I worked as the Creative Director on a PS3 game called Rochard for 2,5 years, here I will talk about the experience of making this game.
Rochard is a science fiction platform game available for the PlayStation 3 through the PlayStation Network, for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X through the Steam online distribution platform, and for Linux as part of the Humble Indie Bundle 6. Developed by Recoil Games, the game revolves around the manipulation of gravity and the use of a G-Lifter, a gravity device used to easily move heavy objects around. The title combines increasingly challenging environmental puzzles with action, humor and a story of rich twists.
The game’s launch dates for the PlayStation Network were September 27, 2011 for the US and September 28, 2011 for Europe. The worldwide Steam launch of the Windows version took place on November 15 of the same year.
The development of the game was riddled with bad luck. Probably the worst thing was that the Playstation Network got hacked two weeks before the intended launch. We had spend all the remaining money the company had on marketing telling the press that the game will be available for purchase in Playstation Store on early May 2011.
The Playstation Store opened again in next September and everyone had forgotten Rochard, the sales were poor even though the critics seemed to like it.
Rochard was born out of a necessity to save a dying game company. We had two months to make a demo to show it in Game Connection in France, after that the company would be out of money and business. We set to work and made a plan for a game that would be doable with 20 people, 10 to 15 minutes of playable content and something that would get noticed and get us a deal with a publisher.
Rochard First Development Demo 2009
I talked to the Recoil guys and they said it’s okay to show you some previously confidential material. This is the first playable demo we did from scratch in two months using Unity. We presented this in Game Connection 2009 in France with Samuli Syvähuoko to many publishers. Samuli Syvähuoko is a game industry legend, he started Recoil Games among many other game companies. The first two days we had difficulty getting time from people but then everything changed.
People who saw the demo kept coming back and wanted to show Rochard to their friends and this kept repeating. After the two first days we were fully booked and people were lining behind our door to see Rochard. People squeezed in to the small booth to see what everyone was talking about.
This was a validation of our hard work and we knew we had something good. The demo was so well made that we could give the controller to people and they could play it themselves without a hitch. For me personally this was one of the high lights in making Rochard, having the honor to represent a very talented group of people who worked very hard to make the game happen.
Rochard & Unity 3D Engine
When we started developing Rochard’s demo we took a big leap of faith with a relatively new 3D engine called Unity 3D. We found out that it was much faster to develop on it than other engines so we embraced it like only a desperate dying company can.
The choice was right and soon everybody knew that Unity was hot and upcoming, so we made a demonstration using Rochard’s production assets to show how we used Unity and what it could do. We were hoping to ride in Unity’s rising fame and get our message in also.
On the video below Rochard’s producer Kalle Kaivola talks about Unity engine. Unity never asked us to do this but they were very happy to show this on their booth in trade shows and game conferences. From our part it was a totally calculated move that worked for both companies.
Rochard is the first ever released Unity Playstation 3 console game. We worked closely with the Unity guys and we would fly now and then to Copenhagen to work on the console support. The Unity guys were really accommodating to us because they also wanted to break into new territory, the console space. We actually started the Unity development first on XBox 360 because we thought that is a more likely platform to yield us a publishing deal.
We were close to signing with Ubisoft but their biggest concern was Unity’s lacking console support. We worked frantically with Unity to convince Ubisoft that we are able to deliver but in the end they still felt it was too great of a risk. We were all out of money and no publisher and we were already having a funeral party for the game company, basically getting drunk and saying we tried everything but it wasn’t enough.
We were going to lose all the computers and furniture next Monday because Recoil Games was so deep in dept. In the early morning hours our funeral party was ruined because we received word that Sony Online Entertainment had signed Rochard. It turned into a crazy celebration, the company had been two days away from bankruptcy.
Voiceover & Sound Effects
The casting was done with the help of an game industry legend Lani Minella. She has worked in more than 500 video games as a voice actress and a producer. With her help we found the right voices for the characters. We got a bunch of readings for the leading male part and there was one that I really though fit the part perfectly. I looked at the name and realized it was Jon St. John, the legendary voice of Duke Nukem.
Lani played the leading lady Skyler with an Australian accent and John was written to be from Mississippi so his voice called for a southern drawl. Lucky for us Jon St. John has lived in deep south so it came easy for him. Marc Biagi absolutely nailed the important villain sound of Maximillian with his awesome performance. Even though the dialogs were recorded at different sessions over many weeks the characters really sound like they are talking to each other.
The talented Mr. Jarno Sarkula worked on a lot one the environment and weapon sound design and my part was to direct and piece the voiceovers, the musical score and the cut-scenes to a cohesive experience. It turned out to be a lot of work and late nights piecing together the dialog for an 6 hour game with multiple characters.
Producing Music
When I started to think about the emotion and mood of Rochard I wanted the music to be special and memorable. My friend Markus “Captain” Kaarlonen was the obvious choice since I have worked with him many times before. I knew he could nail the ambitious soundtrack needed to get people immersed into the story and the world.
The main theme and many others were fully orchestral classical tracks to give the game more credibility and make it sound bigger. The orchestral part was contrasted with the opening intro song Grinder’s Blues, a full blown Missisippi blues track. Also a third musical dimension was created with adding 80’s synth tracks. The mixture of songs and styles is unlikely but it was very well received by the critics.
The characters in the game had two sides to them: the tough fighting spirit and the vulnerable emotional side, this was also considered when Captain was composing the tracks.
The game soundtrack ended up having 11 tracks. I still feel after many years that the music was one of the big stars in the game and made a small indie game appear much bigger.
Writing the Story
I asked Samppa Viikinen, one of the main guys behind the level and game design, to experiment in Unity with zero gravity. Samppa soon came back saying zero gravity is not feasible but low gravity could be interesting. Once the guys started to play around switching between normal and low gravity the pieces started falling into place. We had found a unique game idea. The idea of being in a low gravity environment suggested space and the ability to generate gravity suggested sci-fi.
This is when the story started telling itself. Alfred Hitchcock said that the best way to write stories is to start from a key scene and then start asking a lot of questions. Soon there was a story of a mysterious find inside of an asteroid millions of miles from Earth connecting the Native Americans to an ancient civilization in stars.
I have always liked the ordinary down on his luck kinda guy being in a bad place in his life and then things get worse. To give John a fighting chance he was made a tough miner operating equipment in the harshest of environments surprising his enemies how hard he can fight back using his mining tools and brains. John also has the moral and technological support of Skyler, their relationship is the best story part of the game.
Originally we had planned to find someone to write the story and dialog of the game but then when we were supposed to hire them we had already burned the budget for it. The story and dialog writing fell on my plate which was already full with directing the creative process and also I was doing half of the audio work in the game. This is one of my biggest regrets of the game, the story could have been so much better but we had a limited time and budget.
The story of Rochard was much more elaborate than we could pull off. The events had started thousands of years earlier involving a Hopi Native American legend. Maximillian’s and John’s father had another story to tell from 50 years earlier how they found the clues to an asteroid and how they found alien technology leading to the invention of antigravity.
John also had another story to tell when he was young and the best Astro-Miner in the company payroll. He was a reckless hot shot who wanted to keep his record no matter what. In the game we see a very cautious and careful John because of what had happened to him and his team a long time ago.
Telling stories in games is very challenging, especially on a small budget and a small team. I think we did an okay job but I still wish we could have made it better.
Logo
In the beginning the title was spelled Rockhard but the visual flow of the logo was better without the K and I decided to name the character Rochard, pronounced in the same manner as Richard. Some argued against using a strange name as a title of the game instead Rockhard that actually means something. I decided to go with my gut feeling and stayed with Rochard without K.
I wanted the logo to be memorable and simple geometric shapes. The typeface I chose as a starting point is a beautiful design called Colo. The round shapes contrasted with sharp edges made me think of mining machines and their blades cutting into rock. I had an idea of a title sequence where this would actually be shown before you start the game. I really like long intros that set the mood.
The company our heroes work for, Skyrig, had a lot of screen time through out the game. Originally the company was named Skydrill but that was already a real company making windgenerators so we had to change it. A running gag in the game was that Skyrig was a ruthless big corporation that had very little regard for it’s employees and this would periodically pop up in different situations.
