Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there any way to respec the points distribution?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

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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Ten Ton Hammer thanks Resistor Productions for their time to answer our questions.

If you'd like to read more about Disciple, or jump right into the game, the official site is found at www.disciplemmo.com.