onPause Interview: Young Horses president Phil Tibitoski

Earlier we posted a preview about Octodad: Dadliest Catch that had a few comments from Young Horses president and community manager Phil Tibitoski. Below you can find the full chat that I had with Tibitoski over the weekend.

For those that may not be familiar with the series, could you give us a quick description of the game? I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but how did you come up with the concept of Octodad?

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is about destruction, deception, and fatherhood. The player controls Octodad, a dapper octopus masquerading as a human, as he goes about daily life.

Seth our audio guru has a nice explanation of how we came up with the concept. “We had pitched for three days of basic ideas…one page pitches. So…we split up into teams of three and four and basically sat around for an entire day, banging our heads against the wall, trying to come up with eight-page pitches to bring back to the team… John Murphy, one of the artists and I were in a group together and we were like, ‘okay lets just go crazy.’ Somebody said something that reminded me of Descartes so I was like, ‘what if you were kind of a passenger in your own body?’ And then someone was like, ‘what if you were driving your own body?’ ‘What if you’re a guy inside a robot and you were driving them?’ ‘What if you’re an octopus in your head?’ ‘Well, what if you’re just an octopus?’ And that was how it happened.”

Octodad: Dadliest Catch was shown on stage at the Sony press conference at E3 this year. How long had you been working with Sony before E3? When did you find out you would be on stage? What was it like getting up there in front of a worldwide audience?

We’d been working with Sony for only a short time before E3, and found out about the opportunity for the game to be on stage maybe a bit more than a month beforehand.

I wasn’t actually on stage showing the game. That was Kevin Geisler, Young Horses COO and Programmer/Producer. I was however in the audience. It was one of the best moments in my life to see something I took part in creating reach such a huge global audience alongside all the other amazing games that were shown.

With Octodad making an appearance on a console, how does the control translate? Will you also support gamepads for the PC version?

Controls for the DualShock 4 break down like this.

Legs Mode:

While in legs mode you use L2 and R2 to raise your Left and Right feet. In conjunction with this you use the Left and Right joysticks to move the legs while you’re holding down the trigger. Then you let go of the trigger to drop the foot. Repeat and swap to walk about.

Mode Switching: Tap L1

Arms Mode:

The Left joystick controls the horizontal or X and Z planes of movement for his arm. The Right joystick controls the lowering/raising of the arm on the Y axis by pushing forwards and backwards. You use these two together to wiggle about. Then to grab/release an object you just tap R1.

Also if you hold down circle you can make Octodad’s entire body go limp. That’s just funny. Yeah! Octodad will have gamepad support on the PC.

Are there any plans on bringing Octodad: Dadliest Catch to Xbox One? Has Microsoft been in contact with you at all?

We’re interested in getting the game on Xbox One because we think Kinect could be a great fit for the game, but we haven’t made any moves towards this yet. It might not happen, but we’d like to if it seems feasible.

Obviously Dadliest Catch will have better graphics, but what will be different from the free version that users can download from your website?

Well the free version on our website is actually Octodad 1. Octodad: Dadliest Catch is the sequel to that. So there will be an entirely new story. In the first Octodad you could only explore your own house, but in Dadliest Catch you will visit a lot more places including things like a Grocery Store and Aquarium. Being in public is an entirely different ballgame for Octodad because they’re not used to his wacky antics like his family is.

This leads to more stealth and uses of the suspicion mechanic we only got to see a little bit of in Octodad 1. But don’t worry, you’ll still be a destructive mammoth like the world has never seen before. Destruction is still a big part of the game. We also have some other things we’re not quite ready to share with the world yet, but keep your eyes peeled on our blog and social media for future announcements.

Do you suspect any members working on Octodad is secretly an octopus? Maybe an Octodev?