It was only in 2014 that Tower of Guns came blazing onto the scene from Terrible Posture Games. This rogue-like, bullet-hell shooter challenged player to climb a mechanized tower of death, shooting everything that stood between them and the top. A few years removed, Terrible Posture has returned with the next take on this chaotic style of gunplay survival, teaming up with Grip Digital to create Mothergunship, the latest in this chaotic, over-the-top style of first-person shooter survival.
So many enemies, so many bullets, and so many guns make for Mothergunship look like the kind of game set to offer a never-ending adrenaline boost. If that wasn’t enough, it brings co-op and gun-crafting to the formula for this outing, upping the ante even further. In order to make sense of the bullet maelstrom, GameWatcher reached out to Mothergunship and Terrible Posture Games Director Joe Mirabello to make sense of it all. What we got was one of the most interesting crafting systems we’ve ever heard of and how Mothergunship will challenge you to happily abuse that crafting to its fullest extent.
GameWatcher: It would appropriate to say that this is sort of an unofficial sequel to Tower of Guns, which was also handled by Terrible Posture Games. Where do we find ourselves with Mothergunship? Can you give me a general idea of what sets it apart from what came before?
Joe Mirabello: I look at Tower of Guns from a number of goals that I’d set out for myself. For one, it was an experimental project to see if this rogue-like, bullet-hell combination of gameplay was interesting and whether or not players would respond to it. Secondly, I wanted to see if I was capable of making something like this on my own. Tower of Guns was mostly a one-man project. I had some help with music from my brother and I had some friends help playtest, and later on I had the help of other companies to help me bring it to consoles, Mac, and Linus, but I designed Tower of Guns from the ground up just to see if I could. Where we find ourselves with Mothergunship is that the previous experiment is complete. We know what worked, what didn’t work, and we certainly know a lot more than we did about how a game like Tower of Guns functions best. It’s no longer just me on design and programming either. There’s an entire team of dedicated people helping me to bring this next one together, which is awesome and allows the capacity for something much more ambitious than Tower of Guns ever could have been. We’re staying true to that style by giving the player lots of crazy things to play with – lots of bullets, lots of spikes, and lots of over-the-top gameplay – but it’s a much more polished, refined, and tightened experience.
GameWatcher: Tower of Guns had a sort of randomized mechanic ranging from the level to the player character approaching them. There was a light story to that. From what we’ve seen in the Mothergunship trailer and screens, there’s a little bit of a story here too. Can you tell us about that?
Mirabello: Tower of Guns was very loose with the story. It was a randomized possibility every time you played where the player never knew if they were going to be the drunk college kid that wandered into the Tower or the grandmother that mistakenly thought she was in a recycling center. Mothergunship is its own universe with its own lore. Earth has been taken over by a race of kleptomaniac, data-stealing robots and the player is one of the last survivors of the Earthling resistance. Your job is to fight make your way up from ship to ship and fight through the armada – each ship is a level – until you reach the final ship, which is the Mothergunship itself. You fight through tons of ships, tons of enemies, tons of bullets and a few surprises. Between each ship, you go back to your headquarters, recollect, and get ready for the next challenge, allowing for a little more breathing room compared to Tower of Guns where you’d have to take on the whole Tower in one sitting until you died.
GameWatcher: At the same time, Mothergunship’s levels are going to be randomized the way Tower of Guns’ levels were, correct?
Mirabello: Right, every time you enter a ship it will be different. It’s not as punishing as Tower of Guns was. In that game, you had to get through the entire Tower in one go. Here, you take on one ship at a time and if you die, you get sent back to your headquarters and the next time you return to that ship, it won’t be the same. We built it as sort of a lunch break experience versus Tower of Guns, which was more of a gauntlet. That said, this structure allows us to have a bit of freedom and create some set pieces if we want to. We can build a non-randomized puzzle mission or other fixed setup in this structure.
GameWatcher: Mothergunship features what appears to be an extensive crafting system to go along with the numerous weapons that you can find in the game. Would you care to expand on what we’re getting with that system?
Mirabello: So as I mentioned, between each mission you go back to your HQ and one of the things you can do there is craft guns. It’s a pretty crazy system. Along the way, you pick up scrap like barrels, split pieces, caps, and more and you can combine them together like Legos. You can build a gun that literally lines the bottom of your screen with thirty barrels and it gets pretty ridiculous, pretty quick. We try not to say no to the player. One of the only limits we give you is that all the barrels must be pointing forward. Besides that, we want the player to be able to do as they please with this system. You can find pre-built guns along the way as well, and those might offer some ideas, but the crafting system is where the heart of the gunplay lies. You can even rip those pre-built guns apart for pieces and make a new gun with them. Everything builds towards your crafting in the HQ workshop and sort of this quest of hoarding pieces to put towards the “ultimate gun” for particularly hard missions.
GameWatcher: How did this gun crafting system evolve from what you learned with Tower of Guns?
Mirabello: Tower of Guns actually had a light kind of gun modification. We felt there was something really interesting about taking a rocket launcher and putting a shotgun modifier on it so it fired ten rockets in a spread. Players really responded well to that over-the-top gameplay. Furthermore, you’ve got enemies that can fill the room with bullets and we felt it was sad that the player couldn’t respond in a similar fashion. So when we were looking at Mothergunship, we took note of a lot of other first-person shooters and their weapons crafting systems. These systems were almost always more serious. We decided we wanted to take this idea and run in the completely opposite mechanical direction where it wasn’t about realism so much as its about making the most chaotic and fun weapon you can create with what you have. A big inspiration was space-simulator games where you could add modular attachments to these ships like weapon batteries and the sort. I saw all this customization I could do with these ships and wondered why I couldn’t do that with a shooter. It was never so much about slapstick as it is more about designing these weapons that work the best, behave the way the player wants, and become naturally ridiculous simply as a result.
GameWatcher: Creating balance in that system sounds a little nightmarish. How do you keep the player from becoming too overpowered in a system like this?
Mirabello: You’re right. The balance is challenging, but we created a system that was built specifically to create that balance. You have unlimited ammo in Mothergunship, but there is an overheat meter that fills as you fire your guns. The amount it fills per shot depends on how much ordinance your gun puts out. You could build a gun that has a ton of barrels, but firing that gun one time would pretty much fill your overheat meter in one shot, leaving you open and vulnerable for a moment while you waited for your energy meter to recharge. You can upgrade your energy meter so you can fire more and your recharge rate so you can be ready quicker, so more outlandish guns that are unfeasible at the beginning of Mothergunship can become more useable later, but it also keeps the player from completely breaking the system. You can also dual-wield weapons, so it’s possible to have a heavy-hitting beast of a gun in one hand and a more viable machine gun that uses less energy in the other. The balance sort of reins the player in, but we want them to be able to experiment as much as they’d like.
GameWatcher: What’s the craziest gun you’ve put together out of this crafting system so far?
Mirabello: I can think of a couple. We had this one we called “The Window,” which lined the entire border of the screen with around thirty barrels. That was one of those examples where you fire this thing one time and you’re done for a moment. The overheat meter is full. This question is kind of hard to answer though because every time we add a new gun part, it changes all the possibilities of things that can come out of it. Truthfully, I’ve come up with a new favorite gun every time we’ve updated the game with a new part. It makes for so many new possibilities and considerations of how that part fits with everything we already have and I love it. More than anything, I’m really excited to see what players will build as well.
GameWatcher: Enemies are quite over the top too. You’ve got defenses, turrets, robots, and these ridiculously murderous bosses working to kill you from every angle. How did you approach the new enemies and their behaviors coming for Mothergunship?
Mirabello: This is something we’re always working on as development progresses. We want to have familiar faces from Tower of Guns. There were certain enemies in Tower of Guns that had synergies with one another and made for fun fights. We want to recapture that in Mothergunship. However, one of the major complaints on Tower of Guns was lack of enemy variety, so we’re working towards that variety with enemies in Mothergunship. We’re playing with everything from the small to the gigantic and how they respond to the player. There’s this spider-tank for example that makes for a bullet-soaking beast and a huge priority threat. If you get distracted by other things and don’t keep an eye on this spider-tank, it will catch you off guard and destroy you. Meanwhile, we’ve also got quite a few new enemies that we haven’t announced yet. I can’t speak to them yet, but I’m really excited about them and players can expect to see them in the near future. We’re building towards a lot of variety and surprise and it’s working out well so far.
GameWatcher: What about the arenas? You mentioned that each level is a single spaceship. How did the arenas of battle change between Tower of Guns and Mothergunship?
Mirabello: That goes into my entire philosophy on level design. With Tower of Guns, it was an experiment in level design. I treated it like an abstract playground and people responded well to that. With Mothergunship, I tried to take that playground philosophy to the next level. Every arena is something for players to explore with all of these pitfalls and surprises to be found. Since it’s more than just me now, we’ve given the level designers this sort of toy box of things to place around levels to try to create an element of surprise everytime you enter the room. There’s a handcrafted aspect to a lot of this, but it’s still a rogue-like experience and there’s still layers of randomness on top of that in the way things spawn and challenge the player and us as the designers as well.
GameWatcher: The concept of bullet hell always brings up a level of separation for the players. Skill and twitch reflexes are the measure by which the okay are separated from the great. Are there different levels of difficulty to choose from? Do you cater to the soft-hearted as well as the hardboiled?
Mirabello: There’s a little something for everyone. Right off the bat, we offer Nightmare Mode in this one because players really loved that challenge in Tower of Guns. That said, the way we’ve structured missions in Mothergunship currently, there’s a choice and variety of paths to take to the Mothergunship. This is still in early concept, but what I mean by that is that there could be a path that takes more missions and a longer time to get to the final Mothergunship, but that path will be easier. Meanwhile, there might also be a path that is shorter, but more difficult. That way, players of various skill will experience similar gameplay, but at different levels of scale and flexibility. We’ve also thought about scaling to the performance of the player. If a player is doing well, we might give them a challenge or gauntlet room that rewards their skill if they can complete it. Meanwhile, the player that’s having a hard time might come across rooms that present lighter challenges so players of all skill will find a means to progress.
GameWatcher: We’ve seen multiplayer mentioned for Mothergunship in the form of co-op. How is that working out? Will it be online only? Will I be able to invite a friend over and take on some split screen action couch co-op?
Mirabello: Co-op was one of the most requested features for Tower of Guns, so we definitely built Mothergunship with that in mind from the start. Players wanted to be able to take on this crazy experience with a buddy. Right now, it’s online-only because splitscreen would be very hard to accomplish here. We’re talking about the difference between rendering one hundred bullets at a time in single-player and rendering two hundred at a time in splitscreen. I love couch co-op, but that was be quite a challenge to implement. Online co-op is coming along quite well though, and there are other multiplayer aspects to the game that I can’t speak to just yet. Players have been deeply interested in multiplayer since Tower of Guns. As a result, we’re gladly putting a big focus on making multiplayer options that are more than just afterthoughts. They’ll be deeply integrated parts of the game if players want to take their friends along for the ride.
GameWatcher: You’ve got to be getting comfortable with this style of game as you approach another release. What comes after launch day for Mothergunship? Will there be any plans for DLC or will you be going after something new?
Mirabello: The day after launch of Mothergunship is going to be a marketing sprint, then I’m going to sleep for the entire day after that. That said, when I wake up, I’m going to watching Mothergunship closely to see how the community responds to it. We all will. We’re going to listen to what people are saying, see how they respond, and grow it from there. There are a lot of things in flux and there’s still a lot to work on with this game, but we will definitely keeping our ears and eyes on the community and finding out what they’re enjoying and what they want the same way we did with Tower of Guns.
This game is looking like a customization heaven. The challenge of taking on randomized ships on our way to destroying the Mothergunship itself seems like only half the battle. Putting together a gun that is uniquely your own in every way and upping the destruction and functionality with each part sounds like a first-person shooter dream come true. It will be awesome to see Mothergunship in action when it finally arrives, if even just to see what kind of crazy bullet-slinging concoctions the community creates.
To find out more about Mothergunship, be sure to check out the game’s official Steam page and website.
To get the latest news and updates on the game, be sure to follow Mothergunship on its Twitter and Facebook pages.
