Posts Tagged ‘Bunch of Heroes’
Bunch of Heroes Preview
Jube - Tuesday, 20 September 2011 06:58
Bunch of Heroes Preview
*Note: The version of Bunch of Heroes that I played was not a final version. Some information listed below may be inaccurate at launch.
Bunch of Heroes is a top-down shooter from NGD Studios, an independent developer from Buenos Aires, Argentina (read our Interview with NGD Studios). In Bunch of Heroes you play as one of four elite fighters, brought together to save humanity from an alien invasion. As if an alien army weren’t enough, the aliens also have a zombie army under their control. Using a large arsenal of weapons and attacks, make your way through objective-based levels.
Key features:
- Play with your friends in the 4 player cooperative online campaign
- Amazing cartoon style graphics and Funky Rock and roll Music
- 4 Playable characters with amazing Ultra attacks
- Lush and diverse environments
- Multiple objectives within each level
- Dozens of fun and wacky enemies
- A huge arsenal of weaponry to annihilate them with
- Place and use turrets to gain tactical advantage
What I Liked:
- Graphics: While I’m not usually one for cartoon-style graphics, I really enjoy the look of BoH. From the characters and enemies to the environments and game effects, they all blend together to form a winning combination.
- Humour: There are lots of witty bits buried in BoH. I don’t want to give too much away, but in more than one level your hero is tasked with saving some cheerleaders. Get it? Save the cheerleader, save the world? Heroes? Hmm, I hope that was actually a planned joke and not just coincidence! Big potential to look like an idiot here!
- Characters: Both the heroes and the enemies have a lot of appeal and are fun to look at. Each of the four playable heroes has an ultra-attack which can be used when you’ve collected a full bar of energy. Heroes each have their own personality, their own jokes, etc. The enemies are a kick as well. For example, aliens with bayonettes are cute but creepy at the same time, as they continually stab away at your character. They remind me of an old movie called Trilogy of Terror, where a chick gets terrorized by this super-creepy African Tribal Doll that comes to life, complete with spear.
- Objective-Based Action: As soon as you enter a game of BoH you’re going to be neck-deep in aliens and zombies. Heck, even the chickens don’t like you in BoH! But, unlike many other games of a similar nature, the action is objective-based. So it’s not just a matter of clearing enemies or finding an exit, you have regular objectives which gives the game play more purpose.
- Weapons: Beyond your base weapon, in BoH you’ll find plenty of things to lay waste with. Turrets can be picked up and placed, grenades come in super-handy when surrounded, and a number of powerful weapons can be found in crates throughout each level. My favourite weapon is probably the Mutilator, and it does exactly what its name implies. AK47 is fun, and plenty powerful as well. There’s pretty much a weapon to suit every play style, from a sniper rifle to tesla, and you can even melee.
What I Disliked:
- Dying in Co-op: No one likes to die in a game, but dying in a co-op game of BoH was particularly painful. There was no respawn until the level was done. Since I sucked and lost all of my lives rather quickly, I had to sit and watch my co-op partner work through several objectives before I could get back into the game. This is the biggest issue that I encountered in the game. [Note: This will be changed with the arrival of the game's first DLC which will include a heal gun.]
- WASD: I felt like BoH would have been more enjoyable using a gamepad over a keyboard. Unfortunately I didn’t have a gamepad handy to test out my theory. The controls are hard-coded for WASD movement, a layout which I have rejected since I first started PC gaming. I always re-map my keys and WASD is simply not a comfortable layout for me personally. [Note: The first BoH patch will include a menu to customize controls; and apparently the game does play very well with a gamepad]
- Reloading: After a mere ten shots it’s time to reload. That seems a bit steep, especially for those of us who spray and pray. Ten shots come and go pretty quickly when you’re covered in alien scum. A reload of 20 shots would probably feel much more reasonable.
Summary:
Bunch of Heroes is a fun game, both in single player and co-op; and it launches on Steam tomorrow (September 21, 2011). Watch out for the redneck shotgun dudes, they’ll eff you up all southern fried chicken style!
Tags: Action, Bunch of Heroes, Games, PC | Posted under Previews | 
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No CommentsNGD Studios Interview
Jube - Monday, 19 September 2011 07:09
NGD Studios Interview
The developers at NGD are getting ready to release a new self-published action game for the PC, called Bunch of Heroes. In Bunch of Heroes you play as a member of a team of elite fighters tasked with saving humanity from alien invaders. Bunch of Heroes features colourful cartoon graphics, four playable characters, objective-driven gameplay, plenty of weapons and loads of enemies to use them on!
NGD Studios is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Are there many game development studios in Buenos Aires? Is NGD the largest?
We are not the largest, just one of the very first studios here in Argentina. In the past 10 years the industry in Buenos Aires has grown from a couple of dozens of enthusiasts divided in less than 10 amateur teams to a community of more than 2000 people working in more than 60 studios.
This growth can be explained by two factors: the fact that Argentineans are big consumers of videogames – although sadly mostly through piracy- and thanks to our currency’s devaluation after the economic crisis Argentina experienced in 2001. Suddenly it became quite cheap to hire Argentine developers to work on games, and we used this advantage to learn the tricks of our trade.
From software factories with 500 employees, to indie developers like Daniel Benmergui (today I die), the dev scene in Buenos Aires has blossomed. The game development industry in Buenos Aires is here to stay. Some companies are still offering development services and QA for big players such as Zynga, EA or Playdom. There are other studios, like ours, who strive to make our own original ideas.
What does NGD stand for?
We never revealed this in public before. But, this is Voodoo Extreme so here it goes…
NGD started as the fusion of three teams of game developers that wanted to work on an MMO. We barely knew each other when we started working together so when we had to configure our first development servers, we named with the placeholder name “Nuevo Grupo de Desarrollo” (New Development Group in English).
For almost 6 months we fought to come up with a super-cool new name for the studio, but trying to please everyone proved impossible. Discussions became so heated that in the end we settled for the acronym that started it all.
What is gaming, in general, like in Argentina; is it as big as it would be anywhere else like Europe and North America?
Gaming is as big in Argentina as in every other part of the world. It even resembles Korea in terms of competitive gaming and Lan houses.
Argentina has never been targeted by the videogame industry as a market because of the huge piracy rate here – PS3 was launched this year being the only platform officially available -.
As the platforms are not here officially everything is imported and in dollars, which means very high prices for both hardware and software. Luckily this scenario is slowly evolving as digital distribution platforms (such as Steam) become more popular and original retail games are getting more affordable.
Piracy has had a strange impact in the development community though… it’s very common for an Argentine gamer to play hundreds of games per year, which means that gamers and potential game developers here are very game literate.
In regard to your newest title, Bunch of Heroes, can you tell us a bit about the game from behind the scenes; such as length of development, how many people are working on it, and how much it’s going to retail for at launch?
The development of the game started two years ago when three of the most experienced developers at NGD, Gastón di Pasquo, Leonardo Benaducci and Javier Barreto, decided to do a shooter prototype to test a new engine Leo came up with on his spare time.
The concept art and the quality of the first prototypes were extremely good so we decided to back the project as a full blown NGD Studios game. The core team was around 6 people, peaking at 12 people when finishing all of the game’s content.
The launch price is going to be $9.99. We are planning a special launch promotion and something unique for Regnum Online fans too.
. Do you just pull appearance and personality for a character out of thin air, or are they modeled after people you know, TV / Movie characters, etc.?
Gastón, (Lead Artist), came up with the main characters. They are the “resón d’etre” of the game.
Political satire is a very popular subject in our country and the idea of mixing heroes with very distinct political backgrounds fighting together to save Earth seemed fun and fresh.
Gastón’s cartoon style allowed the game to depict some violence within a humoristic context, lighting up the mood.
The characters are of course inspired by typical stereotypes of the nation they represent, but we tried to add a twist to each one of them. For example: El Camarada is a Russian who retired in Cuba, so he actually speaks some really broken Spanish too and throws exploding cigars (a subtle satire of a confirmed attempt against Castro’s life).
What are your thoughts on all of the DLC that get released these days? It seems a bit over the top sometimes with day-one DLC and games that release them non-stop. From a gamer perspective I miss the days when developers would just release a free patch and toss in a bonus map or some new content. Now it’s an endless stream of paid DLC. Is it just so expensive to develop and produce a game these days that you can’t be truly profitable unless you release further paid content? Or is it just big publishers being extra-greedy?
DLC is a great way to add functionality and extend the life of a game in general. It’s a great tool but it can be used in the wrong way. Some of the big players seem to be more concerned about how to use DLC just to maximize revenue or to avoid the re-sell of games. Used as a marketing ploy, these DLC can hurt the original game experience which seems dumb to us.
Most of the DLC available out there should be free… paid DLC might be acceptable only for big expansions or really game-changing features.
If BoH does well do you think you’ll release further content for the game?
We are already working hard on our first free DLC which adds a Co-op survival mode. We’d love to add competitive multiplayer in the future too if the game does well. Also, we have a couple of Heroes that could join the Bunch, and weapons that didn’t make the cut in this release. Once again, it all depends on how the game does.
A big part of our team continues to work on Regnum Online, our Free to Play, Realm vs. Realm MMORPG. We are always improving and adding content to Regnum, our first game.
Our next big thing might be a huge and original MMO that we are prototyping, but it’s a very ambitious project and we are still looking on how to fund it.
If Bunch of Heroes does well we will work on more downloadable games of course, maybe a sequel? Who knows? We have tons of ideas that we’d like to work on.
Have you worked on console games at all, or is the focus primarily PC at this time?
We actually have a port of Bunch of Heroes running on PS3… if anyone knows a publisher that wants to take the Bunch to PSN and XBLA drop us an email! 
What are the benefits of being an Independent Developer / Publisher?
Being able to reach your audience directly when working on the games you love is amazing.
Doing all of this without any kind of external investment is really tough though.
Do you prefer to be an Independent Developer / Publisher or would you go with one of the bigger publishers if a satisfactory offer came around?
Our objective is to work on triple AAA online games. As long as we are alive we will continue to push for that goal. If we can make it on our own, great! If not, we’ll see. If the right deal appears, it is not out of the question to work with a big publisher.
How important do you think Steam is to Independent Developers? Is it difficult to get a game launched on Steam?
We think that Steam is a great platform, run by people who care deeply about games and about independent developers. It may be difficult to get their attention though; Steam’s commercial team is way smaller than what people may think. Unless your game has had some media exposure it may be hard to reach them.
We were lucky to travel to the GDC and bold enough to show up at Valve’s booth to show them our prototype a while back. Once they saw the game things moved very quickly. Working with them has been great.
Social networks are great communication tools, it seems ridiculous to use them for repeating automated messages about your progress within a game; even more so to play crappy social games on the browser to supposedly get something extra for an otherwise immersive experience.
Twitter and Facebook should be used for their only true purpose: organizing revolutions and un-tagging yourself from pictures that should have never been taken in the first place.
Of course, you are welcome to follow us on Twitter and Facebook at www.twitter.com/ngdstudios and www.facebook.com/ngdstudios
Tags: Action, Bunch of Heroes, Games, Interviews | Posted under Interviews | No Comments
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