Friday, October 29, 2010

When I got into this business...

I wanted to make run and gun tactical FPS games for PCs and Macs. I had been playing these games for over 15 years, dating back to late night networked Doom and Marathon death matches all the way to today's team based military shooters like Medal of Honor, Call of Duty and Killzone.

As of 2010, I've spent the better part of 10 years working, in some form or another, on Black Powder | Red Earth. Making contacts, doing interviews, studying battles, reading hundreds of books and even attending weapons manipulation and tactical courses (until 2004, I had never even shot a rifle). All this research, prep and brainstorming had the effect of breaking down my suspension of disbelief in so much else of what I was playing and watching in theaters. I liked what was there, but I wanted to go further.

In late 2006, myself, Altay and Phil came up with the idea of social gaming in my apartment in Hoboken during one of our monthly meetings on the subject. Taking FPS games and hooking them into a social network where you could build teams out of a known pool of friends and then manage a variety of customized weapon systems and kits for different roles/play styles.

From the gameplay side, we wanted to incorporate some of the key things we felt were lacking in games at the time - namely, shooting through soft cover and getting rid of bunny hoppers!

Inspired by Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the game would be a multiplayer/free-to-play experience and it would allow us to really create something different from the rest of the pack.

Over the next 2 years we made multiple demos using Epic's incredible Unreal 3 tool set and went to GDC to pitch our wares. While the ideas were well received, the concept of a computer only based free-to-play FPS, was not. Honestly, it was heartbreaking.

By this time, Facebook had become a viable platform for alternative free-to-play gaming experiences. We went back to the labs and started cooking.

About one year later, our product launched. We cut it loose and watched to see what people did. I had a lot of ideas and expectations, some of which were right and others which proved to be way off the mark. We tuned and then put some advertising dollars behind it. When we hit our next user benchmark, we turned off the ads and watched what people were doing. What did they enjoy? Where were they spending the most time? How could we streamline the flow to the elements they used the most?

As November rolls in, we are prepping to launch version 2 of the game. Highly optimized to meet player desires and hopefully exceed it, we're learning a whole lot about how to make money in the free-to-play space. The graphic novel, like all things, is taking longer than expected to hit our quality marks, but what we have is solid and still engaging, even 6 months after I closed the book on issue 1 (and 2 for that matter).

We are so far from where we started it's hard to even remember the days when we first landed in Astoria, with our crew. Looking forward to 2011, there's a lot of options. I'm not sure which way we will go, but I'm sure it will be an interesting ride :)