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

Ten Ton Hammer: You're planning on releasing Mind Twist on iPhone and PC. Do you think that’s a major advantage that these sort of digital products, these simpler games have over kind of big titles like World of Warcraft? Is that the major advantage, the fact that you can just spread yourself across so many different digital areas?

Randy: I think there are two questions in there that I’ll try to answer. On one hand, people have been saying for years that we’re going to see what’s called platform play, but nobody’s actually delivered it. With Mind Control, we’ve already built it, our orbital game platform at this point.

When I’m playing Mind Twist, I’m playing on my iPhone vs a PC. I’m going over to Richard Garfield’s house (the creator of Magic: The Gathering) later and we’re going to be playing his PC vs my iPhone. Platform play is something that Mind Control has now actually built. Absolutely that’s an advantage of this game, and it’s something we haven’t seen out there. I mean, you see a little bit of what I’ll call massively-single player games. All you’re really doing is putting up a high score with that sort of registered high score board list. What we’re doing is actual multiplayer matchmaking across all platforms.

One thing that turn-based strategy games definitely have an advantage on is that it doesn’t matter what your input device is, so we’re able to do cross platform matchmaking in a way that doesn’t give anyone an unfair advantage. If you’re playing a shooter, it’s such a different experience if you’ve got a mouse vs a console controller vs an iPhone, you can’t really make a fair game across platforms, but with a turn-based strategy game it’s “how well can you think”. The input device isn’t really what the gameplay is all about. So, on the one hand, that’s the style of games that I like, that Richard likes, and that Mind Control likes, and on the other hand, it does lend itself to cross-platform play, that works out really well for us.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you looking to branch the product to other places besides PC and iPhone? Are you looking to go anywhere else besides the two that you mentioned?

Randy: Absolutely. We wanted to start with a smaller target, make sure we get the game up and running, start getting feedback from the customers on what they really like and what they don’t like, but absolutely, the medium term plan is to start adding more platforms. The different platforms have different constraints. PC and iPhone happen to be the easiest for us to self-publish on, but something like Xbox is interesting and I like the user-base that’s there.

But things get complicated depending on which platform you’re talking about. But as far as do we intend to branch out? Yeah, absolutely, that’s definitely the plan. We just have to get something up and running first.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk a little bit about the game itself? The term turn-based strategy games is a kind of broad sort of term because there’s a lot of games that kind of fall under that umbrella. What are we going to be looking at: cards, figures, something else? How are things going to be represented on the screen?

Randy: Both Richard and I have a background in collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering. That said; we don’t want to do just another card game. I don’t expect complicated booster packs.

What I do think makes a really good strategy game, and what this game is going to have, is a collection of digital objects that you own. You get to customize your gameplay experience by figuring out which of those objects you want to take into battle with you. That’s something that Magic has in deck building and it’s something that Dungeons and Dragons has in terms of character building. It’s something that I think is the real hallmark of what we would call on the table top side of the business as hobby games, games that you can spend a lot of time thinking about. You have the solo activity of customization that you can play while you’re getting ready for the real game, which is your inherent multiplayer experience, so the game is being designed with multiplayer first.

There will be a single player mode. We’ll have a campaign that can serve as a tutorial and will be a fun thing to do when you’re not in the mood or don’t have someone to play against, but it’s the multiplayer aspect that we think is going to really make this shine. It’s designed to be played head to head competitively. It’s a game where I’m matching my brain against yours. I’ve got my strategy, and you’ve got yours, and we’re going to play it out.