Next up in our continuing coverage from the Indie Arcade at Eurogamer Expo 2011 is an interview with Rob Hale from Squid in a box. He was there to give the public a first hands on with Waves, Squid in a box’s first release, a UDK powered twin stick shooter. If you missed it, here’s my early impressions of the game. Here’s what Rob had to say for himself:

DIYGamer: The build you’ve got on display here, how close is it to final?

Hale: Very close. 95% of the way. The only thing that’s not completely finished is the challenge mode. That’s the only thing that’s not enabled in this build, we’re still tweaking some of the challenge levels. There are going to be 20-30 separate scripted levels in a run, that you can beat, and get a 5-star rating on, and that star rating will affect your multiplier during the challenge. So it should be quite different, but those aren’t ready for public consumptions just yet, but that’s the only thing.

DIYGamer: What made you decide to make a shooter in this vibe, what attracted you to the genre.

Hale: It was partly an accident. I didn’t intend to start making a game, I was just fiddling around with the unreal dev kit one day, and I made a mad little marble, rolling around, picking up glowing dots, and that was it, that was all I had done. The next day I decided: Puzzle games are boring, I’m not very good at doing them, I’d have to make loads of content. Making 100 physics based puzzle levels wasn’t an appealing idea to me. So I thought: I’ll give it a gun. So I gave it a gun, and I gave it lots of little marbles to shoot at. It’s basically just evolved from that point, there’s never been a design document. I never sat down and actually planned. How it’s ended up looking is just an accident of me pissing about.

DIYGamer: Sort of let the game design itself?

Hale: Basically. It has, it’s basically designed itself. I put the slow mo in one day, because Epic wanted to take some UDK games to an expo, I think it might have been Gamescom. The night before I sent them the build, I put in the slow mo, on the right mouse button, and that’s another feature that just stuck.

DIYGamer: How long have you spent on the maths behind the multipliers and the scoring, and communicating how that all works to players?

Hale: There has been a lot of revision of that. At one point it was a lot more complicated than it is, It’s quite complicated now, but it was incredibly complicated, and it’s actually been toned back a lot, to try and make it a bit more understandable and instructive. The majority of work has gone into actually making the game have interesting scoring mechanics, to make it so people can actually play the game as a shooter, and find ways to get large combos, and chain kills together to get huge scores, and make really quite hard to get on the leaderboards. The majority of game design work has actually gone into that, the enemies and everything else are dead quick, they come very easily, I can make a new enemy in about a day. But I’ll spend weeks agonizing over how the scoring should work.

DIYGamer: The cube guy is a bit of a bastard, the times that he kills me are the ones that have been most annoyed by.

Hale: Yeah, he’s an interesting one. He originally just tumbled about on his sides, and was completely none threatening, you could just avoid him so easily, he had nothing to do with it. It was actually a friend who said “You know what, why not just make him charge at people?”. I thought that seemed a bit harsh, so the cube enemy disappeared for a while, then I decided to try it out. I put in the charge attack, and after a lot of experimentation, it ended up the way it is. You can goad him into to charging you.

DIYGamer: He’s like the Chess piece, the Rook.

Hale: Once he lines you up, he’s coming for you.

DIYGamer: Have you got any concrete details about pricing and release?

Hale: It’s going to be $10, £7.99 in the UK. It’s going to be out on Steam, and it’s not going to be out before the last week of October this year. I’m still working out all the details with Steam, so I’ll hopefully get a concrete release date in the next couple of weeks.

[Squid in a box]