Interview with Aliza Wenders, the lead programmer/developer of Angry Cat Studios!
Lev: Hi, what did it take from a technical and development standpoint to make the former #Advjam2017 build into a full game?
Aliza: The better question would be that what did it take to make the #Advjam2017 build in two weeks? Of course a lot of improvements and additions were made to the core of the game since then, but the #Advjam2017 build was so -if I might say- elegantly built that we could mostly concentrate on making new content, fun features, and even a user-friendly, fully functional editor.
Lev: How did you manage the various tasks of the designing/programming and creating the graphical assets?
Aliza: We started using Trello as a way to share our ideas and the daily progress. But it was not that difficult to orchestrate the process, because we already knew how graphical assets had to be made, thus we could practically split the process of making graphics by Derwen, and the process of programming by me and only merge our works at the final stage.
Lev: How did you decide what should have been in the game and where would be the “end” to it?
Aliza: To be honest, it was never really decided per se, and there are still a lot of content we could add, but then we would still be making this game 10 years from now. Now we have enough content to present both visually, both gameplay-wise varied levels, and a good story.
Lev: How much story, puzzling elements and action/platforming elements will the game contain?
Aliza: We are trying to make the game accessible for fans of all three aspects. Some levels will be more lore and puzzle-heavy than others, but if you are a hardcore platforming fan, you could always ramp up the difficulty level... not that the normal difficulty will be easy!
Lev: Will the game be playable with a controller?
Aliza: Absolutely! I never used a controller in my whole life before, but I bought one just to test it with Mimic Hunter and to help me understand how it works, and what feels good, and I absolutely prefer playing with a controller to playing with a keyboard now. And all controls are remappable, so it shouldn't be an issue for anyone.
Lev: What was your main goal when creating the Tower Builder?
Aliza: The original #Advjam2017 tower was a 100% script generated level I coded in Notepad++, it saved a lot of time in those 2 weeks, but made it ultimately impossible to create more complex, larger towers, and I would never do it again. The Tower Builder is a completely point-and-click based, intuitive, WYSIWYG experience where you only need to write a few lines of script when you want to make some cool interactions or puzzles. The tower I was scripting for 4 days during the #Advjam2017 could be done in less than 6 hours now.
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