This interview is so jam packed with information, that it's been split up with some headings to make it easier to find any specific information you might be looking for, but we recommend reading the whole thing anyway!
State of the Game/Upcoming Features
Exudes Excellence(ExE): First of all, I want to thank both of you for taking the time to do this interview. It really means a lot to us to be able to do something like this, despite being a small and upstart site. Now, both of us are actually relatively new players to the game, (Though we did play it during the beta, which was how we knew we wanted to feature it on ExE) I think the first thing that really popped out to us was the quality of the community in the game. Despite being a an entirely PvP game (for now, plenty of questions about Adventure Mode, don't worry) it's so rare to find any abusive or disruptive players, it seems like everyone is just incredibly nice and helpful. Are there any factors that you guys think helps contribute to this?
Howard Tsao (HT): We are definitely fortunately to have a great community. Even though it is still pretty small, we are really proud of the players we have.
Eric Chung(EC): The game mechanics themselves promote teamwork. It's in the players' interests to pay attention to each other and not be hostile. Things will quickly go sour if people don't cooperate. I think that's the most important part.
HT: I think there are a few things that we did that seemed to have helped. Firstly, we have a community ambassador program. It started at the suggestion of some players, and we adopted it. It gave players who wanted to be more involved a voice and a more significant role in game as a helper. They also volunteered to organize a lot of community events, such as tournaments, scrimmages, training days, etc. And they also help moderate our forums and in game chat, etc. And with in game features, we noticed players who want to teach so we just added a commendation system, which allows players to give people that show good sportsmanship and are helpful in game a thumb up
EC: Yes, additional features were added in to further support what was being instilled on a systemic level. Just reinforcing what the core mechanics are already doing on their own. It's pretty fantastic, really.
ExE: It definitely all does seem to help, even other people that I've played with have made comments about how friendly and helpful the community is, and how almost strange it feels, because it's so far from the animosity of other competitive games. It's really great to hear that even more steps are being taken to promote that.
EC: Yeah it all comes down to the kind of teamwork we offer. Traditional FPS may say they have teamwork but at the end of the day your squad could win and you not have any kills. It was that sniper on your team who won. Not the team. When you win in Guns Online, it was your team and it was your crew that put it all together.
HT: Another set of things we are doing is to better teach new players the game. For veteran players, they really just need the new players to learn a few basic things and they can crew together. And the veteran players, because it is so team oriented, don't mind directing the combat, but we are trying to do more to get new players up to speed with the update that we're rolling out this week
EC: What Howard means is veteran players teaching newbies.
HT: There will be more extensive tutorial, and a match that is just for level 1 and 2 players that community ambassadors can go in and teach.
ExE: That's really great to hear. I had noticed that there is a game manual, but even after reading that, it was still fairly confusing as to what I had to do when I was playing. It took me a few matches to figure things out myself, and I even still don't understand everything fully. It really seems like you guys are doing a lot of listening to what community members are saying, and working on getting that stuff worked on and implemented.
HT: Yeah exactly, and this is exactly what we thought we needed to do
ExE: Speaking of still trying to learn things, I noticed while playing, that while Team Deathmatch certainly seems the be the most prevalent game type in skirmish, there are other modes available that newer players might not know about (myself included). One of them being King of the Hill, which is pretty self explanatory, and I have seen played every so often, but what are the other modes?
EC: There's Team Deathmatch, King of the Hill, and Capture Points like Arathi Basin in WoW.
HT: And Crazy King!
EC: Ah yes! Crazy King!
HT: I lose on it all the time, but I love it, hahaha
EC: One of the reasons why some game modes aren't played as frequently is the number of players required to play some of those. E.g. currently our only KotH map is 3v3. We're releasing a 2v2 KotH in a ruined city tomorrow. Remember, 3v3 is actually 24 players. So that can be hard. CP has a 3v3 and 4v4, CK has a 3v3. Expect more CP and CK soon, with fewer players required :)
HT: I think with deathmatch, it is also the most straightforward match type so it's easier for newer players to try, but we definitely see the more experienced players playing a variety of match types
Adventure Mode
ExE: Definitely agree with that. It's something that everybody knows, and is easy to just jump in to.Now, speaking of game modes, let's jump right in to Adventure Mode. You guys put up a Kickstarter project for it, and it's initial goal was hit pretty quickly. What can you tell us about Adventure Mode? What are the teams thoughts on it?
EC: We had a lot of ideas when we started working on Guns of Icarus but a lot of them, well, we simply couldn't fit them all together in one game or work on something for several years without putting a game out. It's definitely got a lot of qualities that MMO's do, but we like to call Adventure Mode MMO-like. MMORPG is a loaded term and there are a lot of expectations that come along with it. From what we described how our economy and travel will work, a lot of players are already noting similar mechanics in other games that served as loose inspiration for us like Puzzle Pirates and Sid Meier's Pirates! The idea of your ship as a vehicle and tool for moving trade goods through the world where each mission you take will affect the world in some way or another. And of course, while you're on a mission, the airship-to-airship combat will still be a core part of gameplay. You interact with the world through and with your airship.
ExE: So this is actually something you've been wanting to do for a while then? Has the thought of getting this part of the project off the ground (pun intended ) been around since the beginning? Or did it sort of develop into something you wanted to do eventually during the process?
HT: Yeah, it's been a dream of ours since pretty early on but we didn't really have anywhere close to the resources that we needed to pull this off and it's something that fans thought would be cool, so we had to take an incremental approach and build this a step at a time.
EC: And of course, whenever you brainstorm something you come up with all kinds of ridiculous things. This is one of those ridiculous things, but yeah how can we approach it? One step at a time.
ExE: Awesome, it's definitely something I'm already looking forward to, even with only a little bit of experience in GoIO. One thing we're really curious about, because the differences and overall improvements between the original Guns of Icarus and Guns of Icarus Online are so astonishing, In your opinion, what will the major differences, apart from the obvious gameplay changes, be from Skirmish to Adventure mode, and just how drastic is it?
EC: All the core mechanics will remain more or less the same. The biggest change however is what we're adding on top of everything that you see in Skirmish. Mainly, the ability to fly your airship with a purpose other than blowing people up.
HT: And you'll still have the choice to play Skirmish or Adventure, so Adventure Mode will not replace Skirmish.
EC: You'll still be blowing other airships outs of the sky but you'll be doing it to bring precious foodstuffs to neighboring towns that are starving... or raiding other towns. Also, since Adventure Mode is an online persistent world with MMO-like quality, we want to preserve the common practice of "playing alone together" that happens in almost all MMORPG's. You will be able to play the game by yourself without the need to find a crew. For example, you can choose to play as a gunner or engineer and get a ship that is on rails. This will be similar to the original Guns. So playing by yourself will be a valid way to explore what we have to offer in Adventure Mode. We'll make sure to offer a good subset of the game to be playable in this manner.
ExE: That's really exciting to hear, knowing that you can go solo, and not have to worry about flying the ship if you don't want to. There is a lot of information about the faction system and how player actions affect the relations between rival and friendly factions. How much of this system is part of the Econo-Political system (one of the kickstarter stretch goals) and how much will be inherently part of Adventure mode as it is confirmed at this stage?
EC: This is a pretty tough question to answer. The way I would put it is this: The stage that the KS is in right now covers Co-Op functionality. This includes the single player type stuff I mentioned as well as crewing up with friends and fighting AI enemies like Left 4 Dead. The role that the faction stuff can play into at this stage can be many... as far as implementation goes we can start skinning various game modes to represent faction goals and characteristics. But the real meat of being able to really join a faction and affect a "world" through your faction really lies in the Econo-Political section. You can look at it by how many systems we can to add to Skirmish and what system will lead to the next.
HT: With getting to the full Adventure Mode, we'll use whatever we have and can muster to get there, regardless of how much we ended up raising on Kickstarter. It may take longer, I might have to cater to publishers again, which i really don't want to do, hahaha. But we'll keep pushing, and we've gotten this far so far, so I like our chances.
ExE: Well, that answers my next question, I was going to ask if there would be plans to try and incorporate some of the econo-political features eventually even if the stretch goals aren't reached. Though hopefully it will.
EC: In order to get a thriving and dynamic economy going and the Econo-Political System, we thought that AI System needed to come first. While it's AI first and Econo-Political second, there will inevitably be some bleeding that will occur back and forth. As far as incorporating econo-political features, we will definitely try to think of something. At the end of the day, an economy can be represented through a series of dynamic spreadsheets... but do we really want to do that? Of course we'd like it to be a little more immersive than that.
Muse Games
ExE: Now, we've got just one last question or two. I wanted to ask about Muse games as a whole. You guys are based out of New York, one thing that I know a at least a few gamers I know like to learn about a studio, is how large is your team?
HT: we have 8 fulltimers, and we have a network of contractors and interns that we work with regularly. There are not that many studios here in NYC
ExE: There really aren't many studios in the North East at all. I (TastyBacon) live in Connecticut, and it's somewhat disheartening that the majority of US studios are out on the west coast, so it's awesome to finally see the east coast getting a little bit of developer love.
HT: Boston has a pretty happening indie scene actually, and NYC has gotten a lot better. It's still small, but it's happening.
ExE: Yeah, both have really picked up recently, which is exciting. Especially the Indie scene. I was just at PAX East and they had a large section on the floor dedicated to indie games, which you guys were a part of.
EC: Yeah there were a ton of people with us at the Indie Megabooth. So many that we didn't get to meet everyone. It's bonkers
ExE: Okay, last question I want to ask, You guys had another title that got kickstarted, CreaVures. Is there anything else the studio is working on? Or is Adventure Mode really your sole focus at the moment, which would not be surprising in the least after learning that you're such a small team.
HT: Oh great question! We had a couple of things that we were experimenting with, concepting and prototyping, but recently it's been all GoIO. One was an over the shoulder camera fighting game with.... hamsters, lol
ExE: lol, that certainly sounds interesting, to say the least.
HT: It's more of a beat'em up actually, and the other one that a couple of us were jamming was this concept with chinese calligraphy and landscape painting about a traveller's journey, but that's also really early.
EC: You get tired of looking at the same stuff sometimes. Naturally, the opposite of airships are hamsters. Duh.
ExE: haha
HT: hahahahaha Eric and our animator Derek are both like martial arts masters or something, so they did some choreography, and derek animated them... on hamsters. LOL! It's pretty cool actually.
ExE: Well, thank you again to both of you for doing this interview, and we wish you the best of luck with Adventure Mode, and all of the studio's future projects!
Interview conducted via Skype between Greg Iezzi (TastyBacon) representing Exudes Excellence, and Howard Tsao and Eric Chung representing Muse Games. Some minor editing for grammatical errors, continuity, and removal of unnecessary messages. Very minimal amount of changes.
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