PALGN: What are the backgrounds of Mr. Robot’s developers?
NT: Moonpod is Mark Featherstone (programming) and Nick Tipping (art). We met at Gremlin Graphics and also worked together at Infogrames and Rage Games. The last mainstream title we worked on together was Gun Metal for the Xbox. During this time Mark became frustrated with the way certain genres of game were being squeezed out of mainstream development and had been working on a space game idea in his spare time. I helped out with some graphics for it, and we got a little game up and running called StarWarrior. When Rage Games looked like it was going bust, Mark suggested we start our own company and we formed Moonpod. Our first game took the concepts from StarWarrior and expanded on them. It took us a year to develop and we maxed out several credit cards in the process but eventually we released out first game: Starscape.
Starscape, Moonpod's first game.
PALGN: How long was Mr. Robot in development?
NT: It ended up being almost exactly two and a half years. For indies, that’s a long time – most work in times scales under a year so they can release lots of games quickly and benefit from exposure on portals. It was a tough project and a lot of hard work, but the day we finished was one of the best days of my life. I can only compare it to passing your driving test; we sat in the pub all day with huge grins on our faces.
PALGN: Mr. Robot mixes classic isometric platforming action with Final Fantasy style combat. Why this particular combination of styles? Did you try other modes of combat before settling on the current method?
NT: I’d like to say we had a master plan all along, but I’d be lying! Game design at Moonpod is always ‘liquid’ and the game mutates and evolves throughout the development cycle. The ghost hacking element of the game wasn’t even in the design when we started, but when the idea was suggested we were so excited about it we just knew it had to go in; even though it extended the project quite considerably. I should point out that this is not a very good way to develop games, at least not if you want to release them in your own lifetime!
As for why we chose to marry those two styles of game – on the face of it, they just don’t sound like they would go together, but somehow they work very well and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. The more we tested it the more convinced we became that we had chosen the right design.
PALGN: A game like Mr. Robot has to walk a fine line between fun and challenge – it’s no fun getting stuck in one area, but then there’s no satisfaction in walking through an overly easy game. How do you keep things in balance?
NT: Endless play testing! Play testing is a huge part of game development for us, and taking time to iterate over the game to tweak the balance of it is what we believe makes the best games. With Mr. Robot we also ran a fairly long beta test, which was a new experience for us but was incredibly fruitful. When you’ve been playing a game for so long, you sometimes miss the obvious and feedback from the beta testers was invaluable.
PALGN: How do you go about designing an area in Mr. Robot? Some of them are so fiendishly convoluted that it must take ages.
NT: We actually ship the editor with the game so it’s possible to see exactly how we put it together. There’s already five user created adventures, and they can be automatically downloaded and played just by clicking a button in the front end. The editor uses a building block system, so it’s a lot easier to build rooms than a game like Unreal tournament; more like Lego than sculpting. The difficult part is writing scripts for the more complicated rooms. Much can be set up just using the editor, but the game can also be controlled using the lua scripting language so it’s possible to make it do things that weren’t initially part of it’s design, essentially coming up with completely unique gameplay. The drawback is that each room becomes like a mini-game program of it’s own, and so you can end up spending a lot of time debugging scripts. All of this functionality is available to end users, and we’ve already had people coming up with some pretty complicated scripting to introduce new gameplay.
The Mr. Robot editor in action.
PALGN: A lot of indie developers seem to hold back on the graphical side of their games but Mr. Robot doesn’t skimp at all on the eye candy. Why is this? Do you think this is necessary to get mainstream gamers interested in the game?
NT: At the end of the day, games are a visual medium and we’ve always tried to push that as much as we can with only one artist. With Mr. Robot, I did get a little carried away though – I have a love of robots in general so for me it was a dream project. I was in hog heaven designing and animating all the robot characters!
Having said that, what goes on in the game is always the most important thing and I don’t think that pursuing graphical excellence is a prerequisite for indies. Mainstream gamers are generally looking at the most cutting edge games that have huge art teams so competing with them directly would probably be pointless. There are always people out there who can see beyond limited graphics if there’s a good game behind it, so what goes on in the game should be a priority.
PALGN: Did you consider making Mr. Robot a fully 3D, rotatable game?
NT: The game engine is full 3D, so we always had the option to make something a bit closer to Mario64 with a following camera. However the room based nature of the game didn’t seem to warrant it and having a relatively fixed camera neatly sidesteps a lot of common problems in third person games. How many times have you played a game and the camera is annoying? It’s a tough thing to get right and takes a lot of programming time, so we decided it was best not to implement a potentially bad feature and instead spend that time improving other areas of the game. One unexpected bonus of the fixed camera has been that it’s actually easier for some people to get to grips with. We have heard reports of people who can’t play 3D Mario games, but had no trouble with Mr. Robot!
PALGN: Do you think there’s a big market for the kind of retro-flavoured gaming offered by MoonPod?
NT: I don’t think it’s ‘retro’ that people respond to so much. I think it’s more that our games are something you can’t get anywhere else. There are definitely people out there actively searching for games that offer them something unique. It’s a niche for sure, but the community for these games is bigger than marketing people realise (probably because the same community members aren’t the kind of people to waste time filling in marketing surveys!). There are certainly enough Moonpod fans out there for us to be in the position where we can keep releasing new games, which is all we could ever hope for.
PALGN: Are there any plans to expand Mr. Robot, or make a sequel?
NT: Right now we’ve made no decision about our next project. We have four games in prototype form, and we are also talking to a publisher about a much bigger project, so if that gets the green light it will occupy us for some time!
We do have plans for expanding the existing game in several ways however – we’ve just released an additional free adventure, and we are putting a lot of work into making the editor as user-friendly as we can. We are also providing comprehensive documentation and tutorials. Beyond that we’d really like to tackle a bigger expansion but we need to look at where that will fit into our development plans first.
Save Huey, the newly released free adventure for Mr. Robot.
PALGN: Mr. Robot feels like it would be perfectly suited to the Nintendo DS. Any plans to bring the game to any of the consoles/handhelds?
NT: We are actually approved Nintendo DS developers, but we’d need to get a publisher interested in the idea to go ahead with it. This is something we’d very much be open to, but we aren’t actively pursuing: you can waste months chasing after publishers and get nowhere. As a two-man team we just don’t have the time to look into it. Console download services are a similar risk for us. We want to work on them, but can we risk the development time when we may have to wait a number of months for a release slot? Making games for a PC means we can just sell the game ourselves. Still, I would love to be able to play Mr. Robot and Starscape on a console. I think we could make the Mr. Robot editor work with a pad; imagine sharing user built adventures through Live Arcade! Check this groundwork shot for StarscapeX in high def too:
StarscapeX.
PALGN: Indie game development is on the upswing and you could be seen to be at the forefront of some kind of “punk” gaming movement, though indie game development seems to be more about making good games and selling them, rather than making any political or cultural statement. Any thoughts on this?
NT: Yes you are totally right! Indie gaming is not like indie music where everyone is young and cool – we are all middle aged (although Mark has been known to smash up hotel rooms from time to time).
I can’t speak for others, but for Mark and myself going indie was purely about freedom of expression. Even though you become limited in manpower, you have the freedom to choose projects you want to make. Starscape and Mr. Robot are games that would never see the light of day under a mainstream studio system, and yet these are the types of games we want to make. Marketing people stood in our way so went indie!
PALGN: Old C64 classics Head Over Heels and Paradroid seem to be big influences on Mr. Robot – are there any other golden oldies that you’d like to revisit in upcoming games?
NT: Both Mark and I over the years found there were a few games we kept coming back to which could often be more fun than the latest and greatest of first person shooters. I’m currently anticipating the remake of Speedball 2, which was one of my favourite games on the Amiga. Out of all the games we have played over the years, Elite and its sequels are the ones we are the most fond of and the space trading genre is one we would dearly love to have a crack at. Space trading games don’t seem to be very popular any more, but we think it’s the kind of game our audience would enjoy (as we very much do). Sadly they are a lot of effort to develop and are beyond our current means – we need to hire more staff!
PALGN: Are there any releases by other companies that you’re particularly keen on, or wish you’d made?
NT: Yes, we wish we’d made any game that earned millions!. From indie games, we really liked Oasis last year, and we are big fans of PomPom’s games, especially Space Tripper. Currently Mark is playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and I’m playing Mr Driller.
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Many thanks to Nick for taking the time to chat with us. Check back on Tuesday for our review of Mr. Robot.
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