Augustine: FUZZYEYES is a very low profile company, we don't really go out and talk to people about what we do

Yug: is that a good thing do you reckon?

Matt: I think it's better to keep quiet until you've got something to show and then blow everyone away than rave about it and then fizzle out.

Yug: That's a very good point. I know very little about FUZZYEYES, or the background. FUZZYEYES itself, where did it come from?

Augustine: Anyone?

Yug: It came from another world!

Sonny: I made us work so hard it made everyone's eyes fuzzy

Yug: FUZZYEYES is here in Brisbane and it's also got offices in Taiwan and Beijing.

Matt: What do they do there and what do you do here?

Augustine: We are game developers. And Brisbane is the headquarters for its operations. FUZZYEYES have a few studios positioned across the globe, and we are also in talks of setting up Singapore. Right now we have two operations, Brisbane and Taiwan. There is a pool of talent in all these areas and we are keen to tap into them.

So basically we have four studios. Going back to your question on what does each place do, mainly for Human Resources we do it in Taiwan, we do a lot of production there too. When I say Human Resource I don't mean getting talent in from Taiwan to here, I mean that they do some of the work there and basically Taiwan is a very strategic location.

Most of the work begins in Australia, also the core members are in Australia. None of these are overseas. So that's basically what we do in the studios. If there's anything they can help with and give us a hand with...

Sonny: Or it gives me a good reason to fly all over the world

Matt and Yug: [laugh]

Yug: Fair enough






Matt: Do we want to talk about HotDogs HotGals?

Augustine: You've seen the trailer for HotDogs HotGals, yes?

Yug: Yeah, we saw it when we were at SupaNova, we saw a fair bit of it last year and it was... quite intriguing.

Matt: But actually we didn't get to play with it. It was just coming out at the time. How did you go with that? Apparently it got quite well received... not necessarily in Australia, but in Asia generally it got quite well received.

Andy: Actually, it's doing ok in the US and Europe at the moment.

Matt: Oh, ok!

Sonny: From a low profile company that game is particularly... particular.

Matt: Well, let's not beat around the bush here, where did you come up with the idea for that?

Yug: Was that one of those late night 3am in the morning things? You know, after a couple of drinks "You know what would make a great game?!"

Sonny: Well, the idea of making HotDogs HotGals is that when you start making some major commercial product, and we're thinking we can do a first person shooting game, or an RPG or whatever you want to do. The problem is you try to do a first person shooting game, everyone, pretty much, they get in the industry and they try making an FPS game. And I would say 99% of them have failed, because there's so much competition. People only play the games by the big names.

Matt: You end up with your first game being compared to Halo 3 or Unreal Championship or something like that.

Sonny: So, we realized we were probably going to make a significant loss with the first product, and people were probably not going to remember the name FUZZYEYES, either the end user or publishers. So if we're going to make something, we'll at least put our name out. That's why we have HotDogs HotGals. It's just a new genre of new games, new ideas, nobody's ever done it before. And certainly people are going to keep buying for a couple of more years.

Yug: It's a bit of a jump from HotDogs HotGals to Edge of Twilight. I mean, they're very.... I know a lot of gaming studios tend to sort of stick with what they know.

Matt: Look at The Creative Assembly..

Yug: Yeah, Medieval war games, or THQ tend to stick to the children's cartoon games, things like that. Was it difficult to make the transition? Was it hard to make that decision? Or was that the point?

Andy: I don't think it was hard for the development team. They wanted to do something on a bigger scale, an epic experience.

Sonny: And also we wanted to do something creative, and fun for the core members.

Andy: Even though HotDogs HotGals was fun, it was kind of small-scale, and dealing with a particular market. So I think most of the team wanted to do something like an action adventure game.

Yug: It just seems like the kind of game that would have a lot of passion behind it.

Andy: Yeah, it is, it is. All the members have put a lot of effort into it. A team effort, really.






Matt: So with Edge of Twilight, what can you tell us in terms of the platforms that you're supporting?

Augustine: Officially, Edge of Twilight is on the PC, and the Xbox 360. For now.

Matt[to Yug]: You said PS3, did you just make that up completely, or...?

Yug: I didn't say that, did I?

Matt: You said that when we were in the car, on the way.

Yug: I think some sites say PS3...

Augustine: Some sites say PS3, some sites say it's multiplayer... so we're trying to set the story straight as well.

Matt: So officially it's PC and 360. Why those particular platforms? Ease of development, established user base? What were the reasons that you chose, or that you WOULD choose to do it on one platform?

Augustine: We've done extensive research and for now has decided on the XBOX 360 and PC.

Matt: And the PC because it's pretty much the biggest platform, right?

Augustine: That's right.

Matt: You're committed to the 360 because it's already established...

Yug: So what can you tell us about Edge of Twilight? Can you give us a general spiel?

Matt: What sort of game is it, what's it about and what do you do?

Andy: It's an action adventure game. We've already mentioned that.

Matt: There appears to be jumping and stabbing.






Andy: Yeah. It's an action adventure game set in a sort of steampunk-slash-alternate fantasy world that has been divided into two separate realms of day and night. The general story of it revolves around this clash and power struggle between two different races. One, the Athern who are more industrial, steampunk, and the Lithern, who are the opposite pretty much, the more spiritual race. The player takes the role of Lex, who's this bounty hunter who's a half breed and thus has the ability to shift between day and night, and because of this ability is called on by the Atherns to help them in their struggle against the Lithern. That's the initial setup of the story but...

Matt: Yeah, we don't really want like a full... "and then in the end"..

Andy: What we're trying to do with the story is... the story has a more mature theme to it. It's not a tale of good and evil, good guys vs bad guys. It's more about the player's perspective on the world, and the characters themselves, will hopefully change during the game. I mean we're dealing with themes like greed, oppression, genocide, cause and effect. We're kind of drawing parallels with the real world where there's a lot of the grey area in between right and wrong, good and evil and all that.

That's the general storyline at least. There are a number of plot twists, as you'd expect, some mysteries and that sort of thing, but generally we're not trying to point out to the player what the story is or anything, it's more like they'll get their own perception of the world. So that was our aim from the beginning. Make an original world, visually original as well, like steampunk fantasy. Not traditional fantasy as well, alternate fantasy. It is an action adventure game, so there is combat, and there's a number of action parts to it. But there's a fairly serious storyline to it.

Most of the storyline and the gameplay is based around the duality of the world. The character himself changes, his abilities change between day and night.

Combat is in early days.

Matt: That was going to be my next question.

Andy: Yeah, combat is... gritty... what we wanted to do is bring a cinematic experience to the whole game, but we wanted to give this feeling of struggle to each encounter with enemies. So struggle to live, struggle to kill. Every enemy is actually quite difficult, so you're not just overpowering them. It's not like 100 enemies run up to you and you smash half of them in one hit…

Matt: What's that 360 game where you do that?

Andy: 99 Nights?

Matt: Yeah! It's not like that, huh?

Andy: This is more, smaller groups of enemies. Different tactics. Your combat abilities change as Lex himself changes, combat abilities change between day and night. And that sometimes needs to be taken into account as to how you are going to deal with the enemies, who also change between day and night sometimes.

Yug: Is it a real day and night sort of thing? Any particular level you're in could it be day and night?

Matt: Yeah, is it a parallel kind of world?

Andy: At many points during gameplay we've given the player the ability to do so. There is a tactical advantage to being in one or the other sometimes.

Matt: I'm trying to think of the name of the game... Vampire game...

Andy: Soul Reaver?

Matt: Yeah.

Andy: It's a similar kind of idea.

Matt: Obviously you'll do it better, though?

Andy: We're hoping so! It's kind of a different approach. A lot of the puzzle and exploration elements are based of the day and night concept as well. So in the day realm he uses a number of steampunk gadgets that affect Athern machinery, whereas in the night realm that machinery is kind of dead, and he needs to use other special abilities. In the night realm he's more agile, he can use some specific abilities. One special ability is to ‘invert’, he can invert onto ceilings or a number of surfaces. So combining the two you kind of get through combat and puzzles and the gameplay's based off that. So yeah, it's kind of similar to that older game, Soul Reaver, but... you know.

Matt: See my understanding, because all we'd seen was concept art, I actually thought that's the stage it was at, that it was at the concept art stage. So it's good to see that you guys have got, you know...

Andy: And yeah, that video you guys saw was... in... May? So there some stuff there. Compared to HotDogs it's just a... huge difference, in terms of how much we need to do and think about and all that.

Yug: It's an epic game, sort of.

Andy: In many ways, yeah.

Yug: If you've got a lot of people doing concept art, do you have someone overseeing that it's all the same style, keeping it consistent?

Justin: Yup, me!

Yug: That's your job?

Justin: Yeah, poor me.

Yug: Is that difficult to do?

Justin: It is quite difficult, yeah. Especially when dealing with this scale of game, it is quite big, quite epic as you said, there's a lot of concept, we count hundreds and hundreds of concepts.






Yug: Are there any specific rules and guidelines that you use?

Justin: What I do is during the start of the project I set up, I do a lot of research and study and make up my mind what artistic direction to go for, and I've laid down quite a lot of styles, using a lot of period and traditional art, photography. And I'll make up my mind and laid it down and say ok, this is the style, this sort of alternative fantasy, which becomes like a style guide for the others to go with. Within the project I'll guide them through creating designs, and the vision I'm describing to them. Sketches sometimes help too, and colour studies. There's experimentation involved in that initial process, and a lot of study.

Matt: Yeah, it's a creative process, but also would involve a lot of study.

Justin: Yeah, especially since steampunk, it's not really that common a thing. For some games, it's hard to pick that as a main style.

Matt: Yeah, I can't think of many games that have gone down that road

Justin: Yeah, which is why we actually wanted to go that way, something that could make us set our game apart from others as well.

Yug: It's a tough style to pick. Most games are like... World War II shooters.

Justin: Yeah, everyone's idea of steampunk is different. I think we've got down that pretty well. So something different for the player to experience, a new vision, a new style, so that's something that was involved in the concept and creation process.

Matt: How do you go being an independent studio? Most studios have a publisher, but you guys don't have someone like EA to pay your bills, how does that work?

Sonny: The good thing is we have the freedom, the freedom to do whatever we want. From Hotdogs to Twilight. If we wanted to make adult games we can. So we have the freedom. But with freedom comes danger. There's a risk. It's actually more difficult to find resources, to find publishers who are interested. We have one advantage that HotDogs did well, so publishers know that.

Matt: Yeah, you have an established record financially.

Sonny: Yeah, financially we are OK. That's why we made such a decision [to do HotDogs]. That probably doesn't really answer your question...

Matt: No no, actually, that's a big part of it. So in some respect does HotDogs itself actually finance development on this project.

Sonny: Partially, yes.

Matt: So have you been able to get any funding from the government from either Federal of State?

Sonny: So do you want the big talk or the little talk?

Matt: The less angry talk.

Sonny: I have no anger about it. But before anything else, the state government is great. The state government has helped a lot. Especially in taking our product to overseas buyers. Especially the development in Japan, Tokyo and Taiwan.

Yug: Yeah, we've heard the same elsewhere before.

Sonny: State government was excellent. Then you go the Australian Government, so Federal. You go to them and ask them to make arrangements to talk to some company, and they charge you a couple of thousand dollars. So we never actually agreed on that price, so I have no idea what facilities they offer. But really I would say that the government support is great if you're a successful company. But not so great for a new business. Obviously if you were one of the more successful companies in Brisbane you go to federal or state and apply for a grant and you'll probably get it. The new business is too risky to invest. It's not necessarily helping the industry that much though. The creativity of the industry.

Matt: Yeah, especially for the independents, who really need that money.

Sonny: But still I would say, the state government was great.

Matt: So with previous games, especially HotDogs, what have you taken away from that? Have there been hard lessons you've learned from that? Things that you know for next time?

Sonny: Oh yes, definitely. Especially on the production side of things. I'll give you a perfect example, when dealing with companies, to use the old methodology we incorporated into HotDogs we had an internal team to deal with the CG cutscenes and all that. But with this game because it's got such a scale and involves so many storylines, dialogue, characters and all of that. So we had to look at getting someone, you know a professional cinematographic director onboard, to enhance the quality up to that of next-gen.

Matt: With the next-gen consoles being capable of such high quality graphics ingame are you going to actually go with CG cutscenes for Edge of Twilight or...

Andy: No, in-game.

Justin: Yeah, it's all realtime for the whole thing.

Andy: And I personally believe it's just better. It doesn't take you out of the game.

Matt: Yeah, I don't like being taken out of the game for any reason. You know, menus, inventory and stuff.

Andy: And like you said it's good enough now that why wouldn't you do that. You're not losing any story, not losing any emotion.

Matt: You look at the characters of, I think Gears of War is a particularly good example the character detail possible.

Yug: And Heavenly Sword, is another good example.

Andy: Yeah, that was particularly good from the point of view of cinematic direction, etc.

Justin: Another thing is that workflow and the pipeline we used for HotDogs was no longer valid for our production.

Matt: Too big?

Justin: Yeah. We had to streamline the whole process, make the whole thing faster, making sure that we delivered the product on time. And adopting the type of human resource management... before it was all micromanagement and right now that's almost impossible. Especially when you're dealing with CG studios and other kinds of studios. So the new process really helped us move production, increasing speed, so that's something we learned and we take on board.

Matt: So how many people are currently working on Edge of Twilight?

Sonny: On our team? About thirty something. And we have two studios working on it, Brisbane and overseas.

Matt: So who are you hoping to appeal to? Are you looking for a sort of general appeal or is there a particular demographic you're marketing towards with Edge of Twilight?

Andy: I think what we're aiming for is a fairly hardcore market, as far as the title of the game and its content it's a fairly mature game, 16+. Yeah, it's catering for the 360 gamer demographic as far as not being entirely mainstream. But it's still got equal combat and puzzles and stuff, so it will hopefully appeal to a pretty wide audience. But yeah, I'd say our target is more hardcore gamers.






Matt: Yep. Is it going to be a single player? There's no concept of multiplayer at all?

Andy: Nope, single.

Matt: That's good, actually. I find a lot of the time games sort of tack on multiplayer to prolong the game, or they compromise to make it multiplayer. But there's still a place for a good story.

Andy: Yeah, exactly. That's what we thought from the very beginning. Let's just make a good single player game. If we were going to do an online game we'd do a separate game and just focus on that. And I think it's impossible for us to do both of those things in one game as well. One of them would have to suffer.

Yug: I regards to sound or music is that handled internally?

Matt: And how far through is that, are you doing a lot of recording?

Sonny: Sound is a major part of development, but it doesn't come into the final product until later. Right now we have already been looking into external studios.

Yug: I'd imagine that sets the feel of the game so you really want to get that right

Matt: And really you've got that squelchy sound when someone gets killed, I don't think you need anything else.

Andy: That's all we need.

Matt: Just that for everything. Someone walking down the street *squick*. So when can we expect to see something.

Sonny: Well, this is pretty controversial right now. We're competing with some guys. We're looking at what will come out that will be similar. There's quite a few of them...

Andy: Possibly a new Prince of Persia, and stuff like that.