Don't miss this Interview!

[Moon]

The Russian print magazine Game.EXE features an exclusive interview in its current issue with the guys from TBG Software. It's an excellent interview, giving great insight behind the scenes of the game development and who the people are who're bringing you this great game. With the friendly permission of Michael Kabanov from Game.EXE we are therefore re-printing the original interview here to share with you.

Thanks to Stan, Clay, and Rodney for taking the time to answer the questions!

Martin

[Moon]

First things first, please, tell us about you – people that are behind Drop Team game? How are you, what are your interests in life, what do you do when you have some free time from developing Drop Team?

We are TBG Software, a new startup company working on our first game. Even though DropTeam is our first game, the principles of TBG have been doing professional software development for over fifteen years. After many years of successfully developing various kinds of business software, including AZ Net’s “Product of the Year” here in Arizona, we finally decided that it was time to follow our true dream of making games and simulations for a living, even though it means taking drastic cuts in salary and lifestyle. We’re doing this because we have always had a passion for games and simulation, often spending long hours developing game code in the evenings and on weekends even when we still had our old “day jobs” in the business software industry. We think that our experience in the business software world gives us a decided edge in the game industry: we know how real schedules, deadlines, and budgets work and we know how to deliver a finished, solid product to demanding customers. So we’re not the typical cocky youngsters who decided that making games “might be fun” - we treat our game development with the same level of professionalism that we’ve treated multi-million dollar enterprise business applications.

When we have free time from developing DropTeam (which doesn’t happen much anymore), our CEO Stan Marks busies himself building his own 44 foot sail boat in his back yard. He hopes to have it finished in a couple of years. The software architect, Clay Fowler, spends the little bit of time he has away from DropTeam caring for his new daughter Aedan Ruth, who is now 8 months old. Rodney Foley, who does much of the GUI programming for DropTeam, has been known to play a game of paintball now and then.

There is a lack of sci-fi games on the market these days. World War II games, games about Special Forces and numerous elves and goblins all over the place – we are sick of playing such games, believe it or not. And games like Warhammer: Dawn of War can be counted on fingers on one hand. How can you comment this situation on the market? What are the things that make people exploit WW2 and goblins’ settings in their games?

The game industry is suffering from the same malady that plagues the Hollywood movie industry: consolidation of a few powerful publishers that see no reason for creativity or originality. The blame for this unfortunate situation falls on three parties: the big publishers, the purchasing public, and game developers.

The big corporate publisher wants to churn out another clone that is guaranteed to generate x number of dollars. Why take a risk by creating something original, when the gaming public is apparently willing to plunk down yet another $50 for yet another WWII first person shooter? Since game developers have allowed the costs of game development to skyrocket (which is absolutely not necessary!), the big publishers are putting up huge sums of money to fund development, so they can’t afford to risk losing all of that money on a “new” game idea.

The gaming public is to blame because they reward the big publishers for this behavior. How can you blame a publisher for releasing yet another special forces shooter, since so many people go the store and buy it whenever a new one is released? The real question is, why does the public continue to go to the store and buy it, when they’ve already bought and played 3 or 4 games that are exactly like it (except that this new one has – GASP – realtime bump mapping)? Maybe a psychologist could answer this question, but I suspect it has something to do with the way games are reviewed by the game press. These unoriginal clone games are the ones that are usually given the highest scores in gaming magazines. For example, Doom 3 received very high marks in most game magazines, even though we have ALL trudged through dark corridors with a shotgun SO many times before. Why did it receive high scores? Because it had BUMP MAPPING! Perhaps we the public should blame ourselves for the current lack of originality in the game industry.

Finally, game developers are to blame because they’re inept at project management and engineering. They have allowed the cost of game development to soar astronomically. They feel the need to have ever-growing teams of programmers and artists (after all, you need an entire subteam devoted to BUMP MAPPING!) They have apparently never read The Mythical Man-Month, or they would understand that these large teams are grossly inefficient and are usually making games take longer to develop, not shorter. A good team consists of a very few, very talented people, not an army of mediocre people.

(cont'd)

[Moon]

How did you come up with the idea of Drop Team? Can you tell us about the early days of the project, the hardships that you had to overcome and about you meeting Battlefront.com guys?

DropTeam (and the sequel game that will be following it) is the game that we have always dreamed of playing. We’ve spent many years doing prototypes of games like this, learning from those prototypes, then throwing them away and starting over. It’s only recently that we finally felt we knew exactly how to make this game that we quit our jobs and dived in head-first.

You could say that the biggest hardships have been making time to work on a project of this scale. It’s a frightening (but wonderful) thing to quit your steady, dependable job and work on your dreams instead.

We teamed with Battlefront after showing our early alpha build of the game to several other, more traditional publishers. In those early days, we already knew about Battlefront and were big fans of their games, but for a long time it never occurred to us to approach them as our publisher. Thinking it was a long shot, our CEO Stan Marks finally reached out to them and arranged for them to try our alpha build, which was a truly horrible piece of software. The guys at Battlefront were able to see past the lack of “glitz” and “glitter” and see the core gameplay itself: this was a fun, interesting, intelligent game. Not only did the guys at Battlefront understand what we were trying to accomplish, they immediately offered the first of many excellent, constructive suggestions about how we could make the game better. Once we began talking seriously with Battlefront, we never even bothered to return emails from the other publishers. Since then, partnering with Battlefront has proven to be the best decision we could have made. Their expertise and direct input on the game has made it orders of magnitude better than it otherwise would have been.

The game is positioned as a serious and realistic title, a non-mainstream wargame with true physics with action that takes place in a futuristic setting on different planets. As you have true physics and realistic gameplay, what additional boundaries do you have? A futuristic world might base on different rules, if they are compared with the rules of our times and our universe…

The DropTeam universe is our own universe in the future, so play is bound by the same physical laws we live with today in our real world. For example, you can deploy futuristic units such as a hover tank, but a hover tank slows down due to air resistance when operating in an atmosphere (and doesn’t when operating in a vacuum.) Kinetic projectiles still need to penetrate armor, and it’s harder to penetrate at an angle than it is by hitting a flat surface. None of these things have changed simply because the game takes place in the future and this is one of the things that sets DropTeam apart from other sci-fi games. It seems that many sci-fi games expect the player to believe that basic physics no longer apply in the future, or that the laws of physics have somehow changed to accommodate whatever “rules” the game designers conveniently needed at the moment. This is not so with DropTeam.

It is much easier to be a sci-fi game developer than a re-constructor of historically oriented games. There is no need to read through tons of history books, no need to browse museums with a cam and a tape-line. You just sit down, think of your favorite girl and here you go – a new ‘stardestroyer’ or ‘anti-gravity’ gun has born… Well, we do know that it is not that simple. Thus, what are your sources of inspiration? Which vehicles or ships would you name as the stars on your sky of inventions?

Our primary sources of inspiration are the great military science-fiction authors of this era, such as David Drake and Keith Laumer. These pioneers have done much research and study to describe exactly what combat in the far future might look like, and how surprisingly close it will sometimes be to what we know today. These great authors also teach us how to be disciplined in terms of unit capabilities. For example, it is not acceptable to make a vehicle simply levitate above the ground; one must explain what physical principles this behavior is based on and simulate those principles in the game – both their advantages and disadvantages. If the sci-fi setting is driven by “magic”, then smart players will know they are being fooled and this will lessen the game’s appeal.

(cont'd)

[Moon]

How do you see the audience of your upcoming Drop Team game? These will be wargame fans? Combat Mission addicted gamers? Or, on the contrary, this will be a casual player that is sick of kiddie styled sci-fi games?

Our target audience is definitely a more mature, intellectual gamer than the typical “run-and-gun” shooter fan. We’re looking for players, like ourselves, who like the depth and tactics of strategy games like Combat Mission, but also enjoy the adrenaline and teamwork of real-time, online gaming. When one first plays DropTeam, he often thinks it is a very simple game: he deploys combat vehicles, drives them around and shoots things. As he learns more about how the game works, though, he finds that there are many layers of complexity under this simple surface, and he learns that winning victory for his team involves much more than simply driving and shooting. It requires understanding the different capabilities of the game’s various equipment, understanding how to use terrain, sensors, sensor jammers, off-map support assets, direct support units such as mortars and engineers, captured facilities, team coordination and real tactics such as flanking and hull-down positioning in order to beat the other team. Your first few minutes of playing might feel like an action game, but once you’ve learned how the game works, it feels more like a strategy game.

(cont'd)

[Abbott]

Thank you for posting that article, I enjoyed reading it.

our CEO Stan Marks busies himself building his own 44 foot sail boat in his back yard

Wow, what a project. Some of the finest carpenters in the world are boat wrights and a man better know what he is doing with an investment of that magnitude. Stan Marks you’ve got guts! 44 foot is also a very useful hull size. Good luck with that.

[Madmatt]

Were are having problems posting the body of the interview so here is link to the rest of it as a doc file.

DropTeam Developer Interview

Madmatt

[Bonxa]

Thanks for sharing this! Looks like the guys from TBG are a solid lot. I definitely fit the description of their target customer, for what it's worth.

[dan/california]

Can I but in now and join the beta test? please? pretty please?!