For those of you who missed EGX Rezzed in Birmingham this year, you missed one of the best Game Jams that we have ever seen at Continue Play. XMPT Games came on stage and wowwed us with their asymmetric physical assault game, Personal Space. The game is mental, and you can get yourself a copy here - while it is free to download and play, you can also make a donation to the team for all their hard work.
Personal Space is about 4 characters at a hug convention. Our 4 characters - your grandma, your teddy bear, a smelly monster, and an alien - all love to hug people. The kicker is that they all hate being hugged. The aim of the game is hug the other 3 characters while avoiding being hugged yourself.
It is a beautifully simple premise which led to a hilarious game. We were there at Rezzed and were wiping tears from our eyes (from laughter, not misery) before we even got a chance to download and play it. We were so impressed with the game, in fact, that we approached Luke from XMPT Games for an interview, as we want to know the minds behind such an incredible game. Thankfully, Luke was more than happy to answer our questions.
First of all, tell us a little bit about how you all got started as a studio. What is XMPT Games? What does XMPT even stand for??
We all met working at a previous company and discovered that we share a mutual love of creating games. After about four years of making games together for fun, we had develloped our skills to the point where we were finally ready to take the jump and form our own company. The name XMPT Games grew out of this; it was originally supposed to be ‘exempt’, but no one ever pronounced it like that, so we just decided to go with XMPT instead.
So the theme of this Game Jam was ‘touch’. What was the thought process from the word ‘touch’ to your finished game, Personal Space?
Within about 5 minutes of hearing the word ‘touch’, we arrived at the idea of setting our game at a hugging convention and just ran with it from there! We had been talking about themes that could come up in our hotel room the night before, and for each theme we thought of we tried to think of possible games that we could make to fit it.
This really helped to minimise our planning time on the day of the jam. We were able to get going with development more or less straight away.
Personal Space is finally available on your website to download for free. Can players expect many changes, or was putting the finishing touches to the game more a case of simply ironing out the bugs?
It’s mostly just a few little bug fixes and polish - one fix you may notice is that we’ve stopped the sound effects from spamming all the time when there’s a lot of action going on!
Producing a game in only nine hours often leads to a lot of focus on the core gameplay, leaving the menus and other features for a later date; we have also added in things like a lobby menu, to allow other players to join your game.
Was the teddy bear actually overpowered??
Despite the fact that all the characters run off exactly the same code, it has been experimentally “proven” that Teddie is over-powered. We will be working tirelessly to fix this balance issue in a future patch, despite Teddy’s best efforts to resist it. He has developed sentience since the Jam, so he can be a little difficult to deal with at times, due to his numerous attempts to take over the world.
The judges gave a lot of advice and comments at the end of your presentation. Which comment made the biggest impact on you?
Rami’s comment, seconded by Mike, was a very interesting one; he talked about making sure that the game is not “solvable” (i.e. in a competitive game like this you don’t want a single tactic that will always win). We’ve made a few tweaks to the released version with this in mind. We’ll also be listening carefully to player feedback and watching people play the game to work out if there are any tweaks we need to make to keep it competitive and fun!
How did you approach development for the Game Jam?
We had a few hours in the car on the way up to Rezzed, where we just talked about game ideas non-stop. By the time we went to sleep the night before the Jam, we had created a shortlist of three ideas that we thought would be fun to work on; when we got the theme we tweaked one of those basic concepts into the game Personal Space.
We were looking for things that were mechanically interesting and not linked to a specific theme; this meant that we could make a playable build very quickly. The basic idea that Personal Space came from was a game in which your only way of damaging other players is by blowing yourself up - sure, exploding turned in to hugging, but the basic seed of the idea was still there!
Also, the best thing we did for ourselves at the Jam was to get a playable within three hours, rather than work for eight hours, only to test it at the very end. We made a rough version of the game first so we could play it and work out what needed to change. The final game was our fourth playable Build, so we’d already tested and tweaked things a lot to make sure the game was fun to play.
Tell us about your other games. Do you have anything you are working on right now?
Up until now, we’ve release two titles on Playstation Mobile: Penguin Party (which is free), and Monster Hotel. [Editors note: You can find 'PlayStation Mobile' as a separate tab on your Vita's PlayStation Store; the normal store search won't show you Playstation Mobile games, so make sure you look for it manually.]
We’re currently working on a new game called Frisbee Combat League, which should be released on PC later this year; if we can bring it to PlayStation Vita too, then we definitely will.
We post regular updates on our blog and Twitter (@XMPTGames), but you can also find out a bit more about the game here. We’ve come a fair way since that post though, so expect a new update very soon.
Finally, who are your videogame heroes?
Seeing Double Fine open up their development process to the public has definitely been inspirational to us. They’ve made lots of great, funny games, but they’ve also gone a long way towards demystifying how they make games too; whether that’s through their Amnesia Fortnight or the documentaries on Kickstarter, there is a lot of content which they have put out there which is a great help to people in our shoes. Rich probably has 30-40 episodes from various games documentaries they’ve released.
There are also a plethora of British indies that have provided us with plenty to aspire to. FuturLab and their speedy climb from Playstation Mobile to PlayStation4 have been a team that we look up to. Rami and Mike from the Rezzed judging panel are also great examples of the sort of developers that we seek to emulate.
So that’s it for the interview. We would like to thank Luke and the rest of XMPT Games for taking the time to talk to us. We will keep you up to date with future developments from Frisbee Combat League and the team.
Nic Bunce
My top 5 games would be Bastion, Transistor, Resident Evil 4, Thomas Was Alone, and Dead Space, in no particular order.
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