For our second Dev Talk of PAX East 2019 I got the chance to meet/talk to David from Headbang Club. We’ve actually talked before through a private discussion bored for Nintendo Switch devs utilizing OpenFL so it was nice to meet the man in person and talk about his team’s ****ing great idea of a game, Double Kick Heroes!
Down below as always is a link to the video interview and even further below that I’ll hopefully be able to unpack some information we discussed that didn’t make the cut or plainly wasn’t filmed, however this interview is PACKED so I highly recommend a watch.
We covered a small array of topics so despite the subjects being scattered there’s a lot of information in the video itself and I find little outside the interview to include in the text portion here. Double Kick Heroes is a game made using an open source engine, this means free export options, no license to use, a name and a face behind the software and a peak into the actual code that makes it work every single patch. This leads to quick and easy development with homebrew ways of getting around engine errors instead of something like Unity where a part of code breaks after an update and we’re totally left in the dark.
We took a long time discussing how the team would price their game, they’re currently in early access and have recouped most of the the budget that went into creating the game so now the team has to decide a new price for the final release. A few driving factors in this decision is the music feature in their rhythm game. Double Kick Heroes features nearly a dozen artists with different levels of popularity and success, all need to be paid equally an fairly with royalties, which would dig into the game’s profits heavily. The team also plans to add more content to the game in expansion packs with new songs/artists as to keep the base game as cheap and accessible as possible to the general consumer.
I really did enjoy talking with David and stopped by his booth several times after our Day 1 interview to show off his games to friends and fellow devs. Since we already discussed our theme in this article I feel the need to address supporting your friends and peers. We’re all in this race together to succeed, in a way we’re competing but also we’re all trying to succeed and one person succeeding doesn’t actually stop anyone else from doing the same. In a later interview we discuss this more with Octosoft! Be sure to support your friends in whatever they do, and share their work; word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising.