WZ – Anthony: Speaking of the maps, and you mentioned Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress 2 starts to have, like I remember the level where the trains come in, and can kill you. Do you have environmental effects on the maps, or are you keeping it clean for like a more arena play kind of thing?
Mapara: I think we are trying to keep it consistent right now, so it’s like players’ skill, and when you throw in a wild card element like that, you can do it really well, but… we don’t know how to do it yet, so we want to just get the basics working first. We want to get the game working with our core mechanics first, and then we’ll layer in stuff like that.
Lopez: It’s very important for our characters and players – it’s very skill-heavy, and your skill level and how good you are in terms of killing other players is a major part of our game, so we want to implement, make sure the player knows that the more you affect the other players, the better you’re going to get at it.
WZ – Anthony: When can I get an art book? That’s the other question. [laughter]
WZ – John: The art work is really great.
WZ – Nicole: The art work is amazing!
Mapara: Thank you!
Lopez: You know, with the style of the shooter, we went back to try and take all of the iconic elements that make a great Western – the different types of characters, you know, from the regular sort of cowboy guy to the, more of the Mexican bandito, but what we’re doing is we’re taking all those elements and we’re sort of exploding them, making them very, very iconic, very out there. But we’re also implementing something, like Phantom Poncho is influenced by the Mexican Day of the Dead. Like we have this one character, she’s a bull fighter, she’s a matador, so we want to open up the door to be able to go in and introduce characters that are a little bit more bizarre, but still fit the overall world, and I think that’s what makes it more unique and interesting.
WZ – Anthony: I love the area effect, your shooting line, your aiming line? I like that it has a little bit of flare on it, that’s nice.
WZ – Nicole: I love the whip!
WZ – Anthony: It looks like a scarf when he’s running, but it’s a whip, right?
Mapara: Yes!
WZ – Anthony: How many characters are there? I’ve counted 5…
Mapara: There’s 6, and we’ll be heartbroken if we can’t add more after that, so we’re going to do our best.
WZ – Nicole: That would be awesome. Everything we’ve seen so far is awesome! I love these guys.
Mapara: It’s pretty cool too, they each have, we don’t share animations, so everyone does everything different. Like they each have different personalities, like the way Kid Red does his roll, or the way Gordo dives on his belly, or the way, you know, we just want really want to kind of push their personalities, so they each have over 100 animations.
WZ – Anthony: No cheap color swaps!
Mapara: Yeah.
WZ – Nicole: Do you guys have a story for the game?
Lopez: To develop the characters, we created backstories for everybody, because for us it’s very, even though you’re not following a storyline and really getting to know the character, I mean obviously we want the player to become the character, and implement whatever it is they want to do with it.
Mapara: For example, Phantom Poncho, he’s a bounty hunter, and the town, basically every character in this town of Lonetree is either an outlaw with a bounty on their head or they’re a bounty hunter… There’s this crazy town with all these outlaws, and it also attracts all these bounty hunters, so everyone’s either an outlaw or a bounty hunter.
Lopez: With the development of the characters, we had to come up with stories.
WZ – Anthony: I think it would be hard when drawing those characters NOT to come up with stories.
WZ – Nicole: This guy’s reputation is “Stranger.”
WZ – Anthony: Ha ha, he’s a confederate soldier? That’s funny.
Mapara: The way the game works is, every player has a bounty on their head, so that’s kind of like their leaderboard, or their score. If you kill somebody, the bounty on their head goes down, and the bounty on your head goes up, so players start gunning for each other. Then, as you hit higher bounties, you’ll start unlocking reputation classes. So, in the beginning, you might be Killer: The Petty Criminal, but then you might become Killer: The Outlaw, or Killer: The Legendary. As you do that, you get Perk points, and you can assign those Perk points into gameplay attributes. So you can say, you can create a character, a Killer character, and name him, color customize him, but then you can say “I’m going to trick him out to be the hardest shooting Killer in the game, with the most damage.” Or you can say “I’m going to build the fastest Kid Red in the game.” You know, you can kind of make your own build for the characters.
WZ – Anthony: So there’s like a slight RPG element? Nice.
Mapara: It just makes you want to keep playing, and to have multiple characters. Like to have a few different Killers, or Kid Reds. It’s crazy. We were scared to show the game because it’s pre-Alpha. Our friends were like, “Guys, it’s fun, just show them.”
WZ – Nicole: I read some of the press release, the thing that stuck out to me the most was that you guys called it Secret Ponchos because it was the name of your development blog, and I thought that was awesome.
Mapara: Yeah, people either hate the name, or they love it.
WZ – Nicole: I love it! I think it’s great.
Yousuf: There’s no in between though! It’s so weird.
Lopez: But I think, you know, we’re getting such a reaction from people, that I think it’s very positive. In the beginning, if somebody comes in and says “I don’t like it, blah blah blah,” but I mean one of the comments in one of the forums that we saw was just like “I hate the name, but I can’t stop thinking about it! You know, it’s like it bugs me so much!”
WZ – Anthony: I wanted to ask about the soundtrack, because in the trailer, you had a really nice Spaghetti Western kind of, Ennio Morricone thing going on, and obviously I can’t hear anything right now, but do you have a soundtrack?
Mapara: Yeah, Chris Gury, this guy, he’s been my friend for a long time, and he’s a really talented musician. He’s not a game musician, he’s like a band musician, and I thought, so much game music needs to be there, but it just sort of doesn’t have that feel like you want to listen to it. So we just got him involved, and he plays all the instruments on it. He can play trumpet too, but he usually gets one of his best friends to come and play trumpet. It kind of has a good feel, and he’s done a whole album for the game.
WZ – Anthony: Which surely will be released with the game, right?
Mapara: Yeah, yeah, he’s really excited, we’ll put it out there. I love Spaghetti Western music so much, that that’s kind of what inspired the whole game, the music and the attitude of the music, so yeah, he’s been hard at work, and it’s an exciting genre to work with.
WZ – Nicole: So can we hop in on this next round?
Mapara: Oh yeah!
If you’re interested in what it was like to play Secret Ponchos, you should definitely mosey over to our Hands-On Preview, pardner.
