Indie Spotlight: Mr. Robot
Mr. Robot is a fascinating blend of adventure-platforming and 3D role-playing. Mirrored in the likes of Mario64, Mario RPG, and a lot of other 2D and 3D platforming/strategy games, Mr. Robot is a bold new take on platform and RPG gaming. If you need a little insight into how this game is played, take a look at the preview here. And being that this is the Indie Spotlight, we had Nick Tipping from Moonpod to answer our questions and give gamers some insight into this independent project. Also, be sure to stay tuned in with VG Core’s Part II interview with Nick, as he discusses what Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo thinks of independent gaming, and his discussion with them about Mr. Robot.
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VG Core: Designing a game that is geared toward casual gamers must be a difficult task, considering that unlike hardcore gamers, casual gamers aren’t going to go out of their way to read up or find out about these kind of projects. How do you outsource to casual gamers, yet maintain your focus on the core audience?
NT: Well, I'm not really sure we do have casual gamers in mind to be honest, and the mass gaming community has always been tough to crack (If we listened to market research, we'd never make a game!). We've always talked about the possibility of making a purely casual game, but it's not a class of game we've ever been interested in ourselves and so we aren't really 'qualified' to make something we feel would be good enough. Really, we can only make games that we ourselves would like to play, and beyond a few titles like Chuzzle we've just not been enthralled by anything aimed at that sector. I can see why anyone who hasn't played it might think of Mr. Robot as a casual game, but whilst it does contain puzzles, it also has action, RPG and adventure elements. Players should also expect a 'darker' storyline than would appear in any game aimed at portal sales; whilst the robots do intentionally look friendly, the world they live in turns out to be anything but!
VG Core: Aiming to capture the attention of a mass gaming community, that might be interested in your game, seems like a difficult task. How do you reach gamers who don’t know about your game?
NT: How we aim to reach a wider gaming community, that's always the crux of the problem for indie game developers. Pure casual puzzle games really only sell well through portals, and there's not a lot of point attempting to sell them solely from your own website. With an indie game (and by indie, I mean a non-casual, non mass-market game), it is possible to make a living selling only from your own site if the game is good enough. If enough people enjoy it, you can build a small community around the game, and word of mouth, combined with advertising and other marketing efforts can give you a sustainable business. It might not be much, and it's hard work, but we are only a small team with low overheads, so it keeps us happy! We really started Moonpod with the goal of being happy, whilst a certain base level of monetary income is obviously going to be part of that (it's hard to be happy if you can't pay your mortgage!) it's not everything. Freedom of artistic expression (in our case, making games we want to make) is also a huge part of it.
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All that idealism aside, you are right in that there are some specific issues pertaining to Mr. Robot. It's a very difficult game to classify - is it a puzzle game? an RPG? a platform game? action? adventure? Well, yes, all of the above! It's quite difficult to say what the experience will be like from screenshots alone, you have to try it for yourself. How you sell that to people is quite a conundrum, and perhaps best answered by letting the game sell itself. That's really what's great (and scary) about selling games online; a downloadable demo is there so people can make their own mind up about whether the game appeals to them. All we have to do is make sure there are people coming to the site (through advertising and other marketing efforts) and to make sure the game is actually good - which hopefully it will be if we've done our job right :)
VG Core: The community you’ve developed at Moonpod.com, on the forums, is astounding. The back and forth posting and feedback about the progress, the interaction, and overall development of your projects has created a really significant aspect between developers and gamers alike. Have you found that this community broadens the exposure of your product and ideas, or that it increases the general popularity of a product after it's been released?
NT: In our experience, having a huge community doesn't make a massive difference to sales, although we have definitely tracked sales that have come from word of mouth, just not nearly as many as from direct marketing methods. It's too easy to look at everything as a business decision though - having a community forum is quite simply fun, and honestly, there are times when you can be completely down about a project because everything goes wrong at the same time, and the occasional email, or nice comment, joke or discussion on a forum can completely lift you out of a funk. I really consider all of the board regulars as friends now, even the nutters are great to have around :) (they know who they are!)
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Again it's quite scary to have truly open discussion about what's good and what could be improved in your game, but more often than not, you get some great ideas. Anything you can implement improves the game experience for old and new users alike. As indie developers, time is of course your most precious asset, so there's only so much you can do. Having a supportive and enthusiastic community has caused us to think about ways to develop games so that adding updates after release is a less of a development burden. Mr. Robot for instance was built in a data driven way, unlike Starscape - meaning you can alter and add to it without having to recompile the game, by just changing text files. That should allow us to respond to more of the ideas that come from the community.
VG Core: And what about the forum development diaries. How has that affected your connection with designing games?
NT: I think of the developer diaries in the same way - It was a bit of a gamble for us to show development, warts and all, as it happens. I'm sure we get more exposure, but they do take a long time to write and prepare (a day at minimum) and I don't think they work well as an advertising medium as they mainly appeal to other game developers. The major benefits are that you get a lot of feedback and interesting ideas, hopefully help other developers avoid some of your mistakes, and also it's rather therapeutic to draw a line under a month's work! I really wish more developers would show their cards early on in development, but I think many are scared to do so, what with rampant cloning in the industry. We are immune to that because our games aren't aimed at portals and take so long to make, nobody is likely to try and copy them!
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VG Core: While we’re on the subject of developers and all. Some of the developers I’ve talked with claim that independent gaming is growing, others say it’s become shelled away from the kind of market it needs, and some have said that it’s exactly where it needs to be. Financial analysts seem to think that independent gaming is going to play a big role in the upcoming generation of gaming, especially for casual gamers having access to a broader range of casual games. How do you think the casual market will be affected getting deep into the next-generation of gaming?
NT: This is where I think it's important to differentiate between 'casual' and 'indie', and also 'developer' and 'publisher'. I'm sure financial analysts are basing their assumptions on the revenues of casual publishers like Real Arcade. Casual game publishers are doing extremely well, but seem to be reaching the limits of their growth. I expect it's already getting harder for developers to earn a living selling casual games off portals. Competition is increasing, exposure times are shortening, and I suspect reduced revenues are round the corner. Indie games on the other hand are only at the start of their potential, but I doubt it's so easy for big
business' to exploit them in the same way they have casual games (although I'm sure they'll try!).
Indie games are really hard to make, and by their very nature, don't make anything like the profits of mainstream games. They also tend to fare badly on portals, getting lost in the crowd. I think they are better maintained by a small and enthusiastic team backed up by an interested community. Hopefully you are immune to the pressures of casual development, but then it's inherently difficult to develop and market anything more complex purely off your own back. I always tell anyone who asks that there's not really any point trying to do what we are doing if you
think you are going to make decent money in the short term or medium term - you have to have a far reaching plan spanning a minimum of 5 years, and probably longer. There's obviously quicker and easier ways to make money in the games business. For that reason, I suspect large scale business will never really have much interest beyond the casual audience.
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VG Core: Where do you think Moonpod stands in the midst of the current-generation and the next-generation?
NT: As for what the future holds? I can only guess - 2D casual puzzle games have pretty much reached a level of perfection that makes them timeless; I suspect they'll be as valid in ten years as they are today. I do think it will become very difficult for new people to enter that market and get the kind of revenue they can live off. It might be prevalent for portals to think about that, as the more people who can make a living in making games for them the better it will be for them. The kind of thing we make at Moonpod can draw comparisons with mainstream titles though.
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NT: We've asked ourselves this quite a bit lately - what happens when the latest bargain basement Walmart EPC does pixel shader 10 with ease? We have attempted to concentrate on graphical design rather than graphical techniques with Mr. Robot, and whilst we do some shader work, it's obviously not anything like the level of 'Company Of Heroes', 'fear', etc. If that became the minimum level of expectation, then I'm not sure how we could compete without a clever game idea that used reduced art content like Defcon or Geometry Wars. I'm not overly worried though - I was playing 'Grim Fandango' the other day, and thought that whilst it technically shows it's age, it doesn't suffer from it due to the unique art design. I think if you can strive for that, and , more importantly, offer something in the gameplay department that you can't get anywhere else, then you should be ok.
Possibly my only other concern is what devices will become the norm. There's a good chance that if media centre PCs take off, many households won't need a normal PC as they'll only use one for email and internet. It's also possible that a console could eat into the market in the same way if it had extended capabilities. I also wonder if tablet PCs might become a bigger market. I really like the idea of having a tablet PC lying around the house that I can browse the internet on, but games that exploit it would need to work with a stylus. The multi-device trend is something I'm quite sure will explode, phones are already taking over from lots of other devices (although they are a pain to develop for, with a rubbish revenue system for developers) and lately there doesn't seem to be an electrical device that Bejewelled doesn't run on (Bejewelled - washing machine edition is likely to be a big seller).
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That concludes Part I of our interview with Nick Tipping from Moonpod Games. Next week, be sure to stay tuned in with VGCore.com as we ask Nick the tough questions, and his experience with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo as they each survey Mr. Robot.
Article By: Cyguration
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