as he immediately loved the game idea and our playful logo for the studio. I set him to work on a playable test of the POW camp, trying to recreate the pixel style, isometric view of the original Great Escape game. Alex put together a great little demo; you could walk around, interact with things, and the guards would even shoot you if you went out of bounds. Only problem was, it wasn’t fun. Time had moved on. My eight-year-old imagination could no longer fill in the gaps, and after years of being bombarded with AAA graphics and gameplay, we realized this approach was not going to cut it.







Finding a New Look

7 EarlyPrototype -isometric
An Early Prototype of The Breakout

In late November, I flew out to Burbank, California for CTNx, a big convention for animators and illustrators. We were there to promote Niko and the Sword of Light, but I hadn’t realized what an inspiring trip it would turn out to be. I was surrounded by amazing artistic talent, all having designed great characters for their own projects with bags of personality. I realized at that moment that the key to all of the original Lucas Arts games I enjoyed so much as a kid was the fact that they approached them more as an animated cartoon. In games like Full Throttle and Day of the Tentacle, it was for that reason the characters became icons in people’s minds.

Within a week, I had completely redesigned the characters in The Breakout in a much more modern and graphic style and ditched the isometric viewpoint of the game for more of a filmic perspective with painted backgrounds. I posted all the new artwork to my 400+ Facebook following and ran a poll.




9 Pixel or Graphic
Within a week, I had completely redesigned the characters in The Breakout in a much more modern and graphic style and ditched the isometric viewpoint of the game for more of a filmic perspective with painted backgrounds.

To my surprise, the graphic look won hands down. As much as the pixels triggered feelings of nostalgia, it seemed that people were growing a little tired of it and all seemed in favor of a modern style they hadn’t seen before. So I immediately got to work and animated three tests of the main characters, each winding up the guards in their own special way. I also storyboarded out the teaser trailer, trying to capture all of the elements of this game that would excite people. I wanted to make it intense, to tease people with the potential and excitement of the escape, but leave them wanting to find out more.

Preparing For Kickstarter

10 pow vs goon
I immediately got to work and animated three tests of the main characters, each winding up the guards in their own special way.

In the lead up to our proposed Kickstarter launch, we tried to build up our social network as much as possible using Facebook and Twitter. We visited some UK game shows, including Geek in Margate, and spoke to other indies and asked for their advice and ideas as much as possible. It struck me straight away that this community of game developers were all open and willing to help. It really felt like a group of people that realized the value of helping each other out in order to survive in this highly competitive industry.

So with everything we had learned up to this point, we all sat down and flushed out the content of the Kickstarter page. The trailer would lure them in, then we would pitch all the features that would set it apart and make it fun, within a minute. We would then show some clips of gameplay, as from research, gamers want to see what it actually looks like if they are to part with their cash. To wrap up, we briefly talked about the rewards and some of the exclusive features, like becoming an in-mate or guard within the camp. We also started work on a playable demo, but quickly realized what a huge amount of work it is. When you make a demo level for a point-and-click game, you are essentially making the base for the whole game. You have to animate and design all the assets to enable the character to walk around and interact with the environment. Once that’s done and it works, the rest of the game is essentially additional level design and repetition.

We also knew from running a previous Kickstarter that in order to get enough press coverage, we would need some help with PR, so we hired a company called Novy PR over in the States, as well as a local team called PR Hound. They both helped us nail down the written pitch on the campaign page and prepared a press release to go out the morning of the launch. On April 2, six months after the conception of The Breakout, we felt like we were firing off a rocket by pressing a big green “Launch Kickstarter” button. I held my breath and pressed it, we blitzed the press and coincided it with a Facebook launch for all of our existing fans.

12 TBOposter
Come check out The Breakout

A Great Ride

Two weeks later, it’s been quite an intense experience, but good fun and so nice to see the great comments and feedback from people, which motivates you to keep busy. The campaign has naturally slowed a little, but the backers are still coming in. It’s been great to build a base of fans from whom we can ask questions and run polls about the game. We also put the game on Steam’s Greenlight program and linked it to the Kickstarter page, which proved so popular we got Greenlit in just two weeks!

So if you like adventure games for adults, with real life and death consequences, where your stealth, preparation, and adequate supplies are vital to your chances of escape, or if you’re a fan of nailbiting tension, a bunch of evil villains, a classic A-team style partnership, and an atmospheric score, then come check out The Breakout!

The Breakout’s Kickstarter is currently running and can be viewed here. You can also keep updated with the team’s progress with the game on Facebook and Twitter.

 

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