How Scribble Shooter Was Made: An Interview With David Hamblin and Simon Brislin
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
Sometimes classics have to be reinvented to be rediscovered.
Example. Doctor Who. That show has been reinvented so many times that you’d need an abacus to keep count. And yet each generation latches onto their particular iteration of the Doctor and proudly proclaims him the best one. These days, most people would probably say that David Tennant was the best Doctor so far. Yet if you ask an older generation, you might find Tom Baker as the most common answer. Sure, the special effects during Baker’s reign were hokey by comparison. Sure, the plots weren’t as complicated. But they were fun.
For me, personally, it’s always been Sylvester McCoy. Tennant was probably the best of the Doctors, but I’ve always had a fondness for McCoy. Quite simply, he was the one I grew up with. I discovered the Whoniverse through him. Sure, those episodes are cheesier than a Round Table pizza, but they’re endearing. And, at the time, quite enthralling.
With video games, it’s much the same. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I spent many, many weekends (and birthday parties) at Malibu Castle Golf & Games, shooting my high-scoring initials into every arcade game I could find. Star Wars was a piece of cake. Afterburner was a yawn. Pole Position a breeze. No, the one I used to love was Galaxian.
Galaxian. Shaddap kids, it was FUN.
If you have no idea what any of those game titles are in the previous paragraph, stop right now and go Google them. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
You see, back then, you could do a treatment for a video game that simply read, “SPACESHIP VERSUS BUGS PEW PEW PEW THEN A GIANT BUG THEN A BIG EXPLOSION THEN MORE BUGS THEN VICTORY MUSIC” and everyone automatically knew exactly what you were on about.
(By the way, they used that same treatment to create a movie called The Last Starfighter. Most awesome movie ever. Check it out.)
I miss those early days. Days when giants like Nolan Bushnell and Richard Garriott decided, you know what, let’s create games that are so awesome that they’ll have to invent an internet just to talk about how today’s games pale by comparison.
And the reality is — at least for me, personally — I have a certain malaise about the scènes à faire of most video games today. Why must every RPG make me play as a sixteen-year-old farm boy with spiky blue hair? Why must every FPS make me play as a grim, lantern-jawed antihero who’s haunted by his past?
Or, as the Gods of Ragnarok once bellowed to Sylvester McCoy, “ENTERTAIN us!”
This is why Scribble Shooter is such a breath of fresh air.
Scribble Shooter is this generation’s Galaga. It really is. In an era of ever more byzantine Rube Goldberg titles with too much emphasis on technical whiz-bangery and not enough on raw fun, Scribble Shooter brings a dumptruck full of epic fun and drop-kicks you in the chest with it.
You want Final Fantasy anime cutscenes that go on for ten minutes? Go away. You want photorealistic effects that make you puke up your breakfast taquitos? Leave. You want yet another symphonic score full of French horns that sounds like it was ripped off from Stravinsky because it was ripped off from Stravinsky? Play something else.
You want pure, imaginative whimsy that’ll leave you grinning like you just got to hang out with your childhood crush, except you found out that your childhood crush was Bar Refaeli and she wanted you to come party in Ibiza? Then you’ve got to sign into PlayStation Home and play Scribble Shooter.
I love this game. I really do. I love it more than Axl Rose loved cornrows. Because it’s actually quite an advanced game, but it makes a deliberate effort to look old-school. And I don’t mean old-school the way old-school games actually are (because, if we’re honest, a lot of old games are better remembered than revisited), but the way we, as gamers, memorialized them.
I had an opportunity to interview David Hamblin and Simon Brislin, the men who brought Scribble Shooter to life.
(Author’s note: HSM would like to thank Home Community Management for helping to facilitate this story.)
HSM: Scribble Shooter is an amazingly whimsical game; it harkens back to being a bored child in class and doodling a fond memory from a round of Galaga. Is something like that the genesis of Scribble Shooter? Where did the idea for this sort of arcade game come from?
Simon: That’s exactly right. When I was a kid I used to draw spaceships and imagine them doing loads of cool stuff – It’s the Toy Story and Calvin and Hobbes idea. And then I thought ‘What if you could play a sketch’?
HSM: What makes Scribble Shooter so memorable is that it looks like something anyone could have come up with. Yet it takes just as much work to create a game that looks deliberately *un*polished as it does to create a game which looks like it had millions of dollars thrown at it. Was the idea to always have the finished product looking as homespun as it does?
Dave: I wanted to keep as close to the original drawings as possible, I grew up watching childlike animated cartoons on TV in the UK, things like “Rhubarb and Custard.” I love the energy they had and the fun-feel. I wanted the art for Scribble Shooter to have some of the same craziness.
Simon: Absolutely. The art style was one of the first things we came up with. I wanted it to be so retro it almost didn’t feel like a video game.
HSM: If I understand correctly, David, all of the artwork was created by your son? Of particular note, the various objects onscreen move in such a way that they appear like they’re hand-drawn animations. How much of this game is his creation or idea?
Dave: Both my sons got involved, but the original Idea for Scribble Shooter came from one of our designers, Simon Brislin. He came up with a list of possible Bosses and I was working on them at home and my twelve-year-old son wanted to have a go. He wants to work in the games industry as an artist, and he came up with loads of enemies of his own. I tried to use as many of the designs as possible. His elder brother also did some designs for the gun turrets and enemies.
Simon: Dave’s sons were great. I’d come up with a rough idea of behavior and maybe some ideas as to what it needed to look like, and I’d chat with Dave about it. He’d take it away and come back the next day with a bunch of sketches and concepts. Then, we’d work those up into the stuff you see on screen.
HSM: The music is deliberately (and wonderfully) old-school, like something appropriate to a mid-80’s arcade shooter. But it’s the sound effects that are really notable — those were all evidently produced by a human being?
Simon: I came up with the idea of using a human being for all the sounds quite late in development. We didn’t have any sounds for ages and then I noticed people making the sounds for themselves and then I thought ‘Why not have our actual sounds sound like that?’. I think it’s been done before, but I just thought that it fit with our game perfectly. I sent some reference to Ash Sargant and gave him a gameplay video and he dubbed over it with loads of sounds of him just going “Pew pew” into a microphone and it worked brilliantly. Ash also did all the music. He did everything really lo-fi and loved hitting bum-notes and missing the beat. Initially I was a bit confused by the music but after we got the first track in-game I fell in love with it.
HSM: The coffee mug ring on the “paper” screen. Planned from the beginning, or added in as a cool afterthought?
Dave: We originally had the idea to have scrolling lined paper like in a note book or jotter, but the lines became a bit repetitive. But we still wanted the feeling of constant upward movement, so we kept the ring binder down the side and I went off and played with spilling coffee and splashing ink to add some interest to the blank page.
HSM: Give us a sense of the development cycle for a project as unique as this.
Simon: Scribble Shooter has taken a while to develop. The majority of it was written a few years ago in a totally different language. There were very few of us working on the project, and we had plenty of other responsibilities, so it’s been on the back-burner for ages. We all took a big hiatus from it to concentrate on some other stuff, but we knew we’d come back to it.
Dave: Simon had already been working with Jonathan Venables (the then-Lead Artist on PlayStation Home), to get the first level up and running, I loved the idea and jumped at the chance to lend a hand. Once I got my sons involved, we had so much cool stuff to draw from that it did take a long time to complete. We worked on and off over a couple of years as a kind of little side project and also did some work in our own time.
HSM: What was the biggest challenge you faced with bringing Scribble Shooter to life?
Dave: As I took over as Lead Artist for Home from Jonathan Venables, the biggest challenge for me was finding the time to complete Scribble Shooter, alongside all my other responsibilities.
Simon: The biggest challenge for me was writing the game. This is the first substantial project that I have designed and programmed mostly myself. The first version was also my first project in that language.
HSM: How far can this concept be scaled up? Will we see future iterations of this game with more human-sourced sound effects? Sequels which give other genres the same treatment? Virtual commodities (t-shirts, ornaments for personal estates, et cetera) developed and sold to go along with it?
Dave: I would love to do other Scribble-based games; we still have loads of unused drawings and ideas, But we are very busy working on lots of other really cool stuff, so it’s a question of finding the time.
Simon: We’ve got the ideas. We just need to find the time.
HSM: This could easily be a standalone PSN title. Why PlayStation Home?
Simon: PlayStation Home gave me a unique opportunity to design and program a whole game myself. I’m a designer. I’m not sure I’d be able to do that on any other software development kit.
HSM: Gaming today largely focuses on photorealism and “you are there” levels of immersion. Is there something to be said for the minimalist simplicity of many of yesteryear’s gaming experiences that Scribble Shooter pays tribute to?
Dave: Absolutely. I play a lot of smaller bite sized games and apps, and I am often drawn to an interesting visual style over realism. I like to be transported to a different kind of world from the one I live in. I also love animated films for the same reason.
HSM: E3 2011. What was the reaction when Scribble Shooter was unveiled?
Dave: I was very pleased with the response to Scribble Shooter.
Simon: I was really surprised by the reaction to Scribble Shooter. I think Scribble Shooter is great but I’ve been so close to it for so long that I didn’t dare trust my own opinion. I am extremely happy that it’s been so well received and that other people like it too.
There’s something else about Scribble Shooter which, after talking with these guys, that I particularly love: this is one of those truly unique gaming experiences that comes along less and less frequently these days. And the only place it can be played is within Home.
It’s these sorts of gaming experiences that help make Home a go-to experience. Xi, for instance, was only available in Home. Both Sodium games are exclusive to Home. So are both Midways. So is Novus Prime. So is Conspiracy. The list goes on.
And in return, Home offers an opportunity, as Simon pointed out, to create games that possibly couldn’t be developed elsewhere. For all of us — developer and consumer alike — Home is something quite unique indeed.
I’d like to thank David Hamblin and Simon Brislin for this interview; I can very confidently say that they have created something which everyone in Home should experience. Because Scribble Shooter captured that rare commodity which all the best gaming experiences have: it’s actually, memorably entertaining.
July 21st, 2011 by NorseGamer | 8 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
LinkedIn
Twitter
This game review should be appearing in every gamer magazine on the internet that is read by PS3 owners. It is tragic if they miss out on this game just because they either have never signed into Home -- or they tried Home once and never came back. With the quality of the games now appearing in Home, it is time for Sony to pursue those PS3 gamers aggressively. It would be a win-win situation for everyone.
Brilliant article. Been looking forward to this game for a very long time now.
Excellent read, thanks Norse, great job. I hope Scribble Shooter gets great reviews and brings new users into home, I get the impression some gamers are too narrow minded and would never give Home a chance, but maybe games like Scribble Shooter will open up their minds.
I liked the demo of this game in the E3 does anyone know where and when it will be available in Home?
It will be made available in two week’s time.