What's that coming over the hill? It's a monster Overlord Minions interview

To be honest, we were surprised when Codemasters announced its ghoulish action RTS-with-RPG-elements game Overlord was coming to DS. Despite the black humour and all, it just wasn't the sort of game we thought would appeal to the increasingly casual DS market.

But hey, here comes the game's associate producer Dean Scott to politely explain why he's making games and we're not.

Dean Scott: Codemasters is committed to Overlord as a brand, and branching that brand out on as many platforms as possible. There's nothing in the concept of commanding mental little monsters around to wreck stuff that wasn't going to appeal as a Nintendo DS game.

We knew it would work well on the DS, because we were going to design it exclusively as a Nintendo DS game. We weren't just going to force the original game design down onto those small screens, carelessly smashing off the bits that wouldn't fit with a hammer.

That's how games are made: with hammers.

When thinking about an Overlord game for DS, we started from scratch. We brainstormed what we thought would be an excellent way to use elements of the universe in the context of DS.

There were three pillars: Firstly, have the interface entirely touchscreen controlled so it could only be a DS game. The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass did this spectacularly well, we thought.

In our game, the player IS the Overlord. He is never seen in gameplay. So having that direct, tactile means of commanding the minions connects the player more to their role.

Secondly, split the gameplay up into manageable, self contained chunks. We didn't want to have a design where you were waiting ages between save points, and had this big persistent world to keep track of in your mind.

Each level is a mission, and you have the tools you need to complete it (i.e. the minions) from the start.

Thirdly, we changed the design to more of a puzzle game as you rightly say. Fast action games with an epic scale are tricky on that small screen. We're fans of the classic 16-bit game Lost Vikings and took inspiration from that.

Our four different minion types already have very different abilities, and we wanted the puzzle gameplay to challenge the player to combine the abilities of the minions to get through each level.

Puzzle gameplay was something that was only a minor part of the original game on Xbox 360, so it gave us a way to make the DS version unique. We've made a DS game set in the Overlord universe, rather than making the Overlord game people know work on DS. It's an important distinction.

Why not an RTS? It'd be tough to get the personality of the minions across in a game like that. They'd just be 'units' instead of crazy little farting maniacs. That would kill the personality of the game.

Oh, there's plenty of fighting. Don't worry about that. The progression through the game relies on solving traversal puzzles that get more complex the deeper you get. But it would be less fun if the levels were empty, so there are plenty of Halflings and Dwarfs and the like to mess up.

Stylus swipes get the minions swinging punches and throwing fire around, so there's a nice balance to the gameplay. But you'll find even with our boss characters, defeating them involves solving puzzles rather than just wading in with your fists.

That makes sense: a tiny brown minion isn’t going to take down a giant made out of stone that's 10 times his size by trading blows. I don't care how many kung fu films he's watched.

Your minions are the tools to solve the puzzles in the game. Except for when they pick up actual tools, of course, but let's ignore that for now. On a basic level, you might find a cracked wall. Cracked walls being the universal videogame language of 'you can blow me up'.

All you have to hand is a special plant that will make the green minion fart pungent gas for a while, and the red minion's ability to throw fireballs. Can you see where this is going?

Farts are explosively flammable. Fire is a 'flamm-' that you can apply to something '-able'. I'm not giving you any more clues.

That's a fairly basic early puzzle. Later on, we've got all four minions in play, each influencing a different area of the map where another minion is present. They all work together, even though they are apart.

I could tell you them all, but I don't want to get into "ZOMG! SPOILERZ!" territory.

No. It's not an RPG where there's a level of persistency of levelling up and the like. You start a stage, and you have what you need to finish that level.

RPG elements would have confused things and taken us away from where we wanted to be with the dip-in-and-out-ability.

Each minion has a special move however, which is powered up by getting them into fights and smashing the breakables in the environment. That's the yellow bar that sits under the health bar.

Hah. There's a story in that. We'd originally planned to go down that route - well, sprites on a 3D backdrop. Then we specced out all things we needed the minions to do, and there's a lot.

And there's four of them. And they need to be doing it eight directions. And then there's all the enemies.

We sat down with the calculator, and figured we'd need something in the region of 54,000 different hand-drawn frames. And then we did a little poo in our pants.

That was clearly going to take a vast amount of time, and we wanted the game to come out in some sort of workable timeframe - like, before Nintendo DS 8 came out with its sweet hologram graphics.

A secondary factor is that pixel art, sadly, is a dying art. There's just not the same breadth of outsource available as with 3D.

So we built some minion models, they looked wicked, and the decision was made. It also meant we could have full 360 degree movement for them in game as well, which made it better to play.

It's something we were working on, but pulled out. It sounds logical that a game with up to four controllable characters should work as a co-op game, but that's not the case.

If you were playing our game in four player, you'd have instances were the player controlling the blue minion would just have to stand still on a pressure plate to keep a door open. That would be his role in the puzzle until you'd found a way to hold the door open permanently.

Standing still isn't all that much fun.

The way to make that gameplay work is to design a whole other game which is built to engage up to four players at the same time.

Nintendo tried that with The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords on the GameCube, of course. We decided that we'd just make the one game for now, rather than two. If a million people buy this game and tell us they want a co-op version, we'll do that next time.

I'm just proud that we made the game we thought the platform needed, rather than just try and port something. We wanted to make a game that gamers would be into.

We could have also been slaves to trends, and done Minion Brain Training or My Pet Minion… actually, that last one does sound pretty cool. You could feed them Nintendogs! But anyway, we've made the game we wanted to make.