by Cody "Micajah" Bye



In game development, few companies ever try anything new anymore. Most
original ideas are either too hard to technologically implement into a
game, or they are left in the mind of whoever thought of the concept in
the first place, never to be touched due to lack of funding.
Unfortunately, people rarely work for free, but they will drive towards
a goal if there's even the smallest chance that they may succeed.
That's what the situation was like with Lockpick Entertainment and
their wonderfully unique game, Dreamlords. Built with a team that could
be counted on two hands and currently operating with fifteen members of
the development staff, Lockpick is succeeding where so many other
independent developers have failed. Not only have they successfully
released their game, but they are now working on the third "Era" in
their title and have been successfully running for around six months.

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David
Rosén, CEO of Lockpick Entertainment and general evangelist
for the innovative MMOG.

On top of that, Dreamlords has a thoroughly entertaining gameplay
setup. Using both a web browser and an RTS client, players of the game
compete to take over certain areas of the world that are in contention
as well as develop enough technology to take down the "boss" of each
Era and effectively win the game...at least for that Era. While
Dreamlords garnered lots of attention when it was first release, things
have tapered off slightly for the team. Lockpick has been relatively
quiet in the industry news, only coming up every now and then to
announce an upcoming Era or a necessary patch. However, when the Ten
Ton Hammer team found them on the list of developers who would be
attending Leipzig GC, we instantly sent in a request to speak with them
and continue to learn more about their phenomenally original game.

Meeting in the miraculously quiet business hall, Phil Comeau and I
(Cody "Micajah" Bye)
went to take a look at what the Dreamlords developers had to offer in
the way of updates and any new additions to the game. Thankfully, it
turns out that the relative quiet that's settled over Lockpick is
merely due to the team's continuing to work on the game and plug away
on portions of the world that need the most attention. That particular
morning the Nordic Games booth was particularly busy compared to most
days, and we had all sorts of businessmen running all around us
dispensing sample copies of games and generally wheeling and
dealing.  Lockpick's CEO, David Rosén, was on hany
to answer my question, and I eagerly voiced all of my questions to him.



Since we hadn't really talked with Lockpick since we had done our
review of Dreamlords in late March, I was curious concerning what had
changed in the last few months. With any freshly released game, most
people anticipate some sort of change to occur simply due to the
availability of more gamers to try the game. Dreamlords is no
exception, and there have been quite a few changes since release. "The
biggest change we've made is to PvP," David said. "We thought the
initial PvP was a bit to shallow. You could only spawn units from your
base and didn't have the ability to upgrade anything.



"In this second step of the PvP, we added that when you capture a
tactical point, you could also upgrade it and start spawning units from
that tactical point," David finished. For those of you not familiar
with Dreamlords, tactical points are set on a map - you can't move
them. David described a sort of trade off game where you could either
try to capture as many of these points as possible - thus ensuing a
quick victory - or taking those spots and trying to build them up into
something defensible.

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Here I am discussing
Dreamlords with the Lockpick crew and enjoying what they have to say.

According to David, the Lockpick team is also working to improve some
of the gains gotten through PvP. At the moment, there are rewards in
fighting in PvP, but there are no resources associated with fighting in
PvP so players that are crafting oriented have a reason to play in PvP.
“It’s just building up an incentive for players to
participate,” David added.



Concerning Eras, I was curious about how the general community had
accepted the semi-scheduled restarts of the Eras or if anyone had
thrown a fit about the constantly restarting gameplay system. "Really,
the sort of Era system - or the restarts - are relatively common in the
web-based browser games," David said. "Games like Utopia use them to
level the playing field. At its core, Dreamlords is a competitive game
and to keep the game competitive we have to level the battlefield at
certain points. On the other hand, we have to have some sort of
persistency. That said, we include a few persistent elements
– like the gear you gather over the Era – that
remains persistent.