Interview with WhiteMoon Dreams -- Iron Agenda

[saultydog]

Friday evening at Gen Con, a couple of us from Iron Agenda sat down with Kevin and Scott to talk about the demo, the company, and game creation in general. If you have a spare hour and fifteen minutes, take a listen!

http://www.ironagenda.com/2010/08/13/episode-097-whitemoon-dreams-interview-at-gencon-2010/

Thanks to Kevin and Scott for spending a couple of hours with us and we look forward to seeing more down the road.

Josh

[ATC 1982]

Way to go with the podcast

[Ankehl]

Summary summary summary!

[Skyydragonn]

Summary summary summary!yes please. I simply don't have an hour and a half to listen to an interview unfortunately :(
Much less a child that'll let me listen for that long lol

[saultydog]

OK, I listened to the episode and made some running notes as it was playing. Some of what you see below is verbatim from the show, but most of it is paraphrased. Please don't treat any of it as quotes from Scott and Kevin. There are a lot of little things I couldn't write down so if you do end up with an hour to spare you might want to listen to the episode. Hearing it straight from Kevin and Scott's mouths would be more meaningful, I'm sure.

This will have to come in two posts since it exceeds the max post size by over 5000 characters.

Part 1:

Scott introduces himself as the creative director of WhiteMoon Dreams
Kevin introduces himself as the director of the Warmachine game

Discussion about how busy the last year has been, especially the recent months.
Scott talks about how they can start making the game in ernest now that they have a good idea, visually as well as on paper, about what the game will be.
It is a gameplay proof of concept
A lot of the engineering heavy lifting is already done (animation, locomotion system, input, etc. is pretty well done)
AI is in its infancy (work really beings on it next month)

Most game developments go awry because they change direction and don't keep their eyes on the goal
"The first draft is always shit" -- Ernest Hemingway; the first draft shows you what to do and what not to do, but never confuse it for the final product
WMD is planning for lots of time to do it right, lots of time to polish it so that it won't just be good but great
More eyes see the product within days of its release than see it through its
development; design is all about reacting to what goes on
Testing and reacting, then getting other people involved; design is communication
Down the road, the designer is no longer a viable arbiter about whether the game is right
Need fresh eyes to jump in and run in the wrong direction because things weren't adequately communicated to the user

PP fanbase is rabid: what kind of steps will be taken to mitigate miscommunication between the game and players?
Tutorials of sorts, but the tutorials will be part of the game not a separate test level that takes you out of the game.
The game should teach you to play it organically, the player shouldn't know they're in a tutorial.

What kind of research did you do to get the details that the playerbase will scrutinize and criticize?
Varies based on what they're doing. Lots of research into the RPG books (world/character guide for architecture, etc.)
For characters, lots of sourcebook scrutiny (wm books, etc.). The PP guys sent all of their art, ortho diagrams they use for the miniatures, so that refined decisions can be made in terms of scale and construction. Lots of communication between Matt Wilson/artists and getting responses directly from them. Combo of lots of research and leveraging the expertise of the people who created the world.

Simple things like a character raising an arm causes problem due to the design of armor, etc. So if Vlad might chop off his own head when he swings his sword.

Modifications needed to be made but with the close watch of Privateer. Stryker's shoulder pads needed to be altered slightly so that the plate scales hinge into each other and slide into each other. You still see Stryker, but he has a full sense of movement. He still fits.

Demo on Friday morning: How did it go?
The room seemed to be hard to find at 9 AM. It went well, though. Throughout the day Kevin ran into people saying they watched it and thought it was amazing. Lots of genuine enthusiasm. WMD feels they communicated that they are serious about it. No haters which surprised Scott. There's almost always criticism about something as beloved as the IK.

Leaps and bounds since last year. After the first demo last year there were haters (at least, online) saying it came out too early, it won't happen, etc. What's your response?
Hata's gonna hate! They asked that morning for a show of hands about who didn't think it was going to happen. Maybe about 6 raised their hands.
Should they have believed it would have come this far?
Statistically, they should not have believed it considering how rough the game industry is. Most don't make it, there are so many risks. It takes all the aesthetic risks of the movie industry and adds to it a layer of technical risk where the skills may just not exist. The probability of success is low in general. WMD has a strong background and have been through this "crucible of pain" before.

At one point people were speculating on a forum that WMD was going out of business but then someone responded "but they're hiring tons of people". Kevin just responded "exactly". So they are expanding.

How does PP's desire to slowly leak out information affect you? WMD also wants to keep a constant level of interest. To keep the audience's expectations at a good level, they want to trickle out info rather than blast the community with a lot of info and then have nothing but silence. It's easy to show something too early so they want to wait until things ready to be shown.

It's easy for people to make snap decisions early based on incomplete info.

Last year's demo, you asked people to talk about the game and talk about their wants and expectations. A year later, what do you want out of the community now?
They watch the forums, but they don't jump in. They do watch for trends in what people are talking about, what's important to them. Going forward, they want pretty much more of the same. The demo now gives the audience a direction that the game is going in so they want us to keep our focus on that. No design by committee but it is important for them to know what people are looking for.

Hopefully the demo will stoke the fires of imagination and give people more ideas on what they think the game can be. If a gem comes by, they might pick it up and polish it up.

Will the site have a video of gameplay at some point? Kevin: as far as he knows they have footage of the game being played that can go on the site soon.

Obviously the tabletop game cannot / should not be exactly translated to the screen. What is on the tabletop that you love that won't be in the game?
That person-to-person interaction will be missing to a point. Mostly, though,
everything that makes the tabletop game special will have some sort of analog, some sort of spirit, in the video game. Not necessarily one-to-one, but focus will be there for example. But you probably won't be allocating individual focus points to your jacks. Upkeeping spells will detract from your focus, feats may be interpreted as a very powerful spell possibly affecting your focus level. Feats can be game changers, just like on the tabletop game.

Balance in the game is seriously considered, how much damage would a rifleman do to a jack, how much punishment should a fully loaded out warcaster be able to take, etc.

The existing tabletop game has a number system that helps in that regard, but can't be translated exactly to the video game. When in a first-person game random rolling of dice would not make it as fun. Perception of time is quite different between a turn based game and a realtime game. Certain effects cannot be directly translated.

This affects the game balance.
Any act of translation is an act of reauthoring. They need to focus on intentions rather than perfect translations.

Have you found any opportunities to pull in more fluff that a player might not have seen on the tabletop?
They talk a lot about the personalities and histories of the characters just to define a character's face, for example. There are a lot of interpretations on what things look like in the books so they had to go into the fluff to define Sorscha's single look, etc. She is frustrated and unhappy, lost her father at a young age, and so that helps to refine how she acts, walks, and so on. All these things form the basis for the character artist's work; they talk about "why" not "what". Why is this character the way they are? As they come to a shared understanding of that, they characters become fleshed out more strongly. Similar to an actor defining a character's past to inform their future decisions.

Animation is acting, the animators must understand the characters to do it correctly. Posture of hands, facial animations, they way they walk, scowls ingrained from a painful past, etc.

Voice acting: imperative that the eventual voices are perfect

We'll see characters out of the armor (and some Menites out of their masks) in some scenes. The characters need to feel human to the players. Many ways to tell all sorts of dialog with a character that doesn't say anything (if
the High Reclaimer were to be in the game, for example). Take the Metroid games, or Half Life games, for example. The voice acting in the demo was very minimal, Stryker/Sorscha had no lines. The trenchers were voiced by Scott in the demo.

Voice is a powerful thing, less is more when the main characters are the player's avatar in the game. The player should not be separated from the game by bad voice acting. The player should be allowed to project some things onto the main character.

It's essential to get that right, not to go crazy and write a movie in the middle of a game. Unskippable cinematic scenes that take the player out of the game == horrible.

[saultydog]

Part 2:

The demo takes place in Riversmet, 605. A lot they can't talk about or risk giving away the story. For the demo, there needed to be a reason for Stryker and Sorscha to meet. Riversmet was being obliterated by the Khadorans and set a good scene.

Riversmet was also a good spot to start out because it isn't the home of any one people. It is heavily influence by Cygnar and Khador as well as some Rhul. Lots of foundational work to determine what an IK city look like in general. The IK is not your standard swords and sorcery fantasy with generic stone huts, etc.

No mention of the Retribution of Scyrah. Should people infer anything from that regarding the timeline? The Retribution and mercs won't be a playable part of the game, it will concentrate on only the first four Prime factions. All they can say is that the game has a lot of potential to be successful and therefore no end to what can be included in the future. They can't tell us about the story they're building for us. But all things are possible in the future.

They agree that downloadable content with additions would be possible. But no one is served by throwing the kitchen sink at the players. Do it all right rather than do a lot wrong.
Warcasters cannot be made from scratch in the game, but there will be some level of customization specifically for the single-player game. Slow upgrades to weapons, etc. although no real mechanic has been determined. It won't be numbers-heavy.

For multi-player games, think of the customization as being more about creating your battle group rather than customizing the warcaster. Taking a certain complement of warjacks might make all the difference in a particular mission, for exmaple.
There will be a max size on the battlegroup, but the exact method for determining the battle group isn't nailed down yet. They do wish to incorporate some kind of point system since that lends itself as a good way to balance selection.

At the beginning of the episode I said we were the podcast that Plays. Forever. That is the creed of WhiteMoon Dreams. Please talk about that and the company's core philosophies as described on the website.

The company has been founded on a core set of philosophies: might sound trite, but they love everyone. If they see a company that needs a hand, they'll help them out. If there's something they can do better serve the art form that is games in general they will be there to help out. Some good karmic things have happened because of it. A german company needed some help with one of their employees here in the US before he could leave for Europe. They gave him some office space while he developed something
and he became part of the company essentially. That gave WMD a lead into another contract. The philosphy serves them faithfully.

They try to pursue the idea of not making games but making game creators. Similar to what Jack Welch did with General Electric for years. GE doesn't make microwaves ovens, they make leaders that get the products made (paraphrased). WMD directs from a standpoint of "why" not "what". Try to get everyone in the company into a position where they can grow doing what they love doing. It continually improves the quality of the work the studio can output. Each person should go home at the end of the day feeling like they can do things better than when they came in that morning. It is a
working environment where people have to self-direct. A small company that does big stuff where employees have to be flexible and willing to learn all the time.

They are not going away any time soon. They have the methods of taking this game to its final goal. They won't be closing their doors in a year and the game will be as awesome as it's intended to be.

Who is the best Warmachine player in the office?
Lee, the runtime lead engineer. He has an uncanny ability to spot patterns which shows in the tabletop game as well as his work on the video game. He grokks game system the moment he sees them and he now stomps everyone in the studio. He shifts around from faction to faction but he goes back to Sorscha a lot although he played Kreoss for some time, as well.

Kevin and Scott both play all the faction to figure out their strengths and weaknesses, but they always go back to Cryx. The speed and evil things you can do with Cryx is wonderfully insidious. They compare it to playing a blue/black deck in Magic: The Gathering.

If Scott could choose a second faction it would be Cygnar. Very well rounded faction, adaptable to any situation.

Back to the game: creating even a single character takes a tremendous amount of work so we won't be seeing everything from every books. The game would fail to some degree if the only difference between Sorscha and Stryker were what they looked like. Lots of work goes into making them different.

Next year they will have a much more solid idea about what each character will be in the context of the video game. Some spells, for example, may not make sense in a real time game or they might need to be changed to make sense in that context. Think more of the battlegroup as a unit rather than as individuals. So maybe pair good ranged jacks with a pure melee warcaster or unit to balance things out. Or if you go all melee, make sure you have a way to get in quickly.

Playtesting: everyone is going to want to be one. They do want open beta tests, etc.

Will there be any other stops on the con circuit this year? PAX is possible. There is a big Warmachine contingent there that would love to see the demo. Probably a less formal showing there.

The website will be updated far more regularly. Not every week, but enough where people will know the company isn't out of business. No plans to "go dark" over the next year.

[Ankehl]

Thanks a lot. Many interesting things.