Mode 7 Interviews
Interviews of Co-founders Ian Hardingham and Paul Taylor on Frozen Synapse, Determinance and independent game development.
© respective authors
Frozen Synapse was really simply meant as a strategy game where every decision you make is meaningful, and where the mechanics are not obfuscated.
People are willing to pay for something that delivers on a very specific promise and fills a specific need; higher-priced games can work in the indie space, especially as the majority of units are sold during discount periods.
Our attempt at a “high price; minimal bullshit” play with Frozen Synapse was largely successful; I feel like we under-delivered on both our server provision and our speed of updating post launch, but all-in-all we still brought players a huge amount of content for the price they paid.
The big way we're doing this is with cross-platform multiplayer - there will be no segregation of the community and everyone will be able to play together. We're currently planning on using our own server software, which is a version of what we're using for the PC version.
We are also thinking about new units, but we are really aware that new units are such a massive issue in a multiplayer game and really change balance, making the game really different. So we're going to approach that seriously and have a beta community around that. I'm a big Starcraft 2 player and the stuff that Blizzard are doing is fundamentally changing some things about the game and what classes of units they choose to introduce are really intriguing to see where it goes. And that level of detail terrifies me. But there are things we can do that modulate the gameplay rather than break it.
They set out from the beginning to create a turn based strategy game with gameplay derived from older email based multiplayer gaming in order to enable asynchronous gameplay.
The team was completely surprised to find that players preferred to play by taking concurrent turns, and this changed many of their expectations regarding the game.
FS is an interesting one because it’s a game that obsesses people for a short time. It’s a very intense experience and people tend to play heavily for a couple of weeks, then drop off the scene only to come back a few months later. For that reason, I think there will always be a core of ‘FS’ players, but a greater group of casual players who play the odd match every month or so.
Music: as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to create a unique style for this game, so I took a lot of influences on board. I’m very into late 90′s electronica like Plaid and Boards of Canada; and I’m a fan of pretty much every genre of dance music, so all of that came in. I also love games composers like Jesper Kyd: he’s someone who is very good at melding different styles together.
The game started with a basic 2D prototype that was then refined until we had the mechanics working. After that, we concepted the art and started to get some of the actual rendering system in place.
The art and gameplay then evolved together until we had a multiplayer prototype, which we fleshed out into a beta and released. We then spent the next year tweaking that and working on the single player side of teh game.
In terms of keeping the older players engaged, we’re just about to release a patch which has a lot of fixes in it. We’re really serious about fixing those problems that people have and trying to get everyone the best experience possible. Centralising the servers again was something we did along those lines.
Yeah, we’re very keen on not dumping things. One thing that we said is that we’ll always keep servers running, as long as we’re in business, and if we go out of business we’ll open-source the server so someone else can run it. We’re doing this because we want to make games, not because we want to make piles and piles of money - although we do want to be commercially successful. There’s definitely a tension between those two things in the indie games scene in general, but it’s so important for us that our games persist, and we’ll take any steps we can to make sure that happens.
Well, I’m working on some new music literally right now – I have Ableton open in another window, it’s so exciting – for the first bit of Frozen Synapse DLC, which should be out in a couple of months. We’re doing a few things for that which should be good fun.
We’ve also started pre-production on our next game, which is very exciting. We’ve partnered with an amazing artist for this one and I think it’s going to take what we’re doing to the proverbial next level.
Oh, and the second _ensnare_ album should be out later this year as well! Larks!
I think it's a fairly unique kind of multiplayer gameplay that's quite low pressure and gently paced – you can play it while watching TV and that's one reason that a lot of people come back to the game if they stop playing for a while.
I think people forget just how much a simple mechanical change – like removing health bars and introducing something like our time-to-aim system – can have… it really shifts the entire paradigm of a game. You end up with something totally different, that has a different feel.
I think you really nailed it there: we wanted to do something different. There aren’t many modern fully-fledged tactical games like this, but if you throw a stone you’ll hit an FPS.
We really wanted to make a simultaneous-turn-based game because we feel that’s an area of gaming that’s under-explored. A lot of turn-based games are really dry, and real-time games rely a lot on actions-per-minute or twitch-type reflexes; simultaneous-turn-based design solves those problems.
The idea for Frozen Synapse first emerged when Ian was playing a lot of Laser Squad Nemesis. He wanted to develop a game that distilled the tactical elements into something a bit more immediate.
Originally, the game was planned as a 2D pixel-art Nintendo DS game, so yes, it was quite different!
We were really sure that it should be there, but like all of these things you get to a point where you think, “Can we really do that?” For us, that was really early on, way before the beta. When the beta came out, a couple of people said to me, “Ooh, it’s going to be tough doing SP as well – you’ve bitten off more than you can chew”, but by that point I knew it was going to happen – we were completely committed. The idea was always to get the mechanics fleshed out in MP first and then use those mechanics to tell a story..
Everyone says, “Oh, we have a fantastic community”, but we really have a fantastic community. They are just endlessly supportive and helpful. Even the trolling is good natured! So that was just a huge victory. We always wanted to base our games around providing features for a really die-hard group of fans and players and I hope they’re happy with how we’ve performed.
It’s really nice to get mails like, “You guys listen to your community more than any other devs” and I do get a lot of them so I hope that means we’ve done it right.
I think that you get a lot of credit of from people who look at your beta game and kind of ignore a lot of problems that they have with it because it’s a beta. Even though those aren’t necessarily problems that you were planning on fixing… It’s really important for us to find out what those are, so I really push people on forums – not to give us their wish lists but what they almost implicitly expected to fix, because those are the things that will damage us. If people say “yeah, I loved the beta, but they should have done x, y and z” – that’s what they need to fix.
With a simultaneous-turn-based game, when you’re watching your turn back, it has to be exciting. We went for ths abstract aesthetic to help build up the atmosphere, to make you feel like you’re a real tactical commander, but also we wanted to make sure the action was exciting and dynamic. So yes, you very much have those two aspects to contend with simultaneously.
It's the ultimate tactical game! We wanted to make a simultaneous-turn-based game where you pit two randomly-selected squads against each other; instead of choosing your own units and loadouts, you're coping with the “hand” you've been dealt. So many strategy games are based around the turgid drudge of memorising tech trees or trying to pen your opponent into some kind of pre-conceived situation: our game is about mental agility and reacting to your opponent.
Frozen Synapse is about having the most fascinating mental battle between two people you can imagine. It’s about being different every single time you play. It’s about taking as long or as little a time as you feel like playing a game for.
When I first had the idea for Determinance in 2003 it was like a diamond encased in mud and rock. We spent the last three years trying to expose the diamond by haphazardly cutting chunks, but the convoluted development is a huge part of what Determinance is today. I'd like to say we made one mistake and we should have prototyped right at the beginning (instead of plunging straight into full production), but I don't think we would have come out with what we have now if we'd done that. In fact, we might well have given up. Only with the huge investment of time already in the 'broken' Determinance did we have the motivation to fix it.