Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate Interview - "We Thought Unreal Engine Would Do A Little Bit More" (2024)

Key Takeaways

  • Rocket Panda Games revamped a ten-year-old game to maximize multiplayer features.
  • Developing Phantom Breaker posed challenges like going over-budget and UE5 limitations.
  • Rocket Panda Games faces hurdles in game discoverability despite high audience acceptance.

I played a lot of good games at Tokyo Game Show last month. Persona 5: The Phantom X got me excited to re-enter its world, Dynasty Warriors: Origins showed me why I first fell in love with the series, and The First Berserker: Khazan was a novel take on the Soulslike genre, even if that’s not what the development team envisioned.

But one small indie game captured my imagination, especially as it's a game that, typically, wouldn’t have been one I gravitated towards—Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate.

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I got to go hands-on with the title, and following my demo, I spoke to Rocket Panda Games’ CEO Mike McNamara about the game’s development, utilizing the IP, and marketing an “anime, all-female, waifu beat-’em-up” in the West.

The Birth Of Rocket Panda Games

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To get to Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate, you first have to tell the story of Rocket Panda Games, whose inception as a studio is fascinating on its own.

I want to get into game development and publishing for myself, knowing the risks.

“We launched Rocket Panda Games about four years ago,” McNamara says. “Part of the reason was, I used just to do marketing and translating for other companies, and then, sometimes the games you work on do great, and it's like, ‘oh man, we did that, but we didn't get part of the action, or any of the upside to it.’ So, I thought, well, I want to get into game development and publishing for myself, knowing the risks.”

Getting to work on Battle Grounds Ultimate is a full-circle moment for McNamara, as he and his game producer Sakari-san, go way back.

“Sakari and I met ten years ago, and it was one of the first promotional jobs that he gave me at my small little company back then. He's like, ‘Hey, promote this game in the States for me.’ And now we’re a team.”

Remaking A Ten-Year-Old Game

The first part of creating Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate was acquiring the IP from Sakari’s previous company, Magus. Following that, McNamara and his team sought to resolve issues they found with the previous title.

“We’re making the game that we felt the original could have been. There were a lot of restrictions with online play back then and we moved the game into Unreal Engine 5. The restrictions came from budget, so you couldn't go all out and make the game you wanted to, but we spared nothing, put all the bells and whistles that we could within our constraints.”

The team also really wanted to push its multiplayer functionality to its limit, “As we were developing, Ninja Turtles [Shredder’s Revenge] did six-player co-op, like, ‘Dang it, what do we do?’ So, we have six-player co-op, which is the maximum from a memory capacity standpoint, but we added eight-player versus.”

I mean no shade on Epic, but we thought Unreal Engine would do a little bit more.

McNamara shares that when developing the game, Rocket Panda Studios went significantly over budget. There were three core reasons for this, the first of which was the transition to UE5.

“I mean no shade on Epic, but we thought Unreal Engine would do a little bit more in terms of sprite, logic, and collision. But for this 2D type of look, Unreal Engine actually sucks. So we had to do a lot of just custom features and tools in UE5 to get the game to play the way we wanted it to,” McNamara says.

He cites inexperience and feature creep as another, and the difficulty of developing for multiple platforms as the third, something that proved a real budget-buster.

“With Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, you've got to get an agreement. They look at your content to see if it's worthy to put on their platform, so there's the first hurdle. Then there's all the equipment you have to get, because there's dev kits and test kits, and then all the QA you have to do.”

McNamara says marketing Rocket Panda’s unabashedly Japanese title in the West doesn’t concern him, with “audience literacy and acceptance of different country’s media at its highest level,” instead, it’s the discoverability on platforms like Steam that might trouble them.

Steam Next Fest is great, but there is definitely a, I don't want to say ‘shovelware’ or ‘crap game’ issue on Steam, but a discovery issue. It’s the same with social media, YouTube, and everything,” he tells me.

“Now there is so much out there, if you’re lucky having a good game means, okay, ‘I will give you the time of day to at least pick up a controller and maybe spend five minutes to see if I like it or not.’ We're just trying to do what we think is the right answer path to getting there.”

The Future Of Phantom Breaker And The Industry At Large

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McNamara sees big things in Phantom Breaker’s future, providing Battle Grounds Ultimate performs. “I would love to see it evolve into different genres,” he tells me. “But this is going to sound very raw, it depends on how this does and how a lot of the other things do.”

If Battle Grounds Ultimate does perform, McNamara tells me his vision for the Phantom Breaker franchise doesn’t stop there. “I think everyone talks about transmedia and media mixing. There are a lot of different buzzwords that have gone around, but I do believe there is something to be said about offering different forms of the same content to different people. I'd love to see an anime too, for sure.”

I don't know that all of the money being spent and diverted in certain ways is really in the interest of the player.

While McNamara says the reason for his game’s budget ballooning comes from a “player-first” perspective, he says costs within the games industry at large are increasing because of “arrogance from the big publishers” that “think they can do no wrong.”

He says the issue started during Covid, but now publishers feel “instead of making ten small games, let's just go all in on one.”

He feels companies throw money at a game thinking that will make it bigger and better, instead of deploying their budgets effectively. “I don't know that all of the money being spent and diverted in certain ways is really in the interest of the player. I guess that's my biggest beef with a lot of how the industry has gone.

It’s a stark reminder of just how difficult it can be to have your game break out, but with a demo now performing well at Steam Next Fest, Phantom Breakers: Battle Grounds Ultimate has everything it needs to succeed.

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Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Ultimate Interview - "We Thought Unreal Engine Would Do A Little Bit More" (2024)
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