During Playstation Experience 2015 we were treated to the reveal of a ton of new games, but nothing caught my attention quite like Brut@l. The ASCII stylized visuals look slick, combat looks intense and the ability to create your own levels offers endless gameplay options. I think Brut@l is going to be something special when it releases later this year – you can see it in action in the trailer below:
Looks rad, right?
We recently had the chance to ask Richard Wood, producer of Brut@l, a few questions about the game and its features – check them out below:
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Firstly, how would you describe Brut@l in your own words?
Richard Wood:
Brut@l is a modern re-imagining of the classic ASCII dungeon crawler, fusing old-school gaming with a fresh 3D visual style to create something unique for the PlayStation®4 and PC.
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There’s a huge resurgence of retro styled games, with 8-bit and 16-bit graphics very popular within the gaming community. Brut@l takes it to the next level though with its ASCII style, albeit in a modern fashion. It looks fantastic and immediately caught my eye when the game was revealed. What inspired you to go for this aesthetic style?
Richard Wood:
Frank (Lead on Brut@l) always describes the game as what he imagined was happening when he was playing older rudimentary ASCII games. When we decided to do a roguelike, based off of older titles that defined the genre, it was a natural starting point to try and bring what we imagined was happening to life.
We’ve had a lot of Tron references since we announced Brut@l, while Tron itself is not an inspiration for the game, at least not directly, we did want to evoke that sensation that the player had somehow “fallen” into a 2D ASCII game and found themselves inside a full 3D environment created from ASCII.
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I can imagine that being limited to ASCII characters means you’ve had to be particularly creative when it comes to character and enemy designs. Has it been a difficult process creating everything based around ASCII characters?
Richard Wood:
Honestly I think you’d be surprised how well it’s gone. I don’t want to say it’s been simple as we’ve definitely had some challenges, but overall the team got into the right creative headspace really quickly and since then it’s been all systems go. I actually think having an ASCII theme, and the limitations that everything has to be made from ASCII has been freeing and creative in many ways, it gives you set rules to stick too and makes you be creative in different ways.
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So you can play as one of four character classes in Brut@l – can you give us more information on each class and how they work?
Richard Wood:
Character wise it’s important to point out that while they have different feels to them, and start differently, long term they can all do everything. By this I mean you start off with more health on the Warrior, however through gaining XP and levelling up you can level up your health as the Mage. The same goes for the use of weapons and crafting abilities.
With that out of the way, each of the characters have certain defining characteristics.
Ranger: Moves fast, above average health and above average damage
Amazon: Similar to the Ranger however uses kicks versus fists and thus can do damage from slightly further away
Mage: The Mage starts off with lower health, however has the strength of magic on his side. He wields a staff that can fire magic at enemies, this uses mana however so he needs to be careful not to over extend.
Warrior: The Warrior is your typical tank, he has a lot of health, can deal some serious damage but is quite slow and thus cant quickly get in and out of combat.
In terms of each characters starting skills, we’re actually doing a feature every two weeks over on our blog (https://brutal-game.com) where we’re sharing a video and blog piece on each character. We’ve just released the Ranger and Mage and the Warrior and Amazon will be coming shortly!
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The trailer ends with the reveal of a huge fire breathing dragon. Is this a boss encounter or a standard enemy? Will there be a lot of enemies of that scale throughout Brut@l?
Richard Wood:
Scale wise we have a lot of large enemies, not quite epic dragon size, but our Rock Monster, Troll and others are quite imposing. And the Dragon? Well, you’ll need to make it to level 26 to find out what REALLY happens.
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Brut@l is supposed to live up to its name with a ‘brutal’ difficulty level. Besides hordes of enemies, what other hazards will players encounter throughout the 26 levels of the procedurally-generated dungeon?
Richard Wood:
We actually have some great platforming elements in the game. I came onto the game around Alpha and never honestly expected any platforming game play, it sounds an odd mix, but it’s actually really great and works well. Bar that, we have other traps and puzzles the user will need to overcome, although in the grand scheme of things surviving enemies will be the toughest battle the player faces.
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What sort of multiplayer options will Brut@l feature?
Richard Wood:
We have local co-op, so you can play the game with a friend and traverse the dungeon together.
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Brut@l offers a ‘Dungeon Creator’ tool that allows you to create your own levels, a great feature considering the popularity of titles such as Mario Maker and Little Big Planet. How flexible is the ‘Dungeon Creator’? Will we be able to share our levels with other players?
Richard Wood:
Firstly, yes you can share your levels with friends and other players. We have a leaderboard function where you can play levels and up or down vote them, so great levels will rise to the top. We also have a ‘search’ function so you can look up anyone else’s level.
Flexibility wise it’s quite in depth, you can place all forms of flooring, decoration, items and enemies. There is a cap on enemies, i.e. you can’t place 1,000 Orcs, but overall it’s very flexible. Internally we’ve made a lot of standard dungeon levels, levels you’d expect, but we’ve also seen some great creativity from the QA team with purely platforming levels that challenge different types of gameplay – I’ve died a lot to lava in these platforming levels, obviously this is because the levels are bad and not because I suck at platforming.
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Brut@l had a big presence at the Playstation Experience with the trailer part of Sony’s press conference. Has the game seen a big rise of popularity since this reveal? How has it been working so closely with Sony?
Richard Wood:
Being at PSX was incredible. We’re a small team so having that kind of exposure on our own would have been impossible. Popularity wise we definitely saw a spike of people looking to see what the game was about; the trick is maintaining that throughout the rest of our development. We have a lot of things planned, reveals of characters, features and how things work. Shameless plug incoming; keep an eye on our Twitter for more! @Stormcloudgames
Working with Sony has been great, they’re really supportive, they just want to make good games, which luckily is what we want to do so it works out well. I’ve not had a selfie with Shuhei Yoshida yet though, so if you could all go tweet @yosp and tell him he needs to make this happen that would be great.
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When can we expect to see Brut@l release and on what platforms?
Richard Wood:
We don’t have a solid date right now, the game is feature complete but we’re in the final phase of making it look, feel and play great. We’re looking to be on the store before summer on PlayStation 4 for sure.
We’ll also be coming to PC, but at this time I don’t have any information on the release date for this platform… yet!
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Finally, can you tell us something about Brut@l that no-one outside of the development team knows?
Richard Wood:
I don’t think I’ve ever spoken about how we got the name ‘Brut@l’. Naming a game is surprisingly difficult, you take all of your work, ideas and time and try and sum it up in a single word in many cases, that makes it really difficult. We had a list of about 200 names, 195 of them were awful, I can say that now.
Brut@l came about after one of our programmers, the guy responsible for all of the combat and enemy behaviour jumped into play the game on console. For someone who coded all of the combat he died a lot, not just a few times, but, A LOT, at one point he just burst out ‘This game is Brutal!’ and that was that.
He still dies a lot in the game.
Brut@l is coming to us from Stormcloud Games – you can find out more about the game at the official website through this link!
