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Archaïc : Hi Timm. Can you introduce yourself to our readers.
Timm : I’m Timm Hellwig, the CEO and sole owner of NG:DEV.TEAM. I’m a game developer and designer since 1989. The focus of my company is to create arcade games and in-officially continuing old favorite games of our youth. Games no one else is developing anymore. I’m a Neo Geo fan since 1991/1992 after seeing it in a German video game magazine. I took a few years until I actually could afford my AES and later Neo Geo CD and MVS. I’m both a Neo Geo gamer and collector.
Archaïc : You are a collector Neo Geo, what major games do you own? Your favorites?
Timm : I have all good to very good Neo Geo games. My favorites are Metal Slug 1-3, the Last Blade 1/2, Real Bout 2 and Garou. For shmups I like Last Resort, Viewpoint and Pulstar a lot.
Archaïc : Do you collect or play to other games / consoles that Neo Geo?
Timm : I’m not really interested in consoles anymore since they started to use polygons. But I collect the best JAMMA PCBs like all Cave games, Toaplan, Raizing, Seibu Kaihatsu and Psikyo. Also all very good PCBs from Irem, Konami and Taito. I have a small private Gamecenter at home with currently 7 Japanese Egret II/3 and Vewlix cabinets.
Archaïc : How long have you worked on Neo Geo? How did this idea come from? Why Neo Geo?
Timm : Since late 1999. At this time we developed for Megadrive and Gameboy Color on Flash carts. After seeing a SNK Neo Geo dev test cart on the Internet, I started to research for developing on Neo Geo. Not much information was available at this time, so I needed to find most things out on my own. Development started on Neo Geo CD and later I modified a Samurai Spirits 2 AES cart to take eproms. It was always a personal dream of me to develop for my favorite system, the Neo Geo.
Archaïc : How do you choose your next game?
Timm : We always have a long list of candidates, we just choose what feels right at the time for the next game. We also speak with our artist to find out which game would be the funniest to work on for them. We only do projects where everyone on the team is highly motivated. If a project is not fun enough, we drop it or freeze it until we find a way to make it fun to work on it again.
Archaïc : How do you work? Do you use the development kits or did you create your own tools?
Timm : We created our own development tools in 1999/2000. Later after we decided to become full time Neo Geo game developers we created our own development hardware in 2009/2010. Currently we are working again on new development hardware for a new product line up…
Archaïc : Unlike Last Hope, all your games offers their own box and cartridge. How do you produce them? How did you make the molds? Have you established partnerships?
Timm : We get most of them from a Canadian source. We are not doing any molds on our own at the moment.
Archaïc : How long does it take to develop a new Neo Geo game from A to Z?
Timm : Depends on the game. As our teams always develop 2-3 games in parallel and there is some overlap between the teams it’s hard to tell. Shoot’em ups can be done in 12 months. Run’n’gun games need 2-3 years. With our three teams, one for CGI and two for pixel art we can release one game per year. Next year we will upgrade to four teams.
Archaïc : What were your biggest challenges/difficulties in developing Neo Geo?
Timm : Overcoming the hardware weaknesses. The Neo Geo was an absolute powerhouse. But today it shows its weaknesses. Like having only 15 colors per 16×16 pixel tile, having only 96 sprites per scanline including the backgrounds. A lot of our ideas are not possible on Neo Geo. It also makes both programming and pixel art a lot more time consuming and expensive. It’s still a lot of fun to develop for my favorite hardware though. I think it’s more difficult/frustrating for the graphic artists than for me as a coder.
Archaïc : The studio LeCortex, French developer of Treasure of Caribbean and Crouching Poney Hidden Dragon, has announced plans to broadcast their development kits soon after their two games are available. And you ?
Timm : No, sorry, we are a commercial developer, not a community service. We are here to stay for a long time. Those guys will drop out after the pony game [and stop Neo Geo Development right after]. Jeff Kurtz already made everything that he creates available for the public anyway. Several people already develop small homebrew projects for fun with his dev kit. Our tools wouldn’t really offer anything of value for new hobby developers anyway.
Archaïc : On your first 7 games, 5 are shoot’em up. Gunlord looks like Turrican and Kraut Buster, which is coming soon, is a run’n gun. Do you plan to test new genres? If yes, which ones ?
Timm : New completely genres? No. But we plan to slowly fill empty spots on the Neo Geo lineup. I think we will do alternately a shmup and a non shmup from now on.
We are mostly Arcade game fans, but we want to do more console genres like Gunlord in the future. As we will focus our arcade game development on a different and a lot more powerful arcade hardware in the future, we will focus on Neo Geo more on console games or old Arcade genres that don’t need modern hardware. So the types of games we will develop for Neo Geo will change in the future. I don’t want to name any specific genres though. But it will be genres that have no representation at all or at least not a good one on Neo Geo. We already made some exciting mock ups and concepts.
Archaïc : Many gamers compare Kraut Buster to a sub-Metal Slug. What do you think of this view?
Timm : Well Metal Slug is a master piece series. It was to be expected that some people will look down on our effort. We are confident to reach a similar quality like Metal Slug 1 though and will beat MS4 and 5 for sure. The reason why we did it anyway is just, that’s a personal dream project for myself and the pixel artists. I don’t think we will do a sequel, but at least it will be the run’n’gun game with a war setting I wanted to make. Future run’n’guns we’ll do will get a Scifi or Fantasy setting and probably have Contra gameplay as a focus.
Archaïc : What are its strengths? What would you say to convince these players to buy or test Kraut Buster?
Timm : It’s faster, more fluid (twice the framerate) and more modern. Players have better controls about their weapons and can aim in more directions. The mask system adds some interesting and fun twists to it.
We addenership?d some Contra gameplay elements to it. As there is no Slug tank in it, it’s not really like a Metal Slug game anyway. It’s basically a fresh take on the slugs. It would be a shame if people pass on it just because they are bored by the Metal Slug games.
Archaïc : Can you already tell us about your next game? What kind will it be? And why this choice?
Timm : The next game of our active projects that will be ready is a CGI Shmup. It’s vertically scrolling like Strikers 1945+ or Sonic Wings 2 but with a different gameplay and setting. It’s more like a console Shoot’em up and not like an arcade Shmup. There won’t be much bullets in it, it’s focus on shooting enemies and destroying stuff. We choose it as the next release because it’s the project with the highest probability to be completed in time and budget.
Archaïc : For when is your n Do you know when preorders will be available?ext game planned?
Timm : It’s already in development by our CGI team for some time. We will present it latest in February/March 2016.
Archaïc : The new product you’re talking is RetroVGS console, is’nt it? RetroVGS announced adapting Gunlord on their console. Why this partnership?
Timm : No. I’m speaking about something different, an arcade hardware. The RetroVGS is not really an existing product right now. The RetroVGS is more an idea for now. We choose the RetroVGS as a potential port platform for Gunlord because we like cartridges and the way the crowd funding campaign is setup there is no risk for us in waisting time and money. If we port to say Wii-U we don’t know if only 2.000 people buy it or 20.000. It would be risky at the low sales price of digital downloads. RetroVGS will also offer better service to developers than the big platform holders.
Archaïc : So, what is this new hardware you talked?
Timm : It’s secret for now. We won’t show it before 2016. But it will be awesome for high end Arcade gamers. We are very excited for it, we will finally be able to show our real potential on this platform. No holding back anymore. To develop new exciting arcade games that are not possible on Neo Geo hardware. Danmakus require more power. Games with lots of bullets, glowing colors, shiny gold items and explosions.
Archaïc : Thanks a lot Timm for your answers.