Ten Questions With… Roel Ezendam (RageSquid) Ten Questions With...
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Ten Questions With… Roel Ezendam (RageSquid)

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Action Henk Website

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If navigating tricky obstacle courses at high speed while controlling an overweight action figurine sounds like fun you definitely won’t want to miss out on Action Henk. The game was released a while back on Steam Early Access and impressed us with what it has to offer. RageSquid, the team behind the game has just released the first update, and we were fortunate enough to catch up with company co-founder, Roel Ezendam to find out more.

Can you give our readers a quick introduction of yourself and the studio?

Hi there! I’m Roel Ezendam, one of the founders and also game coder at RageSquid. We are a small game studio from the Netherlands. We’re a group of friends that know each other from a game development education. Currently we are working on our debut title Action Henk, a game about an action figure in a mid-life crisis.

How did the idea for Action Henk come about?

When we designed Action Henk, we really wanted to create a game that we would love to make and play. Our art lead Gabrian likes to create colorful art as well as art that you can measure, so toys was a great combination of colorful yet realistic. I wanted to have a go at creating a physics-based platformer, so that’s kind of how it all came together.

What are the games that influenced you and how?

The first games that come to mind would be Trials and Trackmania. These games are so easy to grasp, yet so insanely difficult to master. We really wanted to create an experience similar to these games. Joe Danger is also an inspiration, but more from an art-style point of view.

What features of Action Henk are you the most proud of?

I think the high quality 3D environments and the highly polished gameplay are the things I’m most proud of myself.

What is the biggest challenge creating Action Henk?

The biggest challenge for us didn’t necessarily have anything to do with creating the game itself. Just trying to manage a team of people that are scattered all over the place, and having to take care of every single thing, on both a development as well as a business & marketing side. That was the biggest challenge for us.

What aspect of creating the game was the most fun?

For me personally, building the physics of the game. I just love creating a system of variables and trying to tweak them in a way that the player really has to think about how to approach the levels.

How is your experience with Steam Early Access?

We’ve only been live for about a week now, but so far so good! We’re getting a lot of positive words, which is great. But on the other hand we’re also getting a lot of great feedback and bug reports, this will speed up the development so much.

What are the future plans for Action Henk/RageSquid?

For now we’re completely focused on Action Henk’s Early Access. We mainly want to add more levels, characters, skins and other content. But we are also looking into possibilities of adding for example a level editor or local multiplayer. These things take a lot of time to do properly, so for now we will also focus on content to at least have a steady update schedule. We’re not sure what we want to do after Action Henk is done, I guess that depends a lot on how much of a success the game will be. We also don’t want to lose our minds to much on a new idea, because we’re not done with the current one yet.

What is the most unusual thing on your desk right now?

Haha, there are a lot of unusual things on my desk. I mean, look at our office:

I guess the most unusual thing would be the electric race track that goes around my PC and monitor, including a loop!

Anything else you would like to add?

We would love everyone to have a look at Action Henk! It’s on Steam Early Access and we’re going to be adding a lot of cool new stuff in the upcoming months. So if you’re into speed-running or physics based games this could be a nice game for you 🙂

A big thank you to Roel for answering our questions and best of luck to the team. Anyone that has not yet experienced the joys of Action Henk should check out our Early Access preview HERE and then head over to the Steam Store to buy a copy.

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Tags: Indie, Interview, RageSquid

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