Plantman Q&A with Dennis Nielsen.

I recently managed to contact Dennis Nielsen, Creative Director, Game Designer, Cow-founder of Copenhagen based game company Exploding Cow and *deep breath* . . . One of the guys behind Plantman — Phew!

Dennis kindly agreed to answer a few questions that I’d bet have been on many of our lips. Here’s what he had to say:

How did the National Film School of Denmark come to develop and self publish an iOS game?

There are different educational programmes at the Film School — the only programme not focusing on live-action films is called “Animation Director” — which is the programme I finished this summer, Plantman being my graduation project.

As an Animation Director student you get to play around with all different aspects of animation and games production, focusing on being “The one with the vision” and working with all kinds of people from different fields. You have almost endless creative freedom when it comes to the midterm and graduation projects. Most student choose to do animation films (of course) but I simply chose to make an iOS game, because it just felt like the right choice of platform. I hope to see more games published by the Film School in the future since it is a rather unique set-up with a lot of potential for making great story driven games.

From feedback to in general, how has life been for all involved since launch?

It has been amazing to see all the positive responses to Plantman — especially since we launched the game with the catastrophic error of not being able to save — Even so, we got a lot of kind words from people who played it anyway.

Now that the new update is out it finally starts to feel like the game is all done, after 10 months of hard work.

To our big surprise Plantman got featured on the Chinese App Store the first day of launch and we have received a staggering number of downloads. So far we have reached more than 160.000 downloads in total which is just insane! We are extremely happy about it.

Your film school influences and abilities have shone through in the production and presentation, yet even as a whole package — it’s still one heck of a debut!

Experienced iOS developers still struggle with touch screen controls, yet first time round you’ve pulled off a flawless and responsive scheme. The gameplay itself is fun and sometimes challenging. The story is well written and immersive . . . Something tells me there’s more experience behind this “debut” than meets the eye? Beginner’s luck? Or did the whole school get involved!?

Thank you for the nice words! About the controls — My ambition from the start was to make a game without virtual joysticks — It was important to me that we made a game that felt tailor-knitted for mobile platforms — We have spend weeks just figuring out the answer to the simple question of “what is a swipe?”. Touch controls seems so simple in theory, but it is in fact a tough and delicate process of tweaking and testing before you nail that “right” feeling when your finger hits the screen.

Plantman is actually my 3rd game that have been released on App Store. My midterm project was an old school 2D point n’ click adventure called “Shadow of Kharon” [Free] which was released in spring 2013.

In the fall 2013 I teamed up with programming wizard Jacob Sloth Laursen and we formed the game company Exploding Cow, outside my studies at The Film School. We have released one game so far called “Blendimals” — a puzzle platformer where you combine animals (in a big blender) to solve the levels — the game is soft launched on the App Store only in Nordic Countries so far, but the world wide launch in coming up.

For both Plantman and Shadow of Kharon I have worked closely together with producer Andreas Hjortdal and Script Writer Mads Grage — both students of the Film School — everyone else on the team have been people from outside the school — both students, friends and professionals — so it definitely takes a fair amount of knowing-the-right-people and a bit of luck when making games at the Film School.

Plantman definitely evokes nostalgic feelings of the PlayStation classic Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee. Was this intentional?

There were several things I wanted to achieve with Plantman — I wanted to make a game with loads of personality, a game where storytelling blends together with gameplay, a “relaxing” puzzle-action experience, and not least, a game without guns.

To me Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssee is the perfect example of how to achieve this.

Using Oddworld almost as a “genre” was very appealing to me — to figure out all the little things that made me fall in love with that game in the first place and then twisting the gameplay to fit with my own ideas and the story I wanted to tell.

Plantman is neither paid, nor “Freemium”. While it’s refreshing to see no ads or in-app purchases, I can’t help feel like I want to throw some money at you! Whose wacky idea was it to make the game completely free?

In short, it was the Film Schools wacky idea — being an education of arts it is not allowed to make profit of games (or films) produced at the Film School — But then again, working on a non-profit production also have its benefits — People are in it for the passion of the project, and if you do an episodic game series (like plantman) it is quite nice to release a “pilot” episode that everyone have access to …and also you can get away with a few more bugs obviously.

Having almost completed Episode One: Last Day at The Plant Plant, I’m left wanting more. Do you have any exclusives you can reveal regarding Episode Two? E.g. A release date? Whether it will be available as an in-app purchase? If so, pricing? ( Seriously, you must need to put food on the table! Ahah. )

Right now we’re looking at different possibilities to fund the production of Episode 2 so unfortunately I can’t give you any details on the release just yet. But the whole story of the Plantman trilogy is already planned and is definitely going to be epic! We have a lot of new gameplay ideas we want to try out and I can promise that Andy and S.A.M.M. have a BIG adventure ahead of them.

Do you have any plans on porting the game to other platforms?

We are currently looking into making an Android version of the game.

So . . . What’s next for you guys? Are you currently working on any other projects? Or is your focus locked primarily onto Plantman for the foreseeable future?

While we are planning the next episode of Plantman, we’re also working on the last bits of “Blendimals” and making it ready for its world wide release on iOS and Android, later this year.

It’s been great to finally catch up with you!

Please accept my apologies for my naivety of the Danish language and wishes of the best success for the future!

Det var så lidt!

There we have it! Hope this article has answered any questions you may have had regarding Plantman and shed some light on Exploding Cows’ other projects. If you have yet to download Plantman, I highly recommend doing so. Check out my “first look” View the trailer ,and the official website and Facebook page and respectively.

iPad owners, don’t forget to click the link to install Shadow of Kharon. Last — but by no means least! I shall update this post with a for Blendimals on world-wide launch day.

Originally published at https://pressright.blogspot.com on June 27, 2014.