We previewed Bullet Noir a few weeks ago, and found it to be an old school breath of fresh air. It’s a Sin City-styled top-down action game in the vein of Hotline Miami, all one-shot deaths and instant respawn as you navigate various criminal dens looking to take down the crime boss who killed your father. It offers the kind of instant gratification few action titles do these days.
In fact, it’s so old-school that it made us wonder where the inspiration behind it came from. In a bid to learn just what makes it tick, we interviewed Tavi Petre, Game Director of Bullet Noir, to find out all about its development.
How different is working a game like this, to the titles that WOLCEN are usually known for?
It’s very different! Bullet Noir is the first game of Wolcen’s Indie Initiative, where we’re aiming to put the fun that players can have at the center. I remember as a kid going to the arcades and spending countless hours with friends playing video games. What kept us in there for “one more round” weren’t the high quality graphics or the immersive cinematics. Those games were fun because they delivered their bang for the buck in unpretentious ways. What you saw is what you got. No ads, no paywalls, no controversies, just pure enjoyment.
This is what we’re trying to bring back, and that is why we at Wolcen believe it’s so important to encourage our team members to express their creativity and pursue their indie development dreams. Bullet Noir captures that – it’s a small project developed by a small team, and shows that we’re committed to delivering smaller scale passion projects, bringing them to life and hopefully bringing a bit of that childhood joy in people’s hearts.
How influenced where you by properties like Sin City?
Bullet Noir really is a love letter to all things action and Noir, paying homage to titles like Hotline Miami, John Wick, Sin City and The Matrix. It’s funny you bring up Sin City – Bullet Noir was born out of our love of particularly Hotline Miami and Sin City. This canon of Noir plays a huge influence on the story, as well as the gritty atmosphere and striking visuals you’ll see in game.
Games like Bullet Noir were huge a few years back but have quietened down – do you feel like it’s a risk to produce a game like this now?
With the current state of the industry, every game development project is a bit of a risk! But the risk gets compounded by chasing trends, huge team sizes, increased difficulty to access publisher funding and completely forgetting that first and foremost games are all about providing entertainment, and the way to do that is by being first and foremost fun to play. We believe there’s a market for our indie project, and our challenge and focus is to find the right people who share our love of all things indie, dark and gritty.
The art style is unique, but did it present any extra challenges while designing stages?
We are incredibly proud of the art style we’ve managed to create in Bullet Noir, especially seeing all the positive reviews that praise us for it, but I’ll be honest – we first focused on the stage creation and made sure the game was fun to play first and then bring in the visual style to crank it up to 11. The real challenge for us was to create realistic stage layouts that serve the gameplay in the most fun way possible. We are glad that our stages match and compliment the visuals and art throughout the game.
How does early access help the team, generally?
Early Access today is very different from what Early Access was a few years ago or back when the Steam Greenlight program existed in terms of players’ expectations. Players have become increasingly more demanding (as their time is precious and there’s plenty of entertainment options out there), so now they do expect a good game even at this stage, and we hope we delivered that.
For us at Wolcen, our community is at the heart of everything we do, we love listening to their suggestions, feedback and criticism as we believe that makes us better game developers and designers. We knew we wanted to bring Bullet Noir to Early Access as feedback from our community would be crucial in creating the best version of Bullet Noir when we will launch the 1.0 version of it.
Was there ever a thought of not going early access, and releasing it later?
We did consider launching straight to 1.0, however by doing that we felt that we would miss an important step in involving our community and have the time to implement their feedback before going to 1.0. For us, having a supportive community with whom to actively engage in dialogue is essential for the success of any game that we create at Wolcen, so we decided to launch onto Early Access first to hear what they had to say!
Did you find it difficult to balance the challenge over multiple characters?
Honestly, it wasn’t easy to create four distinct characters and balance the game around them, but we are very proud that we managed to provide players with different playstyles to experience Bullet Noir with. We think we managed to pull it off!
Is the story of Bullet Noir based on any existing properties or is it a completely fresh IP?
Bullet Noir is a completely fresh IP! That’s allowed us to create something that feels new and unique, whilst also being completely inspired by other Noir stories and settings.
Are there any plans to support the game post-launch?
Yes! We can’t talk about them at this stage, but we have some interesting DLCs in mind that we’re sure our players will love.
It’s a simple, cathartic game by today’s standards. Did you have it in mind to put fun or challenge first during development?
It’s important to us that Bullet Noir remains both fun and challenging, in a way that makes sense to the game. We have an emphasis on the challenging nature of the game, at times Bullet Noir feels like a puzzle game, but the game is also built in such a way that hilarious moments are always around the corner!
Bullet Noir is on PC via Steam early access now.
