VGM had the opportunity to talk to the Senior Producer of PAIN, Travis Williams, to get the scoop on the popular $10 downloadable title on the Playstation Network, and find out what PAIN fans have in store for them. In PAIN, you launch one of several wacky characters with an oversized slingshot with the sole purpose of causing as much destruction to the environment and pain to your character as possible. The physics model created on Havoc powered events ensures a unique experience every time you play, and the interactivity with the environment is extensive.
VGM: First of all, thanks for coming on to do the interview today.
Travis: No sweat.
VGM: How did PAIN come about? What were some of the inspirations for creating PAIN?
Travis: We had a meeting of the minds; marketing wanted to know what it is exactly what kids liked to do when they played videogames and they went out doing this research. What came back was that kids like to do what they called the four “c”s. The first thing was that they liked comedy in their games. They also liked creativity in their games- being able to use the games to express themselves in different ways.
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
They wanted competition in games as well. Really no game is a game without competition. Chaos is the last “c”- the unpredictability adds to the replay of it all. So they came to us with this paper and said after doing a bunch of research, these are the things that gamers generally like in their games. They made a point to say that this applied to teenagers, but me being in my mid 30s now, either I have the brain of a teenager or it’s not necessarily exclusive to teenagers (laughs). At the same time we had this prototype that was going on that we had yet to name but we were engineering it for the Playstation Network so when we got a hold of this paper, it meshed well with what we were doing as far as this prototype was concerned, and that prototype was PAIN. Because we wanted to make this a PSN exclusive title, we added the fifth “c” to that, which was community. So these five “c”s were our governing design principles going forward and that was really the origin of PAIN and everything within PAIN was represented by the five “c”s.
VGM: PAIN is hilarious but it takes a pretty sadistic sense of humor to really appreciate it…
So what's on the menu?
Travis: (chuckles) That’s right.
VGM: Are the guys at Idol Minds just as sadistic?
Travis: I’d say actually they’re more, you know it’s funny because when I started working on this project, one of the things that concerned me about the title was- OK, how do I know when I’ve gone too far? My directors were like- you’ll know- and I told them- you don’t understand…I’m the wrong guy, I don’t know how far is too far. We are a team here, so what we have to is figure out subtle ways to do what we’re trying to do and really let the user get as crazy as he wants to because that’s all part of the creativity, is that we say we’ll give you the tools to build the castle but we won’t tell you how that castle has to look at the end- it’s your castle, not ours.
VGM: That actually brings me to my next question. Watching some of the high speed collisions like smacking your forehead into a lamp pole is cringe inducing…was there anything too ‘cringe worthy’ that was removed or toned down?
Travis: Actually, I don’t think we had any problems with toning anything down because there’s a fine line between being graphic and being gratuitous and every time you injure your character they get back up. There’s no blood in the game and we really wanted to be that Loony Tunes, Wilde Coyote kind of violence and not your Mortal Combat, God of War type of violence. A lot of people said, “oh, you need to have blood in the game”, but it’s supposed to be funny and if it’s not funny any more then it’s not comedy and that’s number one on our list. If you watch Jackass, you’ll notice whenever they’re bleeding, it becomes real serious and less funny, and that’s definitely not what we wanted to do.
VGM: The drunk Santa character that lets out lengthy burps as he flies through the air was brilliant…
Travis: (laughs) Yeah.
VGM: What other colorful characters can we expect for download on the Playstation Network? Will they also cost 99 cents?
Travis: To date all our characters are 99 cents. We might have some premium characters that might cost a little more than that, but I don’t really know the price point on those. We actually just announced the next character that’s coming out- Hung Lo. He’s a little person and he’s a ninja.
Presenting Hung Lo! and a little to the left
He’s going to be the first one, but after that we’ll see. We asked the people on the boards- what would they prefer, a pirate or a ninja? And everyone said ninja, ninja, ninja, so we’re going to release the ninja first, but we can’t have a ninja in the game without having a pirate in the game. So the next guy after the ninja will be the pirate.
VGM: Will we see the ninja within the next month or so?
Travis: It will definitely be within the next 60 days. The only delay that’s going on now is with synching up to have all international titles ship the same time we are, we’re working on the localizations and we’re pretty much done. I’d expect within the next 45-60 days you’ll see both the pirate and the ninja.
Taste the bottom of my foot, weakling!
And then we’ll start working on more aggressive things.
VGM: Like what?
Travis: (laughs) What I can tell you is that when we launched the game, what we did is say- here’s the initial offering of PAIN, and we wanted people to contribute to what comes next. We also wanted to make them believe that we are listening so we asked them “what do you want next?”. If you go on our community board and see what people are talking about, we are listening, and you can probably figure out what those things are.
VGM: It would be nice to be able to rotate the slingshot 360 degrees….that would allow players to fully explore the environment. Is this something that’s being considered?
Travis: Yes! We had to build an environment that facilitated that. If you use the Downtown as an example, it was made where you have 190 degrees of turning, but in the next area you will have more degrees of freedom for your launch.
VGM: Will it be 360?
Travis: Umm…actually, we’re looking at it now and we’re asking- can we do 360 and we can, it just wouldn’t be as exciting. I don’t think we’re going to take the option out to make it 360, but most of the stuff that’s exciting is less than that.
VGM: What about further incorporating Six Axis motion controls? Given, this is a $10 downloadable title, but it might be fun to tilt the controller to control the characters in new ways, aside from the explosive Ooches you can perform.
Travis: We’ve thought about that and as a matter of fact, it might still be in there. As far as drifting is concerned, drifting is a little more exact and we didn’t want to confuse people with shaking for super ooching. We’ve got some new gameplay mechanics we’ll introduce later that might make the Six Axis a more likely candidate.
VGM: Any kind of gameplay specifics that you can use with the Six Axis?
Travis: It will be gameplay specifics, but I can’t tell you anything more. The game was built to expand, and different areas force you to play the game a little differently, we’re thinking of new mechanics we can put into there.
VGM: What is the origin of the Ooch? Did someone misspell ouch and it stuck?
Travis: You know what? It actually came from our art director. It’s almost a truncated ‘scooch’. It’s like when you’re sitting down somewhere and it’s a tight fit and you want someone to move over, you say oooch over. That’s basically what it is.
VGM: Can you tell me about the physics model incorporated into PAIN?
Travis: It’s a little lighter than a normal gravity physics model. We tried to make it as accurate as possible but we also had to slow it down a little so you can control it. If we turned on full gravity and made everything behave really realistically, then you wouldn’t be able to do some of the crazy things that you do. It’s sort of like moon gravity a little bit; we wanted things to behave like you knew they should, but at the same time, make it a little floaty so you can do things like drift or ooch in a certain way.
Jarvis almost deserves whats going to heppen next
VGM: How have fans been reacting to PAIN since it was launched? What are some of things they liked and what didn’t they like?
Travis: What’s funny is when you have a game not like other games, you get a little nervous when you launch it because you’re like- I hope people understand where we’re coming from. It seems like everyone understood perfectly where we were coming from and what it meant. The thing that people didn’t like was the fact that the game only includes the downtown area at first. It’s kind of a bad situation and kind of a good situation too. Everyone was saying- hey, this is a really cool game, but why don’t you give us more? So we were like- OK, we’re working on that- and part of it was we wanted to see if people got the game in the first place. Now that people have gotten it, we want to take it a step further. Then we say- what kind of areas would you like to see? Once again, we went to the boards. We just actually made this decision this week about what are the other areas, and a lot of that input came from the boards. We printed out all the things that were the top ones that everyone was talking about. What people don’t appreciate is how long it takes to get from idea to execution to fruition.
VGM: Because there’s so much going on in each level…
Travis: Right. And so now when we launch our next big theme people will see that in fact, we are listening to them. Gamers as usual are pretty jaded and they don’t think you’re actually going to listen to them. So I think it’s going to be a breath of fresh air to get a product out there where you can actually prove that you are listening to your players. As soon as we do that, they’re going to want something else. What are you going to do?
VGM: From reading the PAIN blog site, it looks like an amusement park level is in the works…can you tell me more about this level? What kind of rides will we see and how big will it be compared to the downtown area?
Travis: I think the amusement park is maybe a liiiiitle smaller, not by much, but a little smaller than downtown but there’s much more to do. That was also one of the great things of getting an environment out there and having people play though it, is seeing how people interact with it. A perfect example of this is if you take downtown and you do a really good launch, say 20 seconds or 30 seconds, you can do a minute long run in the amusement park. It’s one of those things where now we know how to play the game, and because we know how we play the game, we disassembled what we had for the initial part and we built it in a way that facilitated the PAIN gameplay. It’s going to be pretty cool and I think the level of interaction is much more than the downtown area. Definitely.
VGM: What kind of rides will we see?
Travis: If you look in the downtown area we hinted at some of the rides, like the Tilt and Hurl. You’ll see rides that spin around really fast and you hold on and those are the vomit inducing rides. I’m not saying that you’ll vomit in the game (laughs), but the rides have been PAINized, for lack of a better word.
VGM: When can we expect to be able to download the amusement level?
Travis: Soon (laughs). It’s always later than you would want it. We said our bigger releases [themes] are going to be quarterly and incremental releases [characters, new modes] are going to be on a monthly basis. Like I said before, the only reason why we haven’t gotten a lot of this content out sooner is because we’re under this mandate that we need to be consistent around the world so when we release anything else, we want to make sure Europe has got it, Asia has got it, and so forth. That’s the only reason for the delay, and we’re past the majority of it now. You’ll start to see a lot more of these updates really soon.
VGM: So the map will probably come after the new characters, correct?
Travis: Yes, and like I said, we have some improvements that we would like to do. We took out this exploit that got players big scores in aftermath, we’ve fixed that. We’ve fixed an issue we had with the web browser. When we do the next update, we’re giving everyone a free single player mode- the Fun with Explosives mode- which is going to be a lot different than the multiplayer mode.
VGM: How is it going to be different?
Travis: Basically the way it works is we have the normal, hard, and painful modes, then we also have the freestyle mode where you can just go through and blow up stuff. There’s the leaderboard version of Fun with Explosives- the way it works is you’ll start off with a certain amount of explosives that are already there. If you explode 10-15 (boxes) then you’ll get more time. After you’ve exploded a certain amount of explosives then randomly boxes rain down from above and land on the actual board, and then you have more boxes to blow up. My personal high so far is 170, so you can tell it’s a lot different than the 2-player Fun with Explosives where your high score is 60, or something like that, there’s a lot more there.
VGM: Will there be an online mode and what will it consist of? Can we see multiple slingshots going off at once with lots of flying bodies creating havoc?
Travis: I can tell you this…I can tell you that we just finished talking about online and multiplayer. The one thing that we said we wouldn’t do was dual launching at the same time.
VGM: Why is that?
Travis: It’s a lot of information. And what I mean by a lot of information is if you just take your normal fun with explosives or normal Paindemonium, we’re already tracking how you do damage. To track another guy doing damage, across the network…
VGM: Would cause some major slowdown…
Travis: Oh my goodness, yeah, because there’s a lot of moving parts in a PAIN level. What we could tackle are things that are more head-to-head like the bowling and Horse is still up in the air, but we think we can, and Fun with Explosives. Anything turn based, where there’s only one person in the air. I’ll save you the trip; if you go to our website, everyone is saying, “we want online, we want online!”. We basically said, OK- what’s it going to take for us to do that.
VGM: What new modes are planned for the future? I found the mime toss to be very entertaining- but it’s not in the multiplayer mode…is that a possibility?
Travis: It is a possibility. We were thinking about how you can take a single player mode and make it into a multiplayer mode. We talked about that, there’s a lot. Generally what it comes down to is the feedback that we’ll get from press and gamers. That’s how we came up with taking the Fun with Explosives mode and made it single player by doing this, this, and this. We are going to drop in, in between the themes, some brand new modes that no one has seen before. I won’t be specific but the only thing I’ll tell you is that if we do offer modes like that, our agreement was it will spread across every single theme. So for example, if we offer you mime toss, independent of any particular theme, then you would be able to play that in downtown, you would be able to play that in amusement park, or anywhere else.
VGM: Jason Coker noted in the blog site that “new levels are in the works”, plural. How many new levels can we expect to see and what are some of the concepts being considered?
Travis: New levels are the new themes, we’re definitely targeting major releases every quarter.
VGM: So there’s definitely more than one theme being worked on now?
Travis: Yes, more than one.
VGM: Do you envision a sequel for PAIN or will all new content be available through downloadable add-ons?
Travis: Well, when we think about sequels, it would really have to involve major, major gameplay changes. Before we get there, we’d really like to see how people react to the new things we’re doing. I don’t control the money, I just come up with the stupid concepts. I would really like for there to be another PAIN, but until then, at least for 2008, I don’t think people will want that because it’s going to be pretty good this year.
VGM: What other projects is Idol Minds working on?
Travis: Nothing that’s been announced. But I can say that I’m pretty proud of what they’ve done on the Playstation Network. There’s not a lot of developers now that have that kind of experience with the Playstation Network.
VGM: Any other goodies in store for PAIN fans that we didn’t cover?
Travis: Well, like I said- if there’s something that I’d like to get out is that everybody from the producers here at Sony to the people actually working on the game at Idol Minds reads those boards. When we hear ideas, no matter how crazy or whacked out other people think they are, they help us think differently and we say- how can we make that work because we think that’s a really good idea. We need other people to germinate, so if there’s anything I want people to realize, is that the boards are there because we really want to experiment with a new kind of game making, that’s collaborative. If someone tells us- “put blood in the game!”- well we won’t do that because it’s not funny. But if someone gives us something that we all think is funny, or it’s comedy, it’s chaos, it’s creativity, it’s competition, or community, those are the things we’ll really latch on to. And there already have been plenty examples of that, that have been posted. I’d be pretty excited if I was a normal kind of PAIN player because if you kind of like PAIN or you really like PAIN in the future there’s going to be a lot more for you to really, really like. I was really excited when I saw the demo, just this week, of the amusement park. It’s awesome.
VGM: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.
Travis: Anytime!
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