Interview – Mode 7 Games and Frozen Synapse
Today we welcome another new contributor to Newbreview.com. Eddie “LavalampBamboo” Johnston kicks off with an interview with Mode 7 games, so I’ll hand off to him right now - ed
Mode 7 Games are a small indie developer based in Oxfordshire, and are currently working on their latest game, Frozen Synapse. I caught up with the guys to find out what it’s like to develop games in the UK, and how their current game is shaping up.
LavalampBamboo: Your first game was Determinance, a third person sword-fighting game. What inspired you to create this and what did you learn from making it?
IAN: I love games and I wanted to make one. I’d always liked the idea of a freeform fighting game and then I fell in love with Tribes 2 so I added flying to the mix. I can’t even begin to list the things I learnt making it… that’s like asking me what I learnt at University. It’s not just the standard stuff – the specifics of coding and managing – but it’s also growing as a person. Determinance was a second undergraduate degree for me.
PAUL: I had never been involved with making a game before, or even with any kind of software development project, so I learned exactly what needs to happen to create something! As I have production role, it’s good that I now have a basic handle on what the hell is happening.
More importantly, I learned some absolutely vital lessons about game marketing – specifically that you need to actually do some!
LavalampBamboo: As an indie developer working in the UK, how would describe your experience within the games industry?
PAUL: We’re very much on the fringes of the games industry proper in this country: if I go to Develop it’s not like I know 80% of the people there. I like the fact that as an indie, it doesn’t really matter where you’re based – everything is determined simply by the strengths of your game and your marketing.
I have to say, I think we’ve had better experiences with the gaming UK press than we have with other members of the UK industry itself. Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing and brilliantly nice people out there who have been very helpful to us, but there are also a lot of boring self-interested types too: that’s the nature of any media or entertainment industry.
IAN: Yeah, I spend very little time thinking about “our place in the industry”. Being an indie is about making your game and hoping lots of people like it. Industry events seem to be more about working in a large company than they do about games. I don’t work in a large company, so it all goes above my head. Or below my feet. One of those.
LavalampBamboo: Some readers might not be aware of Frozen Synapse, so let’s imagine I’m not either. Tell me about the game.
PAUL: Frozen Synapse is a sci-fi strategy game, which is comprised of short matches that can be played very quickly. You can move your units anywhere, coordinate attacks and use cover: it focuses on raw tactics rather than unit management.
You know that bit in the movie where a SWAT team storm a building and there’s a guy outside in a truck looking at a tactical display and giving them orders? We want you to feel like that guy. Except you’re not in a truck. There are no trucks. Trucks are not in the remit.
It’s the indie game which will see us make our first real mark on gaming. It’s aesthetically very strong: we’ve been having great comments about our graphics from an early stage, and people seem to be excited about it, which is very gratifying.
IAN: 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.
LavalampBamboo: You describe FS as “the ultimate strategy game”, with games being both “bite-size” and “hardcore”. How did this unique take on the genre evolve?
IAN: It started by me and a mate playing a lot of Laser Squad Nemesis on holiday in France. I loved the core concept of “Simultaneous Turn Based”, but hated how long games would take; how an early mistake could ruin the entire game; and how the games always started in the same way. Then I played a lot of the STB mode of Chaos League, which was fast and interesting but wasn’t, in the end, all that deep. Those two games kind of created an idea for a game in me, which grew over years, and finally became Frozen Synapse.
PAUL: Again, we wanted there to be modes where you can play super-quickly. There’s a genius mode that Ian came up with called Secure, where you basically bid on defending an area of territory. Matches are over quickly but can still have really interesting twists, and as soon as you’ve played one, you want to play another.
LavalampBamboo: FS uses an interesting art style throughout. Can you talk about how this came about, and what or who influenced it?
PAUL: I did the art direction for this game, but we used some very talented freelance artists to get the look we have now. Originally, the game was going to be from a “side-top” perspective (Canner Fodder-style!), but as things developed we knew it had to be top-down. Top-down looks rubbish with anything other than very abstract graphics, so we set about trying to find an “interface-style” look which would be acceptable.
I was influenced by the film and TV graphics work of Mark Coleran, who used to do almost all of the computer interfaces you see in the background of movies. Aside from that, things like Tron and Ghost in the Shell. Actually, the Mission Impossible movies got mentioned a lot – there’s bits in all of them where you see an interface with guys moving through a building, so that was something that came up.
At the moment, I’m looking around at other games to see what they’re doing with things like lighting and explosion effects – there’s some really creative stuff out there. It’s old hat now, but I still love the way Geometry Wars looks, so don’t be surprised if you see some coloured wireframe type stuff creeping in later down the road.
LavalampBamboo: FS is a PC title, but did you ever consider any other platforms for the game, either consoles or handhelds?
PAUL: We actually started out with Frozen Synapse as a Nintendo DS title, but we realised that it definitely needed to be developed on PC first, just from a creative standpoint. It would have been an XBLA Indie Game too, but that’s now completely unviable because of the pricing structure. Once the game is ready to demo to publishers I will definitely be looking for options on all the other platforms: it would still work VERY well as a handheld game.
LavalampBamboo: Of what I’ve heard so far, the music in the game is very fitting, and sounds great. Could you describe the creative process behind the music, as well as how you make it suit the game?
PAUL: Thank you! I started out by playing the game and working on a palette of sounds I thought would be appropriate: we wanted a very polished sound, but I also wanted to try and avoid film soundtrack-style cliches.
My concept was “high-tech meets low-tech”, so I have things like very complex layered synthesizer patches rubbing up against really nasty, dirty samples I recorded with a Gameboy using LSDJ and a GBA running Nanoloop. I also wanted to get a bit of glitchy stuff in there, so there’s lots of lo-fi samples of me slamming doors, hitting pots and pans: all the “found sound” stereotypes! I love the idea of the musicality of data and computers – I’ve always found that very romantic – so, I always go for quite emotive melodies combined with very obviously digital sounds.
It’s really, really, really important to me that I can prove you don’t need a million dollars and a huge library of custom-recorded string articulations to create an amazing soundtrack. For those guys doing that, that’s brilliant, but I want to show that, while you need compositional and sound engineering abilities, it’s really all about the effort you’re able to put in.
In terms of making it work with the game, I’m ready to do anything that needs to happen – we’re still working on it.
LavalampBamboo: What kind of promotion will you be doing for the game? Any upcoming events?
PAUL: We already do a weekly podcast called Visiting the Village, which is a discussion of the week’s weirder gaming news, and also looks at indie games quite a lot. That’s ongoing and is helping to bring people to our site – http://www.visitingthevillage.com . Anyone interested in us should check that out. There’s also bi-weekly blogs on our ModDB page http://www.moddb.com/games/frozen-synapse/.
We’ll be kicking off our marketing proper with a big event at Gamecity in Nottingham at the end of this month: we’ve set up an event to challenge the general public to beat us at the game, and we’ve got some immense prizes to give away. There should hopefully be videos, podcasts and blogs from that, so people who aren’t going will get a flavour of it. It’s on Friday 30th, 10am-5pm in the Market Square, if you’re in the area.
After that, we’ll be working towards our first proper trailer and I’ll be hitting up every single news site I can possibly find with that.
That should start to build a community around the game, and from there we’ll continue putting out updates as we work towards release. I’ll be instituting a big PR campaign to get previews as widely as we can, then possibly a beta (we’re still undecided about that) and onwards through the organisational nightmare that is the review phase.
Finally, we do plan to advertise the game online when it’s ready to release – we’re taking advice about that from other indies and planning out our strategy right now. I want to get a lot of video content up there for this game – we’d really love to have a feature which allows you to export game clips to YouTube (I’m only making this public so that I can pressure Ian into actually coding it)!
As I mentioned before, we didn’t put the marketing effort in ourselves for Determinance for a variety of reasons. This game will be different: I want it to be one of the best-promoted indie games of all time
LavalampBamboo: When will Synapse be released, and how will we be able to get our hands on it?
PAUL: I’m not going to make a commitment on this yet: we hope early-ish next year. You will definitely be able to buy it from us direct via http://www.frozensynapse.com . We’re also going to be talking to all the major online distributors if we can bend their ears! As far as retail goes, it’s something we’re looking at: if it’s viable I would love to get the game to worldwide retail, but for a small indie studio that’s all about finding reliable partners.
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You can find out more about Frozen Synapse at www.mode7games.com, or alternatively visit http://www.moddb.com/games/frozen-synapse
You can also tune into “Visiting The Village”, Paul and Ian’s weekly show which looks at some of the quirkier game news stories, and also how the game development is coming along. Check it out at www.visitingthevillage.com .
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Now this sound like a title that has a ton of potential!
I’d like to check this out on the PSN if it ever makes it!
Sound like a brilliant game. Someone should pass their details on to someone like Gamerdork…have them go on and pimp their game because it sounds like it’s a game that deserves some massive exposure.