No Stoat Till Brooklyn
By Oddbob

It's a sad fact, dear readers, that if one wants the very best of shooting action in the comfort of their homes that generally we're forced to either turn to the Eastern Doujin scene, splash out some of our hard earned cash on consoles or, more often than not, turn to emulation for the classics. For some bizarre reason unknown to your reporter - generally, western shooters just don't seem to get the proverbial "it". Sure, we may be adept at expanding the arena shooter, we may be masters at the tube shooter - but with scant exception we're pretty darn useless at creating horizontal and vertical scrollers.

Erm? Shoot things?

The likelihood of a western Indie creating something as inspired as Guwange, DoDonPachi, R-Type or even Sexy Parodius is disturbingly slim. Take a look, if you will, at the shooters the major portals carry or even the oft feted Rake In The Grass release "Jets N Guns". You'll soon start to notice a pattern. As my dear old Mum used to say "Mutton dressed as lamb". For some inexplicable reason a lot of western developers seem to carry the unerring belief that in a shooter, the presentation is king and you can paper over the cracks of even the shoddiest and thinnest of games by rendering off a 3d asteroid and the odd starscape whilst employing some siddyfiddlers to do the soundtrack. Naturally, we have a nice derogatory term for this - "the euroshmup", otherwise known in the trade as "run away, as fast as you can, do not look back".

It's a depressing state of affairs when a genre that has so much room to play in and a vast array of mechanics at your disposal that most developers are happy with "move a bit, shoot, get hit by 50 rocks, get faced by an enemy that takes 500 hits to kill, the end". It's more worrying when you start flitting through your emulator of choice and realise that actually, outside of the Indie scene - there's very few games that pull this stunt.

It's not all doom and gloom though, friends. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and for once, it really isn't the oncoming train. Prolific Indie dev, Cactus (an IGF finalist this year with his shooter "Clean Asia") has found a certain talent within the niche providing short and frantic blast fests, Rodents own hosted shooter "Deadeye" is a beautiful piece of work, Kairos has brought the glowing vector to the freeware market with style and X-Out continually proves himself the master of the horizontal shooter with his Prototype series.

For this reporter though, the poster child for the western Indie shooter scene comes in the far more abstract shape of Fren-Ze from Hermit Games. Whilst at first glance you may find yourself thinking this is just yet another in a long line of abstract shooters, Fren-Ze excels in it's intricate design and strikes a fine balance between risk and reward without ever resorting to unfair tactics. It's a tough game, have no doubts there, but incredibly satisfying and even the most lowly of kills in the game have a reassuringly chunky feel to them.

Fren-Ze has a slightly odd history for a game in the Indie world - whereas most games make the leap from PC to console - Fren-Ze took the opposite route, MattV of Hermit Games explains a little further. "I was a mentor to an industrial placement student (Ant/Chalk) at a games company. I gave him a little framework to render lines and flat polys in 2D and some other bits of helper code, input and some maths bits. His only remit from me was "make something with lots of bullets". He spent about 4 months, nearly all of that was actually designing the enemy waves, and he'd give me builds a couple of times a week and we'd talk about it. Ultimately we got it distributed on a Playstation 2 magazine disk, but following that there wasn't much interest so I went and ported it to the PC. I added the reflect mechanic, it was brutally hard before that, and some glowy type stuff to the graphics. Ant added another level and we stuck it out".

Unusually for a shooter in the Indie scene, Fren-Ze has also remained a stand alone title. Receiving only a few revisions and to date, no sequels. Given most portal based shooters appear to make it up to somewhere in the region of eleventy billion sequels before you can blink an eye, it might seem a little odd to the casual observer that Fren-Ze remains in its solitary state.

"Up until recently Ant and me were working together on another shooter.", Matt explains. "I've had to pull out of the project 'cos I just haven't had time to do it justice but he's carrying on and got some other great people working with him".

Does this mean that Hermitgames will be dipping out of the shooter market in future?

"I want to do another shooter one day, probably just on my own or something, I've been playing Everyday Shooter on the PSN and it's totally inspiring but I've been so busy recently with Ooki."

Huzzah! But, Ooki? What could this mysterious Ooki be that Matt refers to? Could it perhaps be the IGF finalist for 2007 known as OokiBloks being released by work3? Surely not... (of course it is, stop being so silly - Ed)

"Yeah I'm the coder on OokiBloks, the brilliant art, music and game design are all by this other indie dev called work3. It's a puzzle action game in the vein of Parasol Stars, Bubble Bobble, something like that. You jump a monkey about hitting blocks and collecting bananas. There's a chaining mechanic for proper hardcore players. There's also a dynamic music system where sounds are beat matched, so they trigger in time with the music, but also key matched, so they follow the musical structure and melodically sound right. As you hit blocks the game builds a dynamic melody and the banana collection builds a counter melody. Playing well makes it sound awesome."

Seriously people, check out the trailer. If it doesn't get the old school happy joy muscles flexing with glee then there's something quite wrong in your head. Mind you, we can't help but be struck by the thought that it's always monkeys in these sort of games. No-one ever really gives any love to stoats (Sam Stoat being the honourable exception, but that was reprehensible), so whilst we had Matt cornered we poked some more to see if he'd put a stoat in just for us.

Monkeys? Why is always monkeys?

"I'm not sure how far and fast stoats can jump, we don't want to misrepresent any animal or move our game away from being anything but realistic. We've spent a long time coming up with this wildlife simulation, maybe you should talk to the Velociraptor Safari guys?"

Well colour us disappointed, but Velociraptor Safari folks - if you're reading this, forget Jetpack Brontosaurus and make good with a stoat game, alright?

Matt's indie career to date then, has been quite the varied beast - from the genius of the Uncle Clive inspired "Super Mario Pac", to the awesome Fren-Ze and now with some serious rhythm action monkey simulating taking place. Before we left Matt in a ditch somewhere to mull over the verbal interrogation we gave him, we wondered what he'd come up with if we were to offer him an infinite amount of money and time. "I'd like to be able to just make games for myself all day long." came the reply. Now that, dear readers, is dedication to the cause. Not even the slightest mention of toilet breaks.

Fren-Ze 003 is out now from Hermit Games and it's fantabulous. In case you hadn't realised.

March 2008

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