Cam'ron launch
Bone Thugs and harmony - resurection
Twista - new
Ludacris - Chicken and Beer


Can you give our readers a brief rundown on Codeglue? How long have you guys been around, how big is your team, what have you been working on, etc.?
Codeglue is an independent game developer from Rotterdam, The Netherlands and was founded in 2000 by Maurice Sibrandi and myself. In the mid-nineties, Maurice and I developed several Philips CD-i games for a small game developer, a job which we really enjoyed. So with the rise of the mobile games industry, we decided to get back in the games industry and start our own mobile games company.
Over the years we have developed various mobile games, like Love a Lemming, Worms World Party for the Nokia N‑Gage and more recently several iPhone games like HydroTilt XL and the upcoming Happy Tree Friends game Slap Happy. Now we have a team of ten and develop games for the digital download platforms of consoles like XBLA, PSN and WiiWare. Rocket Riot is our first game for such a platform.

Describe Rocket Riot in 5 words for those ignorant of it.
Pixelated bazooka firefights with jetpacks!

What was your main inspiration for Rocket Riot?
The game's designer, Sander van de Vegte was inspired by a game called BreakQuest which had a level that had similar blocks. We thought it would be a cool idea if you could destroy all these blocks in some way. And most of our team likes games such as Megaman, Bomberman and a lot of other classics, so you might find some likeness in gameplay with these games. But also some modern games like Unreal Tournament and Smash Brothers inspired us, which have a lot of that "What the hell is going on?!" in them.

The art in Rocket Riot is what first truly grabs you. How did you come up with such a unique style and what were your key influences?
For the visual style we really looked back at the time that we started playing games ourselves. We really wanted to capture that 8-bit retro look, but it had to be contemporary and show the power of the Xbox 360. To get there was really an organic process. Our first blocks were flat like the blocks in BreakQuest, which just didn't have that wow factor. But after a lot of experimenting by our lead programmer, Henry Falconer, we finally ended up with cartoon-shaded 3D cubes. Which we are all still very much pleased with, I must say. To make sure you feel you are playing on an Xbox 360 we added some cool explosions to the game. The game can draw a lot of particles which are in fact real 3D cubes which have physics, so that they bounce around your screen. You understand what I am talking about if you've ever used the Big Rocket power-up in the game! ;)


Whose idea was it to inject Rocket Riot with its retro feeling?
I think the 'older guys' from the team that had quite a large say in that. It's the 8-bit games from the eighties that we grew up with and it's those games we got inspired by. After having seen the first mockups, we just knew we had to go that route. And being able to make a more contemporary visual style out of classic pixels was such a cool thing to do!

How pleased have you been at both the critical and public response to the game?
So far, Rocket Riot has been very well received by the public as well as the media. Obviously we are very pleased with that! It tells us that we have made a game that people like. The things that people love about the game are exactly the things we loved putting into the game: the humor, the explosions, the 8-bit references, etc. This really motivates  us to create more of these innovative and addictive games!

Is Rocket Riot an XBLA exclusive or have you been approached by other companies?
Rocket Riot is exclusive for XBLA for a few months, after that we can take it to any other platform. At the moment we are looking at the possibility to bring the game to the Playstation 3 platform. That platform has a similar target audience, so it might be a good fit for the game.
What's next for the company?
We want to keep making awesome, fun, quirky and visceral games for every platform. We always try to be innovative with whatever we do so you can expect our next games to at least be 'different' in that aspect. Right now we're working on a design document for a 2.5D HD Metal Slug Contra physics-based platform shoot-em up with robots.
Do you have any DLC plans in the works?
Whether we are going to do downloadable content for Rocket Riot will largely depend on the success of the game. E.g. If it does really well we might choose to offer new maps as downloadable content.

Where do you find your muse when developing all your titles, and how big a role does it play when developing these titles?
I don't think we can point to one source and say "that's our muse". I think it comes from pretty much everything we've seen, heard and played and every employee brings something else to the table. We always try to have humor in our game so we can definitely list Monty Python, Discworld and Tenacious D as inspirations. We also watch a lot of Futurama, the Simpsons, Family Guy and Code Monkeys. And we listen to a lot of rock music. Rock music is very important.

Since you are one of the first studios that got your hands on XNA, what are the benefits of using such a developer tool?
The benefits of using XNA were that we could enter the console market fairly easy. After having developed mobile games for years, Rocket Riot was our first console game. During development we wanted to focus on game play and visuals and not so much on the Xbox 360 system. XNA Game Studio was the perfect technology for that. Besides that it is fairly easy to release a PC version of Rocket Riot due to XNA's cross platform nature, which is a benefit as well.

Do you plan on using XNA for future projects?
We would definitely use XNA again for a future project if it was an Xbox 360 exclusive title. XNA takes much of the stress away of the developers so they focus more on game play programming, which is great. If a project would need to run on the Playstation 3 as well, we might choose for a middleware solution that targets both platforms. As I don't expect XNA to turn up on the Playstation any time soon. ;)

Was Microsoft a good partner throughout the process?
When we started developing Rocket Riot, the first version of XNA was just released. This version of XNA certainly wasn't ready for the XBLA platform yet. Because Rocket Riot uses all the Xbox 360 features so extensively, especially the networking layers, we had to work closely with the XNA team to fix some of the issues we came across. That said, the XNA team has done a great job in our opinion and has always been very responsive to our requests and we’ve always had their full support during the development of Rocket Riot.

Are you upset with Microsoft at all over the handling of the release of your game? (Not even mentioning it the week it came out but promoting the other games that came out, plus technical issues as far as getting it on the marketplace, etc.)
Well, it hasn't been a smooth launch that's for sure. Those first days we all felt a bit sad, because you've worked so long on the game and then players can't download it (if they even knew it was released). The good thing was it forced us to start a dialog with the players. We now communicate with them quite often via out Twitter account. We get a lot of positive feedback and compliments from the community which gives us the confirmation that we have created a cool game and that we want to create more of these types of games.

What's the one game you wish you had developed in the past, or even passed up on, that you wish you could go back and create?
We didn't pass up on this game, but we would have loved to have worked on Psychonauts. That is such an awesome game and it has every element we always try to put in our own games, like humor, weird stuff, innovative gameplay, etc.

If you could create a retail-sized game what sort of game would your team like to create?
I've enlisted the help of Joost Peters, our lead designer. This was his idea:
“I would really like to make a giant zombie apocalypse MMO where every player is a survivor living in a camp. Every region has it's own camp so people in France are in a local camp and people in the US are in a local camp. Players have to gather food and build defenses for the camp. From time to time you have to form raiding parties to scavenge for food and guns and ammo. And the camp needs to be guarded at night so some players would have to stay up at night to guard the camp. Anyway, basically Fallout 3 meets World of Warcraft meets Dead Rising.”.
Because Codeglue doesn't focus on creating retail game, we would like to ask a bigger game developer to develop it for us! We would buy it!

Where do you hope to see the company around the time of the next console release?
Still making games for XBLA and PSN. Who knows what Microsoft and Sony have in store for us in the next few years? With digital distribution going the way it is and Internet speed going up for everyone, a lot more will be possible. As long as we can keep riding that wave at the forefront, we're happy.

What's your dream project for the company's next title?
Our number one dream project at the moment would be to bring Rocket Riot to Playstation 3. It would definitely appeal to the PS3 owners we think. Next in line would be the new game idea we have, which would be a 2.5D HD Metal Slug Contra game. After those two options, maybe Rocket Riot 2 with all the new ideas we have, and maybe a Natal game somewhere in between.

What's your favorite game of all time if such a beast exists?
I've asked everybody at the studio today what their favorite game of all time is.
Joost: Half-Life 2 and Dead Rising
Harald: Doom 2 and Revenge of the Evil Aliens
David: Starcraft
Peter: Rainbow Islands and Daytone USA (he's old skool)
Maurice: Mario 64 and Day of the Tentacle
Niels: Baldur's Gate 2
Bas: Dead Rising and Diablo 2

What game are you currently obsessed with?
Joost: Rock Band 2 and Red Faction: Guerilla
Harald: Guitar Hero Aerosmith
David: Team Fortress 2
Peter: Last Cannon (iPhone)
Maurice: Mafia Wars
Niels: Tales of Vesperia
Bas: Mass Effect