Interview With Rob Peall Of Domino Effect, Developers Of Red Awakening

I recently had the chance to sit down with Rob Peall of Domino Effect to talk about their game, Red Awakening, which is currently on Kickstarter. We talked quite a bit about the game's design, Rob's process, and where they're going from here as we repeatedly made efforts to sneak around and kill each other in-game.

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Peall:  It’s surprising to me—I was talking with a guy just yesterday—people’s perception of what they expect a first-person game to be. They just expect it to be a game where you run along a corridor and you shoot that guy. You know what I mean? Even games like Thief and many games have done first-person and have done something different with it.

I think that, at this moment, people have just become very jaded with it. Because I think, in some ways, it’s a genre that hasn’t changed since its inception. It hasn’t changed since Doom. It’s still essentially the same mechanics, whereas if you look at the transition from 2D to 3D and platformers and things like that, they’ve changed a lot more. Even that, you could still say it’s the same kind of formula.

Me: You’ve got this distinct visual style. How are you planning to make the maps feel different other than different layouts?

The next map we’re doing is quite different. We’re doing this sort of John Carpenter-inspired Syberian Outpost inspired by The Thing. So there will be no visibility on the outside. Have you ever played Modern Warfare 2? The very first level, on the cliffhanger. We’re basically going to be doing it like that. Because obviously we’ve got the thermal imaging. We’re already kind of playing to that. We’ll make you use that completely outside because there will be no visibility.

The other part we’re looking at doing, as well, is having a few of the maps in the day time. But the inside will be really, really dark. So when you go inside, it’s going to be a lot darker. I don’t know if you’ve played Metal Gear Solid V yet, but they have a kind of thing going on where you go in a building and then you go out, and as you approach the door, it’s so bright you can’t even see the outside. You’ve got that moment where it’s almost like your eyes are adjusting.

So we’ve got a map in Miami so we’re probably thinking about doing something like that maybe. Maybe a little bit of being blinded by the sun. That kind of thing. We’re going to be doing one in a swamp kind of area. Because obviously, based on slasher movies. We’re going to be doing that kind of backwards slasher kind of thing. One in a zoo. Probably one in a school.

Do you know what’s going on with the blue? Because I think that’s one thing that people don’t quite understand. It’s not just a stylistic thing. There’s a bit more to it than that.

If you bring up your arm module, and you see the radar there, eventually that radar will have a cone coming off of the player. So if I run past you, obviously I would come up on your radar, I’m detected, whatever. There will be your three levels of detection. Usually your radar changes color, the corner radar. We have it where, at the moment, the entire screen changes. So if I go over to purple, that would be like I had just spotted you. Then red would go over to “we’re in combat now.” And then that would transition back down.

It’s kind of inspired by Drive and stuff like that. I just really like that kind of stylistic look. I think it gives everything a cold kind of feeling, as well.

But because of that, every level will have a similar overall style?

Yeah, they will always be the blue and the purple and the red.

Since you were talking about detection, are cameras going to do anything eventually? Or right now are they just to test detection?

Yeah, that’s just to show detection. But eventually, you will be able to go into the guard’s room and use the computers to monitor the cameras, disable the cameras, etc. Basically like Goldeneye. I don’t know if you get it but TimeSplitters is probably our biggest influence in terms of mechanics. We just really wanted to do one of those “fun” shooters but a little bit different.

We didn’t go into it too much on the Kickstarter but we’re doing a kind of campaign-based multiplayer. So you’re currently playing as the cheerleader. She’s got a kind of fucked up backstory that the player will discover the more they use the chemicals. That’s one mechanic we don’t have in quite yet. You can see that we’ve got the stamina. So you can only swing your blade so many times until you run out of stamina, like Bloodborne or something like that.

But eventually, we’ll have our chemicals in there and we’ve got two chemicals. They will be kind of like a special in a MOBA or a usable perk, I suppose. One will make you super speedy, and you’ll be able to sprint, be more agile. The other will make you more like a tank. You can take more bullets.

But basically, that also feeds into the fact that we’ve got no regenerating health. So eventually, when you go down to about half health, you’ll go down to about 75% move speed—obviously, these numbers are still rough. If you’re on like low health, you’ll be at about 50% move speed. So you’ll be able to use the chemicals to counteract that. I guess it’s just to make the player feel on top of the world when, in reality, they’re nearly dead.

It’s kind of like the last stand in a slasher flick.

Yeah. A lot of it comes from the CIA experiments that were done in the sixties, as well, so we wanted to mess with chemicals. This is basically what Red Awakening is. If you’ve seen the movie Battle Royale, The Running Man, anything like that, you’ve got a kind of alternate 1980s. In the mid-eighties, in America, shit just hits the fan after Vietnam. Kids just don’t want any more war. The unemployment rate goes up. Everything like that. Kids just start boycotting schools. And the government looks at them and says “well, there’s over 100,000 of them,” for example, “when there’s only ten of us, so we’ve got to do something about it.” They then fund the CIA sort of derivative program and basically, they use that.

That’s the other thing I wanted to do, as well. I find it interesting that people have such an interest in serial killers. Especially America has a real interest in serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and everything like that. I wanted to try and take that kind of Running Man, Hunger Games type thing but then mix it with—basically making the stars of those slasher movie stars the stars of their own TV show. Like a pseudo-reality game show.

So you’ve got like ten characters to play as. And there’s a bit of that “they started out as the victim. Something fucked up happened to them. It made them into the psychopath.” So you’ll know you’re playing as the cheerleader, you know, you won’t know what her story is. And the more you use the chemicals, if you keep using the chemicals, you’ll activate a trip stage and every now and again that will show either a messed up image or part of a story thread.

So I’m kind of leaving it up to the character. If you think of Hotline Miami, I’m more kind of just hinting at a story rather than trying to tell some deep story.

So that people can just kind of make what they want out of it?

That’s it. And like I’ve said, we’ve got the cheerleader here. We’ll have the jock, the stoner guy. And you can see there’s just kind of a reference on her shirt there, the Wolverines.

And that’s one of the big things for us. We wear our references on our sleeves kind of thing. It’s open to very kind of obvious pop culture references. Even in here, we’ve got the kind of crackled computer. Very much like the GTA kind of humor, I guess; the typical British kind of humor.

The story. Is it going to be like at the end of a match, maybe something will show up?

No, it could be during. Actually, it’s completely player activated. Completely player driven. So the more they use the chemicals, the more they will find out. And the chemicals, we’re calling them painkillers. So we’re kind of saying that it heals emotional and physical pain.

We’ve also got different states for those chemicals. Like one of them is “Katarina” and the other is a bottle of vodka. So the more you use the alcohol, the more dependent you’ll become on that. So we’re going to have a few stages. Say you hit the vodka hard, you’ll be drunk, whatever, and then you’ll become dependent on that. And we’re looking at the cold turkey stage, where for a few matches, the camera is a bit jittery. You have consequence for dealing with that.

I suppose that’s the other thing we’re just trying to really get across will all of that, everything is player choice. So if the player wants to be a complete pacifist we’re rewarding the player for that. We’re not saying that you have to kill anyone but basically, if you’ve got a gun in your hand in a game your first instinct is to instantly hunt someone down and kill them. But that’s not the objective of what we’re doing here. So we’ve basically given people all of these different objects to hunt each other and kill each other but you don’t have to do any of that in order to win the match.

Eventually, our main mode is what we’re calling “Dual Demolition.” So if you think of Counter-Strike but both teams have got bomb sites and both teams have got bombs. So say if you’ve got that kind of American football kind of back and forth.

So yeah, as I’ve said, you could go the entire match without killing anyone and still be the highest ranked player in that match.

So you’re going to make it so that objectives are going to be worth more than kills?

Yeah. So it’s going to be like the stamina. The stamina is even connected to kills and things like that. So the more kills you get—that’s something I was watching with the guys in Vietnam. There was a documentary I watched about these guys’ first kills they did and what a buzz it was for them. They were saying it was like better than any drug they could take.

So I was just thinking, rather than giving someone that kind of 50 points that come up on the screen, you’re given your stamina back for that because it’s giving the player a bit of a buzz. So it gives people the incentive to play it like a shooter. But I’m not saying you have to.

We’ve been compared a lot to Hotline Miami I guess just for that reason. Just for the look of it and the story, just kind of going with it. But that’s been one of our biggest problems. Getting that across. Because we are a first-person game and people just say, “oh, we see guns in the game so you’re just making another sort of Call of Duty or Battlefield or whatever.”

So the currency system. Is it going to be on a per-match basis or is it going to be persistent?

Well, the way we’re doing it now is also a little bit like Dark Souls. Because the team really likes Dark Souls. So obviously you’ll get a little money from completing the objective, getting kills, etc. And then you’ll be able to chain those different rewards and get more money from that or whatever. But if you die during that round, you’ll have to reclaim that money, kind of like in Dark Souls. Because you’ve only got three lives anyways. So if you lose those three lives, you’ll get no cash at the end of that game.

We wanted to give people a bit more of an incentive to play carefully. Because if someone’s on a decent kill streak and they’ve got like $10,000, they’re going to be playing differently than someone who’s got like $50.

So it will be persistent?

Yeah.

Being that you’re going to have this persistent story and this persistent currency system, are there still going to be dedicated servers?

Yeah. We’re going to have two modes. Basically, one is going to be almost like the old arcade games. So we’ll have the original mode and the arcade mode. So one of those will just be where you can jump into a server and play without the story. So I guess like a “campaign mode” and a “regular” mode or whatever.

And the campaign mode will kind of depend on a master server whereas the other one won’t?

Yeah.

Something I’m very interested to hear; you’re basing this on slasher flicks and old CIA stuff, but if everyone is “the killer,” then how do you continue to make it unnerving?

That’s basically where the core mechanics come in. You know that all the weapons, there’s no reloads or anything like that. Now, in this map, at the moment, we’ve got a lot more guns than there would be in reality. And once those guns are empty, they would just lay on the map empty.

So basically, it will be that constant kind of cat and mouse gameplay. Obviously, everything’s got to be tweaked yet. Like the chainsaw is going to be a lot stronger. Any weapon that is pink will kill you in one shot. So there will always be that kind of fear of “I’ve got a knife. What’s he got?” Usually, people aren’t worried about what the other person’s got unless it’s a sniper rifle or it’s really high powered. So I’ve basically said “let’s make every weapon high powered but make them very sparse.” Every single weapon will be overpowered out to a certain range. Because if everything is overpowered, it will kind of be balanced. That’s kind of the way that I went about design.

But yeah, it will be that kind of cat and mouse gameplay. If you think that a guy’s going to come after you with a chainsaw and you’ve got a knife, you know that that chainsaw will kill you in one hit when your knife will take four, then there’s going to be a bit of fear there.

It was interesting to me. Yesterday, we had four of us on with this YouTube guy and it’s surprising just how much people jump because of the speed and things like that. Because you can go from being very slow to very quick. Which is also a bit of a joke because, if you think about those slasher movie villains, they sometimes just walk in but they could be right behind a person. It’s a little bit of a piss take of that, as well. But yeah, basically, that will be what you’ve got.

And the other thing you will see, it’s not implemented yet. You know how in most stealth games, you’ve got safe zones? Usually, the dark, shadowy area? We’ll be doing that. Everywhere there’s a dark shadow area, you’ll go in and become completely invisible, basically. Obviously, unless you’re seen running into that area.

So you’re going for fear by “everyone has power”?

Yeah, everyone has power but at the same time, I guess it’s like this sort of false sense of security in some ways. You feel powerful up until you realize you’ve got no ammunition or someone’s got something bigger than you.

And you’ve really got to be the faster one because there’s no chance at recovery.

Yeah, and like I’ve said to you earlier, eventually we’ll have it so that the lower your health gets, the slower the character moves. So if you can think, if you’re on low health and you’ve got no painkillers to boost yourself up to 100% move speed again, then that’s going to be pretty scary. I’m already at 50% but there’s a bloke running at me at 100% with a chainsaw.

Right now, there are four or five weapons spread around. Is it going to stay low-numbered like that so many people can obtain weapons in the first place?

No. It will eventually be 5v5, so there will be a lot more handheld weapons just laying around: screwdrivers, knives, sawblades, that kind of thing. Because obviously these weapons will stay in the map over the course of the match and a match can be anything from twenty minutes to half an hour long based on what they’re playing.

Basically, the way we’re thinking about it is, we’ll still only have a few spawn points for weapons. So there still won’t be a massive amount of weapons but there will be a certain amount of weapons that could spawn at that spawn point. So say we’re in the kitchen, that could be a meat cleaver and a butcher’s knife. So it would only be the weapons that would be around in that kind of area.

So there won’t always be a chainsaw in the kitchen?

No. [laughs]

Given that, the characters aren’t really going to vary in any way, other than the storyline?

Well, when you asked about the currency earlier that was something I forgot to say. We’re still going to be doing that aesthetic thing, so you’ll still be able to change what your character looks like. But in terms of movement and abilities every character will be the same. We wanted to try and have the most even playing field possible.

I did originally have it a few years back where there were two types of character, hence why there’s two abilities. But then I just literally sat there one day and I was thinking about streamlining and I was like, “well, it would probably be better to have both of them run off the same battery and give the player more kinds of options.” Because that’s something we’ve been trying to do as well. Give the player as many options as we can to build that kind of gameplay.

So you said you’ve been working on this a few years?

Me, myself, it took me about two years or so to write. So in total, I’ve been working on it about five years but this build right here, we’ve been working on it about two years—about 18 months or so. We adopted to Unreal Engine 4 like the moment it came out. Because we were originally using Unreal Development Kit.

I’m assuming that you haven’t been working on it full-time?

No, everyone’s got their own jobs and lives and everything like that. But we try to do as much as we can most evenings and we used to meet up a few times a week when we could.

What happens if the Kickstarter fails?

This is something that we’ve been talking about, just with our PR guy and such. We’ve got some other contingencies in place. We’ve passed Steam Greenlight. We’d probably go straight into Early Access after a couple of months or so.

Obviously, it would become more difficult to work on it. It’s quite difficult now, like I’ve said when we first started out, it was much easier, but we never envisioned it to take this long to get to where we are today.

We’ve got other things coming up. Probably going to be going to a conference up in London, something like Develop. We’re probably going to be going to that and talking to some publishers. We’ve been talking to publishers for quite some time now. They’re all very interested but it’s just that kind of tipping point. It’s the most kind of frustrating time, I guess.

Are you planning to expand the parkour?

Yeah, we’ve got it on the list of things to look at.

Right now, I’ve noticed it’s mostly just wall running.

Yeah, there is wall hanging, though. I don’t know if you’ve worked out how to do it. If you wallrun and hold the “aim down sight,” you’ll wall hang.

There is also an air glide in there. We had quite a few Team Fortress players play it and ask “oh, well can you have just a bit more control in the air?” So there is that old Quake 3-style air glide.

Yeah, I mean, we’re going to be adding to it and stuff. We’re looking into having it so that you can aim down sights as you run down the wall, sort of like what Black Ops 3 is doing, but probably not quite like that.

It’s interesting to me when people say “did you always plan on having people going on the roofs and this kind of stuff” and I always say “well, yeah yeah,” but it actually turned out that the first event that we ever took it to and we first implemented the parkour, we gave it to a five year old kid and within a couple of minutes, he was on the roof, jumping out of the map. He goes “am I supposed to be up here?” We go “yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t worry. In like a month, that will look like Mirror’s Edge.”

Is thermal vision always going to allow you to see people from across the map?

That’s still something we’re thinking about. It’s either going to be something like that and we reduce the amount of battery or it’s more likely to just be where you can see them when they’re in your immediate vicinity. So you won’t be able to see through walls.

If anything, we’ve noticed that having it that powerful does kind of speed gameplay up in some ways and it does kind of aid the “never feeling safe” aspect.

One thing about the thermal that I should probably say. Once you’ve got it on, to balance it a bit more, it will distort all the sound around you. So once you’ve got it on, it completely encapsulates you. Almost like if you’ve ever played Dead Space, when you go into zero G. We’ll be doing that sort of thing with the thermal.

We want it so that it’s pretty powerful. We’re trying to cater to both playstyles, I guess. Do you want to be that more helpful player or not?

That’s kind of, in a way, someone asked me yesterday “where did the throwing come from?” I said “all of my ideas come straight out of old eighties movies.” I said “Basically, I was really drunk at the time and I was watching Friday the 13th Part IV. There’s a bit where Jason just happens to pick up a carbon knife and throw it at the woman.” And I was just like “huh.” And then I happened to be watching Commando and there’s a part where he throws a sawblade at someone and I said “that’s awesome.” And then there’s the part in Saving Private Ryan: I just found it hilarious when they both run out of bullets and they have to throw their helmets at each other. I thought “why has noone done this before? It’s just hilarious.”

At this point, my questions were mostly answered but, as we continued to play, Peall mentioned quite a few other important points at various intervals. I’ve presented them as individual quotes below.

You’ll probably notice there’s a bit of Fallout there, with the arm module. We were referencing a bit of Predator and The Pit there.

Here, Peall explains the design process for the spray paint can.

There’s always a part of me that looks at how other people do it and I think “well, what can I do with that?” Even something as simple as the spray tag that you get in most games. I thought to myself “well, why don’t I make that a physical object? It’s only a simple animation. All I’ve got to do is model a spray can.” And then I can make that into a weapon that incapacitates someone for a couple of seconds by spraying spray paint in their face. It could also be quite funny, if we go down that route, to be able to choose your own spray color. Just being able to paint.

You’ll be able to tag things but I asked myself “well, why not make this a defensive weapon that you can use like pepper spray?”

It’s the same to me as the throwing weapons thing. It was just me sitting there thinking “well, why has noone done that before?”

He then goes on to explain one of his favorite weapons planned for the game, as well as how respawns work in the world of Red Awakening.

The weapon I’m really looking forward to, which is a fan favorite, is the Potassinator. It’s a banana that’s been dipped in liquid nitrogen, frozen, and it’s been sharpened. It’s also a bit of a ballistic knife, as well, because everything’s throwable. But instead of throwing that, you just squeeze it and it sort of flies out like a ballistic knife.

It actually comes from a discussion with my girlfriend. That’s where a lot of this stuff comes from. Me chatting about random stuff. You can probably find it somewhere online but we have a video called “respawn or reborn?” Because it was one night where me and my girlfriend were pretty drunk, and we were chatting, having a cigarette and whatever. I said to her—we were talking about Call of Duty and things like that—I wonder when it will be that you basically open a box of Call of Duty: Whatever It’s Called and it’s basically a just literally a sign-up form for the army.

We were just laughing about that and people are saying “well, where’s the respawn point?” I just took that to a final conclusion and made it so that every time you respawned in the game, you were basically born out of a silhouette vagina. I don’t know, some people got it, some people were like “yeah, we got it. Where does the player come from every time they die?” Some people just viewed it as trashy.

Here, Peall explains a feature they discovered accidentally.

Oh, one thing we found out that is a feature now. We found out completely by accident. If you throw something at someone, you can shoot it out of the air. On the Kickstarter video, one of my guys throws a chainsaw at me and I just shoot it out of the air. One of those “happy accidents.”

He then explains where a lot of the core design for Red Awakening came from.

One of the biggest things we concentrated on was freedom of movement. And I think, for me, it was also I happened to be watching a film called “Behind the Mask” or something. It was a self-aware, Scream-esque thing. Basically, they had it where there was a woman, a reporter who was writing about a school when she’s investigating all of these old serial killers. Basically, Jason and Michael Meyers had become cult icons. And there were all these people whose careers were literally being a psycho slasher. And it kind of just made me think of it. It’s quite interesting to me, just putting that player into that mindset, as well.

Because that’s the other thing we’re doing. Not only will all the players have their own story, they’ll all have their own one-liners. Because that’s something I really miss out of first-person shooters. I love games like Blood and Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior. Stuff like that. I miss the days when you make a game that’s just supposed to be fun. It was gory, it was bolder. I miss that you just can’t do that anymore.

It’s like when someone said to me yesterday, I asked if he had any feedback. He goes to me “yeah, a double-jump would be really quite cool.” I said to him, “yeah, it’s something I’m looking into but if I do that then I have to sit there and attach rocket boots to the players.” Because in today’s world, you can’t just have it where you can jump 50 feet into the air. People want to know why. Someone asked me “why can you wall run?” And I had to say “oh because all the characters…” You have to make some excuse and write it into the story in today’s world.

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Red Awakening is currently on Kickstarter. It is sitting at $6,625 out of a $54,929 goal with 13 days left at the time of this writing. It has already successfully made it through Greenlight.