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I would like to deeply thank the guys from Radical Fish Games for answering my questions about their epic project CrossCode! I honestly can’t wait for their game to be finished and I admire the work they have done so far.
Enjoy the interview and show them your support! They deserve every bit of it.
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1) Please tell us about yourselves and the company you work at.
We live in an aquarium and make fish games ! 😀 But jokes aside… *ahem*
RadicalFishGames was founded about a year ago, current fixed members are Felix Klein (nickname: Lachsen) and Stefan Lange (nickname: R.D.). We also have several other people helping us with graphics, audio and planning in general.
But we’re not quite a company, yet. We are just a group of game developers that got together to create awesome games (hopefully!). Of course, we would like to become a proper indie game studio eventually. So far, we’re still busy with college and other work, so we can only spend our free time to work on our games.
2) What inspired you to make CrossCode?
One big inspiration was certainly Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, especially the throwing eggs part. The idea was, to take this idea and simply change the perspective from side-view to top-down.
The first version of the game was actually developed long ago, still for the RPG-Maker 2000. That version was still designed as a small minigame, but canceled in favor for other projects. However, the idea survived. Later, we tried to create a version as a Nintendo DS homebrew title. This version was canceled, since C++ development was too troublesome and time was lacking.
The third attempt is the current version, programmed now in HTML5 and the project never got as far as it is now.
The game is planned as an Action RPG with a focus on plot & characters, mostly because that’s the type of game we’d like to create (and play).
3) Have you gotten any inspiration from other games?
As mentioned before, Yoshi’s Island was a big inspiration for the throwing balls thing. Apart from that, old games like Secret of Mana and Terranigma influenced us with respect to the graphical style.
But also games such as Valkyrie Profile and Xenoblade are big inspirations for us. In general, we’re fans of the JRPG genre and would like to create a game of that genre, maybe just with less cutscenes and corridors 😀
4) What more can you tell about the main character?
Sorry, classified Information ;D 😛 The plot will involve several surprises, so we don’t want to spoil anything. But she will have a real name, apart from Bot-chan.
5) What features will CrossCode contain? for example levels, puzzles, character upgrades / more to do/functionality and evt a storyline?
CrossCode is planned as an Action-RPG, kinda like Zelda, but with a level system and more complex battles. Battles will not only include throwing balls, but also close combat and special skills (e.g. ranged attacks). There will be items, equipment and a skill-system.
The game will be driven by the plot and the characters. Unfortunately though again, we won’t go into details at this point.
6) I loved the music in the demo. What was the inspiration behind the music for this game?
Inspiration was mostly music from composers such as Koji Kondo (Super Mario, Zelda) and Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story). In general we aim for memorable musical pieces, with a strong focus on melody and harmony, but we’ll also try to mix it with some more atmospheric pieces here and there.
7) Can you guys/girls share any funny moments you had during the production of your game?
Once we had some very serious bugs with the engine, which pretty much appeared out of nowhere. We went into panic mode. However, it turned out that it wasn’t our fault – just some very serious bug in the Chrome browser (which actually got fixed by now). That was quite a relief for all of us. Not necessarily funny, but still a nice moment we won’t forget soon.
During programming we also always find plenty of bugs that give us a chuckle.
8) Are you thinking about releasing the game for different platforms/formats?
The game is implemented in HTML5, which is basically a language designed to run on many platforms. So we can easily port the game towards any platform that runs HTML5 efficiently enough. We hope there will be several options for that in the future and we’re quite optimistic, especially with the known fact that Nintendo is now releasing the Web Framework for their consoles.
9) When do you expect to have the game ready for release?
That’s a hard question. 😛
For now, we still work on the game in our free time. We do college and other studies in parallel and of course plan to graduate. However, at one point we plan to have a Kickstarter on this project. Depending on how this goes, we can push the development of the game forward by working full time on it.
All that being said, a release this or next year is rather unlikely. It kinda depends on the support we get from our fans.
We thank Radical Fish Games for their time!
The Game Mistress