Developing an Indie MMO

Ted of Digital Flux Entertainment discusses his work on Epic Frontiers

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-digital-frontiers-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Ted: Hi, how you doing? Ted Southard from Digital Flux Entertainment. I’m working on a game called Epic Frontiers, and I’m here to do the interview.

Interviewer: So, this Epic Frontiers is an MMO then? What inspired you to do it, and why do you feel there is a need for another MMO?

Ted: Well, there’s always room for one more.

Interviewer: There is, there is.

Ted: Well, the real reason is, you know, I play a lot of MMOs myself. And as you play the MMOs, you sort of look at them and you say, “Well, wouldn’t it be nice if…”, and there was enough of that going on in my mind that I just decided to get down one day and create the kind of MMO that I would enjoy playing. I believe a lot of other people would enjoy playing as well.

Interviewer: So, walk me through that process. Did you just write down a design document and did you get your friends together and brainstorm ideas? What happened?

Ted: Well, it’s quite a long process. It’s a very difficult and complicated thing to create an MMO, but basically it does involve you sitting down and saying, you know, what kind of experience do you want the player to have in the MMO, and then where is this experience going to take place?

From there you develop your game play mechanics, how you want that to be developed. At the same time you have to start molding the world, and as you do that the two sort of feed off of each other and you get a list of all the tasks that you need to do, all of the code that you’ll need to create, features, art assets. Writing gets developed from there.

I would say that yes, you do get together with a group of your friends, but for the sake of anybody who is considering creating an MMO, I would say don’t do that first and make sure you have a lot of the design nailed down in your head before you go to anybody else. But, basically, that is the process of sort of incrementally building up to all the tasks that you need to accomplish.

Interviewer: To be clear, this is in pre-production phase, or is this in production phase now? What’s the status of the MMO?

Ted: We’re sort of between phases. We’re moving out of pre-production phase and into production phase. So, we’re ramping up art staff. We’re looking for some writers and torque coders.

Interviewer: And you guys have a dev blog and videos. How did you… Do you have a following then, keeping up with the MMO and giving you feedback and stuff like that?

Ted: Actually, we do. We have a good number of hits on the website. We have a development blog that I try to keep updated as much as I can when I don’t have my head in the code or the art work or anything.

We post a lot of our testing videos on YouTube just to keep everybody appraised of where we’re at with things so they get a sense of, you know, how the MMO is built.

Interviewer: You talked about some innovative mechanics in your MMO. Can you discuss them more?

Ted: Sure. One of the more unique aspects of the MMO is we have a NPC conversation system, and I’m sure everybody is familiar with conversation systems, such as Interactive Fiction where you, basically, type in the sentence that you want the computer to interpret. You’re probably well versed in the mass effect type of dialogue that many use that are out there. This is halfway between it. You don’t have to type out the entire sentence.

What you do is you type in a key word, and then there’s different dialogue operators for who, what, when, how, why elaborations on it, and you sort of use those to navigate through the dialogue trees. And the dialogue trees are tied into a personality trait based AI that gives the NPCs a little more life, a little more believability, and it opens the door to missions, such as political intrigue, mysteries, things like that where you really need to talk to a NPC back and forth.

It also gives a lot of the quest giving NPCs a little bit more believability because you get to ask them questions. It’s more of a conversation flowing back and forth instead of a wall of text that comes flying at you.

Interviewer: Some other MMOs focus on social context so that players in the games can interact with each other. Do you think there really is a need for deep NPC text and dialogue?

Ted: I think there is. Part of the problem with MMOs, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way, is that, you know, it’s great that you’re social with the players and we’re definitely looking to put a lot of social features into the game, fully supporting guilds, social networking, front end on the web facing part of the game. But within the game you don’t want the NPC to just be like a vending machine for quests. You do want to develop a relationship with the world that you’re in, and that’s what really makes a great experience when you feel like you’re really part of the world and you interact with it.

Interviewer: Even part of a community. Is it really the world or are you part of a community that you feel is compelling that MMO players like?

Ted: Well, there’s no reason why the world can’t be part of the community. You have the NPCs within your faction. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to go up to them and develop a very good relationship with them. As it stands in a lot of the MMOs now, you go up to them, and they don’t remember you from the last time that they saw you. You can never really develop that into anything.

With Epic Frontiers you can go, you can develop the relationships not just with the NPCs of your own faction, but you can develop relationships with NPCs of other factions. And there’s implications at higher levels than just PVP or PVE for that, that are built into the game. It’s a very unique dynamic that I think everybody is going to enjoy.

Interviewer: For your technology, what did you decide to use? You know, you’re building this on top of another engine. What engine did you use, and why did you go with that decision versus the other potential opportunities that you could have used?

Ted: Well, we decided to go with the Torque game engine. That’s by Garage Games for two reasons, a) it’s a very powerful engine and b) it’s a very powerful engine for the amount of money that you spend on it. It’s very affordable. You get source code access, and it does just about everything that we want.

Garage Games has an excellent developer community where, if I ever run into a problem, I can get questions answered pretty quickly, and they’ve helped me learn and grow in this. It’s a great community of developers. It’s helped me grow my game. I owe a lot of our progress to a lot of the people that are actually not directly involved in the game itself.

Interviewer: Speaking of directly involved in the game, how are you going to get other developers and artists and other people involved in the game, given your low budget that you have right now? What kind of model are you going to use, and is it going to be strictly volunteer work or what?

Ted: Well, what we’re doing is it’s more of a sweat equity model whereas anybody who comes in that’s accepted to the team, you track your hours and you have an hourly rate. And should the game go live and create revenue, we simply pay you back for the money that you worked. It’s the fair thing to do, and we like the whole integrity thing.

I do a lot of recruiting, especially out when I’m at the conferences like this. I understand a lot of people want to go out there get paid for the work that they do. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We should all get paid for the work that we do; however, there’s a lot of people out there who are looking to break into the game industry. And they’re very talented, and they just don’t have a job right now. Or some people do have a job, and they have spare time that they would like to dedicate to a project that they feel passionate about.

We just tell them: take a look at the website, take a look at the game. We’ll send you documentation on it. If you like what you see, you can come aboard. We’re a very good band of people. There’s no egos or anything like that. We try to collaborate on everything, and we just focus on getting things done.

Interviewer: What are some of the other innovative things that you’re adding to this MMO because it seems like you’re a dissatisfied MMO player to some extent and you wanted to address those dissatisfactions with this MMO?

Ted: I don’t know about that. You can say dissatisfied at one point. I would like to say nostalgic.

Interviewer: OK.

Ted: I would like to build a MMO like Alta Online was trying to be. The older MMOs had the technology limitations that they couldn’t put in place, the AI and the features that we can do today. A lot of the MMOs they do what they do, and that’s what fine. They have their place, but I think there’s a gaping hole in the marketplace for what we’re doing. And we’re going to try our best to fill it.

Interviewer: Any suggestions then for other indie game developers who want to make their own MMO, things that you’ve learned, things that you’ve learned about dealing with other people to get them to work on your project, stuff like that?

Ted: Yeah, MMO development is like a shallow pool. If you dive in head first, you’re going to get hurt. What I would suggest is develop your idea on your own. People have a tendency, and I’ve seen it happen a few times, and a lot of good ideas by indie developers that otherwise would have been successful, have been squashed by this.

I would say, develop your idea on your own, develop a skill set. Being an idea guy is good, but you have to have other skills. Learn how to program. Learn how to do art, preferably both. Be a jack of all trades so you can interface with everybody on the team.

Interviewer: Where can people find out more information about the game?

Ted: Well, we have our website at DigitalFlux.com, and we also have the website that’s dedicated to the game itself which is EpicFrontiers.DigitalFlux.com. Come by, check it out. We have development blogs. We update every once in a while with concept art, visualization shots and video of the game development process as it’s happening just so people can see how we’re doing everything. We’re also updating with lots of content so you have a lot of good ideas on what goes on in the game world itself.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.