>> Hi. I'm Katie Sompress,
and welcome to GDC.
I'm here with Rob Hewson from Huey Games.
>> Hello. Thank you.
>> Thank you so much for joining us.
So, we are here today to talk about
a really cool new title coming with Mixer Interactive.
So, if you're not familiar with Mixer interactive,
it's the ability to actually
transform your viewers into players.
So, Rob, you are working on Hyper Sentinel,
tell us a little bit about the game.
>> So, Hyper Sentinel is a Neo Retro arcade shoot 'em up.
So, it's coming out on Steam,
PS4, Switch, Xbox One.
It's an old school love letter to arcade games.
So, if you like defender and
arc type and all of those games,
it's like pick up and play arcade experience.
>> But even cooler than that,
you guys have done interactivity.
>> Yes.
>> So, tell us a little bit about what your viewers can
actually do online and how
they can interact with the streamers?
>> Yes, with Mixer Interactivity in Hyper Sentinel,
we've really gone fully to town with interactive.
So, when you pick up the game and you
go into Mixer mode and you start a broadcast,
nothing's happening on screen until
your viewer is come in and they start pressing buttons.
And they fire asteroids at you,
they fire rockets at you,
they fire enemies at you.
So they're trying to kill you, kill the streamer, right?
Except there's two teams.
So that's the attackers.
We've also got the defenders and
the defenders are clicking buttons to give
you shields and power ups or some weapon upgrade.
So it's this battle between attackers and defenders.
How long can the streamer survive?
Then at the end, you see that the attackers win,
that the defenders win and
the streamers got a score of their own as well.
>> Very cool. Now, you guys are also doing
some really cool things with
viewer and player attribution, right?
>> Yes.
>> So that the streamers can actually
see what's happening in the game.
So, tell us a little bit about that.
>> Yes. So we really wanted viewers on
mixer to feel that sense
of kudos when they do something cool.
So if you hit the "Asteroid" button and
you fire an asteroid and it hits the streamer,
your username is going to pop
up right next to the explosion.
So you get the kudos for that.
Obviously, the streamer can give shout
outs to the people who do cool things.
>> They have to see it's really fun.
I love seeing sweets like right all over the screen.
>> Absolutely, that's what it's all about.
And the same for the defenders.
If they've saved the shield
just for the right moment when the streamer is like,
"Someone give me a shield, someone give me a shield."
They send in, they collective it,
their name pops up and they're
going to get all the kudos as well.
But on top of that,
we've got the top five attackers and
the top five defenders
displayed on leaderboards on screen.
So you can see how you are doing try and get into
that top five before the end of the game session.
>> That's one of my favorite things actually.
Seeing that constant leaderboard because it
does give me that constant motivation and I think,
even if you come into
the game and you just have a few minutes to watch,
you can really come in, feel like you're
having an impact in that game experience.
And even though you've just
shown up to watch the experience,
you can really change how the game play is.
>> That's right. Yeah, that's right.
>> The game actually doesn't have in that mode.
There are actually no enemies
unless people are actually
on stream while playing, right?
>> So, that's what I mean by
we've come to town within interactive.
This is a fully interactive game mode.
Without interactive, there's no game.
So your viewers come in, they've got to
fire things on you to make the game.
We've got a really tight turn
around loop in game sessions.
So each game is a few minutes.
Attackers win, defenders win
then boom you're straight back into the game.
Of course, if you're in the viewer group,
and you're watching this going on,
you're in the line, you're in the queue to
join in to one of the teams, attackers or defenders.
So we swapped players out.
So even if you're just viewing,
you're in line to get interactive as well.
>> Very cool. Then how many people are
actually playing on each side at any point in time?
>> There's 20 people on each side plus there's
one additional special person
which is the person controlling the mixeroids.
So this is the joystick control on Mixer.
So you move the joystick around
and you're actually controlling,
steering around an enemy ship
and you have to try and kamikaze into the streamer.
>> This is really fun.
It's really exciting when you
see that pop up on your controls.
>> Yeah, you are the person who got that.
Of course, the streamer is going to be
giving you some grief
and there's a lot of back and forth.
We really want to engage
the audience and the streamer
in this kind of back and forth.
So he's going to be giving shout outs
to the defenders who help him out.
He's going to be giving brief to
the person controlling the mixeroid and the attackers.
We get this really good sense
of community and excitement going.
>> Very cool. Let's actually watch the video so
that we can give people a taste of what this is.
>> So here we go.
You can see all of these enemies
on screen and all of these pirates are
actually sent in by the viewers.
So the objective here, we are
talking of the attackers is in this video,
the objective is to kill the streamer.
So, here I am, starts up in the "Asteroid" button,
and I'm firing in these asteroids.
This is all happening in real time, right?
Low latency, so you just
click the controller and it goes.
Here is the person controlling the mixeroid.
You got the joystick. You're trying to
kamikaze, crash into the streamer.
You can see in the top left and in the top right,
the attacker is top five. The defender is top five.
You are firing asteroids, enemy ships,
the hunter enemy comes in firing rockets.
It get really intense.
Of course, these power ups, these weapon upgrades,
the streamer can get from the defenders,
help them fight back against the attackers.
Then eventually, the attackers are going
to fire a few asteroids. Boom, there we go.
SquaredBerry that's the username
who finish the job, kill the streamer.
End of the round and then we go again.
>> Fantastic. Very, very cool.
Very cool to see that experience.
So, when you end up thinking about what some of
the objectives that you had when
making the game and then we decided to do Mixer.
What really contributed to that?
>> So when we started working on Hyper Sentinel,
we wanted to make an old school pick up
and play experience but married
with modern design principles,
modern technology which is why we call it Neo Retro.
So we're kind of taking inspiration from the past,
but adding new lighting effects, new game modes.
So that was kind of our philosophy for the game.
We love games like Shovel Knight
and things like that who do that.
They're taking inspiration from
the past but make it brand new again.
We wanted to do that for the shooting genre because we
were big fans of defender in the Iridium.
These are some of the big inspiration for this game.
Then with Mixer, the opportunity
talking to the wonderful people at Microsoft,
talking to the Mixer team,
the opportunity came up and we thought,
hang on a minute, this is really cool.
This fits our game so beautifully.
It's so easy to implement.
Actually getting it working and we develop in Unity,
getting Mixer up and running in Unity was super easy.
We had it working in no time at all.
It was just instantly.
Okay, this is big. This is going to be awesome.
As we we went through and
talked to the Mixer team
and had our ideas about features.
That's when we have things like recognizing the uses,
when you get hit, all of that.
>> The viewer attribution.
The help versus her.
Again, I love what you guys have done with
the different groups and how you even have,
you've really decided to balance that like
really 20 people on each side.
So, instead of just letting everybody in,
you put people into that kind of
waiting queue and then you
have the 20 people to really
make sure it's a balanced experience.
So I think you guys have really
helped even create and help
us on the Mixer side really create
and define with some of these best practices are.
So, it's been fantastic to
partner with you in this space.
>> Thank you.
>> I know one of the reasons when I came to
Mixer I was so excited is having worked
in the game business and in
the game industry for so long when we thought about,
how we're trying to sell
our game and who our sales people are that.
It is changing so dramatically.
As game developers, now for us,
I remember back in the day
we were writing our strategy guides and
writing what texts we were going to
hand out to the people in the game stores.
But today, sales people are
really in a huge part streamers.
So the fact that you guys have
really thought about the streamer as
a customer and build something that
helps them strengthen and
develop and bond with their community,
I think it's such a smart way to really
be innovating and having
that as a marketing beat for you guys.
>> Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
Because as an indie developer,
I think every indie developer knows out
there that marketing and promotion
are hugely important aspects
and it's challenging and with Mixer.
>> Especially today.
Thousands and thousands of games are releasing,
and it's so hard to differentiate..
>> Yeah. As developers,
Mixer allows you to bring that problem into game design.
You don't think of promotion is
something you do opt as a separate.
You're bringing it into the game and that's
a really exciting thing as a developer
because that's what we're really passionate about.
So you're bringing
those problems into the game with Mixer,
and it's central now to
our promotional strategy is what we're
doing with Mixer, yeah is fantastic.
>> Fantastic. So cool.
Tell us really quick about
Huey games. Where are you guys based?
>> We're based in Manchester back in rainy England.
So we brought the weather to San Francisco.
>> You're to blame for
having to jump across huddles over here.
>> I'm afraid so. Sorry about that.
>> So, and then how large is the team?
>> The team is three people.
We work with contractors as well.
But there's just three of us working on it.
Jonathan Paul is really
the creative mind behind Hyper Sentinel.
John Bolton our technical director
has been working hard on it as well.
Those guys are going to give a shout out to those guys
to start giving important stuff.
>> Fantastic.
Then there's another really cool team member
and that's actually your father, right?
>> That's right. Yes.
>> That's really cool.
>> He's the chairman of Huey games.
He has been in the industry since 1980.
So he was one of the pioneers back in the UK
back in 1980 working on Commodore 64 games.
If anyone who's old enough to remember those.
Yeah, he's fantastic.
It's a family endeavor as well which is really enjoyable.
We get to work on it together.
>> Very cool. It's so awesome to see
that father-son legacy and
tradition coming forward and getting to see that.
Especially you think because this is
such a beautiful kind of love letter to the retro style.
>> Exactly, absolutely.
>> It's cool that clearly you've been able to take
your dad's experience in the industry
and bring that into the game design.
>> One of the games that his company published you really
missed one of the inspirations for this game
is developed by a legendary,
developed by Andrew Braybrook,
and that's one of the inspirations from
the style of this game as well as defender and our type.
So they all trying to connects up.
So what we're doing with Hyper Sentinel.
>> Very cool. Then you guys use Unity.
So how was doing the Mixer
integration with the Unity side?
>> It's so straightforward.
Unity is a fantastic platform.
We use it for all our development
and integrating Mixer into it couldn't have been simpler.
In fact, the team at Mixer told
us it's really easy and we like,
is it really, actually it's super easy to setup.
As soon as you start doing
interactive controlling that's when the excitement comes.
So yeah,
you should totally do it if you're an indie developer.
>> Fantastic. Well, thanks
everybody for joining us today.
Thank you so much, and Hyper Sentinel
will be coming out soon.
We don't have a lunch date yet.
>> Not quite.
>> But very very soon.
>> Very soon.
>> So make sure to watch for that on Mixer.
>> Thank you.
>> Thanks.