MMMOGs
(Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Games) are coming to the
iPhone and iPad in the form of
style="font-style: italic;">Pocket Legends,
developed by Spacetime Studios. Ten Ton Hammer sat down with some
members of the development team at Spacetime Studios-- Jason Decker
(Assistant Art Director), Cinco Barnes (Vice President and Creative
Director), Gary Gattis (Co-Founder), and Jake Rodgers (Art Director and
Co-Founder)--to discuss this revolutionary game that blazes a new trail
in the gaming frontier.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Tell us a little bit about
style="font-style: italic;">Pocket Legends.
Cinco
Barnes: The game is an
action RPG that really focuses on cooperative play and has a lot of
depth of character. The team really started off with simple core
concepts. A lot of us are old MMOG burnouts from big projects, so we
wanted to cut loose on a platform that we’ve grown to love.
We’ve done research and development and released several
titles on the phone. So when it came time to do something that was
really close to our heart it made sense, with our core skill sets, that
it’d be really fun to make a simple MMORPG. But with that
simple core, we started a whole lot of stuff.
There’s a lot to this that you don’t see in other
MMOGs. There are some things in this that we’ve wanted to do
for awhile, and it’s strange that it comes out on such a
petite device. There’s some really good game play in this,
especially between groups in the way that you can multiply powers by
working together in a coordinated fashion. We also wanted to do a cute
game; do something with animals in it that didn’t take itself
too seriously and had a lot of room for humor; something that would
give us, as developers, a chance to really have some fun together,
build something that made us laugh and made us want to play together
online.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Can you tell us a little bit about the classes? Is
everything split up into the standard roles of tank, healer, and DPS?
style="font-weight: bold;">
Cinco
Barnes: Yes, we do have that
holy trinity. The fundamental classes include an archer class, which is
our avian species. He’s a bird and he’s great with
the bow and dagger and he’s really strong in dex when he
starts. The stat system is fully configurable so he can get a lot more
powerful and he can get more intelligence to improve his mana and stuff
like that. Basically, he’s the DPS class and he’s
going to have the advantage, statistics wise, of being able to handle
all the bad-ass machinery all the way from an automatic flaming
crossbow to the longbows of frost and fire.
There’s also an enchantress class and she is the elf. This is
one of the most important species in the storyline, and this character
is a healer, and handles that role for the most part, but has a
tremendous amount of spell DPS. We really wanted to have our support
class able to devastate and make that something that isn’t a
painful choice for characters, but instead have the sheer reality of
being able to handle all this magic power. One of the big concerns for
the designers for stuff like this is thinking about the future, and
we’ve got some good ideas for classes that are going to come
out later on that will help these core classes retain their main roles.
The final class is the warrior and this is a straightforward tanking
class, but secondarily does DPS like you’d expect.
He’s also this bear, the Ursen. This bear character has some
neat species abilities such as being able to roar and scare folks. He
has several really unique crowd control abilities that bounce the guys
around when he stomps on the ground and pulls aggro away from the group.
So, the game includes the main classes you would expect, but our take
on them is pretty fun. It’s streamlined and it’s
got a lot of rock-and-roll to it. That’s what we’re
starting with now, with plans to expand in a couple of logical areas.
Jake
Rodgers: It’s fast
and it’s funny, basically, and it is the traditional roles.
Ten
Ton Hammer: How large of a game is
style="font-style: italic;">Pocket Legends
in terms of world size, quests, and all that?
style="font-weight: bold;">
Jason
Decker: We should probably
all answer because there’s a lot of content to consume. We
started off with a core of a good several hours of content that was
fundamental stuff. We’ve been layering a lot on it.
It’s not a traditional world in the way that most PC MMOGs
work. We adjusted the design and technology in such a way that it could
be a lot more accessible for the mobile audience and a lot more for the
casual audience. We made some very specific decisions about how quickly
you can get into, with friends, to play, so it changes a lot of the
travel concepts. You don’t walk around to endless spaces of
nothing, for example. You spend a lot of time bashing monsters and
looting gold.
There are several campaigns. The ones that’ll be released
include a very traditional, nice medieval fantasy-style one that begins
in the forest. There’s a real nice romp through some caverns
and caves. There’s the Ice Fortress and the Crypts. There are
a lot of different chapters in all of this stuff and each of those
represents a big chunk of game hours. Every one of the chapters that we
have has a bunch of different mobs, different mini-bosses, bosses, and
that sort of thing. The quests are intrinsic to the dungeons and the
adventure experience is a little more streamlined than from what you
would expect from a PC game. But still, there’s an ever
present story in place as you’re going through each chapter
in the Pocket
Legends initial release.
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Cinco
Barnes: I’ll take a
crack at that question as well. The gameplay has been adjusted from
traditional MMOGs to something much more [in line with] what our
experience has shown us people do on a mobile device. A lot of people
do quick consumption of content in 5 to 10 minute gameplay sessions on
these things, but we strung all those together as well. You can be in
and out in 5 minutes or you can play for hours and hours and hours
online. If you were to linearly go through the content, I guess you
could get through it in several hours.
However, the replay ability of the content is something
that’s a blast. My partners and I ran through one of the
final submission candidates yesterday, playing the same damned levels
we’ve played a thousand times before every day, and
it’s still a blast. I know the replay ability is cool because
I don’t mind testing it. You take two or three guys in there
running the same damn level, it’s a hoot and a holler and a
darn good time.
Ten
Ton Hammer: So you can go back and replay the levels. Does that mean
that the levels are going to scale up to match your progression? Will
it always be potentially dropping new and better loot for your
character?
Cinco
Barnes: Yeah. There are
parameters that drive that on the group makeup and what your level is.
That was really important to us, from a technology side, to take a lot
from our experience in order to make a rich, replayable game, because
we have already gone through the process of making the stuff that you
can’t play two times. This is really a different animal.
Going back at a higher level to help some of your lower level buddies
out is still really challenging. We did some clever things with that
which people should enjoy.
Jason
Decker: We really looked at
it. There’s min and max in some situations. Think of a
campaign as a thematic set of levels. Each of these campaigns is
appropriate for some specific levels. In other words, there’s
a minimum of levels involved. In the end of these campaigns,
there’s a mini-dungeon which is an amalgamation of the many
exciting high points that happened during that campaign.
Cinco
Barnes: Like highlight reels.
Jason
Decker: Yeah, just like a
highlight reel. A best-of retrospective.
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Ten
Ton Hammer: Is there any PvP in the game?
Cinco
Barnes: It’s a
great idea, and we’ve thought about it too, but
it’s not something that we’re going to include in
the initial ship.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Are there towns or similar places where players can meet up
and head out to adventure?
style="font-weight: bold;">
Cinco
Barnes: Yes, there are. You
can start by dropping into a safe zone, which is a town with characters
who give you some backstory and fill you in on this world that
we’ve got. It’s a perfect place for you to friend
up and then take off on whatever adventure you choose.
Jason
Decker: Some of the
traditional stuff that you would do in other MMOGs are here too. We
have full MMOG support, chatting, all the things you’d expect.
Ten
Ton Hammer: How do you actually chat in the game?
Jake
Rodgers: There are a couple
of different ways. We like traditional chat since we’re old
school MMOG, we have something you can type in and the phone has an
excellent input for that. But we also adopted some good designs for a
quick chat system and the ability for you to be just a few taps away
from the most common things that come up.
The big design challenge for us on the development side, after putting
in things that we knew from our experience would work, was to go
through the process of actually playing together and making sure these
features were going to fit in well with the sort of MMOG style that we
were making. The chat works fine in that respect. Even on a phone, I
like quick chat for the most part because I want to be able to fire off
quick messages, and I have a bay of those that I can pop off really
quickly at any time.
Spacetime
Studios: You can customize
those [quick chat options] as well. I say 'woot' all the time so I
customized one of my quick chat messages to say
‘woot’ and it’s just a tap away.
Jake
Rodgers: I say stuff like,
’hang on a second, guys. If you don’t mind, I have
to go to the store.’ I want to take up a lot of bandwidth
with my personal talk.
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Ten
Ton Hammer: How big is the app in terms of download size?
Cinco
Barnes: It’s small,
sub 20. 19 right now?
Gary
Gattis: I think so.
Jason
Decker: I want it to be a
little bigger.
Cinco
Barnes: Our goal is to allow
you to download it without wireless, basically 3G. That target size
used to be 10 Megs, and we had it down to under 10 Megs. Then they
increased it to 20 Megs, and we immediately filled that up. Basically,
it’s sub 20.
Spacetime
Studios: We’re also
patching down data like traditional MMOGS as well.
Cinco
Barnes: I think I talked to
you a bit about the technology behind all this, which has enabled us to
do this. We’re leveraging four years and ten million dollars
in technical investment in our engine. It’s a very
significant client-server architecture; all editor driven technology.
That’s what enabled us to build as complex an application as
this one as quickly as possible and have it run as stable as it is and
be as synched up as it is too.
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Ten
Ton Hammer: That’s another thing I wanted you to touch on
too, the synchronization. How quick is it? When somebody casts a spell
or does a combo in the game, how quick will it relate to the other
clients?
Jake
Rodgers: Instantly.
Cinco
Barnes: It really is almost
instantaneous. I think I demoed it to you guys at the table in the W,
and we’re looking at half a second ping times and
that’s all the way from our servers in Austin to wherever we
were, and we were seeing that globally as well. It really should appear
and feel instantaneous no matter where they’re playing.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Is it only available on the iPhone then?
Cinco
Barnes: iPhone, iTouch, iPad,
currently the apple suite of mobile devices.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Is there any difference between the iPad and the iPhone
versions?
Jake
Rodgers: Oh, yes!
We’ve taken that interface and completely changed it.
It’s really difficult for me to go back and play it on the
phone after looking at it in the higher resolution. There are just a
few extra things that you can do-- navigation, for camera controls,
casting spells, friends chatting--all of that is much better on the
larger device.
Cinco
Barnes: I wouldn’t
say it’s completely revamped. Our game engine gives us a lot
of latitude on how quickly we display at a larger screen resolution and
revamp the UI and whatnot. It is a ton of fun on these phones, and that
is what it originally was designed for, and then we clang it onto one
of these devices.
Ten
Ton Hammer: So it’s going to constantly grow after its
initial ship?
Spacetime
Studios: Absolutely. Again, I
love to keep harping on the engine, but it allows us to put this stuff
together so damn quickly that we’ll have a flood of regular
content that’ll come out after the initial ship. It was
designed to grow to level 100 and beyond and we’re shipping
it with only levels 1 to 25, and then next month, the Lost Expedition
series comes out that’s got levels 25 to 30. New loot, new
mobs, new bosses, new tile sets, new adventures.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Let’s talk about development time. How long did
it take to develop the game?
Cinco
Barnes: Six months at the
outset. Five to six months from the very beginning.
Jason
Decker: We’ve been
doing research and development. We put out these other games, and when
did we start?
Spacetime
Studios: Like October.
Jason
Decker: Yeah, there was some
interesting stuff going on during that time. There were some different
directions we were looking at, some ridiculous stuff. We made some
other apps, which never saw the light of day, that are still pretty
funny, like a racing app and a conversation one where you can talk
people into various things. But then this one came up and, in a moment
of clarity, everybody decided to buckle down.
Cinco
Barnes: Everyone had that
‘holy crap’ moment where we were doing R&D,
understanding the publishing pipelines for the devices, but as things
came online, we realized that animation works, AI works,
etc…we got an MMOG engine on these devices. There really was
a clouds-parting moment of clarity for all of us where we looked at
each other and realized that this was what we had to do.
We’re miles ahead of everybody else for the technology.
We’re not iPhone developers; we’re MMOG developers
who happened to have a very powerful platform that works with the
iPhone.
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Ten
Ton Hammer: Since it’s so quick to develop, do you have an
idea of how quickly you’re going to be able to put out the
content packs?
Cinco
Barnes: Yes, we do. From
developing, we’ve been taking the metrics to see how quickly
we can do this stuff. I think, on the mob content, being able to put in
more monsters; that’s one thing. We’re also able to
do rapid development of different spell effects, weapons, and other
kinds of items too. When we think about the future, a lot of our
content plan involves a mixture of the durable items as well as the
adventure content and other things to change the experience of the
characters. It’s very flexible.
Jason
Decker: I think that
we’ll be able to keep up with consumption. I think that, with
the levels, you go through them pretty quickly, but they’re
very replayable. The new content packs, we’ve already got
some of that stuff all ready to go. We’re holding back on
some of that just to see how fast people will go through it.
Jake
Rodgers: We’ll be
cranking stuff out. We’ll have a dedicated live team on this.
We’ve run live before on
style="font-style: italic;">Galaxies
as well, so we’re treating this as an MMOG with full blown
community support and the whole shebang.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Any additional applications like web applications, like
leaderboards or stuff like that?
Jake
Rodgers: I’d say
that we’re not shipping with that, but it is a strong desire
for us and the hooks are in place within the application to have that
data. We want to do it.
Ten
Ton Hammer: So what were your greatest challenges developing the game?
Jake
Rodgers: For me,
that’s easy. It was the user interface. Having an MMOG on an
iPhone, we’ve done some things that definitely simplify
things quite a bit, but that was kind of hard. Our visual challenges
too; to make that happen and not have buttons everywhere on the HUD
when you’re trying to play. I think that we addressed that
pretty well. It was a constant ’where are we going to put
this button?'
Spacetime
Studios: Yeah,
where’s this going to go when you’re managing
inventory, there’s hills, and spells….
Jake
Rodgers: So once we did that,
we got that to a place where we were pretty happy about it, getting it
over to the iPad, there’s so much space that we ran into the
opposite problem. Now there are all these gaps everywhere.
Jason
Decker: The most difficult
thing was getting our heads around the fact that we were going to make
iPhone games a while ago, and after that when we decided to make the
MMOG, you have to shift to thinking about the sessions. I was on the
receiving end of a critique from everybody about how long
it’s going to take, about grinding against the mobs and all
that stuff. For me, the thing to get right away was making the
experience feel like it belonged on the device. I knew the UI was in
good hands, I knew the technology would be there, but for my part of
it, making it fun to fight a mob and still be meaningful, making travel
somewhat meaningful but then accessibility…but all of that
stuff seems like a bucket of contradictions. So, fundamentally, being a
designer on the project was my challenge.
Jake
Rodgers: There are so many
things, when we started out, that we had the assumption, even though
they weren’t fun, that they had to be in the game because it
was an MMOG, but we got rid of a lot of that stuff. To me, this is the
style="font-style: italic;">Peggle
of MMOGs. I like it; I don’t even have to think about it.
It’s not a grind ever.
Gary
Gattis: For me, the biggest
challenge was working with my partners again in such close quarters.
That’s not true!
Jake
Rodgers: Gary has a lot of
questions about things that we have to answer all the time.
Gary
Gattis: Man, we’ve
been together for…this is our fifth year. At this kind of
company, most people have worked together ten years prior to this.
It’s not easy running a small, sometimes big company. I love
these guys more than I ever have.
Jason
Decker: I’m
thrilled to be working on a project that is so relevant and
revolutionary. I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that all successful
MMOGs will be put on mobile devices at some point in time in the
future. Not only on mobile devices, but ported to the mobile device
because it lends itself to it. To be on the forefront of that, for me,
is one of the most exciting times in my career.
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Ten
Ton Hammer: So you have quite a bit of experience behind you, too. What
stuff have you worked on in the past?
Cinco
Barnes: Well, Rick Delashmit
comes to us by way of some
style="font-style: italic;">Ultima
experience long ago. He did a bunch of that stuff.
Jake
Rodgers: I worked on a few
style="font-style: italic;">Ultimas,
but not Ultima
Online. My first game was
style="font-style: italic;">Wing Commander 2,
then Privateer.
Jason
Decker: Actually, we worked
together at SOE on
style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars Galaxies.
That was the first MMOG for me, and for you, too.
Jake
Rodgers: Yeah. That was a big
learning experience. We had 5 ½ years of that, going through
all that and starting the DC project right before we left.
Jason
Decker: Actually, we did a
couple of expansions for
style="font-style: italic;">Galaxies.
We did the space flight expansion, which for me, was the reason I was
there. I really love space games so much. We did the
style="font-style: italic;">Jump to Light Speed
expansion, and Jake and I did the
style="font-style: italic;">Rage of the Wookies,
the episode III expansion, and that was cool.
We formed this studio around 2005 and started on a big MMOG project for
NC Soft. That went really well for a while and we had a lot of neat
stuff to show for it, technology and IP, but it wasn’t meant
to be. I think that’s when we started turning our attention
to making things a little bit smaller. We definitely have some
experience in the MMOG industry. We’ve run around that block
once or twice.
Ten
Ton Hammer: Was there anything else you guys wanted to share about the
game?
Spacetime
Studios: We would like to
mention our technology partner, Andy Sommers, and he’s
absolutely brilliant. And there’s another guy called
RickDelashmit who is kind of a right hand man too, so I want to make
sure that if you’re naming names that those guys get their
props. We’re small; we’re six guys right now. We
were 50 at one point in time, so just as we’ve distilled the
MMOG experience down to the iPhone, we’ve distilled the
company right down to the core as well.
