XBox Fan Force

 Looking around The Xbox Live Marketplace -- you won't find anything like Chalked. The Xbox Live Indie Game features unique visuals, addictive gameplay and a soundtrack that is sure to get stuck in your head. 

For those who have yet to experience the world of Chalked -- here's a trailer:

In the game, you can choose to be the hero and save the city, or go the other route and bring it to its knees as the bomb happy villians. It all seems so simple, but yet so addicting -- we sat down with the game's developer Taurice Couser for a look at the creation of this unique and addicting title.

XBFF: So, what's your background? Who makes up the Rece team? How did you get into Game Design?
 

TC: I'm Taurice Couser,  nicknamed Rece and sole developer, artist, etc. The short story is I graduated in 2006 from Virginia Commonwealth University with a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts, did a bunch of art, got a job as a Designer for Warner Bros. in 2007, read some books, learned some C and C++, did a few experiments, position at Warner Bros. changed to Developer/ Designer, made the switch to XNA using C# and made Chalked.
 

XBFF: Is Chalked your first game?
 

TC: Chalked is my first full game. Previously and during production I made many small experiments in flash, C++, and C#. I program and design for web at work so I've made a few websites, flash game/app pieces, etc., but nothing to this degree.
 

XBFF: Chalked is quite the unique concept -- what was the inspiration behind it?
TC: One of my early "learning programming" tests was a concept for a side-scrolling space shooter that used paper planes and had a hand-drawn style where pencils and folded origami would attack you. I let the ambition in me grow and it ended up being too much, it basically it got too big for a first project. Dialing it back quite a bit I ended up with Chalked as it is now.
 

XBFF: In comparison to most other XNA games, Chalked has quite the polished look to it. What was the process like creating the comic book style ascetics?

TC: This being my first title and developing it only using basically weekends and the occasional all-nighter (due to working full-time) - I wanted something fairly simple, but still interesting. I didn't want to spend months on end trying to mimic realism when I could get the same punch (if not more) from a simplified and stylized character. Getting the look it has now is due to many reasons -- from me constantly having to see the same art to programmatic reasons of my understanding for memory usage (there were once plants and vehicles in the environment). Overall, the process was very fun and iterative though. Early on in development, I had cubes chasing Christmas-tree shapes, because the characters weren't made yet.
 

XBFF: The first thing anyone we've shown the game to notices seems to be the unique human beat-box style music. Why go with such a  different choice over say a more traditional soundtrack? Who did the voice work?
 

TC: Initially, when I first put the audio track of me humming and beat-boxing over it - it was a bit of a quick fix to put something there, but when I tried creating replacements for it, I liked the human voice more and more. I re-worked it a little, but decided to keep it. I thought the human voice worked better with the style of the visuals than a traditional soundtrack would.

XBFF: One thing we noticed while playing through as the "good guys" is that the "bad guys" tend to move a bit faster. Was this a conscious design choice?
 

TC: The AI in the game was very fun to create and was a huge learning step. In hindsight, I probably should have made the easy difficulty actually easy. I played around with the speeds of the characters and ended up settling on what it is now. It is possible to run them down, but they are rather fast. The reasons for the enemies in "Save the City" mode being so fast was to have the Players use the Helper characters more to try and trap the enemies. With the enemies being slower than the Player it was just too easy and the Player would probably never use the Helper characters.
 

XBFF: The gameplay in Chalked seems perfect for multiplayer but the game only supports single -- what gives?
 

TC:  Honestly, the only  reason is that this is my first game. When the title was getting close to wrapping up I was thinking of more game modes and I was hearing from many people that they wanted multiplayer and more. I really needed to finish the game and move on, but I'm playing with some multiplayer experiments now so there is a possibility to add it as an update to Chalked but I'm not 100% sure on it yet.
 

XBFF: What's next for Rece Studios?
 

TC: Currently, I'm making a game called dotError. It's a bit smaller with a quicker development cycle, but it's got a nice style to it and it'sanother learning step to allow me to create my more ambitious titles I'm itching to make. I'm building a sort of Voltron-effect with the titles,It'll be awesome!
 

 Chalked is available now for 400 MS points via the community games tab on Xbox Live and your friends at Xbox Fan Force highly recommend checking it out.