Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘SpiritSphere’

Review Fix chats with “SpiritSphere” developer Martino Wullems who details the game’s development process and retro roots.

About the Game:

SpiritSphere is a fast paced local multiplayer arcade game with an emphasis on the ‘local’ part. It draws inspiration from timeless classics like Zelda and Windjammers and is a mix of arcade gameplay and retro action-RPG visuals. The 8-bit art style sticks closely to the NES palette and associated restrictions. The game plays similar to air hockey and Pong and is easy to pick-up, but can get pretty crazy at higher level play.

For More on the Game, Click Here.

Review Fix: What inspired the creation of this game?

Martino Wullems: It’s actually a pretty coincidental collection of events that started the idea for SpiritSphere. I was participating in the GBJAM, a gamejam where you have to create a game based on gameboy limitations in 10 days. I’ve always loved the Link’s Awakening, so I was set on making a top down game set in a dungeon. My game turned out as dungeon crawler, where each room is it’s own mini-game. One of rooms was a pong esque minigame. A few days after the gamejam I was playing air-hockey at an arcade, and that’s when I decided it would be fun to grab the pong mini-game and give it a bit more of a air-hockey type of feel.

Review Fix: Why do retro games still matter?

Wullems: There’s something about retro games that new games just don’t have. I’m not sure if it’s the difficulty or the simplicity, but something just makes playing them very rewarding (to me at least!).

Review Fix: What makes this game special?

Wullems: SpiritSphere is quite a unique mix of genres, the type of visuals in this game is usually used exclusively in role playing games. Throwing those aesthetics into a retro sport type of game is quite refreshing. It’s not often that you get to shoot someone with a bow while you’re in a blazing volcano in a sports game! I’m also quite sad to see local multiplayer games are disappearing in favor of online play nowadays, it’s just a ton of fun to duke it out with your friends while throwing all sorts of profanity at them.

Review Fix: How does it separate itself from the games it is based on?

Wullems: I was inspired by a lot of games, but combining those together creates quite a unique type of game. You see some things from sport games and you see some things from role playing games, but you don’t often see those together in the same game.

Review Fix: What was development like?

Wullems: I started SpiritSphere in quite a rough patch in my life, I can’t use a mouse anymore at the moment and I thought my gamedev career was over. I purchased a tablet PC and fortunately I can work on that quite reasonably, although it’s at a lot slower pace and I have to be careful to take plenty of breaks. Other than that development was a blast, it was a lot of fun to combine my favorite elements of different game genres together in a single game. I did figure out that creating a multiplayer game on your own can be quite challenging, since you rarely have someone to play with haha.

Review Fix: Who will enjoy this game the most?

Wullems: People who love competitive local multiplayer games, or people who love to play games at parties! I noticed that the basics of the game are quite easy to pick up, and even people who rarely played games could recognize the similar rules from air-hockey. If you ever played air-hockey you know into what kind of competitive monsters some calm people can become haha.

Review Fix: What do you think the musical score adds to the game?

Wullems: Since SpiritSphere is such a unique mix of genres, I knew it would be a challenge to convey that in the music. I’ve told my composer Gas at the start of the project what I had in mind, a freak mix of arcade and RPG-ish tunes. And I think he captured that just perfectly! The music can be really catchy, but it still captures the RPG element as well. I think the music for the trailer is a good example, you can definitely feel the vibe of the church that you’re in, but at the same time there are some more funky arcade beats in there as well.

Review Fix: What are your goals for the game in 2017?

Wullems: The game has spent six months in early-access, and I think the game has shaped up nicely. I hope to bring the game to some events and gather more feedback regarding the balance of the playable character and items. I’m also planning a mobile port of the game, but I’m not quite sure when I will move over to that project.

Review Fix: How do you want it to be remembered?

Wullems: I hope people who play SpiritSphere will create some great memories of having a good time with their friends, just as I have myself with local multiplayer games.

Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?

Wullems: I’d like to say that we should all go back to focusing on the fun part of games instead of focusing on graphics and realism. If you never played any retro games, I’d say SpiritSphere is the perfect opportunity to see what retro multiplayer games are all about.