Nếu bạn là một chú lùn vô tình trên một củ khoai tây trong vạc của phù thủy, bạn còn làm gì khác ngoài việc săn động vật để làm những món ăn ngon? Đó là ý chính của Ghunter một trò chơi kỳ lạ tuyệt vời mà chúng tôi đã kiểm tra trong Bilbao.
"Hi friends, I'm in Bilbao for the BIG 2024, and as per usual, as per tradition, we're taking a look at the game being chosen as the best university game, so congratulations guys.
This game is Ghunter, did I pronounce that correctly?
Yeah, fair enough."
"Ghunter with a G, which is a game about cooking and killing. What's the elevator pitch for this?
Well, the elevator pitch is that basically Ghunter is a gnome chef, and you have to provide dishes to your tavern, and to do so you have to go out to adventure and cook your enemies while they are alive."
"Alright, and so is there like some sort of combined narrative, you do some stuff and then there's another turn to do something different, or is this combined in real time, or how do you do that?
Basically it's like a twin-stick shooter, things like Hades, things of that nature, Enter the Gungeon, but depending on the weapons you use, when the animal dies, a different type of dish pops out."
"So if I use the cheese grenade, it's going to have a fondue on the creature.
Cheese grenade?
Well, it's actually the jam grenade and there's a cheese mine, but those are just sort of examples of different combinations you can use to kill a creature to get different recipes at the end."
"Now depending on the recipes you do, which are asked by your members of the tavern, you will actually progress through the story of this world, where basically making dishes is the most holy thing you can do.
It's like a holy crusade, but it's cooking creatures alive."
"Alright, so what else can you tell me about that story that you just mentioned?
What is the setting here, what's going on, why is this so crazy?
Well, it actually started because the idea was pretty crazy.
Our idea was we want a gnome that is cooking creatures alive, so we sort of like retroactively went, well we need a really weird world to explain that, so we thought, alright, Terry Pratchett is a very weird writer, and we decided, why don't we have a witch who's brewing a cauldron, and then on one of the potatoes, like there's a bit of mold, and there's a mushroom forest where gnomes are there, and yeah, then why is there a cheese plant you can chop up and, you know, use to kill a creature?
No one's going to question that."
"You're on a potato in a big cauldron in a witch's stew, suddenly it all sort of like falls into place.
And then we thought, well, we want to make it important, so we went, well, there's already like some religious elements there, so it's like making plates is the most holy thing you can do in this game."
"Okay, I don't remember this game being here available last year, so what can you tell me about sort of the development of the game, the progress you made in the past year, and how you guys made it to stand out for you to grab this award?
Yeah, so basically the project started on February of this year, and we've been working pretty much nonstop since the beginning."
"The development of the game started as 19 members of the team, which later got expanded to 34 as the months went by, and basically our aim for this game was to make the most manageable and fun experience in the time we had.
So nine months is not a lot of time, so we had to, you know, cut down a bit from kind of gameplay experience to make a very unique and whole experience in total."
"So same question as I asked last year to the guys winning the award, this is a university project, you guys are with the U-TAD, so what's coming up next?
Are you trying to turn this into a commercial game with a publisher?
Are you trying to auto-publish?
Are you creating your own studio going forward?
What's the plan?
Well, we've designed a lot of the story and the core mechanics with scalability in mind."
"Our idea is that the core gameplay loop, now that we've got it and we feel that's fun, and by the fact we won, I think other people agree it is fun, the amount of ingredients you have, the types of creatures you can hunt, and just the world in general."
"You know, you're in a cauldron, there's a potato, what if there's a carrot?
Or what if you go to the onion?
It's like, just very naturally, the game sort of allows itself to be extended into a much longer playable experience."
"So I think we are definitely considering looking at branching out and being a studio that maybe follows this as an actual IP, but we have to see how the next few months sort of turn out, I'd say, before coming to a final decision.
Obviously we would need someone to support us, because the video game industry right now is tough, but I think I truly believe in Ghunter and the game we've built, and I think it has a lot of potential."
"So, you know, if any publisher is out there to, you know, to finance us or give us a boost, it'd be...
I like stuff that's not just, you know, ready-made noodles for food, you know?
Yeah, like a cheese bomb or something."
"Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If I could eat the food that we make in the game, that'd be great, but, you know, at the moment it's, you know, something that's like gyro, I can use just, you know, a bit of boiling water."
"You know, being a student, you know, it's not a life of luxury, to say the least.
Playing this game makes you all the more hungry as you play.
Okay.
It's been lovely, thank you so much for your time, I'm looking forward to playing this one, and looking forward to seeing you guys in the future, in future endeavors."