So who doesn’t love the masterminds behind Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theater, The Behemoth? Well, luckily we are here to let you know what they have been up to, so we stopped by The Behemoth’s booth and spoke with Aaron Jungjohann, Lead Level Designer and chatted about PAX and what they brought to the show. Please push play for the audio version or simply read the transcript below.
NGN – This is Joe from New Gamer Nation here speaking with Aaron, Lead Level Designer for Battle Block Theater. We wanted to ask you, here at PAX, how big is the PAX Community as far as getting the word out about your games and getting feedback?
AJ – Absolutely essential. One of the reasons we like to announce what we are doing as soon as we have the idea is we want to get it out there and get people’s feedback. This is an amazing test bed, we get to watch everybody’s response, see what makes them excited, see what makes them laugh. It makes it that much easier to go back to work on the game to make all kinds of awesome progress.
NGN – So has any feedback led to directly changing levels or making more material that way?
AJ – I think if anything it has made me, as level designer, more inclined to be mischevious. Things where you have a catapult that launches you into another catapult that then launches you into spikes get the biggest laugh from everybodies friends as they are watching thier buddy die over and over to this kind of thing. I like being able to mess with people when they seem like they are in on the joke. So very cool.
NGN – What is the future of BBT? What are you guys hoping to show here and to bring out in the near future?
AJ – Well last year we were talking about we were going to have hundreds of levels in Battle Block Theater. This year we actually do have hundreds of levels, we obviously can’t show them all right here. But all our arcade cabinets have all their own set of levels. We are showing a metric slew of new prisoners. We got my favorite weapon the acid bubble, which is absolutely awesome and its like a platforming tool and the coolest way to kill your buddy ever. We got new music, we got our finales, we got barbed wire, fire shooting out of things. Very cool new stuff to see this year.
NGN – So have you thought any about going into a mobile platform like an iOS or Android?
AJ – Funny you say that. Battle Block Theater was actually, at least orignally based, on PDA games from Alien Homonid. We actually released PDA Games as a free downloadable game on mobile platforms we are actually showing that here. We are also showing the other free game we released “Super Soviet Missile Mastar” which we have a gigantic, looks like styrofoam but I’m sure its more legit than that, giant missle set up above our Soviet Missile Mastar Station. Move Joystick, Push Button, Very Good. So yeah we got our mobile thing going on, very cool.
NGN – That about wraps up what we had planned for you, but thank you for your time and we look forward to seeing what else BBT has for us.