Long awaited retro-homage, pixelated open world ‘em up, Retro City Rampage, is nearing release. This started as a part time hobby project for Brian Provinciano of Vblank Entertainment, but it has now grown into something much bigger. He visited Nottingham last week to join in on the fun at GameCity, and I borrowed a few minutes of his time to shove a microphone in his face and ask him some questions. Here’s what he said:

DIYgamer: How many people make up Vblank Entertainment?

Provinciano: I’m the full time guy, and I’ve got another artist helping out, and three music guys.

DIYgamer: It’s a long time you’ve been working on this game, how long is it in total?

Provinciano: It’s been two years full time, and part time: many, many years.

DIYgamer: It seems like a real labour of love? It’s been in your life a long time.

Provinciano: Absolutely, I don’t know how I’ve live when it’s done, it will be really very weird. But it’s a pure labour of love, it’s my dream game. The homage thing is because I got into the industry because of specific games that I love, and I dreamed to one day work on my own Commander Keen, Mario, whatever. So by doing this, I’m really able to integrate doing all of these different genres, all these different styles of games, in this one game. The open world was the perfect medium for it.

DIYgamer: Are there any references to old games that decided to take out, because maybe it didn’t quite work, or it wasn’t as funny as it seemed?

Provinciano: Yeah, there were a few things. I really focussed on fun, and there were some joke that would have been funny, and when I tell them to people they will just laugh like crazy, but they just didn’t really work. Like a Desert Bus joke, the Penn and Teller Desert Bus game, I had designed a mission around that, but it’s just not fun. There’s no point in torturing people, because they’re not going to find it that funny.

DIYgamer: What platforms is it coming to?

Provinciano: It’s coming to XBLA and WiiWare. There’s a possibility of some others, but we’ll see.

DIYgamer: WiiWare? I’ve not heard a huge number of success stories from there recently.

Provinciano: No. I’m purely doing it for the fans. WiiWare is dead. There’s really not much money to be made on there. I’m really just doing it for the fans, and I’m really appreciative of the fans that have been supportive of this. I’ve received a lot of flaming from people that are mad because it’s been delayed or whatever. It’s not the best business advice to be releasing on WiiWare at this point, so it’s just for the fans, I hope they appreciate it.

DIYgamer: It seems to me because of the retro aesthetic, you’ve been able to cram a huge amount of things in there, because it doesn’t take you a huge amount of time to generate assets.

Provinciano: Yeah, the pixel art stuff has been real handy. It’s really amazing how quickly I can throw together an animation. If I’m making a mission, and I’m writing some dialogue, it really is am improv process, just like comedians on stage. I’ll be whipping up a mission, and then as I’m playing it, I’ll think: It would be really great if I could add this little animation there, and I can do that, that’s a huge advantage I have being an artist/designer/programmer. There other thing there too is that once I made a much more data driven system for art, I was able to add much more animation to it, on the technical aspect.

DIYgamer: So you’re on the home stretch now, what are your plans post release? What might your next projects consist of?

Provinciano: I’ve got a lot of ideas. I will be busy for the next while porting, and finishing up the Wii version, and marketing and all that. But I’ve got ideas. There are two specific open world games that aren’t Retro City that I want to do. I don’t think I’ll do those right away, because I think I want to do something different next, then I’ll go back to doing more open world stuff later.

DIYgamer: Projected release date?

Provinciano: It’ll come out in the beginning of 2012. Possibly late January or Feburary.

DIYgamer: Thanks a lot.

[Vblank Entertainment]