Entrevista a Ackk Studios (Chromophore: Two Brothers Director’s Cut / Y2K) (WiiU eShop)

– Who is Ackk Studios? Where are you located? Which are your previous games? 

Ackk Studios is lead by Brian & Andrew Allanson. The rest of our awesome team is Jose Alfaro, Ian Bailey, and Brigid Allanson. We’re located in New Jersey USA. Our previous title was Two Brothers (Chromophore: The Two Brothers Directors Cut to some).

Chromophore: The Two Brothers Director’s Cut

– What can you tell us about Chromophore: The Two Brothers Director’s Cut? What kind of game is it? 

Chromophore:TBDC is an action RPG inspired by GameBoy games like Link’s Awakening, Final Fantasy Adventure.

– It is a game originally developed for PC some time ago, but now you have not only made a direct port but totally remade the game… why? What differences can we find when compared to the original Two Brothers? 

We initially developed Two Brothers for PC in MMF2, which is a particularly crappy piece of software for game development. We used it because we had began to develop the game in there as a hobby, and eventually saw it could be a full game. At that point we didn’t foresee the issues  that would arise on some machines. The next issue is portability, MMF2 is designed to create Windows games. So, to remove the bugs on ALL machines and to bring it to consoles we decided to remake the game in C#. In addition to remaking the core game we are also upgrading some features such as enemy variety, weapon variety, difficulty, and other suggestions based on user input!

– If we are right, it will be available for WiiU soon… Any expected date? Will you add any specific WiiU Gamepad features? (Off-TV, Miiverse stamps)

We’d like to release before the end of the year. Worse comes to worse it’ll be out early 2015. There are Wiiu Specific features but all of them are a bit story spoiling so I’ll keep those quiet for now.

Y2K

– All this exploration regarding different aspects -visual appearance, colours, mix of sounds, physcedelia- seems to totally reach its highest point with Y2K. Can you please explain to our readers what Y2K is? 

Y2K is a 3D RPG that takes place in 1999. It has a massive scope in terms of plot, although the gameplay is meant to be played in shorter bursts. The game will likely take 20 hours to complete. As for the visuals we wanted to experiment with a visual style that hadn’t been seen before in a Japanese Style RPG. So we drew influences from Earthbound, Wind Waker, Scott Pilgrim, and David OReilly. 

– Any clues about the story? Everything points to a really crazy stuff…

The story is a bit complicated and has a lot of twists and turns. The general setup is a 24 year old college graduate comes home to find that adult life isn’t what he expected, or wanted for that matter. He becomes fascinated by the disappearance of a young Korean-American woman named Semi «Sammy» Pak. The game begins with him trying to learn about her vanishing… the more he learns the more he realizes the nature of reality isn’t as he was told.

 – We have seen graphics started being a kind of very marked cell-shading at the beginning and they have been even more accentuated during development by using more flat, shining colors and less painted textures. Did you have in mind such a radical visual appearance when you started, or you are just getting carried away? Where the idea of taking it to the extreme comes from? 

This question made me laugh. We really wanted the game to be recognizable at first glance. When you see Wind Waker you know it’s Wind Waker. When you see some games it’s easy to confuse them with others… to achieve this we worked very hard to find something unique… in Two Brothers some of the graphics get pretty wild and out there… with Y2K, we’ve just decided to wear our weirdness out in the open. But make no mistake, the game is quite serious despite it’s out there visuals.

– You also like to experiment with music and it seems that in Y2K music goes beyond setting, even beyond Eartbound suburbs. What role does soundtrack play in the game, with all this punk or grunge-like characters’ air? Do really enemies look like a German electronic band? 

You guys ask the best questions!! Vella, the games leading lady, is a musician. She fights with sound, and her music itself plays an integral part of the games story. As for the german eletronic band… yes, we have enemies like that… and many more music genre based designs. I think when we had based them on Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade era. We wanted an enemy that didn’t feel like a typical RPG enemy but we also wanted the design to be cool…. AND My Chemcial Romance had come up on a Spotify. We do a lot of things like that, use our surroundings to inspire us, whether they are visual or aural. 

 – You say combats are turn-based as in Dragon Quest or Paper Mario, but… any other clue? Will combats be at random or we will be able to face or dodge them at will?

Outside of battle (in the dungeons) you can see the enemies moving around the map. Some are aggressive, and others have very specific patterns, others act as guards, and some you have to chase. Once you kill an enemy inside of a dungeon that enemy is gone forever. I’ll explain more about that in the question below this one! Dragon Quest in terms of how sturdy the battle mode feels, as well as some things like a text box in battle with descriptions (Earthbound did this as well.. although ours are very novel like and are generated based on context in battle.) As for the Paper Mario influence you can dodge enemies attacks with quick button presses, counter attack with other mini-games, and some moves require full on combos to pull off. Imagine the Judgement Ring from Shadow Hearts, except considerably expanded. 

– What kind of differences are between story-based dungeons and «The Mind Dungeon» ones?

So the Mind Dungeon is technically a story dungeon, although it’s tackled as the game goes on. There are 5 main dungeons in the game, and then the Mind Dungeon. As I mentioned before, when you kill an enemy they don’t come back. If you want to further level your characters (and trust me, you’ll need to) you enter inside the Mind Dungeon. Inside there you can learn new moves, gain experience, and learn about the characters inner thoughts, as well as progress the story. So you think think of the Mind Dungeon as a dungeon that is played parallel to the rest of the dungeons in the game that you are tackling chronologically. 

– And, once again, are you planning any special function for WiiU or is it too early now? We are aware it is difficult to be specific… but could you tell us any expected or approximate release date?

Yes, WiiU specific functions are there! We use the second screen for expanded combos, as well as bringing more depth to the battle mode. Showing stats about your characters levels and abilities that we couldn’t display on the main screen, as it would cause a LOT of clutter. 

Release date will be late 2015 early 2016ish.

– Thank you very much.