Without fail, GarageGames takes it away indie style. I recently got a chance to talk with Tim Aste, who is the Director/Producer and one of the three full-time artists on the development team for the upcoming Fallen Empire: Legions game coming out from popular indie tool provider GarageGames. Classic indie production process where roles are shared in a close team. Fallen Empire is a browser-based FPS that will be launched at InstantAction.com.

Q: I’ve heard Fallen Empire is an updated homage to Tribes. Is this just a rumor or is there some bearing to it? (Insert grin here.) If so, how is this game inspired by Tribes?

A: Yes and no. We’ve been heavily inspired by the Tribes movement models with jetpacks, but we wanted to carve our own little space out too. I’d say the game plays like the bastard love child of Quake 1 and Tribes. We’ve taken some pretty big liberties with the movement system and how it works versus the original Tribes games. However, we definitely have a lot of beta testers telling us we’ve captured the “essence” of Tribes, with how fast and free the movement feels.

Q: GarageGames is known for its support of indie technology. How is that background adding to the development of Fallen Empire? What tools are you cooking up and how are they influencing the game?

Well for one, the way the team has setup development for this game is pretty far removed from many mainstream game studios in the same genre and market. We are only a team of 5 people within a larger company, and are a pretty self-sufficient cell as far as the day to day goes. We’ve had to rethink how we approach the development process in general, having limited funds, time, and manpower. We’ve cooked up the idea of “live development” as an approach to this, where we build a solid core game and then release it to the masses, and then using the community that grows around this game to continue development over time until we have a much more fleshed out game. This also lets us limit our risk by developing the game the fans want without going too far into the hole and potentially making something that just isn’t fun. For the team it was a relief, as Tribes fans have been traditionally very hard to please.

This idea isn’t very far removed to how some bigger MOD projects work for games like Half-Life 2, etc, only at the end of the day we can still create a functional business model around it and still own the IP. Of course, a big part of that is having a distribution platform that can reach gamers. The tech and tools behind our game aren’t too far removed from what is commercially available from GarageGames, but we’ve had to do some custom work to achieve the proper gameplay and the graphics we wanted. We’ve also integrated the InstantAction API, as that is a big part of the distribution of the game.

Q: What’s your full team and how does the pipeline work? How are team dynamics different when working on a game?

A: We are actually wrapping down our core development cycle now (and about to focus on the live development portion, which is an even smaller team). Like I mentioned above, we had to all wear a lot of hats because there were only 5 of us, plus occasionally we’d get a pinch hitter from somewhere else in the office for a week here or there. Additionally, we used 2 outside contractors, one for player models, and 1 for audio.

I’d basically be wearing the producer hat, making sure everything stayed on schedule and the team was working on the proper things to move forward. I’d also be there to provide direction, and be able to make decisions and resolve conflict. Additionally, we were a bit too late to get on the Polysoup train that Rokketbowl and the next round of GG games will have, so we are still using older BSP interiors for our buildings. It’s getting surprisingly difficult to find people who work with with this sort of art-tech, so I had to do all the BSP stuff myself since I’m one of two people in the company who can still really use it efficiently.

On the tech side, we had Adam Larson as our lead programmer, and Thomas Buscaglia as our lead game designer. It was kind of a fun situation with the titles, because we were all leading and directing teams of 1 (ourselves), and we were kind of poking fun at ourselves with that (have to keep a good sense of humor going, otherwise it’s no fun). Adam was the heart and soul of getting a lot of the tech to function properly, as well as making sure the right features were implemented timely and worked bug-free. Thomas, while also doing a ton of heavy programming lifting, focused specifically on taking the concepts of the game and running through them to make sure they all got the proper attention they needed. He spent a lot of time making sure the movement model functioned right, and it’s pretty neat to watch how it went from when we first started in October, to when we did our first round of Beta testing in March. In addition, we had some pinch hitting from Pat Wilson for help with the graphics and effects programming, and Ben Vesco and Sean Sullivan for integrating the game into the InstantAction API to run on the website.

With the art, we had Todd Pickens as our Lead Artist, and Matt Ostgard as the heavy lifter of most of the art assets. Todd’s job was to make sure we didn’t stray off the path and that we got everything done that needed to get done, and we didn’t accidentally overlook a critical assets, or make something that was completely unnecessary. Due to the short development time and the somewhat experimental development environment, we had to be absolutely sure to not waste any time on throw-away assets that weren’t thought through. In addition, Todd did a lot of the concepting and environment work. Matt was the heavy lifter on the art assets, Matt basically spends all his time in 3D Studio Max creating the majority of the shapes in the game, as well as coming up with some original concepts such as the weapons. Also, we had contracted the help of Gavin Goulden to create two character models for us, which were then cleaned up some by Matt to be game ready in Torque, and then animated by Chris Flanagan, who was an intern at the time and now is a full time employee no Rokketbowl.

Lastly, we had Jon Jorajuria do all our audio. Jon had a huge challenge facing him with being an outside contractor and the game in a weird flux-like state when he came on, but with some patience and hard work overcame it all to deliver some really kick ass audio effects. This was very important to the team as we sometimes feel like audio is sorely neglected on games, and we saw ourselves ending up in that same situation, even when trying to deliver specs to Jon when he came on board.

Overall, despite some weird inconsistencies with scheduling and a bit of experimenting, the development team came together pretty awesomely and accomplished a ton in a short-time frame and we hope it shows well in the game we delivered. If anything, it was a good demonstration of how small teams can still compete in the market space with the proper scoping, planning, and a little creative thinking.

Q: Sounds like an intense but fun process! What are you most looking forward to in Fallen Empire so far?

A: In my personal opinion, I’m just jazzed to see how people can mod the game–we’ve left it pretty open. There are some unique challenges facing modders trying to get in on Legions, and so far the beta testers have totally impressed me with what they’ve been able to do. Additionally, it’s always crazy to see YouTube videos of people playing the game in ways you never imagined possible, as well as how incredibly good people get at the game. I can barely hold a candle to some of these folks, it’s pretty crazy.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 2:38 am and is filed under Art Interviews, PEOPLE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.