november 2014

Eye For Games a different perspective on game design and development • • www.eyeforgames.com

SamudaiGeek Sloth Games | Hoorn, Netherlands

ART DIRECTOR

Rai Sewgobind

COPY EDITOR

Jerry Kline

WRITERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Rémy van den WijngaartTom Schoen

COVER DESIGN

Game: SamudaiDeveloper: Geek Sloth Games

Eye For Games is a platform about game design and development where students, young professionals and developers can network and connect. By looking from different perspectives we provide inspiring, motivating and educative content.

EDITION SUPPORT

Geek Sloth Games8 Bit StudiosTequila GamesImpulse LimitedFakedicePinkerton RoadHi-Rez StudiosZero Point SoftwareNine Dots StudioTeam ReptileiFF GamesTurbulon Interactive

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by print, photo print, microfilm or any other means without written permission from the publisher/author.

2014 HIGHLIGHTEDFROM OUR PERSPECTIVE

November 2014 issue

In this issue you will find some topics we’ve highlighted from 2014. Things that we want to introduce to our readers, but also what some of the developers

had to go through this year.

It has been a very interesting year and this is our way to give these interesting topics a place on our platform. Thank you developers for sharing!

www.eyeforgames.com

EFG magazine November 2014

For more information you can contact us at: contact@eyeforgames.com

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SAMUDAIp r o c e s s

INTERSTELLAR MARINESi n d e v e l o p m e n t

Corey Rollinsat Klei Entertainment

Megan Lamat the Behemoth

Earthcore: Shattered Elementsin depth: Mechanics - Card Design

Jane Jenseninterview

GoD Factory: Wingmenrelease

iFF Gamesdevspot

Lethal Leaguerelease

Turbulon Interactivedevspot

Smitein depth: God Designs, character

Zems™in depth: Card Design

Dicetinyin depth: Card Design

SKARA: The Blade Remainsin depth: Mechanics - Card Design

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52

30

46

26

38 27

58 45

44

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C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S !

To all new developers who joined the game industry, to the

developers who are still working on their game and not giving up,

to the developers who had to keep their team together and keep

them motivated, to the developers supporting other developers,

to the developers who have a supportive community, to the

developers who released their game, to the developers who will

keep creating awesome, beautiful, fun, and inspiring games.

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CELEBRATE Game design and developmentwith Eye For Games atDECEMBER 13, 2014www.eye fo rgames .com

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So far 2014 has been the year of 2015, with both Microsoft's and

Sony's consoles still seeking their full potential in the console

race. The Wii U has received some sales bumps due to first party

releases, but Nintendo's 3DS is still their best bet. And it seems as

if most of the big AAA releases for this year were pushed back to

2015. With that said, 2014 was still a year filled with some pretty

interesting news. EFG highlights a few of the biggest stories here,

as organized by month.

JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH

The year starts with the PS4 out-

selling the Xbox One by a 2:1 ratio,

according to NPD numbers.

The long running battle of Silicon

Knights vs. Epic games comes to

an end, with a judge ruling in favor

of Epic Games. Silicon Knights

originally sued Epic saying that their

Unreal Engine 3 was not up to snuff

for their game Too Human. Epic

countersued, saying that Silicon

Knights stole Epic code and infringed

on their copyright. After a seven year

battle and an appeal, Epic wins.

Amazon purchases Xbox One Killer

Instinct developer Double Helix for

an undisclosed amount of money.

Ken Levine, one of the original

founders of Irrational Games,

announces that he is leaving the

studio and winding down operations.

Irrational Games had been around

since 1997, and worked on such

titles as System Shock 2, Freedom

Force, Tribes: Vengeance, Bioshock,

and Bioshock Infinite.

Respawn Entertainment, a studio

consisting of former Call of Duty

developers Jason West and Vince

Zampella, releases their first game

Titanfall. NPD reports Xbox One

physical copies sold approximately

925,000 within its first month of

release.

The BAFTA Games Awards presents

Rockstar with the Fellowship

award, their highest honor. The

Fellowship is given “in recognition

of an outstanding and exceptional

contribution to film, television or

games.”

Facebook announces their

acquisition of Oculus Rift for $2

billion.

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ZeniMax files a lawsuit against

Oculus VR, claiming that ZeniMax

employees such as John Carmack

were working for Oculus behind-

the-scenes while still employed at

ZeniMax.

EA shuts down Mythic Entertain-

ment, the creators of Dark Age of

Camelot, Warhammer Online: Age of

Reckoning, and Warhammer Online:

Wrath of Heroes.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is

announced as a timed exclusive for

Microsoft consoles. Previously the

series had been an exclusive staple

of Sony’s consoles.

Ex-Naughty Dog founder and for-

mer THQ president Jason Rubin joins

Oculus as the head of their world-

wide studios.

Unreal Engine 4 is released.

Ex-Naughty Dog employee and

Uncharted series writer Amy Hennig

joins EA Visceral to work on an

unnamed Star Wars project.

Bungie’s long time in-house

composer Marty O’Donnell

announces via Twitter that he was

“terminated without cause” from the

company.

APRIL MAY JUNE

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Bungie’s new intellectual property

Destiny is released. Bungie expects

Destiny to be supported for

approximately ten years.

Mojang sells Minecraft to Microsoft,

to the tune of $2.5 billion. Minecraft

founders Markus Peerson, Jakob

Porser, and Carl Manneh announce

their departure from the company.

Microsoft launches the Xbox One

in Japan on September 4th, after

originally launching the system in

the west in November 2013.

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime

announces that their next MMO

Titan has been canceled after

seven years of development. Their

reasoning? Mike Morhaime claimed

that “We didn’t find the fun.”

Samsung announces the Samsung

Gear VR, a new virtual reality headset

designed for the Samsung Note 4

phone.

Microsoft announces 18,000 layoffs.

While most layoffs are expected

to be Nokia employees, Xbox

Entertainment Studios is shut down.

The studio was meant to work on

original programming for the Xbox

One but was shut down before it

ever got off the ground.

After announcing he’s coming

out of retirement, Cliff Bleszinski

forms a new studio called Boss Key

Games. Their first project will be a

sci-fi pc arena shooter called Project

Bluestreak.

Casey Hudson leaves BioWare after

almost 16 years with the company,

where he directed the Mass Effect

Trilogy and Star Wars: Knights of the

Old Republic. Previously he worked

on titles such as Neverwinter Knights

and Jade Empire.

Sony announces 10 million PS4s

shipped.

Nintendo announces that their first

party title Mario Kart 8 has boosted

Wii U sales, but doesn’t give specific

numbers.

Amazon buys streaming video

service Twitch, after months of

rumors that Google was interested

in buying them.

JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER

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Halo: The Master Chief Collection

is released for the Xbox One. The

compilation features remakes of

Halo 1-4 and includes multiplayer

beta access for Halo 5: Guardians.

Super Smash Bros. is released for the

3DS. This marks the premiere of the

series on a handheld.

The New Nintendo 3DS is released

in Japan. The upgraded 3DS is more

powerful than previous iterations

of the system and includes two

additional buttons, as well as a

C-stick to compliment the circle

pad.

Bungie’s new intellectual property

Destiny is released. Bungie expects

Destiny to be supported for

approximately ten years.

Mojang sells Minecraft to Microsoft,

to the tune of $2.5 billion. Minecraft

founders Markus Peerson, Jakob

Porser, and Carl Manneh announce

their departure from the company.

Microsoft launches the Xbox One

in Japan on September 4th, after

originally launching the system in

the west in November 2013.

Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime

announces that their next MMO

Titan has been canceled after

seven years of development. Their

reasoning? Mike Morhaime claimed

that “We didn’t find the fun.”

Samsung announces the Samsung

Gear VR, a new virtual reality headset

designed for the Samsung Note 4

phone.

SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER

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SAMUDAIP R O C E S S

Samudai is a 2D action arena fighting game created by

developer Geek Sloth Games. It’s their first game and

they have learned a lot from it, not only design-wise,

but also how to build a dedicated team, as they started

without one.

Discover how Samudai’s process went!

I D E A & C O N C E P T

Questions answered by Nils Wessemius.

How big is the team working on the game? At this moment it’s just us three. We had two extra people working on Samudai but that was only temporarily.

Were there any guidelines that were set from the beginning? Basically we wanted to visuals to be inspired by classis cartoons such as Samurai Pizza Cats. We had a pretty basic idea of we wanted to make but it evolved into something much more.

What kind of ideas were suggested during brainstorming sessions about the game? Too much to name; we are constantly thinking of ways to improve the game. That’s why it’s probably taking us this long to complete it!

What were the biggest sources of inspiration for the game? Like we said, classic cartoons for the visuals. Gameplay however was inspired by games such as Super Smash Bros.

How did you came up with the name of the game? The cats were samurai that died so that became Samudie. We made it Samudai with "ai" to make it sound more Japanese.

Were there any other scrapped name ideas? Well Samudai was always the name but in the beginning we called it Samudai Acro Cats to make it sound more like Samurai Pizza Cats.

Why did you choose this genre? We really like 2D games and we liked Super Smash Bros. Since we felt that there was no such game we decided to make it for ourselves. The extra modes that we added to the game was just to give the player more things to do and have fun with their friends.

What is the main goal of the game? To knock your opponent off the stage or into hazards. You keep fighting him through different stages until you finally face him in the last stage as a boss.

Did this change during the development process? Yeah most of the things changed. The original idea of the game was just one level with logs coming down a waterfall. This ended up being our center stage and we kinda went from there, adding more stages over time. We did know pretty fast that we wanted all the stages to represent different parts of a mountain.

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D E S I G N & D E V E L O P M E N T

STORY

If there is a story behind the game, how does a player discover this story? There is a story we made up to link everything together but, it is not something you will find in the game.

Every ten-thousand years the Gods wage war for the possession of the Holy Ball of Yarn. Choosing skilled warriors to represent them, these Samudai are strengthened by the gods and given power over the elements.

To reach the Holy Ball of Yarn the Samudai must fight each other throughout different unique stages to ultimately face their biggest threat, claim the Holy Ball of Yarn, and settle the balance between good and evil.

How many people worked on the story for the game? Basically it was just Frank and I.

What inspirations did you draw from when creating the game's story? Nothing really; we have a very simple story. The only purpose it had was to link everything together for us. We wrote the story after we had the characters, so you could say that the story is inspired by them.

How much story is in the actual game? There are hints of the story in the game, like the ball of yarn you get when you win, but that is about it.

ART STYLEQuestions answered by Frank Openty.

What art goals did you set for the game? We wanted to keep it cartoony but also show off a distinct Japanese style. That is why we started with totally black cats. When that didn’t work out with the gameplay we gave everything more color. Every character has his own color now. And the backgrounds are basically inspired by Japanese woodblock prints but with our own twist.

How would you describe the art style used in the game? Cartoony but respectful to the source material.

What is the main inspiration source for this art style? For the background Japanese woodblock prints, for the characters retro cartoons, and most noticeably Samurai Pizza Cats and Japanese culture.

Did you have to do any research for any specific designs? Basically everything was researched. The way they paint things like plants and water, I tried to fit it all in.

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GAMEPLAY

Can you tell us about the combat system? You take no damage whatsoever, but you get knock backed when you get hit. The idea is to make your opponent fall into the different hazards throughout the stages or out of the level entirely.

Were there any gameplay functionalities you couldn't implement in the game, but were originally desired by the team? One of the things we really wanted to do was adding online functionality to Samudai. While we kind of realized that it was not something we can do right now we always keep it in the back of our heads. Maybe some day.

How much thought went into the game mechanics? Did you try anything new, or did you update existing mechanics? Well, the game was inspired by brawlers like Super Smash and we wanted to keep it as simple as possible for our first game. I don’t think we did anything really revolutionary but the way everything is brought together is pretty unique. I don’t think we will ever do something completely innovative because our main focus is to have fun in the game; that is enough for us now.

What is the player's interaction with the game? How can a player win or lose and what options are available to the player? It is a local versus game so you’ll always be playing against another person. You win by defeating your opponent multiple times and pushing him or her to their respective end stage. There the losing player will turn into a boss where he/she has the chance to push back. We also have some small gameplay modes that each have their own win and lose conditions.

ANIMATION

What were some of your goals and priorities when it came to the game's animations? Everything the characters do needed to have the right amount of visual feedback to the player.

Was there anything that made animating the characters or environments in the game challenging? Importing sprite sheets into Unity. We had a lot of problems with the pivot points and only recently we found a good way to do it. This is mainly due to Unity 4.3 (Unity 2D) being really new so there wasn’t that much support for it.

Were there any animations that were considered particularly crucial to the player's experience? The struck animation for when people are hit. This was probably the most important animation because before we implemented the animation it was really hard for some people to tell if they got hit or not.

Are there any animated parts that are more for the design or visual effect than functionality? Most of the environment stuff is purely visual. We really wanted things to feel alive.

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PROGRAMMINGQuestions answered by Martino Wullems.

Which programming language did you use? We are using Unity so we had the option between C#, Javascript, and Boo. Since our main programmer was familiar with C# that became the main language.

Which engine did you use? Why? Unity 3D because it takes away all the hassle of writing your own engine and allowed us to prototype quickly.

What was the most challenging part to program? I think the overall interaction between players in combat where certain moves have priority over others.

What kind of bugs did you have to deal with? Were there any particular bugs that stood out and took a lot of effort to fix? We are using a stackable status effect system, much like debuffs in MMOs like World of Warcraft. Sometimes the stacking went totally wrong and characters started flying and all sorts of crazy stuff. These kind of things take a lot of playtesting before you find out the actual source of the problem.

Did you learn anything new about programming while working on this title? Mainly managing complex interaction between players.

MUSIC & SOUNDQuestions answered by Barry Pietersen.

What was the most important goal you were trying to accomplish with the soundtrack?To get a match with the pace of the game. I think that's quite important with fighting games. Also, getting the Japanese feeling in the music without too much distraction. The music has to serve the game, not the other way around.

Did you have your own ideas for the music or was it mainly influenced by what the team wanted to accomplish?Of course influence from the team is there. That should be part of the progress. On the other hand, music should be sincere in a way. Too much input could harm such creativity. The tracks provided were done mainly based on creativity, but I believe that complete independence is not healthy in motion based music.

How would you describe the music used in the game?I would describe it as accessible Japanese/Asian music. It therefore has an European twist.

Which hardware and software tools did you use to produce the music and sounds?Not too much. The production is quite simply done with Logic and some software instruments. However, in order to reach some impact physical instruments such as bass and guitar are added.

Did you have to do any research for this kind of music? I’m not used to creating Asian tracks. So that needed some work at the beginning. Especially the drums-they’re quite different from a typical European rhythm section. I therefore had to read up about Asian and Japanese rhythms.

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QA - COMMUNITY FEEDBACK

Which methods were used to let people test the game? We released some early alpha demos that got us a lot of positive feedback. We changed a whole lot of stuff because of the comments we got from people. We also let people play the game a bit at the Dutch Game Garden which also resulted in a lot of feedback.

How important was getting feedback from the community to the team? Really important. At a certain point it gets really hard to see the things that are wrong with your game because of your connection to it. Looking back at the earlier build it is easy to see that we came a long way.

Did you had to make any tough decisions because of this feedback?Redoing all the character art was probably the biggest thing. We had a lot of feedback about people asking us if we could make the characters stand out more. It was a tough decision but in the end it was worth it.

What was the most common feedback you received after the alpha stage? Well like we said, the characters were kinda fading into the background and needed to stand out more.

What bugs or glitches have been discovered by the community? Nothing we haven’t discovered ourselves, haha.

We changed a whole lot of stuff because of the comments we

got from people.

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MARKETING

Which marketing methods did you use? Mostly social media. We are releasing our game on Steam so everything is digital.

Did you try anything different with how you approached marketing for this title? Well seeing as how Samudai is our first game, everything we did or tried was our first time. If we could do it all over again we could have done it a whole lot better, haha

Were there any marketing ideas you had to scrap? No not really; I think we took every opportunity we could get to promote our game.

How do you think the marketing went? Yeah, one of the biggest mistakes we made in the beginning was the importance of Twitter. We didn’t really know how to use it effectively, but we found out later and it already helped us out a lot.

B U S I N E S S & M A R K E T I N G

PROCESS

Looking back to the whole process did the team learn any new things concerning the art, music, programming, animation, or marketing of a game? Since we are a new company everything we did was something we hadn’t done before. I can’t think of one thing about making games that we haven’t learned something new about. When we started it was just me and Frank and we were looking for a programmer. When we thought we found one, he panicked on us at the last possible moment leaving us back at square one. That, for instance, taught us about how to properly put a team together and what sort of things to look for in people. Since there are limitations to what you can do yourself, you’re always going to need other people, but it’s not always easy to find the right ones. In the end it worked out for us with our new programmer that Frank knew from a previous workplace and things are going great.

Nils: In a more practical sense, I can say for myself that there are a lot of things I’ve learned in the last couple of months, from making websites to Photoshop, Unity, social media, and managing a company and all the stuff that has to do with that.

Are there particular things you want to do differently now with your next game? I wouldn’t say different because we really learned a lot from the mistakes that we made. One thing we really want to change however, is moving to a prototype phase faster so we can get a clear idea about what the game is going to be like before we invest all the time and effort into it. Aside from that, how we are working right now is working out pretty good for everyone so that is probably the way we are going to keep working.

Did the process of developing this game change your perspective about creating games? If so how? Frank: It is important to know what your target group is so that you can change certain parts of your game and messages on social media to better suit your audience. You have to approach someone from the game industry in a different way than you would approach someone who is a regular consumer.

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Earthcore:Shattered ElementsMy name is Radek Smektala and I’m a producer at Tequila Games.

We’re all gamers here, and for a long time we wanted to really push ourselves by creating a big AAA title. We’re also huge fans of fantasy and tabletop games and we wanted to reflect these passions in our next production which has become Earthcore: Shattered Elements.

We’ve been working on Earthcore: Shattered Elements for over a year now. From day one the project has grown and changed almost every day. Right now it’s hard to imagine that we started with only a simple mechanic of three elements (fire, water, and nature) battling each other, based on the rock, paper, scissors gameplay system. In the next step we decided to create various cards assigned to each element as well as adding different skills that could be used during combat. We also created our risk system, which effectively replaces a card’s health, offense, and defense points. In the risk system, the number on the card reflects the risk that the player takes by playing it, and the better the skills on the card, the higher the risk. Ultimately, the risk system adds a kind of gambling element to the experience because when a player’s card loses an elemental battle then the risk number on the card is subtracted from his or her health points. Players need to carefully consider when to use the higher skilled/more powerful cards as they will also possibly cause more damage to their health if they lose.

Having established the various combat mechanics we then entered into a lengthy process of creating cards that would utilize all the different combat features. One day, a very experienced tabletop game designer that we’ve been working with said “Hey, wouldn’t it be fun to create your own cards in the game instead of only playing with the ones

created by the developer?” As it turned out, he was absolutely right and it was really fun. That’s when we decided to create what we have called the “Card Crafting” system which is completely new and unique to digital collectible card games. With Card Crafting, players will be able to fuse cards together and combine their skills to create new ones. When we added up all the possible combinations we realized that Earthcore will offer over 500,000 different cards, a number that no other collectible card game that we know of has ever offered to their players before.

Of course between inventing and refining our different gameplay mechanics we went through several, if not dozens, of different ideas that often had positive effects on the game, or at other times, certain features were discarded after a long period of play testing. I think that this is just a natural part of the game development process for all PC, console, and mobile games.

One event that affected the game a lot was our Kickstarter campaign. We spent over a month preparing a campaign that affected the game’s production schedule. Soon after launch, we realized that maybe doing a Kickstarter wasn’t the best idea. Without a strong support base in the community and corresponding media support, it’s really hard to get through and reach people with your title. We quickly decided to cancel the campaign and focus our efforts solely on developing the game and then building the hype around it. It was also around that time that a very experienced board game designer joined our team. With his help we significantly improved the game design and reached the point we’re at now.

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When we added up all the possible combinations we

realized that Earthcore will offer over 500,000 different cards.

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ART STYLE

Our art director and his team are still working on the final look of the backgrounds and cards but our main vision is clear: We want to create minimalistic and stylish backgrounds for card battles and let the beautiful paintings and easy-to-read iconography of the skills on the cards catch the player’s attention. We’re also trying to animate a lot of the details in the backgrounds and during the battles whilst also devoting a lot of time to preparing the very best and most visually stunning visual effects that our engine allows.

CARD DESIGN

Our Card Crafting system makes almost every card unique, but of course we want to show players how strong their cards are. First of all we’ll have Hero cards that can have up to three skills crafted on them. Second, we’ll have cards with a single skill that can be crafted to a hero. There will be four levels of rarity of these cards – from the most common paper cards, through bronze and silver all the way to the ultra rare gold ones.

It’s also worth mentioning that each skill in the game will have its own unique visual representation, as we don’t want to limit ourselves to just a basic set of visual effects and animations on the screen. It’s a huge and time-consuming investment for our team but we believe that these are the kind of details that separate a great game from just a good one.

DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

There are two things to address here.

First is the artwork we’ve used on the cards. There’s always a story behind the card and we want each creature to be part of the universe that we create. We’re very proud of the group of artists working on our game because we’ve drawn upon talented people from all over the world, consisting of both those who are experienced at working on CCGs (collectible card games) as well as complete newcomers. We always try to give them a brief story of the creature that they’re painting, but at the same time we also want to give them a lot of freedom whilst our core team can focus on the overall graphical design of the game.

The second thing to talk about is not the cards themselves but the skills that players will be able to craft onto them. It takes a huge amount of time to playtest and balance each skill separately and in various combinations. We had some skills that sounded good on paper but didn’t make the final cut because of how they performed in playtests.

The biggest challenge is of course the number of cards and combinations of skills that we need to predict and test to balance the game and try to eliminate any unwanted and conflicting effects.

The other big challenge still ahead of us is to try and explain our unique gameplay mechanics to players that are familiar with many staples of the CCG genre that we’re trying to modify or even break away from.

We had some skills that sounded good on paper but didn’t make the final cut because

of how they performed in playtests.

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Lukas Deszczulka, CEO of Tequila GamesI believe the most important highlight was the moment that we decided to take Earthcore to the next level. We could have finished what we launched on Kickstarter and released it, but instead we decided to enhance our design, devote additional months to development, and hire more people to create a truly AAA mobile game.

Radoslaw Smektala, ProducerKickstarter and the lessons it gave us. We learned to prioritize our work better and we also changed the way we were thinking about promoting our product to the public. We also got a lot of very useful feedback about the game from the people who became interested in it.

Mateusz Nowak, Lead Game DesignerFor me it was the moment when an experienced tabletop game designer joined our team. He brought a very fresh perspective on what we did and had a lot of ideas coming from his years of experience in designing such titles as the Neuroshima Hex board game.

Taking it to the next level

Kickstarter

New team member

Tequila Games Dev Team 2014 Highlights

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We met Tequila Games at Gamescom 2014 where they clearly showed us their passion for card games. It was nice to see how they took their passion and turned this into a digital card game which has a pretty neat mechanic for players who love to create new card combinations.

COREY ROLLINS

My name is Corey Rollins and I work at Klei Entertainment!

I've been at Klei for almost three years now, and over that time my role has evolved so much that it's reached a point where describing it all with a single job title is quite challenging. In fact, I don't really have an official job title. Any time there's a new hire or someone is visiting the studio and getting introduced, it's become a bit of a game here to watch people try and describe my role accurately. But I'll do my best to cover all the bases!

I originally started at Klei as a "Community Manager" which came with all the duties you might assume that title covers. Basically, managing social media, forums, support and generally being the bridge between the community and our game development teams. However, as time went on situations popped up where I had an opportunity to use my uniquely varied past experience. In my past I've worked in film (cinematography, special effects, editing, prop design) where I've worked on some award winning shorts. I have a background in graphic design and traditional agency marketing, web development, and event and product photography. I was a resident DJ at a few venues in college. Heck, I even set up bouncy castles as a part-time job one summer for a few months back in the day (sadly I have not used this particular skill set at Klei yet. One day).

My most common job duties at Klei on top of general community engagement are marketing art, designing the toys and merch for our games, building and running the Klei Store that offers them, event planning for conventions like PAX, getting our games out to press and streamers, a little web development and design, and taking on special projects like our Chester Plush KickStarter or designing and building the laser protected lock box we had at PAX Prime 2014 that people had to infiltrate in a live action ARG. It's quite a mixed bag, but it's really fun.

Your experience working with Klei Entertainment

Absolutely amazing. Every day is different, and I love problem solving. When a new challenge arises, if I don't already know how to do something, I get the opportunity, resources, and trust to experiment and figure it out. It's incredibly rewarding and just an all around great fit for my personality. I love experimenting and trying new things. I have always feared having a job where I do the same thing day in and day out. At Klei I get a chance to use a lot of different skills from past experience and get to keep learning new things. It's also great to be around other people who work the same way. Lots of people at the studio are multi-talented. For example, one of our music composers Vince de Vera is also a UI and graphic designer! It's been really exciting working here for the past three years, and I can't wait to see what challenges and opportunities will pop up next.

“Every day is different and I love problem solving”

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interview

D E V S P O T

iFFGamesWe were a small team of only three at the beginning of the year. We had finished a game for a contest and did not win. The learning experience was great though, and we met some really cool people and saw some awesome games. We had a big plan of making one awesome game.

After GDC 2014 we decided the game was too big for our current budget and would need way more time for development than we could put into it if it was going to be as good as we want it to be. We decided to go for a smaller game in hopes that we could get some funding coming in to be able to work on game development full time (we all currently have full time jobs that do not include games).

We started making a smaller, sort of an Outbreak type game with a bit of a twist. We know there are several out there, but we tend to come up with ways to make things unique. We had it looking pretty good and working well when a friend sent us a message about a new contest. At first none of us were too excited about doing another contest, due to still having not recovered sleep from the previous one. This contest was themed so we had to come up with something with the theme in mind. We came up with a great idea for a game using some of the mechanics we had already created with the Outbreak type game and some great particle effects. We got some help and input from some friends and contacts in the industry that use Unity3D such as Nick from Rival Theory (great a.i. plugin for Unity3D) and Adam from MecWarriors (awesome with animations). These guys were great and definitely show their enthusiasm for games by taking time out of their busy schedules to take a look at your game and help in any way they can. The game was far from contest worthy within a week of the deadline. I was able to recruit a friend to help set up the UI and an awesome audio engineer to help with audio. The game still needed a lot more done to be as good as the awesome games that did win, but we were able to submit a great game with about 30 minutes left before the deadline.

Now, we are currently working on this same game Crowd Control, and hopefully we will be able to publish it on a mobile platform or Windows some time in the near future. We have a lot of fun making the games but we also enjoy playing them. So, until new games stop being released so often, it’s a slow process. One of our biggest highlights of 2014 was seeing our company name in EFG magazine. We’ve never been in a magazine before and it was pretty sweet!

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In January we were received a Steam Greenlight. It only took eight days to get the votes

necessary! That helped spur our growth for the rest of the year and gave us the courage

to continue despite being a small studio with a big project on a very small budget!

SKARA: THE BLADE REMAINS

In July the pre-Alpha version became available on Steam for Kickstarter backers. So we

have completed a very important phase in our development and are learning from our

small community of testers. One thing we are happy to learn is how well community game

testing works!

In June we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign. It was a wild month for the team, working

on the game development and at the same time producing all the content necessary for

the campaign. But we did it and were thrilled to see the response from the community.

From February through April we took part in the Microsoft Accelerator program in London.

This was of enormous benefit to our development-receiving support and advice from

players like Microsoft Studios.

Steam Greenlight

Microsoft Accelerator

Kickstarter

pre-Alpha

What happened in 2014 with 8 Bit Studios?

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We have been following 8 Bit Studios since 2013 and finally had the chance to meet them at Gamescom 2014. Their positive energy, humor, and dedication to the game were very present, which is a good thing because this will definitely help them get more opportunities!

Zems™ I’m Yang Pulse, project lead of Zems™ and project producer at Impulse Limited. I primarily work as the corporate manager and I oversee the rest of the team members to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Zems™ has been in pre-production for three years and development for two years. It's been a bumpy ride since we originally developed using HTML5 canvas so the game could be fully playable in browser, but later decided we wanted to make the game downloadable as a desktop game. The game started out as a close clone of Magic: The Gathering with a modified resource system but has since evolved to include a game board, hero system, and much more that we have wanted to see in online card games.

We've made a number of changes since abandoning the browser-based version, but the most notable one is switching to a hex-based grid.

Early wireframe concept First browser-based version

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Here are some screenshots from our September Alpha:

This alpha doesn’t have a fleshed out user

interface and the game itself is in 2D at this

stage. Moving forward, we plan on changing

the game completely to 3D. Here’s a concept

of what we have in mind for the final game to

look like.

Main menu

After moving the starting hero and playing a card

Early Alpha, No User Interface

Example of a ranged attack

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CARD DESIGN

When the game was first conceptualized we didn’t have a way to balance or sort the factions in the game. After we looked at some other popular paper card games, we really liked Magic: The Gathering’s color pie system, which has a set of colors and players build decks by combining cards from certain colors, with each color leading to potential inconsistency so players cannot simply use cards from every color in a single deck. The unique thing about the color system is that it makes imbalance very interesting, as some colors are strong in certain aspects but have clear weaknesses, so players are forced to combine both strengths and deficiencies.

After several iterations of development, we realized the text area was too small and we decided to split the art and text space more evenly. We also created color variations of the card frame.

There are three main artists that do the card art for Zems™: mariowibisono, herodees, and phoenixlu. Each of them has a slightly different style.

The circle on the red frame is where we intend to indicate a card’s rarity, something we overlooked when creating the original frame. Right now we’re exploring the idea of putting a diamond or some elaborate shape in place of the triangle in the circled area for cards that are rarer than others.

You’ll notice we employ two main styles: semi-realistic and illustrative fantasy. Unlike other online card games that try to have a single consistent art style, we believe there are gamers out there that prefer a more realistic style while others prefer a more illustrative one, and we want to satisfy both kinds of players. Variation in card art is something physical card games like Magic: The Gathering have done for decades and we want to keep that approach.

One specific rule in the art direction is that women should not be oversexualized. The online card game market is right now heavily targeted towards male players and a lot of artwork in other games depict women in scant clothing with very sexualized bodies. I’ve made it very clear to my artists that I don’t want to alienate women in any way, so you’ll never find any artwork that disrespects women or otherwise portrays them as sex objects in this game.

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herodees “Deepsea Vengeant”

phoenixlu “Raptorkin”

mariowibisono “Vigilance, spell card ”

herodees “Speaker of the Pride ”

SPECIAL CARD MECHANIC

One of the changes we made after switching to desktop development is the addition of heroes. I’m personally a fan of the commander format in Magic: The Gathering and I also play League of Legends in my spare time. Both games have the concept of a hero or a commander, and we’ve found that players love the hero system as a concept. In our game, each player starts with a hero on the grid. When players play cards to the field, they must be placed next to their hero. Heroes can move around the grid, attack, and use abilities just like most other cards can. The treatment of heroes as actual field commanders taking part in the battle is what separates Zems™ from other online card games.

CHALLENGE

Developing hero cards is still an ongoing process and I’m sure we will have made adjustments to every hero card by the time the game is released. The main challenge with hero cards is making them feel impactful and unique without also making them singular. Each hero has an ability that encourages players to build a deck that utilizes that ability, but we also want the hero’s ability to be flexible so players don’t think they can only build one type of deck with a certain hero.

For example, one of the heroes we have allows the player to discard a card from his or her hand and then draw a new one. We want players to build decks that revolve around cheating cards into play from the graveyard, but we also want this ability to support players who just want to cycle cards and win through other means. Balancing the two is tough, especially since we want both strategies to be fun without being underwhelming. In the end, there can be no perfect balance and we often have to rely on the fact that cards are drawn from a randomized deck to help prevent this ability from being abused.

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Impulse Limited 2014 Highlights

The biggest highlight for me was when people started messaging us on our Facebook page asking how they can be a part of the earliest alpha - and this is before we had anything playable to show people. You know you’re a part of something awesome if people are asking you questions about how the gameplay is going to work and requesting to play the game before you have anything to show gameplay-wise. This had never happened prior to 2014 and I’m not sure where the sudden surge in hype has come from.

My team has been very thankful that we’ve been able to bootstrap most of the development using our own money. However, we’re not made of cash and we do plan on launching a Kickstarter sometime in 2015. Please follow us on social media if you want to contribute and/or keep up with the game!

Beginning of a dedicated community

Planning Kickstarter campaign

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phoenixlu “Aquaformer”

The release of

GoD Factory: Wingmen

First of all, congratulations with the release of GoD Factory: Wingmen! Have you had the chance to celebrate its release yet?Thank you very much! We celebrated a bit on the launch day by hosting a stream on Twitch.tv, but we quickly had to go back into the action to start fixing bugs that surfaced only now that we had hundreds of concurrent users. For instance, we had a bug with the scroll bar in the match list menu, something we never even thought of checking since we never had enough players to fill up the list. Then we started working on more updates, balance fixes, etc.

Let’s talk about the release. Did the launch go as planned, or were there things that went differently than hoped?The development itself went rather smoothly. We received a lot of praise for the game's stability, and while there were some problems for some users they were mostly isolated. However, I wish we would have generated more interest from YouTubers and streamers. We contacted many of them but had very little return, even though we contacted them in advance. It didn't help that Bandai Namco picked a very difficult launch day, as PAX Prime was starting on the same day as our release.

What have you and your team learned from the experience of launching the game?We definitely learned how to quickly do community management. Before launching the game, we had a very small, very tight group of players expecting the game, but once we launched, we were quickly flooded with emails, posts on forums, complaints, praises, bug reports, balance issues, and more. One of our programmers quickly jumped in and started interacting with them to show that we were present and receptive to their comments.

Are there things you would do differently with your next release? Or things you had wish you had done differently with the release of GoD Factory: Wingmen?I hope that for the next game we'll be able to release simultaneously on all the platforms we are targeting at once. For GoD Factory: Wingmen, we didn't have enough funds to wait until we were done with PC and consoles, but it's something that has hurt us I think. Some players play exclusively on PC, others exclusively on consoles, and some play on both. However, opening up to as many players as possible would have made our game look more “legitimate” in the eye of many gamers and would have helped with word of mouth. I hope that for our next project we'll be able to pull it off!

How did the release go? How do you feel now that the game has been released?Sadly, I must admit that so far the launch did not go as well as we planned. While the reception was good and our players have a lot of good things to say about the game, we lacked the marketing power to reach a sufficient level of sales. We did not break even and we're now looking into ways to bounce back.

Are there any future plans for the game? We want to do at least one major update on the game and see if we can gain back some traction. The most common criticism we've had, aside from a lack of players, is the need for more maps. We listened to the community and we're now hard at work making new maps. We're also working on improving Oculus support (notably for DK2 and subsequent versions), and adding support for a wider array of joysticks and controllers, as well as adding a couple more features in the process. Then we'll start working on console ports.

Guillaume Boucher-Vidal talked with us about how the release went for GoD Factory: Wingmen.

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Jane JensenINTERVIEW WITH

Interview by Rémy van den Wijngaart

Lately it seems more and more established game designers are leaving behind the safety of big publishers

to pursue their dreams at smaller studios. Among them is Jane Jensen, famous for the Gabriel Knight

series of games which she created at Sierra On-line. In 2012, she and her husband started Pinkerton

Road, an indie studio co-funded through Kickstarter. Their first game was Moebius, which they created

together with Phoenix Online Studios. Now the two studios have teamed up again to produce a remake of

the first Gabriel Knight game, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. We spoke with Jane Jensen to hear her

thoughts on this process.

Good day, Jane. What can you tell me about voodoo? I mean...how is your day going?

JJ: Heh. Pretty good. Tons of playtesting right now. We’re about a week away from a final build of GK.

What led you to enter the game industry?

JJ: I bought my first PC back around 1988. I had majored in computer science in college and was working for Hewlett-Packard. I went to a shop in the mall to buy some software for my new PC and ended up buying King’s Quest IV and Manhunter: San Francisco. I can be pretty obsessive when I get into something, and I became obsessed with Sierra adventure games. I wrote to them and asked if I could work for them and was eventually hired on as a writer.

Tell us a little bit about Pinkerton Road and why you started it. What is Community Supported Gaming?

JJ: Community Support Gaming is a crowd-funding idea—basically people subscribe to your indie studio and they get monthly updates on your progress and your games when they ship. We used Kickstarter to do it. Robert and I started Pinkerton Road because we wanted to be able to focus on adventure games.

What is it like to go from a huge, famous publisher like Sierra to a smaller indie studio like Pinkerton Road?

JJ: It’s really hard. Not just Sierra, but I’ve always worked for a publisher who took care of the business, financial, and marketing end of things. So that’s definitely been the most challenging aspect of having our own studio—not having any support in those areas.

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I’m a firm believer that passion

makes it happen

How did the anniversary edition of the first Gabriel Knight game come about?

JJ: I first started talking to Activision about doing something with GK around the time of our Kickstarter in 2012. There were some awesome producers in house who were starting to think about doing something with the Sierra franchises and so we brainstormed some ideas. The idea of doing a 20th anniversary edition of GK1, and having it be one of Pinkerton Road’s first titles, was just perfect.

Coming back to Gabriel Knight after 20 years, how did it feel?

JJ: Very bizarre, very nostalgic. But I’ve loved the project. I’m so glad and grateful that I got to do it.

What were your guidelines for this remaster? What could be changed and what had to stay the same?

JJ: I really didn’t have a lot of guidelines. From the start I wanted to keep it close to the original but rework it a little so it could work well on tablet and mobile. And everyone was on the same page about that.

Which elements of adventure games do you feel have become outdated and which are still engaging?

JJ: I’m a poor person to ask, because I love the old adventure games and I get a kick out of all the old tropes. Nevertheless, we did implement things in the GK remake to eliminate as much as possible things like pixel hunting and wandering around trying to figure out what to do next.

Which part or aspect of Gabriel Knight most clearly shows your passion? What would make players say "That's classic Jane Jensen!”

JJ: I think just the story—the supernatural and emotional elements of it. It has a lot of heart and a lot of weird real-life detail that probably people associate with me.

What kind of future do you envision for Pinkerton Road after the Gabriel Knight remaster? JJ: I would love to be able to work with the new Sierra brand at Activision, and maybe do some more GK games or even other Sierra franchises.

What are your thoughts about today's game industry?

JJ: I’m glad to see it broadening out in terms of audience demographics and product offerings.

What advice would you give to people looking to get into the game industry?

JJ: If you’re really passionate about a certain kind of game, then you should absolutely go for it. I’m a firm believer that passion makes it happen. Even if you start out in an entry job in a game company that you love, that passion will show and you’ll get the opportunities.

Thanks for speaking with us today!

JJ: Thank you for the interview! - Jane

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MEGAN LAM

My name is Megan Lam and I’m the Community Captain at the Behemoth!

My name is Megan Lam and I'm the Community Captain - it's our fun title for Community Manager and PR Coordinator. When we go to expos such as PAX or RTX, I generally work with the press to schedule interviews and make sure they have all the info they need about our games. Similarly, I do this throughout the year with the gaming community through our blogs, forums, social channels, and emails. Since we're a small company, we tend to wear many hats here, so I even help out with scheduling or moderating the Usability Lab playtests on top of overall marketing at The Behemoth. I'm basically the liaison between our studio and the world outside our development cave.

As for why I do it: it's important to our company to recognize our fans out there and also the potential fans who are curious about who we are and what we're up to. We make games because we love them, but also because we want the community to love them as well. On a personal level, I'm doing community management because I enjoy interacting with fellow human beings. And that's really what most online communities are all about - human beings with an occasional bot or two.

Your experience working with The Behemoth

Eye opening and gratifying. The video game industry was not something I was familiar with before working here, so I've learned a lot about the development process as well as the business aspects involved. Everyone at the Behemoth is very talented and we all get along really well - it's probably because they vet personality as much as they check for job experience and skills (I mean, how many offices do you

know that encourage poop jokes and sporadic singing?). They've also fostered an environment where you feel like you can contribute your ideas and be a part of something behemoth (ahem, see what I did there?). Every week there's something new: expos, playtesting, charity events, new parts of Game 4 to play, community contests, etc. I continue to learn so much here and hopefully I'm giving as much as I'm taking from the gaming world!

“It’s important to our company to recognize our

fans out there.”

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The game was meant to be a three month project-a very relaxed project to tie us to our next big game, code named “Project H.”

We were very impressed by our Lead Voice Artist (Pippa Winslow) after voicing Little Bell Cackle, our first world 1 boss and Witch Mersa, our main antagonist. I agreed with the others that it would be much better for Pippa to voice over something much more “solid” for the quality she gave. Moreover, I had always wanted a more dynamic game mechanic for Duckles as the first prototype version (made a long time ago) was very linear and wasn’t like Super Mario, where you could roam the map and move to the desired stage.

The more passionate you are about your interest, the more you want to achieve your vision; it is a very big game, but not impossible to do. Plus our team is made up of very talented individuals - I never could have achieved this scope without them. We wanted to make a very fun, crazy, and engaging experience for gamers. We thought this game and its characters had potential, so we “vowed” to make it happen.

The game has a Metroidvania style which means our puzzles have to tie in together decently at least - a tough goal to work to, as we know there’s a lot of fans of this genre who love it because of good game design from franchises like Super Metroid and Castlevania. There’s lots of game elements in our game to keep things ffresh: over thirty characters with their own backstory, tons of animations (IK bones, skinning, traditional animation), varied enemies (common, bosses, and sub-bosses), and high-res art. The game is quite action packed with a lot of varied music tracks/leitmotif which are practiced, studied, and performed too. So all this takes a lot of time and dedication from the team. The engine was made from the ground up too - not an easy task, especially having a co-op feature included!

Polishing and pulling away is also tough, but we want to achieve a great game together. We want to allow the players to have a very rich experience and a game with great, responsive controls. We want to express our love for games and for the players to know we care. But most of all we want them to have a blast and enjoy our crazy imagination and ideas! As long as our ideas are out there for many to enjoy, I think that is satisfying in itself.

D E V S P O T

Turbulon Interactive

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DICETINY:The Lord of the DiceHi my name is Mike Lee and I’m community and marketing manager at Fakedice. Since I’m the only in the studio who speaks English, (albeit not at native level), I take care of all the communication with users, and any non-Korean companies. I also take care of PR and marketing like SNS, and press releases and so on. I also contribute some of the ideas in the game. I’m proud to say that I was the one that came with the name, DICETINY!

It’s been under development about four months now, and we still consider it to be at the early stage of development. At first we wanted something simpler, but over the course, we ended up adding more stuff as it always happens in game development. Now what we have is a more complex version. Also when we first started, we didn’t think about adding parodies, although we were thinking about putting in some humor. But while we were brainstorming ideas for the game’s storyline, an idea to parody The Lord of the Rings came up. It snowballed from there. Now we want to be the Scary Movie and Shrek of gaming.

The first thing we thought of when the idea for this game came up was the thought of combining RPG elements and a collectible card system with a board game. When you think of board games you initially think of board and dice. As I mentioned, we’re fans of Hearthstone, so we wanted to add some collectible card and card battle elements in there.

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CARD DESIGN

To describe our design, I think it’s Western, humorous, and simple. Although we’re a Korean studio, our main focus is the Western market, so we wanted something that Western audiences would be more familiar with. We didn’t want an anime style, although that’s what we’re familiar with in Korea. Also, we wanted the images to be fun and not too serious. Fakedice guys enjoy humor, and we wanted to put as much humor as we could in the game. Lastly, we wanted to keep the simplicity, considering the size of development. We also got some influence from Hearthstone as we’re big fans of the game.

We have a card called Fakedice. If you use it, you can move up to six spots freely. It’s based on our studio name. Also there’s a card called Magic Missile. Instead of a magical bomb or something, we actually put in a tomahawk missile. Many people find it hilarious. Also, we’re cross-featuring Shovel Knight and Aegis Defender in the game, so characters from those games will have special card skills that will be fun for players of both games. I can’t reveal them right now as they’re still a work-in-progress, so stay tuned.

UNIQUE

I would say the random event is probably the most unique thing about our game. Every spot on the board you get a random event, be it a treasure, a trap, a quest, or a monster. Every time you play you get something different. I think that’s really cool.

CHALLENGE

Since humor and parodies are important aspects of DICETINY, sometimes it was hard to come up with an idea for a card skill. We want to be unique and original, albeit it’s a parody, and sometimes it’s hard to do that. Also, we are not 100% sure whether the Western audience will also enjoy the things we think are funny. We try to see things from the Western audience’s point of view.

We want to be unique and original, albeit it’s a parody, and sometimes it’s hard to do that.

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FakediceDev Team 2014 Highlights

Jin (CEO): Our highlight probably is our Kickstarter campaign launch.

We met Fakedice at Gamescom 2014, where they stood in a hall full of people showing their game off on a tablet. Rai felt the urge to talk to them since she appreciated their courage to walk around and get the attention of the audience.

Kickstarter launch

Gamescom

Mike (Marketing/Community): Maybe Gamescom, because I had always wanted to go to Europe.

GOD DESIGNSMITE

By Tom Schoen

Hi! I’ve been working at Hi-Rez Studios for about 9 years as a Level Designer, Senior Game Designer, and now as the Lead Designer on Smite. My role at the studio is to guide the design process on Smite, related to short and long term content deliverables and new game features going into the live environment. I also do individual god design on rotation with other members of the design team, and work with the balance and community teams on upcoming adjustments to the game.

We asked Scott Zier to tell us something about the

design of Smite’s God character designs. Follow

his design process in this great interview article.

RESEARCH AND IDEAS

God design in Smite starts with research. We want to have a good understanding of the mythology, of a gods potential role and personality, before we put them into production.

We usually have some idea of what we are looking for when we start researching. Sometimes it’s as simple as knowing we want to add a new Mage, or new Roman deity to the roster. Sometimes there are specific gameplay features we are looking to add, such as temporary health shields, or healing, that is the foundation for our mythology research. Once we find a few mythological figures that fit our goals, then we start into concept art and generating gameplay ideas.

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DESIGN

Early on there is a lot of iteration of art concepts and game design to get to the point where everyone is excited and happy with the direction. We’re a studio that loves to test quickly, and iterate frequently, so we generally try to get the god in game in as rough of a form as possible. We then do frequent reviews to ensure the designs we ship are fun and fit the requirements of a Smite god.

There are a number of guidelines for concepting and design around keeping the correct tone and feel for Smite. It’s always a challenge to stay within the guides, while also trying to nurture something unique and special for each god. For example, there are certain visual themes that connect each Pantheon, and certain guides around ability design related to class choice. In most cases the mythology is a boon for this, as it usually starts us with a very unique and interesting foundation!

It’s actually very rare the first design we playtest is the one we ship. We go through a lot of iteration to find the right balance and feel. We tend to push upfront “finding the fun” in a design, and in Smite that is often first around the feel of ability execution and the fluidity of combat. I think, a bit more so than other MOBAs, because we are third person players are sensitive to timings being off or feeling clunky. This is especially true in relation to abilities that affect movement. In other MOBAs you mouse click to move, allowing your camera to roam free and your attention to shift while you transit, but in Smite you move

everywhere with WASD manually, so when things don’t feel right with movement based abilities, they usually feel awful!

One of the advantages to working with mythology from around the world is that most of the gods are already very unique! Our goal as designers is to take what makes them unique from a lore perspective and to translate that into new and exciting gameplay options.

Scrapped ideasThere are thousands of scrapped ideas in Smite that were tested, then dropped for various reasons. For example, we tried hard to have one of our Guardians, Kumbhakarna, pick up players and then throw them to a location of his choice. We struggled with the potential grief factor for allies, as throwing a teammate into enemies could be either an awesome teamwork moment, or a horrible troll. We tried such things as him becoming a “spring board” so that allies had to trigger into him to be thrown, versus Kumbha picking them up. Everything just felt too clunky though. A two step process in Smite (pickup, then throw) requires a lot of camera movement and aiming interaction due to our 3rd person view. Ultimately we decided it wasn’t fitting with the rest of his kit and shelved the idea for a later date. Not long after that we released Janus, who had a better version of team movement through portals, somewhat inspired by the Kumbhakarna trials being fresh on our minds.

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COMMUNITY GENERATED

There are certainly god designs, and god redesigns, that have been heavily influenced by community opinion and suggestions. Our recent Arachne redesign was largely prompted by direct community request, for example. Just about everyone in the studio looks at community posts, but we also have a community management team dedicated to gathering information from our players and e-sports teams and making sure that information reaches the design team. This includes forum interaction, running surveys, and managing more focused feedback sessions. We have multiple community feedback meetings each week to go over all of this, and it’s a big part of our process! A little less formal, we also sometimes just tweet questions or post to reddit and see what the response is! Beyond all that, the influence of the community is present in everything we do. We certainly look back at our more successful and popular gods and judge what went right, while looking at our least popular gods and learning where to improve.

CHALLENGES

Probably the most difficult challenge is just related to our patch release schedule. We put out a new god about every 4 weeks, on top of other new content like skins, voice packs, and new features like the league system. It adds a lot of time pressure to a process that is already pretty complex and demanding. That said, it's also very rewarding come patch day! Getting regular content out for our players to enjoy is one of the exciting things about working on a game like Smite.

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We met Todd Harriz from Hi-Rez Studios at Gamescom 2014 where we had a great talk about how they work closely with their community to design their characters. Eventually we had the chance to ask Scott Zier about their creative god designs.

Congratulations with the release of Lethal League! Did you plan the release strategically?Thanks! Our aim was to release the game in Q2 just before the summer. However, at the start of 2014 we saw we weren’t going to make it in time for Q2 because of the online multiplayer that had to be very solid and needed some more work. We postponed it to Q3 which was a bit troublesome because there are quite some big game events combined with big game announcements we didn’t want to compete with. The date we picked was set between Gamescom and Pax at August 27.

How exactly did the process go when you entered the release-milestone? I think the marketing was the biggest thing we had to tackle before the game was released: reaching out to the press with review copies and connecting with video content creators to learn if they were interested in covering Lethal League. On top of that it’s very important to start building a community before the actual release. This actually started more than a year before the release of the game. In April 2013 we released the prototype of Lethal League which was picked up incredibly well. Before releasing the prototype we didn’t have plans to build a full game out of it, but because of the response the game got from the community (over 200,000 unique people played the prototype) we decided to create a full game out of this prototype. The challenge was to keep that community alive and updated until the release of the full game. This was actually tricky because the development of the game was pretty closed to the public, but by showing the game on several events we managed to keep the community pleased and eager for the actual release.

At some point you had to think about getting your game out there. Next to reaching out to press websites did you have any other ideas as to how you would accomplish your marketing?Our main focus for getting attention was through popular YouTubers and streamers; their impact on the visibility of your game is huge. At several events we met some of the bigger YouTuners and showed them Lethal League. Luckily they were hooked, which resulted in some great features on their YouTube channels. These videos resulted in more videos from other video content creators who wanted to check out the game and make a video about it as well. Another thing that was very important was keeping very close to the community that supported us from the beginning, as well as new fans, to keep the community active. Maintaining an active community is very valuable in terms of word of mouth marketing.

How are you feeling now that the game has been released? How has the response from the public and press been?Incredibly well! We are very happy with the release of the game. The responses we got from the players as well as the press are very positive. A lot of video content creators keep posting Lethal League videos and the community is pretty active with weekly online tournaments and lots of fanart. We currently have an 8.2 score on Metacritic, and the Steam reviews are “overwhelmingly positive” with 99% positive reviews. Oh and the sales are pretty satisfying too.

The release of

Lethal LeagueWe talked to Tim Remmers about the release of Lethal League.

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My name is Carsten “Bozar” Boserup, and I am the community manager. My

role is to build, manage, and develop Interstellar Marines into being the best

community in gaming history. I’ve been working in the games industry for

about four years as a community manager, which today is a full time lifestyle

rather than a job.

“We will be on Steam Early Access for a long time”

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Was the concept of the game always meant to be this big?The concept hasn’t changed. Its always been very ambitious and will continue to stay ambitious. It’s really about creating a hardcore, but realistic sci-fi game that isn’t stepping into fantasy sci-fi like Star Wars, but more like Aliens (the movie) and that universe.

How big was the original team, and how big is the current team?Well we started with just two developers and two community managers when we released on Steam Early Access in July 2013. Before that we only had two developers and a few more helping once in awhile with concepts. Today we have about thirteen full/part time (eight of which are developers) and six interns where five of them are developers. So that is a massive increase in a very short time all thanks to Steam Early Access and our community for supporting us this early on.

Did the project grow larger during the development process? How?Definitely. The co-op mission (The NeuroGen Incident). This was our first implementation of co-op that Kim (our game director) has waited ten years for. Most of our community has been waiting seven years. The scale of this one mission is bringing the Unity engine to its knees all due to its size and complexity.

At some point the game went into Early Access, but the game is still in early access. How are you keeping the community involved with the game?We are keeping the community engaged on a daily and weekly basis with events and status updates through all of our media. That is primarily my job, as well as actually talking with the community (online) face to face and taking their feedback and listening to their concerns. It’s a massive task, as we have fans from all over the world. So this can in no way be a regular 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. job, but more like a 9 a.m. - 1:00 a.m. lifestyle.

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In what other ways is the community involved with the game’s content?We are very much listening to the feedback and ideas coming from the community. Thankfully, we share a lot of the same ideas, and it’s more down to a matter of prioritizing our feature releases to keep our fans and community happy. We have re-prioritized planned features because our community was screaming for it and couldn’t wait to play the game with those features (crouching, jumping, etc.). The community means everything to us, and they are the ones that keep us alive and developing, so we happily give the what they want earlier than planned to keep them happy (if it doesn’t massively interfere with the planned production).

Being in Early Access are there any other plans for making this game bigger?We will be on Steam Early Access for a long time. But with every update we will add more content, gameplay features, and story that will allow the players to enjoy it. Interstellar Marines is a massive and ambitious project. What we are developing right now is the Prologue, which has both a co-op/single player element, but also a multiplayer component. Once we have developed the Prologue then we will start working on three co-op campaigns. We will not do a gold release until we have the entire package fully developed. Once you have bought the game then you will have access to all the campaigns.

“The community means everything to us, and they are the ones that keep us alive and developing...”

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Rai: I met Carsten at Gamescom 2014. What I really found surprising was to hear how long the game was in and would be in Early Access. Soon it became clear that they have an ambitious game and a very dedicated community to help them with their development process.

Zero Point Software2014 Highlights

The release of co-op was a massive thing for us, especially for Kim Jorgensen (the game’s creator) who has dreamed about this since he came up with the concept more than fifteen years ago. But also just the fact that now we have the tech and tools to finally start delivering on our main mode which is co-op, and the immersive and brutal gameplay that the players will experience.

Co-op release

Interns on board

I also think that getting the interns we have on board was a big thing for us. Not only did we increase the team size, we got six new game developer interns from The Game Assembly, which is famous for producing talented and skilled game developers. Getting these awesome guys on board allowed us to speed up the development. We wouldn’t be where we are now without them!

EYE FOR GAMES

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