Firing Blind: Dreadbit's Daniel Leaver on Crafting Seraph

Seraph is a game about finesse. Well, actually it's a game about the timeless battle between angels and demons... but we digress. It's a side-scrolling shooter, and with a gun in each mitt the player must dispatch waves of deadly beasties in increasingly creative ways. Nothing too outlandish about that we hear you scream, but there's a bit more to it than that.

The unique hook here is that you don't aim your guns, auto-lock has you covered on that front. Instead it's up to the player to guide the game's angelic leading lady through demonic battles, blasting enemies and gliding gracefully through the air as she dishes out death. Therefore it's actually a game about graceful movement, about stylish controls. The removal of aiming is a subtle but impactful design choice, and one that sets the game apart from its similarly styled peers.

We spoke to Dreadbit's Daniel Leaver about Seraph in the interview that you can read below, so we'll not go into a huge amount of detail regarding features that are mentioned therein, but we will say that the action fits the concept, it feels fluid, it's easy to get to grips with the controls, and it looks elegant. Movement is straightforward, and it seems as though layers of complexity are going to be added over time (we only played the first couple of missions, so we can't say what the endgame holds). Slick movement is combined with special attacks and abilities mapped to the face buttons of the controller (which, incidentally, we recommend you use on PC, obviously for the PS4 version that's standard); simply put you have options in front of you.

Now we'll let Dreadbit frontman Daniel Leaver tell you more about the game's systems, design, and inspirations, from the basic concept and story, through to some interesting functions that should keep even the most capable players on their toes:

Tell us about the concept for the game?

Seraph is a skill-based acrobatic shooter without aiming. What that means is that you control the character in every way except she aims the guns for you. So yeah, you control shooting, dodging and jumping. All the kind of slick manoeuvres you'd expect, it's just a bit more acrobatic and a bit more visually exciting than some of the other platformers, but at the same time you don't have to worry about landing headshots yourself, the character does this for you. Where this comes from is watching awesome films like Equilibrium and The Matrix. I was just reminded this the other day, but if you remember Underworld with Kate Beckinsale? That as well. All of those films, just really classy. They look awesome and are just a complete joy to watch. I feel like any time that games try to capture that spirit they've gone, 'ok we've got this cool dual wielding, we've got swords, but how do we allow players to aim?' And they've gone 'I know, let's just slow mo the hell out this thing' and you spend probably 90% of the game in slow motion. While this allows you to aim your guns at enemies and take them out whilst doing this cool stuff, but I wanted to not do that for once. I thought, why not try, if the only limitation I can see is the aiming, try taking aiming out of the equation and see what we end up with. We end up with Seraph, which is a really fluid full speed twitchy kind of platformer-shooter.

It feels like you've gone for that graceful style, over the gunplay.

The main things that players need to worry about is positioning, so making sure you're in a good spot and not trapped in corners and about to get spanked by a bunch of enemy demon attacks. And also you have these sort of skill shots in your "miracles," which are your activated abilities on the face buttons. So whilst your guns are still automatically aiming at targets you can shoot off like 6 different types of magical attacks as well. You still have the element of having to position yourself to make sure those attacks land nicely, do the most damage.

How do you unlock these special abilities?

On top of the more minute to minute action platforming sections we've also got a crafting system which is where you collect demonic body parts from your fallen enemies to craft new weapons, new miracles, and new protective items so you don't die as quickly, that's called "transmutation." You also pick up little tiny orange crystal shards which are like fragments of your power... I didn't explain that you're an angel by the way. You're an angel trapped inside a human's body and you're fighting against demons who have been summoned to the place where you're currently trying to escape. They were summoned there by you and it took a portion of your own personal angelic power to summon them. I won't explain the reasons why; that's spoilers. When you kill them they sometimes drop shards, you get them back and that is how you build your skill tree. So you put your pieces of missing angelic shards back into the "Oath Tree," you've got a nice set of passive skills throughout the game.

What was the reason behind the narrative you opted for? You've talked about the films that inspired the gunplay, but what was the inspiration for that story?

I wanted to make sure the character was semi-believable. Not so much of a Nathan Drake character who can just do all this stuff and be an everyman. What's really special about this character who is doing all this ridiculous stuff and be awesome?! The player can just go, ah okay it's an angel, awesome. So it could have been anything really. Angels and demons have always fascinated me and in particular the way they are handled in things like the film Constantine. The way it's not so clear cut between who's the bad guy and who's the good guy when it comes to angels and demons in these kind of settings and also kind of, to some extent, the TV programme Supernatural. It's generally quite trashy, but there are some amazing concepts in they way that they handle the interactions between angels and demons. I especially like that in the Supernatural universe the angels have never seen their God, so they have as much faith in God as the humans do that they protect, it's just a really nice idea. They know there is a heaven, because that's where they live, but they don't know anything else. And I just love that interpretation of religious themes. So it felt like a good time to combine guns and angels and demons.

It's a 2D platformer, talk to us about the art style that you've gone with.

So the art style was half informed by the fact that we are a small indie studio, so we didn't want to make high-resolution 3D assets and stuff, as it's very expensive for not as much game as you'd expect. There is a game if you've got really nice 3D rendered bits and pieces, but we got like 80% of that visual style from taking 2D assets drawn by our wonderful 2D artist Neri [Nerijus Čivilis]. His art style is fantastic, his artwork is beautiful. He's quite hasty, and puts the scuffs and messy brush strokes in on purpose, and you can see that in our backgrounds and our art assets. So I really was very happy when he produced all five of the different level themes, all the character designs, and a lot of the demon designs, in fact all of the demon designs he did himself, which shows he's got a very warped brain. The only brief I gave him is that they should never have eyes, because I feel like eyes give you too much of an idea of what something is thinking or what it's intentions are, and I wanted our demons to be mysterious. They sometimes have mouths, but never eyes so you can't tell what they're thinking; good things, bad things, if they're thinking at all. That's always very creepy to me, if you're not sure if something is even thinking at all.

Animations. How did you come up with them?

I actually did a lot of video research on YouTube of gymnastics. And some of the gymnastics videos, amateur gymnastic videos, on YouTube are amazing. Some of these kids, who are like 8 to 10, are doing quadruple backflip cartwheel things. I referenced different clips from different YouTube videos to our animation team. Do this, this is really cool, I like this sort of thing when they do a scissor kick cartwheel, I'm not even sure what they're called but, it was just referencing all the usual gymnastics kind of tumbling. The animator just got straight on it and went to town on it really. We make sure we have a variety of kind of somersaults so you don't really see the same sequence twice. We've got like eight different arial animations for that purpose.

Tell us a bit about who you are and your origins as a team.

Dreadbit only has one full time employee, which is me. But the way our studio works is whenever I have a cool idea for a game, or one I think is cool, I pitch it to all of my developer friends and ex-colleagues and I say I've got this cool idea for a game, it's this this and this, what do you think? Do you wanna work with me on it? And if enough of them say "that's a really cool idea" then we've already passed the kind of first stage of prototyping in a way. I've already tested the idea out and if people are willing to commit, 6/12 months of their lives to making the game then you know it's got legs. Then the say, we're on board and down for that, I then go off and pitch the idea to publishers or people who invest in different ways to see if they wanna fund it and if they do then that's the second big test of the concept, but then we just produce the game as a team of freelancers essentially or contract workers as you might want to call it. There are only two of us working on it at the moment, just me and a programmer, as we've just submitted it to Sony and we're trying to go through the final QA process and essentially making sure it's bug free enough to be launched to the public, so we're in the final stages. It's worked really well on our previous game, Ironcast which is a kind of steampunk puzzle game. So yeah it worked well then and it's worked well for Seraph, so let's see if we can carry on doing that in the future.

Is there anything else that you'd like to tell us about the game?

I'll limit myself to two things to not take the mick out of your question. The first one is that we have a dynamic difficulty system in the game. We had a problem, very common in games, where some of your users are amazing at the game and some of your users are not amazing at the game. To limit frustration we have a scaling difficulty. So you see this number in the bottom left of the screen that goes up from 1 to 10 and the better you play the game the quicker it ramps up and the worse you play the game the slower it ramps up. So the whole point is that it matches your difficulty level, it's very nice.

The second thing, is that we've integrated a twitch mode into the game so if there is anyone who's a Twitch streamer you can stream the game to your followers and then the chat can choose what happens in the next level. So once you kill the boss a box will pop up with two things to choose from. If you type #Good it will be something like a special weapon in a box at the beginning of the next level, or a double damage orb, or a power up that gives you more experience points, or if they type #Evil it might be two bosses instead of one in the next level or double the number of elite enemies, or something similar. So that's a really nice way for people to get engaged with their Twitch followers.

Why did you decide to go with the difficulty scaling?

It's through personal experience of the Ironcast forums. The two main criticisms of the game was that it was too easy, "I finished it in two hours" or game is way too hard "I've been playing it for about a month now and just can't finish it." And there is no real way to cater for both groups. Other than allowing difficulty modes and you just pick one, but who wants to pick easy. It feels a bit harsh, like you're being punished. So we created this difficulty mode and I think the key thing is, that other games don't do, I'm sure they do scale up difficulty in the background, is make it very overt and front and centre, so that it's very clear to you what level you are battling at. So if it says you're at 2.5, well done you've improved. You were at 1.1 for ages and you've moved up which means you're improving. Then people can battle at 8 and a half or 9 and still complete it and it's clear to anyone watching that this guy is good, there is no question that this streamer or Youtuber is amazing at this game because they are fighting at 9.0 out of 10. I haven't seen anyone get to 10 before so I don't even know if it's possible. It is possible, all you need to do is collect XP without taking any hits from anyone. That' the way we do it. If you can collect 10,000 XP without taking a hit, we know that the enemy's projectiles are too slow, that the enemies aren't moving enough, or firing enough, not using a broad range of attacks, so we know to up the difficulty very quickly, but as soon as you start taking damage it slows down, it doesn't stop because we know everyone takes a bit of damage every once in awhile, even if you're a pro. But we start to slow it down, once you start taking hits periodically at a decent frequency we know this is your difficulty level and we know not to increase it at all after that.

You're currently on Steam Early Access with Seraph and you're heading to full release as well as Playstation 4, but not Xbox One. Correct?

There is nothing confirmed right now. If I'm completely honest it's down to whether it sells a lot. If it easily makes its money back, I'd totally make an Xbox version, there is nothing that's stopping us much, it's just more that you need to make sure it's got legs.

And when are you hoping to bring it to PS4?

I'm going to tentatively say end of August, but it's always terrifying saying that until you actually pass the Sony QA process, because they may not be happy and say "Nope we're not happy you can't do it yet." But I am predicting end of August. We hope to be finished beginning of August so that gives us three to four weeks to prepare for the launch.

Seraph is currently available to download on Steam via Early Access, and will launch fully on PC and on PS4 probably around the end of August.