Rush, Boom, Turtle: Swords & Soldiers & Monkeys & Rockets

Would you believe one of this year's cleverest RTSes is a WiiWare game?
8/28/2009 1:07 PM | 2 Comments | Page 1 of 3

You'd never know by the name, but Swords & Soldiers is a brilliant real-time strategy game on the Nintendo Wii, available as a 10-dollar download. I wrote about it in an earlier column, but I keep playing it and I can't get it out of my head. Here's an RTS that's simple and smart and maybe even deep. Actually, no "maybe" about it. I'm going to say that, yes, it is deep. Think of it as the RTS equivalent of a 2-D side-scrolling game, with a great campaign, a skirmish mode and split-screen multiplayer support. The more I play it, the more I learn about it, and the more I wonder who made this wonderful thing. So I looked it up. The developer is a tiny Dutch studio called Ronimo. I tracked down Jasper Koning and Fabian Akker, two of the main guys at Romino. They graciously agreed to talk to me.

Tom Chick: Tell me a little about Ronimo. I know you're responsible for the original PC version of de Blob, which you sold to THQ, who then made it into a Wii game. That was your first thing?

Jasper Koning: That's the first thing we were known for outside of school. Already in our second grade we wanted to make games. De Blob was sort of a test for us, to see if we could do something to get international attention. Or more to see if our team could function to make games. And I guess it did.

Chick: So you guys were students at the time? This wasn't part of a job?

Koning: Yes, we were. It was our third grade. We got the assignment to make a game of how the city would look in the next 20 years.

Chick: Just to clarify for those of us in the United States, when you say third grade, it's obviously not what we call third grade. Was this the equivalent of our college-level education?

Koning: I'm not sure. I just know that our study was four years and it was in our third.

Chick: Okay. So after de Blob, was Swords & Soldiers the next project?

Fabian Akker: There was something else first. After de Blob, we had our fourth year when we did our master's work on game design. During that year, we started work on a full Wii title. It was a little bit big for us. We built this demo to show around to publishers and they really liked it. But unfortunately, we couldn't proceed on the project because it was a little bit big. Although publishers liked it, they were all saying, "Well, you don't have a track record, so we need some proof you can make a game from A to Z". So a few months after that we got the [WiiWare] license from Nintendo and started working on Swords & Soldiers.

Chick: So what led to Swords & Soldiers? I'm wondering if real-time strategy games are a part of your background. Even though it's a really whimsical game, there are lots of elements from hardcore RTSes. It seems to me like a game made by guys who are fans of the more serious games. Is that the case with you guys?

Koning: It was our first RTS, but of course, we're very big fans of the genre. We did quite a lot of research. We played a lot of RTSes in our day. StarCraft was one of our main inspirations, since we're doing a game with three very different factions.

Chick: Did you know all along it was going to be a side-scrolling game? Was it ever played from an overhead view? How did the game evolve based on making it for the Wii?

Koning: Actually it started out as a Flash game. We were still trying to sell the bigger 3-D game and we needed money, so we started prototyping a few Flash games and this one really stood out. It was fun as soon as the first units marched across the screen. And shortly after that, we got an internal license and decided to blow up that game and make it a full WiiWare title. It was side-scrolling all along.

Chick: What was different about the Flash game and the WiiWare game? Would the Flash game have been three races?

Koning: We hadn't even thought of that yet. All you could do in the Flash prototype was build ranged and melee guys. That was basically it, but it was already fun enough to consider it for a bigger game.

Chick: One of the things I like about Swords & Soldiers is the personality among the three factions. And not just in terms of cute graphics. There's certainly that element, but I mean in terms of gameplay. I'm thinking one of the basic units for China, which is a ninja monkey. That in and of itself is a cute and interesting idea. But you guys went one step further and gave it a unique gameplay function that only the China faction gets. He teleports past enemies, which is a huge advantage in a side-scrolling game. There's a lot of creativity that went into this. How did the game evolve in terms of having so much personality in the gameplay?

Akker: We started out making a very long list of possible characters. Actually, the ninja monkey was the last guy to be implemented. He's also a reference to our company.

Chick: How is that a reference to the company?

Akker: Robo ninja monkey.

Chick: Is that a Dutch thing?

Akker: No, Ronimo is robot ninja monkey. Ro for robot, ni for ninja--

Chick: Oh, right, I see. I didn't realize that. Very nice. Ronimo. I get it.

Akker: That's where the ninja monkey comes from. And, yeah, he was a pretty hard guy to balance.

Chick: Would you say he was the most difficult to balance? Was there anyone more problematic?

Akker: Ninja monkey was the hard one.

Koning: Maybe necromancer.