Team Human Shield is the Tokyo-based team who put together the hilarious QWOP-like security sim, “Human Shield : Stop the War”! You can play it now, right here.
The 4 person team of Mark Reichwein, Graham McRobbie, Federico Sauret and Koichi Yamagishi developed one of the funniest concepts the judges had the pleasure of playing through, whereby you choose a president from a number of countries, and protect them from incoming assasination bullets by flailing your limbs, QWOP-style.
Eurogamer’s Jeffrey Matulef was definitely a fan. “Human Shield takes what’s already a ridiculous concept, then adds an extra layer of humor to it with the awkwardly contorted, marionette-like movements of its player characters. Plus the thought of various national leaders taking bullets for each other is strangely heartwarming, albeit less believable than a zombie apocalypse.”
Tadhg Kelly also chose Human Shield as one of his favorites. “I love QWOP and CLOP style games for their sense of ridiculousness, and Human Shield reminded me of those.”
TWD.com: What was your creative process to come to the design you submitted?
THS: We spent a Saturday morning in October drawing up various ideas on a whiteboard. We had 2 main options, one more conventional and then… the Human Shield. We couldn’t decide on one, so we went for lunch and discussed the pluses and minuses of each idea. But we couldn’t decide, got bored of thinking, and drank some beer and decided to go with the Human Shield concept. It’s difficult to tell how much influence the beer drinking had over the final decision. The idea itself came from trying to think of ways to stop all-out war since we wanted to try for a game that didn’t go the usual route for a theme like this.
TWD.com: What kind of games does your team aim to make?
THS: We just want to learn by creating small, funny and experimental games. And also use the opportunity that we have by not being tied to a publisher.
TWD.com: How do you think you will further develop the game?
THS: On top of our little tribute to indie games like QWOP and Surgeon Simulator, we also want to make a funny absurd game that borrows a lot from the 80s and 90s cheese action movies we grew up with. So, we guess we will start by watching many Steven Seagal, Van Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
Movies aside, we really need to do some polishing, including sound, textures, 3d models, cutscenes, animations, visual effects and especially gameplay.
As usually happens during any game development we had many ideas of features and improvements we wanted to do, but due to time constraints we couldn’t implement. We will review them and prioritize them again.
But one thing we want to do for sure is to extend gameplay/game-depth. Some ideas we have for that purpose are:
– Story mode (including a Human Shield Academy)
– Longer levels
– Different weapons/bullets to stop
– Statistics, achievements, unlockables, rankings, etc.
TWD.com: What’s your favorite Skybound comic?
THS: We have to be frank and confess that we only knew of The Walking Dead (due to the fantastic TV Show and games). But from now on we will be following what you guys do. Especially if you keep organizing splendid challenges like this jam. For that purpose, we are now following you from our team’s twitter.
To read the team’s own post-mortem, head on over here. To follow them on Twitter, go here!
