A new browser based MMOG
is on the market, and it's called Disciple. This Free to Play game with
optional microtransactions takes place in the violent world of Aphelion
as players pit their skills against other players and fight for fame
and power.



Ten Ton Hammer caught up
with Resistor Productions CEO, Toby Batton, and he was more than happy
to tell us more about the game.

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style="font-weight: bold;">Ten Ton Hammer: Where did you
come up with the idea for Disciple?



Toby: Where I got the idea for Disciple, originally, was a
game that came out about 2 years ago, and it was really successful right off
the bat. It was called Duels.com. It was more of a MUD game. I was
playing the game and I felt all the mechanics of the game and the game
play were a lot of fun but it would be a lot more fun if it was
animated. So that was sort of the spawn of Disciple - sort of making a
duels.com style game that’s fully animated.



I had been writing stories about this world called Aphelion for about
three or four years. It was a made up world that I liked to write
about. You can read about it in the lore book on our website.



Ten Ton Hammer: What were
some of the problems you faced during development?
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Toby: The
big problem is that you want to make these fully animated games on the
web without a client of any kind. There were a lot of challenges that
we ran into with Flash, mainly the rendering speed. Flash
can’t multitask; it can only do one thing at a time. So when
you click a button to do an attack, it’s trying to make the
animation show up on the screen and do the rendering at the same time.
So the biggest problem we had to solve was that rendering issue.
We’ve got some really genius Flash developers that were able
to essentially “hack Flash” and make it lie to
itself so that it can both render and display the animation
simultaneously. From a technology perspective, I think that’s
the most interesting thing.



From a concept perspective, and the game play, it’s very PvP
focused. The objective of the game is to level up. The leveling up
process is very similar to a standard MMORPG where you kill people and
you get experience points and gold.



The process that we developed is very similar to Guild Wars, because we
are so focused on PvP and not PvE. The level cap is level 20. Once you
get to level 20 it’s all about 1) getting the best armor, 2)
increasing your PvP rankings, and 3) getting a clan banner.

Ten Ton Hammer: What are
clans and clan banners?



Toby: When
you join a clan, a clan being similar to a guild in other games, the
clan can take all of the gold that they win from fights, put it into a
clan bank and purchase a banner. When they purchase a banner, they get
to choose three different options. They choose the image on the banner,
and the two colors behind the image. Those choices provide everyone
within the clan with different stat bonuses. The image is worth the
most, the top color is worth the second most, and the color on the
bottom is worth the least.



So that’s what it’s really all about- building your
clan, building your disciple, getting the most powerful weapons and
armor and it’s very political.



What can happen is when people purchase these banners, the stats that
the clan leader chooses may not be the stats that the people in the
clan want so you may have a mass exodus of people from your clan moving
over to a clan that has the banner that they need.



Ten Ton Hammer: What
about PvE?



Toby: We do
have a PvE aspect to our game. There are quests that you can go on to
travel different parts of the world. Quests will give you objectives
that are anywhere from an exploration objective to killing an NPC, to
making friends with people, to making enemies with people, reaching a
certain level, getting a certain piece of gear. So there are quite a
few different quest objectives. There is a story line that’s
tied in with that as well.



Ten Ton Hammer: What do
you feel are some of the biggest assets Disciple brings to the MMOG
market?



Toby: I
think the greatest strength of Disciple is that you can play it from
anywhere. It’s just like Facebook or My Space. If you go to
the website and create an account, you can play it at work, you can play
it at home, you can play it at mom’s house. You
don’t have to wait for the client to download.



Ten Ton Hammer: What was
your incentive to go with a primarily PvP centered game?
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Toby: The
whole idea of social networking. It’s available on the web,
you can access it anywhere, so we really wanted to provide a lot of the
social aspect that’s available on the web and integrate that
as much as possible into the game. We want people to really have a
social obligation to play the game, and I think, once again, that
it’s not a client download and you can access it from
anywhere makes that social aspect much more accessible.



The focus on PvP is really about making friends and making enemies, and
bringing that social obligation to the forefront of the game play.



Ten Ton Hammer: PvP
gamers are typically a competitive lot. What kind of competitive
mechanics are included in the game?
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Toby: There
will be a leaderboard on our homepage. We’re using
what’s called the Elo Ranking System. The ranking system will
require what we believe to be about 2 weeks of data so you
won’t actually see that ranking page show up for the first 2
weeks after launch.



Everybody in our game is ranked, so if we have a million people playing
the game, or if we have 100,000 people playing the game, every single
person is going to be ranked based on the algorhythms on how that Elo
Ranking System works. There’s only one
“server,” one instance of this game, so
you’re going to be ranked against everybody who plays. Now in
terms of competition, we went to great lengths to make sure that
it’s not just chance and number crunching. There’s
a lot of different things that you can do as a player to make your
character better.



There are two big areas where you can make decisions that are better
than the decisions your opponents are making. The first area is that as
you level up you get to distribute stat points to different areas:
mind, body and spirit. Depending on your class, you’re going
to want to put those points in different areas and it’s
really a learning process for the players. If they put those points
into the wrong areas, then they’re going to find that their
character may be weaker than the person that they’re
fighting. In addition to that, a lot of what it comes down to is the combinations
of the attacks that you use, depending on your opponent and how
they’re built.



So, for instance, if you’re a Warlord, which is our tank
class, and you’re fighting a Shaman, which is our casting and
debuffing class, you’re going to use different combinations
of attacks than if you’re fighting a Bloodletter, which is
our damage dealing rogue class.



Learning all those systems, the combinations, and how to distribute the
points is really where the competitive angle comes in because the
people that learn that the quickest are going to excel the quickest
throughout the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there
any way to respec the points distribution?
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Toby:
Absolutely. We do have a respec. Each character gets their first respec
free, and after that it does cost in game currency. It costs 25,000
gold. At level one, it’s going to be really hard for you to
pay 25,000 gold but at level 20, it’s not that much.



Ten Ton Hammer: Disciple
is an adult game. What does the term “adult game”
mean?



Toby:
It’s not pornographic, I can make that very clear. But it
certainly is “R-rated.” I think the level of
violence and the attitude of the story telling is probably what you
would expect from a Quentin Tarantino movie, like Kill Bill or
something. So it’s probably not the type of game you would
want a 12 year old to play and we do require that users are at least 18
years old to register.



In terms of the blood, you can hack people’s heads off and
there’s literally blood flying all over the screen. In terms
of the story telling, it gets pretty risqué.



We have achievement titles in the game, and one of the titles you can
unlock, for example, is “Masogonist,” and in order
to do that, you have to kill 100 women, so there are definitely adult
themes in the game.



We don’t have healing potions, we have green beer, so if you
drink the beer during battle, then you get some health points back.



Ten Ton Hammer: How do
the offline battles work?



Toby: You
get all sorts of attacks as you level up. As you level up, you unlock
actions. You can go into the settings panel within the game and you can
turn on “auto-battle” mode. When you turn on
auto-battle mode, a window pops up and all of the available attacks
that you have can be set in priority to what you think is going to be
the best combination. So if you have a debuff, and then a stun attack,
you can do those first, and then follow up with your most powerful
offensive attack.



This really serves two purposes. First, let’s say
you’re at work and you’re playing the game, you can
just open it in a separate window, turn the sound off, put it in
auto-battle mode and then just sit there and accept all the requests
for people that want to fight you.



Now, when someone is in auto battle mode, there are two types of
fights. There’s a spar and a battle. When you’re in
a battle, it affects your rank. When you’re in a spar, it
does not affect your rank. Both types of fights, you get xp and gold
rewards. So when someone is in auto mode, you cannot battle them; you
can only spar them.



So if someone’s simply just trying to level up, and they
don’t want their ranking to be affected, they can go into
auto mode while they’re online and they can just watch the
fights like an animation based on the combination they’ve
programmed into the game. Basically, we’ve given people the
ability to create a bot within the game.



Now, if they go offline while in auto mode, people can fight them while
they’re offline, and they get xp for that too, but
it’s decreased down to 5 percent of normal xp.

Ten Ton Hammer: So can
offline fights happen between two offline players?
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Toby:
Someone has to initiate the fight, so if you’re offline and
you’re in auto mode, you can’t send requests to
people; they have to send a request to you, which automatically gets
accepted. But once again, it can only be a spar, it cannot be a battle.



Ten Ton Hammer: Could you
tell us a little about the microtransactions you have available?
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Toby: Our
business model is that you can log in and play the game free.
You’re not going to feel the need to spend any money until
about level 5 or 7 which you should be able to get to in about an hour
and a half or two hours. At that point a lot of the armor and stuff
that becomes available is what we call “sanctioned
items,” and there’s a group within the game called
the Allied Nations, which as far as the story goes, is sort of an
ancient version of the United Nations.



To get access to these sanctioned weapons and armor you have to
actually join the Allied Nations, and to join them, you’ll
need to pay a monthly subscription fee, which is roughly $5 a month,
pending on what package you get.



Beyond that, the really high end armor and the banners are very
expensive.  So we have our own gold market where people can go
and purchase gold instead of, or in addition to their monthly
subscription so that they can get the gold they need in the game to buy
the gear that they want quicker.



Ten Ton Hammer: How much
time did it take to develop the game?
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Toby: From
the very beginning, about a year and a half, which is pretty long for a
flash game. We don’t want to, nor do we think we will take
players away from AAA titles. Our goal is to give people who
don’t have much money, such as being unemployed, a game to
play that doesn’t cost a lot of money. Or people who are
playing other games who want something to do while they’re at
mom’s house or while they’re at work and this is a
secondary game that they can play.



Ten Ton Hammer: Can it be
run as a Smart Phone application?
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Toby: We are
actually working on an iPhone application for it right now, as well as
a Facebook app.



Ten Ton Hammer: Is there
anything else you’d like to tell readers?
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Toby: We had
a closed beta before launch, and we got a lot of positive feedback from
it. We uncovered a lot of bugs, but we also received emails from
players saying that as far as what they’ve seen what Flash 10
can do, this is the greatest graphics they’ve seen in Flash
10. In addition to that, they think it’s fun to play, they
can log in for 20 minutes, they seem to completely get it.

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style="font-style: italic;">Ten Ton Hammer thanks Resistor
Productions for their time to answer our questions.
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If you'd like to read
more about Disciple, or jump right into the game, the official site is
found at href="http://www.disciplemmo.com" target="_blank">www.disciplemmo.com style="font-style: italic;">.