Killing Floor for Ouya an experiment in 'hardcore' appeal

Announced back in June, Tripwire's Killing Floor: Calamity is a spin-off of its successful first-person shooter designed specifically for the Ouya. It is out today on the console's storefront. "We really dig Ouya's independent style," Tripwire vice president Alan Wilson tells Gamasutra. "When we learned [Ouya games guy] Bob Mills was a huge fan of the original Killing Floor, we just went, 'hey, we've been trying out these ideas, why don't we see if we can make something that works really well for the platform?'" Collaborating with a team in Sweden to retool Killing Floor's assets into new game mechanics, Tripwire eventually honed in on the idea of a top-down, third-person shoot-em-up. Wilson believes it will appeal to the same audience as the original FPS. "At the end of the day it is very much the same style of game, just on a different platform and from a different viewpoint," says Wilson. "We think that the core game that [PC players] love is still there. For us, it's one of those experiments we like to try from time to time. If it doesn't work, we'll live. And if it does work, hey great, there's a whole bunch more people playing Killing Floor." In accordance with Ouya's mandatory free-to-try feature, Tripwire provides the basic game as a free trial, but limits players to one map. Wilson anticipates that if conversion to paid players is sufficient, the team can keep Killing Floor: Calamity going with new maps, features and other DLC -- free and paid -- for a long time. "Like any relatively new device, consumers are looking for that one 'killer app' that everyone is immediately going to leap on and go 'oh god, I must buy this device, because I want to play that game.' Of course, we'd love it to be Killing Floor," Wilson says, chuckling. "But moreover we hope that this will communicate to people that, no, Ouya is not just about old phone games being shoved onto a new device. It's got the better part of 500 games right now. And there are other Android consoles coming out throughout the next year, so I think that it'll catch on very soon." Until then, Wilson says he and the rest of the team at Tripwire are happy to experiment.