The epic stab-you-in-the-gut-a-thon Zombie Vikings burst onto PlayStation 4 in September 2015. We caught up with Zoink’s very own Mikael Forslind to talk about Oink the unicorn pig, listening to feedback, creating the perfect DLC characters and the upcoming physical release of Zombie Vikings.
Chatting Oink with
22
There is always a buzz around Zombie Vikings on social media. Are you surprised by how gamers have taken to it?
People really seem to like the atmosphere, humor and setting of Zombie Vikings. Sure, the jokes aren’t for everyone but that’s the way comedy works. We made the game we wanted and we cracked ourselves up when making the game. Every time we got a new voice recording or new pages to the script we just laughed out loud in the office, making everyone wonder what the hell was going on.
The game has been out a couple of months and people have responded really well to it, especially since we released the Majör Update a couple of weeks ago. Everyone seems to love Oink the Unicorn Pig!
You recently tweeted some awesome images of concept characters on Twitter. How do you decide which characters will make the grade?
The four regular characters that are in Zombie Vikings were decided quite early in the process, although their look changed throughout the development. Our DLC characters Frostbjörn and Raybjörn were also designed quite early in the process. The way we ended up including Raz from Psychonauts was because we’re friends with the lovely people over at Double Fine and they really liked the game. It was really cool to be able to create a zombie version of such a cool character!
We actually made a pretty cool concept last year with a character from a really well known game, a *really* well known game from a well known studio. The concept turned out super funny and cool. But due to various reasons we ended up not being able to use it. We’re actually talking to two studios at the moment about using their characters in future ports of Zombie Vikings. Let’s hope this time it works out better!
You brought Oink the unicorn pig into the single player story as the ultimate travel buddy. Was this always on the cards or was the idea born from gamers’ feedback?
When we developed Zombie Vikings we had good ol’ couch co-op gaming in mind. Get your friends over, grab some food and sit down and have a blast playing together. What we quickly came to realize when the game came out is that… not many do that anymore. Although we have an online mode for the game as well, almost everyone who reviewed the game played it in single-player mode. Since our primary focus when designing the game was co-op we realized we needed to go back and spice up the single-player. It was then that Oink the unicorn pig was born.
We spent a couple of weeks just doing lots and lots of improvements primarily for the single-player experience. We added new enemies, added some new features, re-balanced