PahuPahu

The new year is here, and so are we! Since we are currently working on our next project it's a slow news time, but fortunately the german flash game portal fettspielen.de asked us for an interview, which we want to present to you now! German readers can find the interview in german language here: Fettspielen.de Interview auf deutsch!

For our english readers we decided to translate the interview, so here we go:

FSP: “Please introduce youselves.”

Asu & Lyc: "Ahoy and aloha! We are PahuPahu, a small, independent flash game development team from Hamburg, Germany! We are: Olga ‘Asu’ Andriyenko, illustrator, manga-artist, kitsch-blogger and disney princess, and Jan-Erik ‘Lyc’ Andersen - wannabe rockstar and co-founder of the german gaming network gamersunity.de."

FSP: “How did you end up developing games?”

Lyc: "Well, we like everything loud and colorful, and we are totally addicted to the media. Both of us are gamers since elementary school and we always had dreams of how games could be even bigger, better and more impressive. I’d say I can’t get rid of the idea to develop games since my 14th birthday. That’s the day I got my first PC."

Asu: “And we’ve always enjoyed coming up with new worlds and storys in general. In the end that’s why I started drawing manga. My head would’ve exploded otherwise, I suppose. And because I already did drawings, manga, t-shirts, movie-concepts, pen-designs, animations and websites it was quite a natural step to create a game, too."

FSP: “How do you split up the work?”

Asu: “First we sit on the couch sharing lots of silly ideads. Then I scribble everything you see in the game, while Lyc tries to act like he understands actionscript 3 and is swearing about bugs.“

Lyc: “And when we are done with that we sit down in front of our terribly bad headset and record sounds for the games. Yep, that’s not exactly the perfect way to d
o it, but we keep convincing ourselves that it adds to special atmosphere to our games.”

Asu's workspace.

Lyc's workspace.

FSP: “Did you have a hard time learning Flash?”

Lyc: “A hard time? It was a nightmare, to be honest. Normally I’m more the designer type of guy, and I was always really bad at math, physics, chemistry and everything logical out there. Learning Actionscript 2 in half a year and then learning Actionscript 3 for another six month and than trying to develop a game was … intense. It took a lot of sleepless nights and swearing.”

Asu: “My math teaching grandfather started torturing me with math when I entered kindergarden, so I´m able to save the more complicated calculations from Lyc’s “logic”. Futhermore I’m doing the animations in Flash of course, and I’m still impressed how irrational this application can act.”

FSP: “Did anyone help you?”

Asu: “This whole flash thing would not be possible without the internet being filled with awesome information und tutorials by more advanced flash developers. And we couldn’t live without great people like Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com) putting their high quality music online for free use. Otherwise we wold have to earn money before we were able to license or create our own high quality music and sounds.”

Lyc: “And the study period we spent together in communications design helped too, of course, since we already experimented with flash games back then. We had a really good tutor that influenced my general understanding of precise debugging a lot. Without him my debut in Actionscript 3 would have been much tougher, I guess.”

FSP: “How do you come up with the ideas for your games?”

Asu: “We light a fire in which we burn our pubic hair. Then we dance like crazy around the fire for about three minutes listening to Scooter’s "Hyper Hyper!. Then the rain of ideas starts to fall and fertilizes our brains.”

Lyc: “... or to put it different: We come up with our ideas like everybody else. Everday life, movies, other games, music, the blue sky, a piece of delicious cake. Ideas come and go, sometimes they work out, sometimes they don’t. Having an idea isn’t difficult. Finding out if the idea is good - that’s the real difficulty.”

FSP: “How has feedback been so far?”

Lyc: “We were pretty suprised that we didn’t get trashed by the large flash portals. Lots of players there have really high standards und do like newcomers only if they come up with something this specific community likes. But the feedback we got in the end was constructive and helpful, and we even got some insightful reviews.”

Asu: “I think the resonance from our friends and family is pretty funny, since our parents only partly understand what we are doing here, I guess. And most people hearing that we make a living developing flash games don’t believe that this is real work, and think we live in a neverending party. But I`m familiar with this attitude since I´m also working as a comic artist … ”

FSP: “You released three games in a pretty short time. Do you develop more than one game at a time?”

Lyc: ”These three games were released one after another because the negotiations with sponsors took varying amounts of time and in the end all release dates happened to be pretty close to each other. Development took different amounts of time for each game, Bazonga Quake took quite a while since we had to learn a lot, while Omnom Forest was finished in a week. In general we want to create one game at a time, but sometimes we put a game on hold for a while to release something else first. At the moment we are fully concentrated on one project that is going to be a bit larger than the last ones.”

FSP: “What do you do with your time when you are not currently trying to achieve world domination via flash games?”

Asu: ”Since we did not get rich by the releasing these three games yet and since we still got no Mansion on Hawaii we are doing a lot of other stuff, too. At the moment we are working on websites for two german comedians e.g., I’m doing contract illustrations from time to time and Lyc is working on designs for online shops. Not to mention all the time I invest into my blog and all the work Lyc is doing for his gaming network. And if we still find any time left with all these activities we like to go to rock concerts, play videogames on PS3, Wii and PC, watch a lot of movies and love to eat tasty stuff.”

FSP: “What can we expect from you in the future? Bazonga Quake 2 maybe? ;-D”

Lyc: ”Bazonga Quake 2 is something I really want to do, but I guess it would be a whole new game with similar gameplay mechanics and no direct sequel. Sequels seem to have a pretty hard time selling. But we’ve already got ideas that you will like when it’s about time … ;).”

Asu: ”Our next game - like mentioned before - is going to be a bit larger, and therefore it will take a while till the game is finished. That’s mainly caused by the higher quality graphics and bigger gameplay engine, because it’s going to be - and we can’t tell you more for now - a visit to the adventure genre … Ok, we tell you a little bit more: There’s a salt water pirhana in the game. He’s called Fluffy. :D”

FSP: “Thanks for the interview!”