e spoke with The Behemoth gameplay designer/programmer Tom Fulp and lead artist Dan Paladin about their two latest projects: Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid for Xbox Live Arcade. We found out why they decided to shun traditional retail distribution, the possibility of online multiplayer and episodic content, what kind of hidden content we can expect, and the chances of The Behemoth bringing games to portable systems in the U.S.. Plus, check out our direct feed of Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid straight from the Comic-Con show floor.

Game Informer: Can you give a basic breakdown of Castle Crashers? It seems like all four characters have different elemental powers…

Dan Paladin: It’s a beat ‘em up. You have different combos, everybody can shoot arrows. The only huge difference between all of the knights is their elemental magic powers. There are several levels to go through so you won’t have all of your abilities at the beginning. But as you finish guys off you get more experience.

Tom Fulp: It also has, I don’t know if you’ve played Guardian Heroes on the Saturn. It has that sort of level up where you get points that you can spend on the different attributes. So at the end of the level you can choose to allocate points on magic, archery, speed, etc.

Paladin: We have some surprises too where you’ll gain certain abilities if you pour enough in. I don’t know if we’re still going to do it or not, but each knight has slightly different base attributes in those areas.

Fulp: Yeah, we’re playing around. There are already some things like the barbarian boss is more hurt by fire than ice. There are little differences like that.

Paladin: Even the regular enemies have that too. Did we set the resistance for the actual knights themselves yet? Like if you’re the fire guy and you go to the volcano world.

Fulp: It’s all set for that actually. The whole damage system basically takes into account the elemental power of the attacks.

Paladin: This one, I’d say, is probably easier than Alien Hominid. You probably noticed that right off the bat. I want unlimited lives in the game where you die. The boss gets you or something, and you go back out to the map just like Mario.

Fulp: Yeah, it would be unlimited lives. You have to beat the level without dying. But if you die then you’re just back out to the map. And then you can go back to other levels and keep powering up your character. So it’s kind of a classic role playing game where if you can’t cut it, you can just go somewhere else for awhile.

GI: What’s the overall plot for the game?

Paladin: They take your idol from your town and they take your princesses. And you’re more out to just destroy everything and find out where it is. You don’t really have any idea where you’re going. The guys are kind of like anti-heroes. You still root for them, but they’re not really being very straightforward about it.

Dan Paladin and Tom Fulp.

GI: So why did you decide to go with Xbox Live Arcade for Castle Crashers?

Tom Fulp: Xbox Live we always had in mind. The big thing about it is file size. They want it to be 50 megs so it’s an easy download. We were always a little nervous about that, getting stuff to fit. Now we’re playing around with stuff where we can store the art as vector and either run it as vector or convert it to raster. So we can store a lot more graphics with a smaller file size. We were going through the whole process of getting approved and getting dev kits so now we’re finally official. But it’s been in the works for a while. We’ve been tossing it around for a few months.

The great thing about Xbox Live Arcade is it’s a lot more direct. We don’t have to go through a publisher and we get a lot more money per sale, and we sell the game a lot cheaper too. It’s really like a win, win, win. The only downside is if not enough people download it. But from what we’ve been looking at so far it looks like people are doing really well with it.

GI: When can we expect to see Castle Crashers on Live Arcade?

Fulp: We’re aiming at first quarter 2007. What we’ll also be showing at Comic-Con is Alien Hominid widescreen. We’re aiming for that for the holidays. We’ll have that playing tonight. It’s higher res. It looks a little crisper than before. It runs real nice and it’s widescreen.

Dan Paladin: We’ve gotta take that extra time and make Castle Crashers multiplayer online. It would make it so much better.

Fulp: That’s the other big question: are we going to do Alien Hominid multiplayer? It’s just scary. We started playing with the multiplayer stuff. We could definitely do it but you have to deal with all of the stuff where someone has lag and everything else has to catch up.

GI: So how many players would you support for each title?

Fulp: Alien Hominid is two and Castle Crashers is four.

GI: Do you plan on scaling up the difficulty when there are more players in Castle Crashers?

Fulp: Yeah, there are already changes like the boss will have more health. Even though this demo doesn’t do it, you have some places where there will be more enemies for more players. And now that we’re on 360 we really want to try seeing can we have 50 or 100 enemies onscreen see what happens. But we’re not sure what the limits will be yet. We’re playing around with that. Don’t quote me on 100! Say, “Maybe we’ll try having 40.” [laughs].

GI: Are there any weapons you can pick up from dead enemies?

Paladin: Yeah, you can unlock weapons, but they’re all melee for the most part. And you can unlock characters. There are potentially at least nine right now.

GI: With new elemental powers?

Paladin: I hope so. I don’t know if all of them will have new elemental powers. Probably not all of them, but definitely some other stuff we haven’t seen yet.

GI: Alien Hominid in medieval armor?

Paladin: Actually…

Fulp: Wait and see. [laughs]

GI: Are there any alternate modes in Castle Crashers?

Fulp: Alien Hominid in Europe had a little four-player, all-you-can-eat minigame.

Paladin: You’ve got to tap the buttons alternately and the kids are eating food and there are four of you and you’re all trying to compete to finish first.

Well, we have it this one too with a twist where you eat all of the food on your plate and after it’s done… because we had this guy who could annihilate everyone. No one could beat him. So I always tried to think of another mechanic to put in there. So after you finish a plate you slam on a bell with the trigger buttons and then they’ll bring more food. You don’t actually finish the level when you finish a plate. You get X amount of plates. So hopefully one of us can beat him this time.

GI: You mentioned something about a versus mode when we talked earlier. What would that entail?

Paladin: Four guys, every man for himself. Two on two. Three on one. It would essentially be like a minigame. You just choose your arena and fight.

Fulp: We could also do Double Dragon style where you rescue one of the princesses and you have to fight it out.

GI: This seems like a lot more ambitious project than Alien Hominid.

Paladin: Yeah, we already have like four times more characters in this game than Alien Hominid ever had.

GI: How’s Alien Hominid coming along for Live Arcade?

Fulp: Alien Hominid is just a matter of tweaking everything to be widescreen and then adding some extra fun stuff to it, whether it’s new levels or… we’ll see.

GI: Can you talk about the Xbox and GBA versions of Alien Hominid that only came out in Europe?

Fulp: The GBA version was built from scratch by a company, Tuna, and then we did the Xbox version. The GBA version was really good. You can import it. You can just get it on eBay and play it on a US GBA or DS. And I can honestly say it was really good. But it never came out in the US. The big reason that they always said was because it was the maximum cart size so it had a low profit margin on it. I like to think that was the reason.

We talked about doing a DS game that would come with Alien Homonid and you’d get them both on a DS cartridge.

GI: Is there a possibility Castle Crashers might come to DS?

Fulp: If it did it would probably be a new game.

Paladin: And it would have to be dumbed down a bit because what we have going on is so intense.

Fulp: We talked about it a lot. We’d probably work with someone like Tuna if we did it. We really liked those guys. The GBA version was missing a couple levels, whereas on the DS they could totally put them in there. But if we did it it would probably be a different themed gamed based around the universe and the characters.

GI: Are you guys thinking about doing episodic content for Castle Crashers?

Paladin: One idea was to split it up into four sections. You’d play the first episode and if you want to keep going then you’d pick the others and they’re all not that much money. They’d all run into each other so your unlocks carry over. It all depends on how many levels we end up with whether it’s worth it or not.

GI: What kind of length are you guys shooting for?

Paladin: As long as possible, really

Fulp: That’s a little up in the air too since Live Arcade changes things.

Paladin: Yeah, the size limit. We’re trying to be really efficient with everything so size won’t really be a problem.

Fulp: It should be longer than Alien Hominid though. If someone spends five bucks to rent a movie and they get an afternoon of enjoyment out of it they might pay five bucks for an episode and get a few hours of play out of it.

Paladin: We don’t want to force anybody to pay twenty bucks for something they might not like. So if they pay five bucks and they want more of that game then they pay another five bucks and end up paying twenty bucks in the end. I think it’s a good idea whether or not we do it. I think we should.