On Wednesday, Wargamer had the great pleasure to welcome Aaron Ashbrooke, creative director at Auroch Digital and the visionary behind the excellent retro FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, to our Discord for an hour-long live AMA with our community. It was a blast - and in the course of fielding questions covering everything from Auroch Digital's companywide obsession with Warhammer 40,000, to the delightfully bizarre Warhammer 40k typing game Words of Vengeance, Ashbrooke let us know some juicy tidbits about how the team is approaching Boltgun 2.
Auroch Digital built a good working relationship with Games Workshop over a long time, making games based on the lesser-known Chainsaw Warrior and Dark Future licenses. When the studio pitched the idea for Warhammer 40k Boltgun to Games Workshop, the firm said yes. "It's such a strong, straightforward concept, I think they just got it immediately", Ashbrooke reflects.
It was a dream project for Ashbrooke, combining two of his great loves. Not only is he an avid fan of the Warhammer 40k universe and an active Kill Team player, he got into game development "modding games like Doom and Quake… even as they became old hat, I always loved the aesthetic of sprite based first-person shooters". He says he has "wanted to do a retro shooter since they were not retro".
Ashbrooke describes Boltgun as "a shooter that should have been released in the 90s", which undersells the relative complexity of the game engine, but is a perfect summary of the game's energy. If a high octane 40k FPS had existed in the 90s, it would have been something like Boltgun. It's one of the best Warhammer 40k games out there, a mix of high speed movement and ultraviolence with a bombastic, pixellated take on the familiar Warhammer 40k factions and setting - you can see my Boltgun review for deeper thoughts.
So where can the studio go for the sequel? "The main thing is, we want variety", Ashbrooke says, "I want people to be surprised whenever they play a level". He expands: "Everything wants to feel new and fresh in some way, and pull you through the whole experience".
The original Boltgun ran out of new enemies and weapons by the end of the second act, but kept up the pace with well-differentiated levels, some of them with traversal gimmicks - a classic rail cart level, and a platforming section powered by a jump pack come to mind - and others with hard-as-nails set piece bossfights.
Ashbrooke says the team is asking themselves "Can those be more frequent? Can there be more and more of those things?" Though he clarifies "It isn't about turning everything into a giant set piece, because I also don't think that's interesting".
There's a fine line to walk: "When we say 'variety', that means not repeating the same trick". He says there's a lot of quality control in play: the team "really only want to take the best ideas and put them in the game… we brainstorm a lot of ideas for all different aspects of it, and just pick the best ones and concentrate our efforts on those".
They're aiming for quality rather than quantity then. "We don't want to make a gigantic, sprawling thing", Ashbrooke says, "We want to make a really focused thing that is just all the best ideas".
While Ashbrooke can't talk about what's planned for the sequel, a lot of the most important work at the moment will be invisible to players anyway. The original Boltgun was the studio's very first FPS: "We were making it as we went", Ashbrooke admits, with the effect that "oftentimes [we would realise] well, there's probably a better way to do this, but we don't have to do that right now, so we'll make it this way".
The game was built in Unreal engine, which required a lot of custom expansions before it was suitable to make a '90s style game - Ashbrooke gives the example that it doesn't have "a method for rendering characters as sprites… and doing all of the tiny bits of tech around that". But even the tools for "straightforward stuff, like how levels are scripted and put together" could use some work.
"I think that it was borne out as a good approach", Ashbrooke says, which is hard to argue with - the game got finished and was really good - but tools that were just about good enough for the first game aren't fit for purpose for what the team hopes to achieve in the sequel. While players won't ever see the changes the team is making to its own production pipeline, "They will see what having those things enables us to do in the follow on", Ashbrooke predicts.
We're working on editing the full recording of the AMA and will add it to this article once it's ready. If you'd like to catch the next live AMA with us, join us in the Wargamer Discord community!
As well as being a straight up good time, Boltgun added one of the best new characters to the Ultramarines Space Marine Chapter - Malum Caedo, a terrifying ball of aggression to rival the Doom Slayer. We actually spoke with Auroch Digital about Caedo when Boltgun first released - you can learn more in this article.