As if creating a Metal Slug-style side-scrolling shooter starring a loudmouth hillbilly weren’t enough to distinguish his Xbox Live Arcade game from the crowd, Anthony Flack, Cletus Clay’s designer and animator, has created all of the game’s assets using clay.

It’s a painstaking process, building and posing every character, background object and frame of animation by hand. And the development has not made any easier by the fact that Flack is based in New Zealand on the other side of the world to the rest of his development team the Sheffield-based Tuna Technologies.

I spoke to Anthony Flack, the game’s creator, Alex Amsel, managing Director of Tuna Technologies and Sarah Quick, one of the game’s artists, to find out how they’ve gone about this extraordinary undertaking and whether all of the painstaking effort’s been worth it.

Simon Parkin: Which came first, the game idea or the decision to make a claymation videogame?

Anthony Flack: I have pretty much committed myself to keep making claymation games until I feel that I’ve done it as well as I possibly could, and that’s an ambition that predates this particular title. But actually, in this instance there was also a little game I made on the Amstrad CPC sometime in the late 80s that had an old farmer with a shotgun in it. He was going to be blasting aliens, but it was one of those half-hearted early efforts where you don’t get much further than making the main character jump around on a testbed. For some reason he came to mind again years later when I was deciding what game to do next.

Why did you decide to create a scrolling side-scrolling action game, a genre that’s less popular than it once was and which, in technical terms, a tall challenge to execute well in claymation?

Anthony: Well, the clay animation naturally lends itself better to a side-scrolling game than it does to full-roaming 3d, but mostly I wanted to do this because I enjoy that sort of game and felt like we could do with some more new ones. I probably seek out less fashionable genres anyway because it’s more fun to operate around the fringes. I was also looking to do a game where I could try out some fluid character animation and get to grips with the issues of character/scenery interaction. There have been a lot of technical challenges in putting the graphics together, but solving technical problems makes us feel clever…

Alex Amsel: Technically it’s a more complex game than any of us imagined. Much of it simply has never been done before, and we’re learning new things almost every day.

What makes the underlying game interesting? Had Cletus Clay’s assets been created in, say, Studio Max, do you think it would still be an exciting proposition for gamers?

Anthony: I know that the clay art gives my games a certain appeal, and perhaps a degree of attention that I wouldn’t have if I was using a more conventional style. And there’s nothing wrong with eye candy – I always enjoy a game more if it’s pretty to look at, and if it’s done in an unusual style then so much the better. But although I do put a lot of work into the graphics, if the game design isn’t fun enough to stand up on it’s own, then I’ve failed. I’m not necessarily looking to create wildly innovative game mechanics – my ultimate ambition is just to make games with good structure and pacing, that are accessible, challenging, and fun all the way through. Which sounds simple enough, but even within well-established genres it presents a huge, open-ended question: what change could you make to your design, that would make your game more fun than it is now? That’s what keeps me up at night; graphic design issues are a relaxing proposition by comparison.

My biggest hope is that our game will be considered exciting because it’s fun to play. That’s not really a feature you can bullet-point, but it’s the metric by which all games ultimately succeed or fail. Our game is all fast-paced, slapstick violence with tons of enemies, giant robots, explosions and madness at every turn. It should hopefully tap into that reptile part of the brain that enjoys smashing stuff and making a mess. I want players to start having fun from the moment they pick up the controller, so if we succeed you should know it right away.

You can read the full interview over at GameSetWatch here.