PAX PRIME 2014: Galak-Z: The Dimensional - Interview with Jake Kazdal

o far, I really dig Galak-Z: The Dimensional. Between its procedurally generated everything and its slick visual styling, this awesome new shooting game is one to look forward to, not just for STG enthusiasts but gamers in general.

There is quite a bit of nifty technological wizardry that has been infused into Galak-Z's retro-anime, physics-based gameplay, but how did it come to be in the first place? What were the challenges of making such a game? What is the creator's favorite retro system?

All of this and more was answered as I caught up with 17-Bit founder Jake Kazdal for some good old-fashioned post-hands-on Q&A on one of this years most intriguing shooting games.

SER – What was the idea behind Galak-Z when it was first conceived?

JAKE – Well, I love old school arcade games, I grew up playing that kind of thing and I feel like modern games have kind of become something very different. I mean, the 3D, Assassin's Creed, the stuff that's very complex, you know, it's a very different kind of combat than the old-school, very clean, 2D, immediate combat.

We wanted to tie the idea of the best of modern games, really good AI, good physics- I love physics based games where there's a really long learning curve. Learning to control the ship is a really big deal, you know, feeling good about controlling the ship, and having that sort of responsibility on the player, because this isn't a twin-stick shooter. Its, you know, it's kind of a dogfight simulator. Everything is physics-driven, it's real propulsion-based, [has] Newtonian physics, so it feels alive, it feels real.

And then you marry that to this old-school feel, that old-school aesthetic, these old animes, the old kind of shooters from the 90's and late 80's and just wanted to mash it all together to make the ultimate modern arcade revival.

SER – Why choose a procedurally-generated approach rather than, say, a side-or top-down scrolling?

JAKE – Well, originally I wanted it to be an exploring game - Super Metroid is as much of an inspiration as anything else - and so it started being more kind of more hand-designed levels, kind of more of a narrative slant that way, but the game is all about this organic combat and even when we were testing the same stage over and over, you would come across patrols in different spots, and there would be different dynamics between the different squads and we realized that this game was all about the combat. Providing this endless, limitless space with constantly new adventures and new ways of seeing things just made it a lot more interesting and made it a lot more fun for us as the creators of the game, because it's always new, it's always cooking up a new adventure for you, and that's just priceless.

SER - What were your main influences behind the game design?

JAKE – Again, I love the old, 2D arcade games, you know, things like Joust, Defender, Asteroids, Centipede; that sort of thing was one of the pillars. I like Far Cry 3, Halo- I like tactical combat, using cover, letting your shields recharge, the enemies have really expansive eyes and ears. You can see the vision cones here [in Galak-Z]; they see you, they call for backup, the run off and let their shields recharge, they'll cover each other if their shields are down- someone will come in and block fire- it's very cutting-level AI, we work with a new startup called Cyntient that's doing some very cutting-edge artificial intelligence, so we're taking that and shoving it into this whole classic arcade game and see what we can get done with it.

SER - What were the biggest challenges behind developing Galak-Z?

JAKE – Well, you know, we're a very small team and we're about 8 full-time and a couple contractors, mostly it has just been a lot of balancing. The combat came together pretty quickly, we knew what we wanted to do and it as working pretty well, pretty quickly. It has just been a lot of content, a lot of balancing and tuning and kind of creating a lot of new systems that we haven't done before and getting all that stuff up on its feet and again, you know, we're a small team, so everything is kind of a challenge.

SER – What is your favourite part of Galak-Z?

JAKE – For me, it's about the control of the ship. I mean, I love the aesthetic, and I love the whole world, but being able to fly- if you watch me play, it's almost like Olympic diving; I'm diving around asteroids and going backwards and killing my thrusters and flipping around and just narrowly missing a rock or something... that feeling, it's almost like a sport, it's almost like skateboarding or snowboarding or sailing and so, to me, it's sort of the ultimate brain candy on top of the cutting-edge combat. It's really a dogfight simulator that never gets boring ad you can always get better at it.

SER – We discussed that there isn't really a scoring system at play here, mostly because of the random nature of Galak-Z. Was there ever a point that you wanted to implement a scoring system?

JAKE – We discussed it, but, you know, when the level you play is never the same twice, scoring kind of becomes meaningless. You know, it might be a shorter mission, it might be a longer mission... there's really no sort of benchmark to judge that by. It just didn't really fit for this game. In a classic arcade shooter like this, normally that is a big part of it but this thing is basically recreating a new game for you every time you play it, So it didn't have as much meaning.

SER – Final question: What's your favourite Retro system?

JAKE – Super Famicom.