Community Interviews: Eli Piilonen, Developer of Not The Robots!

     I recently had the chance to talk to Mr. Eli Piilonen, who most notably created the furniture eating roguelike Not The Robots!. This interview covers his inspirations, how he met the team, his hobbies and much more. I hope those that read this learn a little insight about indie developing!


1.) What made you want to go into game developing?

I learned about HyperStudio in the fifth grade.  It was kind of like MS Paint, but you could make a slideshow of multiple images, then put in buttons to navigate between them. I made a bunch of goofy shit with it during the schoolyear. When we were assigned those brick-style graphing calculators in 6th grade math, I learned their built in TI-BASIC language and made some more goofy shit.  Later that year, I got a copy of Flash, tried animating, learned it was harder than I was expecting, and decided to learn Actionscript instead, since I already had a headstart from the calculator.
At a certain point, somebody online mentioned that I could be getting paid for making games in Flash, because that was apparently a thing.

2.) How did you and David start collaborating and decided "Hey, let's make games!"?

I found David's music on Kongregate's audio portal.  I was collaborating with a visual artist named Luka Marcetic who could make textures and character sprites, but I needed some tunes for the game that we were working on (which was called "The Company of Myself").  Tons of stuff uploaded to that type of free hosting service was somebody's first or second attempt at emulating their favorite European trance or hardstyle producer.  David's music stood out immediately - he had several tracks with really distinct tones, and a cool mix of sampled instruments and synthesizers.  Turns out that I hit the jackpot - we got an unbelievably great response from the game, and Not the Robots is our eighth collaboration since we joined up in 2009.

3.)  What clicked in your head and decided to make Not The Robots a three dimensional game?

Somewhere during the Flash days I started to understand that the market we were part of (which, at least on most fronts, was a really nice setup for us) was legitimately a little tech bubble, and that meant it was going to end sooner or later.  After so much time making Flash games, it felt like it was the right time to escalate a bit and start doing 3D stuff (as well as moving out of the sponsorship model to start selling games with price tags instead).  I knew I was going to be learning a new toolkit of some kind anyway, and Unity seemed like the best choice for...a lot of different reasons.

Going from Flash games to this? Impressive!

4.) Who is your inspiration in the industry?

Edmund McMillen, David Rosen and Aubrey Serr (and also the HumbleBundle guys), Tarn and Zach Adams, Jon Blow (and the rest of the team on The Witness), Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, Unity and Valve in general, probably others.

5.) What are your future goals, both with Not The Robots and other projects?

I'm actually releasing an update to Not the Robots pretty soon - there have been three little bug-fixy updates so far, but with this one I want to add a Save&Quit feature that's been getting some discussion on the Steam Community forums for the game as well as some other neat surprises.  If you're not familiar with save mechanics in roguelikes, the idea is that the only way to save is to also quit the game, and as soon as you load a save file, it gets deleted.  This way, you can't use the save system to retry things and the game's permadeath setup still works, but you don't necessarily need to play a whole run (which sometimes might take an hour, depending on the player) in one sitting.  It does also add an extra avenue for cheating, since players can tamper with the save data, but if you want to do that, that's your own deal.

6.) Next project?

Well, we've got a website up at UntitledBulletHell.com, but we're about to switch over to a title that's more ready for release.  It's a vertical shoot-em-up (like Ikaruga, Space Invaders, Jamestown, etc) with strategy elements mixed in (like resources, minion spawning, and turret defense mechanics).  It's got a bunch of local multiplayer features, including a custom visual scripting language that lets users create and share (or mooch) entirely new game modes with each other.  Like...you can add in a mode that's some kind of race and tell it how the checkpoints and scoring rules should work.  You can add in a Tag mode where one player is "it" and if they run into anyone else, they blow up, but meanwhile some amount of the normal shoot-em-up craziness is still going on.  Multiplayer is all local (but game mode sharing is online).  If you've got enough controllers and friends, game types can support up to ten players.  I'm just about done with the core gameplay, so it's almost time to start focusing on single player campaign content!  This part is super important, because we only know for sure that we're targeting desktop PCs, and that means that depending on local multiplayer to sell the game is a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Idea.


7.) What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of developing?

Uhhh, haha.  My job is basically a big web of interests and hobbies, and if you ignore the stuff I know how to do on a computer, I'm a pretty boring guy.  I hang out with people and watch some movies and play some games.  I've been learning how to play a guitar, too.  I'm supposed to be riding my bike but I haven't actually done it lately.  Sometimes I travel.  Standard fare.

8.) What are some of the obstacles you must face as a rising independent developer?

It's hard to take negative feedback without taking it personally.  It's also hard to shout about your game loud enough for anyone to hear you over the internet.  Making up rules for games is a really difficult thing to learn because most people have no idea what they actually like or dislike about a game's rules - they just know that it's either fun or boring to play.  This polarization without detail makes it pretty rough to find actionable feedback and improve.  It also doesn't fix it to only playtest with trained gamedevs, because they react to games differently than an audience member would, so at a certain point you just have to learn how to interpret the wishy-washy kind of feedback.

9.) What are some of the perks of you being a rising independent developer?

I get to do whatever the shit I want at my job as long as I can make enough money to keep doing it.  I have potential access to an enormous and global audience.  I get to make people's lives a little easier.  It's awesome but it takes a lot of work.

10.) How do you feel the community has reacted towards your games, most recently Not The Robots?

I think that on a desktop computer, based on the feedback we've gotten at this point and considering the general gaming landscape, Robots is a good game that could have been a better game with more focus on early play.
I think that for certain players, there's a huge amount of stuff to enjoy in it.  But I also think that for many other players, it's a little too out-there to be immediately approachable, so lots of folks don't get to the parts that I really like the most about it.  The shoot-em-up I mentioned above is largely a reaction to this - this time around, I'm looking to make a game that's still mechanically deep and still has a very high skill cap, but I want to keep it in familiar enough territory for it to be more easily palatable.

11.) Favorite game as a child and present day?

I don't really remember what my favorite games were when I was a kid - we had a Macintosh, which didn't have much gaming going for it at the time, so I played a bunch of random demos and such.  I didn't have any consoles when I was younger, so playing Mario 64 for the first time made my brain explode.
As of now, Resident Evil 4 has my favorite risky design decisions, LIMBO might be my favorite indie game, Little Inferno has the most blindly appealing core loop I've seen, Portal 2 has the most impressive overall presentation/polish, Dwarf Fortress produces my favorite gameplay stories, Red Dead Redeption has my favorite sandbox-contained narrative (which is a weirdly specific category, but it's so damn good at it that it deserves a mention, even if GTAV ultimately has more stuff to do).

12.) Game influences you consider and put in your own games?

Tons of stuff, games and otherwise.  The shooter has elements from Starcraft, Starfox, Mario and Zelda, Breaking Bad, Jamestown, Vanquish, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy, The Road, The Hunt, Shadow of the Colossus, Super Crate Box, and a bunch of other places that I'm forgetting right now.

Frankly, it still blows my mind!

     I'd like to thank Eli for giving me the opportunity to interview him and giving myself as well as others an inside look into the mind of a rising independent developer. Not The Robots! is currently on Steam, and if you are on the fence about it, check out our review here! As always thanks for reading!