The next month of the Playism Developer Spotlight comes out today. This month we have a chat with our (basically) neighbours and developers of a personal favourite, PeakVox. Their game, Gocco of War, has taken Japan and the world by storm, bringing an adorable casual co-op game with shooting, costumes and adorable monsters to Steam. So let’s dive right into the interview!

 

Hi PeakVox. Thank you for talking with us today. To start with, could you please introduce yourself for those who are reading this?

Hello all, I'm X, a developer from PeakVox.

 

I’d like to ask, what gave you the idea to create Gocco of War?

It began from the intention that we wanted to create something new from everything what we had done so far. Not depending on Unity, UDK or any other development support software, but to try doing everything by ourselves. So we chose to use Steam since we wanted to develop and publish a game only with the PeakVox name.

However we didn't have enough knowhow about publishing, especially promotion or the management of a community, so we decided to ask for help from Playism.

Playism, thanks for your support!

 

You've also made the PS Home and a few other games. Can you tell us what experience you gained from this?

Every part of our development experience is utilized in Gocco of War.

During the development of PSHOME, we had provided the avatar’s costume as our main service. Adding to that, players could communicate with other people, as well as collect and combine some ingredients to get some rewards. We got quite a lot of positive feedback from users, and the development was indeed fun.

This experience lead us to have something playable while using the avatar even though we don't have PSHOME anymore.

As for the game lounge called "PeakVox Ninja", we provided a shooter game which had features like; 4 by 4 matches, TPS, throwing ninja-stars and slashing with a katana. Players abroad seemed to like this one, so we chose a shooter game to be the main feature of Gocco of War.

However, we already got some ideas before the development that if we only provide PvP, casual users will get killed by the hardcore users, users demand for co-op rather than PvP, as core players will be concentrating on killing rather than communicating, and so on. This is why we chose co-op for Gocco of War.

Well, users playing co-op now want to have PvP, so it is indeed difficult to find out what the users want. We will be trying our best to listen to all the feedback and implement them into the game.

 

Would you be able to tell us what your favourite part of Gocco of War is?

Let's see… The best feature of the game is "this game is not a hardcore shooter".

What this means is that there are so many foreign shooter games which you need to know your status like remaining bullets, reload timing, accurate aiming, and such. But for Gocco, your bullets will be regenerated with time, no need to have an accurate aim, just rolling around to dodge, etc. which makes this game very peculiar as a shooter.

Even for the item drops in the multiplayer mode, everything will be shared with all the members if anyone collects it, so there is almost no strict feature on this game.

To be honest, regarding the game development, the story of each quests were designed purely depending on each creator of the quest, so you should be able to find those characteristics in those quests.

As for the game scenario, we didn't prepare the story in the beginning, but created it while playing all the quests, so even we didn’t know what happened next or the ending, it was fun. I'm sure any other developer wouldn’t do such a thing though.

All the characters are around the lower grade of elementary school, but what they talk about is far above their ages. However, it will be more fun if you consider them as actual elementary kids and listen to their conversations.

 

Gocco of War is getting a lot of regular updates and is constantly expanding. Can you tell us what you are hoping to see in the game?

We still don't have a concrete idea of "complete version", but our hope is to make this game playable for a long time by providing more avatar items and quests; like DLC quests, or spin-off episodes of sub-characters and such.

PeakVox was working on console games for a long time, so we still need some more practice to have an optimized PC game, so we are trying to have better controls or options so that PC gamers can be satisfied.

However, if we try to make every feature requested from the PC users, we need to recreate the game from the beginning, so we need to say that our ideal design and the complete version may not be the same, and it makes our development difficult.

 

What is your dream?

A stable and secured future!

The PeakVox projects are projects based on the good will of O-two, so it is basically volunteer work in our spare time.

There are many staff indirectly supporting the PeakVox project even though they are not actual members of the project.

We are trying our best to make PeakVox larger, and to develop and manage more projects at once.

 

Do you have a PLAYISM game that you recommend/love?

It's just fun to browse through all the games in Playism because it is so rich in variety!

Bread, subways... we wonder how people can create a game from such a theme. We cannot help respecting the developer of course, but we also surprised that Playism found such games.

Also, the frequency of the blog updates on the Playism English website is very high, and we can feel that the writer is very affectionate to the games written about, so just reading the blog is worth a lot.

 

Do you have a message for everyone reading this?

Japanese users aren’t familiar with Steam yet, but the number of games registered for Steam is (probably) in the Guinness Records! So Gocco of War should be the best game as a starter for Japanese users to get to know about Steam!

Some users may also not be used to PC games, but when you play them with a controller, most of them are just the same as console games.

The Steam sale has quite a big discount rate (Steam sales occur about 5 times a year; March, June, October, November, December), and Playism itself has its own campaigns, so please try our game! You won't regret buying it!

 

Thank you so much PeakVox! Make sure you all check out Gocco of War ($19.99) after such a honest and heartfelt interview.

We look forward to what comes next all the time.