Since July 23rd, 2008, Xbox users have had access to a pretty interesting Xbox Live Arcade title. While not at first an obvious marriage of genres, Little Boy Games' Go! Go! Break Steady combines a musical rhythm game with a puzzler, and veneering it with an art style matched by nothing else on XBLA. GGBS is the first game from the upstart company, founded in Vancouver, B.C., by Ahmed Usman Khalid and his business partner Ivan Tung. We had a chance to ask Ahmed some questions concerning their break dancing puzzler.

(To coincide with the release of the title, Little Boy Games is running a free t-shirt promotion. Details can be found on their website)

The Hachiko: You're a new company putting out your first game. What can you tell our readers about your backgrounds and the company's origins? What were your roles on Go! Go! Break Steady?

AUK: I joined the game industry in 2005 when I signed up with EA. I worked on a central team primarily helping out with the sports titles. I then did a stint on Fight Night 3 for the PS3 as an "everything"-engineer working on online, front end, pipelines and rendering. It was during this project I realized that it would be really cool if I could make my own game and really learn all facets of game development from the ground up. Ivan Tung, who was my mentor and lead at EA, was also contemplating doing something unique and creative on his own. That is how Little Boy Games happened.

You get to wear a lot of hats in a small setup such as ourselves (we developed the game in Ivan's basement with two animators and an artist working with us). Ivan developed our 2D rendering engine including a Flash player that runs on the 360. He was also the primary game designer and handled all the business side of things. I dealt with most of the game features such as game-play, audio, online, systems and Live integration. I also did the tuning of the game-play in terms of difficulty progression and had my thumb in the game design pie as well.

Big Man Busts A Move

The Hachiko: To someone who doesn't know much about GGBS, how would you describe it? I have a hard time describing it to friends of mine because it's hard to compare it to other games. I like to call it a hybrid of music beat games and a puzzler. How would you put it?

AUK: I usually describe it as a hybrid of a rhythm game and a puzzler too. However, it is one of those situations where the final product is greater than the sum of its parts. I am a big fan of both genres. I do feel that the rhythm portion of the game has more depth than other titles in the genre like Boom Boom Rocket or DDR. We do a lot more in there than just 4 buttons or directional pad. And we're talking about just half of the game-play here. GGBS lets you can have a very casual game experience if you choose to, but if you want to dig deep and dominate the leaderboards it can really give you a bang for your buck.

The Hachiko: The first thing I noticed when I played the game was its distinct look, reminiscent of the end of level dancing from the characters in Jet Set Radio. From which games or other media did you and the artists draw inspiration? How did you decide on this particular art style for GGBS?

AUK: All of our character animations are hand-drawn the old fashioned way. That is one of the reasons the animations stand out in today's rigged animation world. The artists looked at real break-dancing videos and tutorials for each of the 20 or so moves every character can perform. They then applied a cartoony, over-the-top flair to all of the animations. The overall art-style went through many, many iterations. I don't think we drew inspiration from any particular source, however, our goal was to make something that looks very unique and appealing, which would then provide a cool backdrop for the already very unique game-play experience.

The Hachiko: Could you let our readers know what the development process was like for a new company putting out its first game? What were some of the challenges and what was the most rewarding part?

AUK: In retrospect the entire development process really felt more like an odyssey. Other than the fact that both Ivan and I were working on this title without any regular income, we had taken a bigger risk producing this title with no guarantees that Microsoft would agree to release the game. With our engineering background, one of the hardest things for us to nail down was the actual game design. The product that is available on XBLA was only set into stone extremely late in the development process.

We first produced a demo for Microsoft that took five months to develop. After getting the go ahead from them we spent almost a year iterating over art and game-play. The most rewarding part of the experience for us, I guess, would be the sense of accomplishment that comes from designing a fun new IP and creating a product that has the polish and appeal to go up against a high-quality selection of games on XBLA.

The Hachiko: The first time I played it, it reminded me of other great games like Elite Beat Agents mixed with something like Zuma. How much of the concept owes to the recent success of Puzzle Quest, where they married a puzzler with another genre, or was it all pure inspiration on your parts?

AUK: When we first started out we wanted to make a break-dancing game. As in you get to make your character dance and choose his/her moves. From that choice, it pretty quickly became a rhythm based game as that is what we felt was the most compelling part of our game at that time. In order to really be creative and bring something new to the masses we thought why not intermarry the rhythm portions of the game with a puzzle element. When we put the prototype together we knew this would be something special. This was long before either Ivan or myself heard of Puzzle Quest.

Bring It On

The Hachiko: There seem to be more beat games and puzzle games all the time. Why did you decide to put out this title right now and how did you arrive at this decision?

AUK: When we started developing GGBS, Guitar Hero was just hitting mainstream popularity and there were only eight titles on XBLA. As I said we had a rough notion of what we wanted to build, which was a beat based dancing game. We thought we could benefit from a small XBLA portfolio (at that time) and the fact that it would be the only one of its kind available for XBLA users. Even though Boom Boom Rocket beat us to the punch in that regards, GGBS provides an experience that I can safely say you can't find in any other game out there at the moment.

The Hachiko: I found that the songs in GGBS were actually pretty catchy. Who developed the music and how did you ensure that there was enough differentiation among the tunes?

AUK: The songs are all licensed music. Trevor Chan from 'No Luck Club' (a Vancouver based hip-hop band) mixed the music for us. We basically decided to go for mass appeal so we chose a lot of different genres like hip-hop, funk, electro and disco. With 20 songs out of the box and with such variety of genres, we wanted to make sure that there is at least some part of the audible content that almost everyone would enjoy. You can actually hear a couple of the songs in TV ads. I won't say which ads though.

The Hachiko: Could you briefly explain the multiplayer aspects of the game?

AUK: GGBS has both online and offline, coop and versus multiplayer modes requiring two players. Such an offering rivals AAA titles like Rock band or GH3 that offer rhythm game-play online. In versus modes, you get to attack the other player both on the puzzle side by adding new pieces to the opponent's puzzle and on the rhythm side where you can spray paint their HUD, making it harder for them to hit the music inputs. Lots of fun to be had there. In coop mode you get to play the music portion together and then play the same puzzle in a turn-based fashion. From personal experience though, coop mode can lead to lots of infighting between friends, especially when one person can't pull of the dance move input combo.

The Hachiko: I'm really fascinated with Xbox Live achievements and have always wanted to ask a developer about the process of coming up with them for a particular game. How did you decide which feats the player should be rewarded with and the breakdown in points?

AUK: Again, a lot of iteration happened there, especially since game-play elements kept being tweaked or changed. The overall goal was to give coverage to all our game modes so the player gets rewarded for playing the entire game. I am personally a big fan of quirky achievements that require a game to be played different from how you normally would. That's why the "Puzzle Master" achievement is my favorite.

The Hachiko: Are there any plans to bring GGBS to any other downloadable platforms in the future? Or will there be downloadable content, like new characters and music?

AUK: Due to contractual agreements with Microsoft we can't port the title any time soon to the other consoles. In time, depending on the success of GGBS on XBLA, we might bring this experience to non-360 owners too. Our game supports downloadable content for music and we hope to release more song packs during GGBS's product life cycle on XBLA.

The Hachiko: What type of game are you working on for your next release?

AUK: At the moment our next step depends on a lot of variables. One of them being the success of GGBS. From a company perspective though, we want to continue developing innovative and polished products and build on all the technology and experience we have developed for GGBS.