Exclusive Interview: 'The Great Rebellion' Developer Reveals New Details About Next Game

Roland Mortiz is the founder of Kvltgames and the main developer of The Great Rebellion. He and his company recently announced they are developing four new titles including a spiritual success to The Great Rebellion titled Hyper Rebellion: Blood & Circuits, Serene Estates: Last Guy, Dverghold, and Biostition.

Moritz spoke with Fandom Pulse about Hyper Rebellion: Blood and Circuits, which he and his company are crowdfunding on IndieGoGo, and we got into the nitty gritty of the game’s progression and upgrade system, the different types of weapons that will be available, the game’s characters, and of course the game’s story. He also discussed the resurgence in retro gaming, the layoffs across the gaming industry, and his thoughts on the state of the industry.

Fandom Pulse (FP): You’ve launched an IndieGoGo for your upcoming game Hyper Rebellion: Blood & Circuits, can you tell us about it?

Roland Moritz: We wanted to make some kind of follow-up to The Great Rebellion, but we also did not want to repeat ourselves. So we decided early on we want to tackle a different genre this time around and change up the tone - this title will be grittier and darker, moving away from the bright pixel art aesthetics of our last game. I personally love isometric top down games and always wanted to make one, so that’s where we are going this time. This game is certainly our most ambitious both technically and gameplay-wise - how far we can take it, depends also heavily on the result of our IndieGoGo crowdfunder.

FP: You’ve described the game as a spiritual successor to The Great Rebellion, what makes it a spiritual successor?

Moritz: We have a bit of a tradition of creating games set in the same universe, but changing it up every time quite a bit - more of an evolution than a direct sequel, taking the last game as a start-off point and then seeing where we can take things from there. From a very traditional platformer to a twin-stick roguelite, taking bits and pieces of story and setting but doing its own thing with them.

Now Hyper Rebellion: Blood & Circuits pushes things even further, set far deeper into the future as a reaction-based horde shooter with some light ARPG elements. We make games we’d want to play ourselves, and we love expanding the cyberpunk universe we've created. We want to keep things fresh, both for our constellation of developers and for our fans.

FP: The game features six characters, can you tell us about them, what makes them unique compared to each other?

Moritz: This is still in development, but we're aiming to expand the roster this time around. Human 10.28 will return, along with some other familiar faces. However, we’re keen to offer more ways for players to project themselves into the world. Human 10.28 was a sort of “doomer”-turned-action-hero, but we’re working to provide more variation than we’ve ever done before. The amount of characters will ultimately depend on the result of our crowdfunder.

FP: The trailer shows off an acid spray gun, a laser, an RPG, and more, what are some of the other weapons that players will be able to get their hands on?

Moritz: Oh, we have a lot of ideas there - various beam weapons, flamethrowers, plasma guns, railguns, miniguns, weapon modifiers… We also want to go into a more retro-futurist direction this time around, so expect things like Tesla guns and Rayguns of all kinds.

An important element will be surfaces like acid, fire, or oil that you can use strategically in combination with your weapons. You have certain weapons that create surfaces and then you can, for instance, ignite them. You can see in one of our gameplay clips we posted that you can spray flammable slime with your sludge gun. That will do light damage to enemies, but if you kick a burning barrel on top of it, the whole pool will be set on fire when it explodes, burning all enemies inside its area (and hopefully not the player). Speaking of environment, we also want you to be able to destroy walls and most objects, making things as reactive as possible and forcing the player to use his surroundings tactically.

Since I mentioned classic Fallout before - the over the top death animations of those games are also something we are looking into taking as inspiration, have characters perish in more than one way - be it by disintegration, burning, melting, exploding etc.

FP: The plan is to have 4 maps at launch, but with the possibility of more depending on the stretch goals you hit, can you tell us about these different maps? How expansive are they? Do they change on different playthroughs?

Moritz: We're still deciding which maps to include and of course that heavily depends on the result of the crowdfunder, but we've come up with a good variety — from cities and deserts to crypts and even naval ships. What matters to us is not just the visual variety, but gameplay diversity. Each location will have its own lore too. Some countries will be irradiated wastelands, while others might be art nouveau-inspired dystopias. We are aiming for a mixture of Cyberpunk and a European-style retro futurism.

It has to be said that those 4 maps are planned for us meeting our total crowdfunding campaign goal. If that doesn’t happen, we will have to scale down a bit, potentially releasing a shorter version of the game with maybe only 1 or 2 stages as an Early Access game sooner. In any case, all donations from the crowdfunder will go to us and help us, whether we hit the goal or not.

FP: Can you provide some details on the progression and upgrade system? Do we upgrade character stats, weapon stats, a combination of both? What kind of upgrades does this entail?

Moritz: There will definitely be ways to upgrade both your character and modify your weapons. We are currently still experimenting with the upgrade system, deciding if we should go for a more Vampire Survivors-route with very frequent randomized updates or a more classic RPG-style level up system (or some combination of both?).

Upgrades will affect all aspects of a playable character, movement speed, damage resistances, special abilities that are either passive or can be triggered and of course the companions from The Great Rebellion will make a comeback. This time, you will be able to use them even more strategically by placing them on the map and using them like turrets or chasing down enemies on their own (and of course the companions can also be upgraded).

FP: There’s been lots of people proclaiming that the social justice warrior infection of the video game industry is being rooted out, what are your thoughts?