I know you’re ready for some Totemball but before the game is released, take a seat and join me as I go head to head with Strange Flavour’s own Aaron Fothergill, part of the brains behind the title.

First things first…I’d like to thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions about the Xbox Live Arcade release, Totemball.  Can you tell us who you are and your involvement with the game?

I’m Aaron Fothergill and I’m Managing Director and Lead Coder at Strange Flavour. We’re only a small company though, so before I get too big headed I also have to point out that I’m also vice president of washing up and emptying the bins.

What’s the history behind Strange Flavour, Totemball and its entry into the Xbox Live Arcade?

My brother Adam and I started Strange Flavour as a small project writing Mac games in our spare time while we were working at Argonaut Games on big console license titles in huge teams. We teamed up with a New York based publisher, Freeverse, to release Airburst Extreme and a game we’d written for Apple’s iSight camera called ToySight. At the start of 2004 the 2 brothers who run Freeverse, Ian and Colin Lynch Smith, persuaded us to leave Argonaut and write our own games full time. We set up Strange Flavour Limited as a full time games development company writing Mac games primarily, but aiming to do handheld and console games at some point (Airburst for instance was designed to be a GBA title as well as a Mac game).

We got a call last year from the Xbox Live Vision camera team, who’d played ToySight and liked our particular ‘take’ on the camera game concept and asked us to work on some games for them. TotemBall came up as a design idea here at the start of the year and we started work on it as a release title for the camera about 3 weeks before E3.

What was the development process like having to design the game specifically for use with the Vision Camera?

It was quite interesting. Writing console games is always fun as you’ve got the fixed hardware spec to work too, but we had the challenge of the Xbox Live Vision camera being a later addition to the SDK. This meant we couldn’t actually use them with the earlier devkits, but this gave us time to get used to the non-camera bits before we got cameras up and running.

Do you think this technology is good enough or do you need a higher resolution camera to fully optimize such a game?

You don’t actually need a spectacularly high-resolution camera to do gesture control. The main thing is that you can get frames from the camera quickly and in a relatively stable fashion. In this respect, the Xbox Live Vision camera is great, as the basic resolution is plenty and being USB2, its data rate is great. It also helps that the path of the data from the camera through the SDK is quite straightforward and not slowed down by API features for the camera’s other uses.

I’m sure there was fun in the studio with all the gesturing going on.  Any particular moment you remember the most during development?

It’s always a chuckle. Generally it’s a good idea not to put your studio on the ground floor where people might look through the window and see people standing waving their arms about or looking like they’re playing aeroplanes.

There’s also the problem that while normal bugs can be annoying, a bug in a physically controlled game can be very stressful. Back when I was writing The Owl and the Pussycat for ToySight, which is a 2D platformer where you fly the owl character around by flapping your arms, there was a recurring bug with the effective weight of the owl,  which resulted in my flapping my arms like mad to get him to lift off the ground. It gives you extra incentive to fix them.

Totemball is the first game that was specifically built for Vision Camera use.  Is there any way for a person without a Vision Camera to be able to play the game?

Not in TotemBall unfortunately. Early on in the design we had to decide whether to make the game playable on the controller as well as the camera. If we’d gone down that route, we’d have had to design the levels differently as the difficulty of the camera control itself normally requires the actual terrain to be designed to be easier to navigate, which would have made the game way too easy under analog stick control. So, for games that are dual control, you need to either do different levels or use other difficulty balancing tricks, all of which take time and focus away from the actual camera controlled game. As TotemBall is designed as a free game for Xbox Live Vision camera users, we decided to go with the camera only angle.

We have however included a rolling demo in the game title so if you don’t have a camera, you can still download the game and see what it’s about.

That will be perfect for those without the camera!  How long from start to finish was the game designed to be?

This is a bit of a sticky point with our testers. Originally we aimed to have about 30 minutes of gameplay from playing the main game type through end to end but with gameplay elements that would promote replaying the game to extend the overall ‘new game’ time. The thinking being that anything longer would be quite tiring.

However, somewhere along the line we got a bit overenthusiastic in the level design and we actually managed to include all the levels we originally planned to do (rather than the 75% of them we thought we’d be able to do in the timescale available) and to get through the main game without attempting to get all the shinys and bonus levels takes you about an hour. To get the Perfect Achievement, the current record is about 3 hours. Add to that the fact that we’ve got 4 gameplay modes that run through all the main maps and you can see why the QA guys who had to play through everything to check it all worked are now able to bench press trucks.

Fortunately we knew players would get tired, so we’ve included a pause mode that’s easy to trigger without hunting for the controller and there are “rest” pickups that let you rest your arms for 8 seconds at a time. The game also autosaves at the end of levels so if your arms do actually fall off you can come back later and continue after you’ve had them sewn back on again.

Can you detail how the co-op play will work with users controlling both the Vision Camera and controller?  Is the co-op play going to be local, over Xbox Live or both?

The Juggling game is a local co-op game mode where 2 players share the same game. One player controls Pterry around the jungle with the camera controls as normal, but when you pick up totem pieces they don’t stack like they normally do. The 2nd player has to juggle them by hitting the A/B/X/Y buttons as the pieces go around the loop. If you miss one, hit the wrong button or hit it at the wrong time, Pterry freezes for 5 seconds. This often triggers nasty looks and shouting of course if you’re in the middle of a jump when you do this.

How close do you have to be to the camera for the most efficient gameplay?

We’ve been working on the basis that the Xbox Live Vision camera is what the team calls a ‘sofa’ camera in that the player is likely to be sat on a sofa with the camera on their TV a fair distance away. In theory you can play TotemBall from a range of distance as long as your hands can comfortably move up and down in the sliders at the side of the screen and can be seen well by the camera you should be fine. Depending on your room, camera positioning, arm length etc. you’ll probably end up with a different ideal distance from the camera to everyone else. If you need to play really close to the camera, you can actually control the game by moving your fingers up and down. If for some reason you need to stand a long way off, you should be able to play with long sticks with paddles on in theory.

Will players have to set up a backdrop behind themselves or something to eliminate visual distractions for the camera?

In theory no.  As long as the background behind you is stable and doesn’t have lights or shadows moving on it you should be ok. The main thing is that you contrast with your background. You might find that wearing a different shirt is more effective than hanging sheets all over the place if you’re getting problematic control. The other thing is when you’re first playing, watch where your hands are in the video sliders. If you’re standing a little too far away and have your arms at full stretch, it’s easy to wander your hands out of view without realizing it. To compensate for this, we’re actually scanning a wider area than it looks and the setup automatically zooms in a little as most people tend to do the setup with their arms at full stretch, when ideally you need to give yourself a little bit of leeway.

How bright should the light levels in the room be for the most effective gameplay?

I’ve actually played by the glow of a very bright screen before, but it’s less than ideal.  The main thing is making sure the light is stable. Normal room lighting is usually ample, although strip lighting can sometimes be too flickery (the camera sees it as changing background) and sunlight can be a bit unpredictable, although the game does some tricks to compensate for that.

Lighting position is probably more important. Make sure you’re not casting a big shadow in the camera view, or your shadow will be detected too. We may use that if we do a Peter Pan game license though.

Will there be an optional Pterry controller that will be a huge trackball set on the floor that one can balance on?

It would rock. Literally. No doubt someone will build one at some point and end up with a Darwin award.  In the future though, when we can do more clever things with the video we get from the camera we could award extra achievements for how silly you look when playing the games.

That sounds awesome.  How were the Achievements in the game decided on?

We picked achievements to reward different areas of the game (we set 2 aside for the Juggling game for instance to promote co-op play) as well as a few to see how many hardcore players there are. Do not enter a weightlifting contest against anyone who’s got the Perfect Achievement and I’m beginning to think The Top Totem Achievement, where you have to complete the Super Challenge Mode game with a single life (and time based levels) might end up with a few more people cursing my name. We’ve also put a smattering of easier achievements in for any normal people playing.

Are the Achievements implemented in the game as rewards through completion of levels and/or are they progressive in terms of achieving an ultimate goal over the course of time through single/multiplayer?

We decided to go for all of our achievements being able to be gained during a single game. 2 of them require you to play the 2 player co-op Totem Juggling game (both players get the achievements) and one requires you to complete the Super Challenge Mode game.

Are there physical enemies (spiritual entities maybe?) that signify a boss battle in the game or is the environment the main obstacle that one must succeed over in order to obtain a totem?

In TotemBall, the environment is the main obstacle (after mastering the controls of course). We do have a couple of monsters, but as TotemBall was designed as a more casual/family oriented game, the monsters don’t hurt you. They’re really annoying when they get you, but they don’t technically hurt you.

Were elements of the game different based on it being a gesture based game as opposed to it being designed for use with a regular controller?  For example, are the levels shorter, are there more save points, is it geared towards short playing sessions rather than longer playing sessions?

Yes, with gesture controls, you’ve not got the fine control that people have got used to with modern digital and analogue controllers, so you have to design things a bit wider to give the player a bit of wobble room.  There are elements for the more skillful players which involve more careful control, but a lot of the game is designed around the point that we know you’re wobbling your arms around like a maniac just trying to go in the right direction, so we’re going to help you out a bit.

We also made a point of using our rest pickups as well as using lift platforms wherever possible (you stick to them when you’re on them so you get a chance to have a quick rest while they take you to the other side). The Pinball bonus levels also give you a chance to have a different type of arm movement, which helps avoid tired arms.

I want to be the first to sport a Totemball Gamerpic!  What kind of Marketplace downloadable content can we expect from Strange Flavour and when?

Ah, well there are 2 TotemBall Gamerpics attached to achievements in the game itself.

As far as content is concerned, TotemBall is designed to allow new game types and maps to be added as content packs. We’re already working on some of them, but what gets released first (and when) will probably depend on the feedback from players after TotemBall is released. TotemBall is the first fully gesture controlled 3D platform game to be released, so there’s an element of the unknown in what particular areas of the game that gamers will want us to do more of first. We might get a deluge of emails from the hardcore gamers requesting more of the difficult platforming maps or a lot of feedback from the casual gamers wanting more roaming areas with more music totems to mix up.

Xbox Live Arcade has shown success to many independent developers out there.  What does a source like Xbox Live Arcade mean to an independent developer like Strange Flavour?

For tiny outfits like us it’s great. We can bring our small team designs to a full next gen console without having to sell 99% of the company to vulture capitalists to pay for the DVD duplication fees for starters. It also means that while a straightforward commercial game is always a good plan, there’s room to try something a bit more wild without staring bankruptcy in the face. The backing of the full Microsoft QA system is handy too. Even though most developers dread the whole process of passing major console certification, at the end of the day it means you’ve got a game out that actually works and won’t need patching every couple of days. It’s impossible for them to catch absolutely everything, but compared to the amount of testing you’re able to do as a small team it means a massive improvement in quality.

Totemball could be the game that brings in the Vision Camera user base.  How excited are you and the team about its release?

Very excited. It’s a very major event for us and seeing how the idea of ‘proper’ gameplay with the camera controls is received will probably have some influence on what we do with our camera game designs in the future.

Are you planning to make any other gesture-based games for XBLA or can we expect something more traditional?

We’ve got a couple of projects on the go at the moment. One’s a traditional game that uses the camera as just a camera, but we’ve also got another gesture based ‘mainstream’ game design that would suit XBLA.

Thanks for the interview Aaron!  Any parting comments or words of wisdom for Totemball fans?

No problem Deacon! Remember, if someone’s making fun of how silly you look while playing, it means there’s someone you can tag in to take over for a bit while you give your arms a rest (and point out exactly how silly they look).