Following on from our review of the fun plat former Gish, I caught up with Alex Austin of Cryptic Sea to get the lowdown on the little black character, as well as the company itself.
Here’s what happened…
GDN: Alex, Gish has received a fair amount of plaudits since it’s release.
Where did the idea for the game originate?
Alex Austin: The original idea came from Edmund McMillen, he had sketched up a
character made of tar that would move around blocks. It developed into
a physics-based character mainly because of my laziness, I didn’t want
to make an animation system for the main character, so I made a
prototype which used physics instead of animation. Once we had that we
knew that it was the way to go.
GDN: One of your team is Luke Hetherington. Is it him who came up with the
styling for the game?
AA: All the art was done by Edmund, he also did the art for our game Blast
Miner (www.blastminer.com) as well as some other Flash games.
GDN: Where did the name Gish come from?
AA: Edmund got the name from an offramp in San Jose called Gish Road, we
thought it fit the game pretty well.
GDN: Tell us a bit about the company from it’s creation to now.
AA: Cryptic Sea is mainly an outlet for games that I’ve programmed and
designed with an artist or by myself. Currently it’s Edmund and I
working on Gish 2 and a few projects I’m working on solo.
GDN: It’s not only Gish that you make at Cryptic Sea. Ramjets, as you say
yourself, is a cross between Joust and old flight sims like Falcon 3.0
and Red Baron. What gave you the spark to create this side project?
AA: Originally I wanted to make a simple 3D multiplayer game, something I
could use as a testbed for graphics and physics tech. At some point I
thought it would be interesting to make everything in the game
procedurally generated, which turned out to be not only interesting but
incredibly difficult. The entire game does fit into a 350K exe file
though which is kind of cool, but probably only if you’re a programmer.
The gameplay has evolved quite a bit from originally just being 3D Joust
to now having more flight sim aspects. The next version (which should
be out early May) will add a lot of new features including missiles,
anti-aircraft weapons and more ground targets.
GDN: Could you elaborate on the game you’ve simply entitled Golf?
AA: Golf? is a game I was working on with Luke, it’s a first-person
multiplayer golf game with rocket-powered carts. We released an demo a
few years ago which got a pretty good response, then we tried to finish
it but the stress of trying to make a high-quality 3D game with only two
people was too much. We are still planning on finishing it someday though.
GDN: You also have some flash games available too. Blood Car 2000 is
rather addictive, is has to be said. Is the Zombie remark in the intro
blurb a slight hint towards the infamous Carmageddon violence problems
of many years ago?
AA: It’s actually from the game Death Race, which I think had "gremlins"
instead of people. It’s basically a satire of stories in games where
they try to give meaning to meaningless gameplay. I always imagine it
being read in a Peter Griffin voice.
GDN: Cryptic Sea look like they’re not afraid to try something a bit more
unique with games like Coil being produced
(http://crypticsea.blogspot.com/2008/02/coil.html) Can we expect more
titles like this in the future?
AA: Coil is actually a project made by Edmund and Florian Himsl (they also
did the game Tri-achnid), so it’s not a Cryptic Sea game. You can
expect to see some more from them soon though.
GDN: What brought you and your team into programming in the first place?
AA: I’ve always been interested in programming, going back to the Atari 800,
I was always fascinated by games and how they were made.
GDN: I’ve got to ask this one. Who came up with the idea for the bridge
building game and how successful has it been?
AA: I originally did the first bridge building game back in 2000, then it
was called "Bridge Builder", but some other company trademarked that
name. Bridge Building Game is a freeware remake of that with some new
levels. I also did some 3D bridge building games when I was with
Chronic Logic, those were pretty successful for indie games. I’m also
working on a new 3D version which should be done later this year. I’m
also considering using elephants instead of trains and calling it
Funkephant.
GDN: What are the future plans (and games) for Cryptic Sea?
AA: We are working on finishing the various projects we have going, we
should have a few games out this year.
GDN: As is customary with my GDN interviews, I like to leave the final
words to you, so if there’s anything you want to say, possibly to your
fans reading this, feel free to do so.
AA: Check out our development blog at http://crypticsea.blogspot.com to see what we’re working on.
We’d suggest it’s worth doing, mainly because there’s some sneaky info about Gish 2 kicking around on there, which can only be a good thing.
