Chris Park Waves @ The Claw

AI War developer Chris Park joins The Claw staff in an exclusive Google Wave Interview discussing his games, his company and the future..

Pushing the boundaries of Internet communications Chris agreed to try an Interview with The Claw via Google’s new threaded “Email/Instant Messenger/Forum/Social Networking” medium known as Wave. We’re pleased to say it worked out very well, almost an ideal collaborative tool for conducting an “over the net” Interview.

We at The Claw would like to thank Chris for his input and co-operation in this project, especially the amount of time he took out of his development schedule to write very detailed and candid answers to our probing questions.

After reading the following Wave, we hope you’ll know a lot more about the future of the 2d space themed Real Time Strategy game AI War, as well as a little more about its developer and his unique way of approaching games development.

Can you briefly summarise the major changes to AI War from version 1.0 (the release version) to version 2.0? How many of these changes are a direct result of player suggestions and interaction from within the AI War community?

The most obvious change is certainly visual — the quality of the graphics have jumped from hobbyist to professional grade since we added a real artist to the team, and for a lot of people that really helps with immersion and enjoyment. It’s still pixelart for the ships of course, but we’ve now got a number of great special effects going and a lot more pseudo-3D work and higher quality visuals in general.

But while the visuals are certainly the most noticeable feature, I would not call them the most significant change for fans of the game. How to summarize 60,000 words worth of release notes in a few lines? That’s how much has changed from 1.0 to 2.0. Or, you can look at it this way: somewhere upwards of 40% of the 2.0 codebase is either new or altered from 1.0. We’ve made improvements across the board: making the controls easier to use and more powerful; making the AI significantly smarter and more varied; improving performance to such a degree that we actually lowered our system requirements; updating sound effect quality; adding cheat codes; adding 50 new units to the game; adding multiple map styles and options for smaller maps; adding achievements, leaderboards, and realtime score graphs; plus a variety of other major, major features and literally hundreds of balance tweaks and bugfixes and the like.

Seeing a list like that, my first thought as an outside observer would be “was the game incomplete at launch?” No one has actually said that to me, but I think about that every time I look at the list. When 1.0 came out, the game was as complete as I could make it on my own — the controls were comfortable for myself and my alpha testers, we had no known bugs, and over 100 hours worth of content (in the sense that if you played full games, you’d need to spend 100 hours at least just to see every last feature). However, that’s where the community involvement comes in. Players with different backgrounds and tastes came up with all sorts of ideas, complaints, and suggestions that had never occurred to me, and integrating those was a big part of the 2.0 push. The player community had some form of input on very close to every feature or change between 1.0 or 2.0.

You seem to take influences from outside of your main sphere of interest in terms of design. For example, you have an interesting blog post about the design of Demon’s Souls ( which I think is unanimously loved at The Claw ) and I’ve seen the likes of Boom Blox and LBP mentioned allready in this interview.

How important do you think it is to step back and look at the bigger picture when going through the initial stages of your design process? And have you been specifically influenced by a game outside of the RTS genre with respect to some elements of AI War either current or coming down the line?

Well, I think that because my first released game was an RTS, people want to look at me as an “RTS guy.” Or because it is sci-fi, that people think that is my core interest. Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep love of both — but I’m equally interested in fantasy settings, or broken earth settings, or urban fantasy, in terms of genres. And in terms of gameplay, I love tower defense, platformers, first person shooters, adventure games, turn-based games, tactics games, and RPGs (mainly JRPGs) at least as much as I love RTS. I’m equally excited about Borderlands, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and Left 4 Dead 2. The fact that I started out with a space-based RTS game is, in the grand scheme, somewhat coincidental.

I think that one of my strengths as a game designer is that I have a background that is pretty wide. I draw on many different genres, and other mediums as well, when thinking about the design for any game. So that tends to lead to titles that sit a bit between traditional genres, which I think is important as a way to really explore new ground. AI War was certainly heavily influenced by my love of tower defense games, FPS games, and TBS games. AI War has the scheduled attacks of known enemies as in PixelJunk Monsters or NinjaTown, it has the larger-than-you enemy forces as in most FPS games, and it has the you-set-the-pacing overall outer structure of a game like Civilization. Those were all very much conscious design decisions that I made by looking at certain games in other genres and thinking about what I might be able to apply from them to an RTS control scheme.

Have you been influenced by any recent games, and thought a specific feature in them would possibly work well within AI Wars?

I think that every game that I like has some sort of influence on games that I create, to some greater or lesser degree. Thinking about Resistance 2 and Super Mario Galaxy led to some of the design ideas for the asymmetrical AI and the scenario generation tools, for instance — you’d never know that from looking at the game, though. And I often cite CivIV for its one-more-turn addictiveness and wealth of strategic options, which really influenced me in a lot of ways. The “overarching maps” of Star Wars: Empire At War and the Total War series were also an inspiration to me — I liked their concept, but wanted to do a multi-battlefield game that was 100% realtime, rather than a mix of TBS and RTS.

Perhaps the biggest visible influence on AI War is Supreme Commander, of course. The economy setup of AI War has become increasingly SupCom-ish with time, and the camera of AI War has been very much like SupCom from the get-go. I seem to recall one of the GPG developers commenting that after they made that camera system, they couldn’t imagine playing another RTS without it. I happened to agree.

Another big influence for the game was actually the board/card game Dominion. In Dominion, you have a set of 25 different card types just in the base game, but you only use 10 in each individual game. The expansions of Dominion add 25 new card types each, for a total of 75 so far. The amount of variety this creates in tactics and the differences between games was a big influencer for AI War and how the bonus ship types are handled — it’s much the same sort of thing, where you have a larger pool out of which only a subset is used in any individual campaign.

What social networking platforms do you use at the moment to support the AI War Community, and do you plan to integrate any of them into the game itself?

Our forums are the primary platform for our core community at the moment, and that’s been working well. We’ve also got a presence on Facebook, and have recently set ourselves up on twitter. I’ve had a personal blog for several years, and my discussions of AI War and game design in general have been pretty popular, but it’s separate from the company itself. We’ve also recently started a company blog, but it’s still in early stages.

Social networking beyond that, and beyond the new matchmaking/game-coordination service that we plan to build out as a custom platform, is something we’re still experimenting with. We support Steam and XFire integration, which involves cross-game chat in both cases. Beyond that, on a case-by-case basis this is something we’re still looking at. Social media is certainly very popular, and we want to leverage that to the extent that it makes sense to do so, but I don’t see it as being something to really integrate into the game itself in most cases. I suppose having the game tweet statuses or something could be clever for those players who have twitter, but honestly given the demographics of our target market, I think that is a tiny minority of our players.

Suffice it to say, I’m not closed to these sorts of ideas by any stretch, but I really need to weigh what will benefit the majority of players over flash-in-the-pan features that don’t really contribute anything to the game itself. With limited resources (I’m the only programmer, for example), that’s the sort of judgement call I often have to make. So it just depends on how things grow and change, and what becomes available or popular in the future!

Can you tell us about the inspiration for the upcoming expansion, “The Zenith Remnant”, along with the key features it will bring to the game, and how you will market it?

In general, I’ve always planned on creating expansions to AI War, as there are a ton of ideas that simply couldn’t make it into the base game; and as a longtime strategy game player, one of my favorite things has always been to get good expansion to a game I like, because it really gives the original game a whole new set of legs. The Zenith Remnant is but the first of a long series of planned expansions (expect one every 8-10 months for as long as there is player interest, or probably 2-5 years at minimum).

Each expansion is organized around a central theme, and the one chosen for our first is the alien race, the Zenith. There is one starship of the Zenith in the base game, but otherwise their existence is not much hinted at. This was something that I’d planned on developing more in the base game, before I realized I already had 100+ hours of content. The Zenith are basically the remains of a great galactic empire, and in the expansion you can find all sorts of goodies lying around from them that you can pick up, repair, and use for your own purposes — the massive new “golem” superweapons are the most extreme example of this. There will also be some interactions with bands of the Zenith aliens themselves, who will be a smaller neutral faction with a variety of behaviors and scenario styles in the expansion.

The biggest gameplay focus for The Zenith Remnant is the grand strategic aspect of the game: adding more capturables, more specialized AI weapons to deal with, etc. More reasons to scout, and more hard choices when deciding which planets to capture, since there will be goodies or penalties on a vastly larger percentage of planets in the expansion. Adding more ship classes, AI types, and map styles is another big goal, as that leads to more strategic/tactical options for players and really adds in more variety from one campaign to the next. Central matchmaking/campaign-coordination tools will also be added as part of the expansion (and retroactively will be free to all base game customers, too); this will be pretty different from matchmaking in a short-game pvp RTS, but we think it will suit the longer-form campaigns of AI War well, and it’s another way we’re trying to innovate in the genre.

We won’t be having a bundle of the base game and the expansion right at first, but expect to see discounts on the base game when the expansion comes out, to make it easier for new players to pick up both in one go. As we continue to work with our digital and retail partners (many unannounced) with this and future expansions, expect to see bundles further down the line.

Fragmentation of the online playerbase is something that is a risk when expansions are added to any game, and of course to some extent that is unavoidable. If you have the expansion installed and I do not, we won’t be able to play together with the expansion features turned on. However, Arcen is going out of its way to make the mix-of-expansions-held-in-multiplayer scenarios easier than with other games in the genre, and early feedback from our community is very positive.

One key simplification is that we have a “unified binary” system for the game, which means there is only ever one “current” version of the game executable/code — that’s one version between the base game and all expansions. The files of the expansions themselves consist of the art/music/sound/etc assets, which are a separate download. Once those expansion assets are installed you are basically in trial mode for the expansion unless you turn the expansion off (easy to do through settings), or unless you unlock the expansion for full use via a purchased license key. This makes it easy for players to download the expansion and try it for free, then buy it only if they like it (rather than having to buy it sight unseen as happens with many RTS titles).

When setting up a new campaign, the host chooses which expansions will be used. If not all players have a given expansion, then that expansion simply can’t be used, but the game otherwise can be played as normal. The free DLC is always considered a part of the base game, and the expansions are not cumulative — so a player can skip the first expansion and buy the second if they prefer, with no ill effects. And in this way, everyone always has the latest AI/interface/etc improvements without being forced to buy the expansion to get those. The expansions are about large chunks of game-extending new content, and that’s all; anything that is a “fix” to the base game is to be free DLC.

Are there any plans to implement a scenario based mode of play with a much smaller fleet of ships, perhaps to teach ship type interactions in a series of fixed challenges/puzzles/missions?

That has been suggested by players, and I think it is a very cool idea. Suffice it to say, with the amount of content already planned for The Zenith Remnant, that expansion is pretty full up already. However, this is on my list to look at for perhaps the second or third expansions, depending on what other potentially-expansion-anchoring ideas come up in the meantime. One key thing about this sort of scenario mode would be to let players design and share scenarios in addition to bundling some. Having a game integrated download mechanism (ala Boom Blox Bash Party, etc), I think will be a must. This one is pretty distant at the moment, relatively speaking, but I am looking forward to it for the future.

It was your tactical videos that got me thinking that there could be some mileage in having properly constructed scenarios for the user to play through and the tactical differences could be highlighted between the ship types, as well provide a smaller scale conflict to play through. I really like the idea of a scenario builder and being able to share them LittleBigPlanet style. Presumably part of this would be to allow customisation of ship graphics and properties, or would you rather keep total control over the balance between ship types?

Most likely this would not effect the actual ship graphics and properties, although those people who want to “mod” the game by swapping in graphics only have to replace the png files in the images folders. We don’t have any special encoding or packaging for our music, sound, or art assets, so that makes it easy to mod those in particular. A few players have taken it upon themselves to do that in the past, and some of their work (explosions most notably) later became part of the official game! For the actual ship balance, that’s something I’m keeping closed for the moment (though I’m open to suggestions and feedback from the community of course), because I don’t want to have the playerbase fragment around a series of mutually-exclusive gameplay mods. Instead, my goal is to package those sorts of ideas in the main game as much as possible. Down the line this might change, and if I ever abandon the project completely my plan is to just open-source it (5+, 10+ years from now, if the game loses momentum at that stage).

There so many hugely different things that could be done with the game: scenario editing, new game modes of all stripes that are almost like total conversions in some respects (using the same pieces for a totally different kind of game), and even pvp-style play modes. All of these sorts of major concepts are things I could see exploring in future expansions, as a way to almost create new games-within-the-existing game. Granted, those expansions will come with lots of other content and features for people who prefer the existing styles of play, but I see AI War as kind of like my “RTS game platform,” where I have one big engine and growing mass of content, and I can use that for a variety of diverging purposes in future expansions. I don’t think anyone has quite done that before, so I’ll be interested to see how that is recieved. It basically would have been like if Counter-Strike had been an expansion to Half Life, rather than a mod, or something along those lines. Using the same engine to drive multiple similar-yet-very-different games.

Do you plan to support the ability for players to take generic ship hulls and build their own ship types in the game? Adding ship components to bigger multi-function hulls?

Probably not — that’s a staple of a lot of space-based RTS games, but it’s not something I’ve personally ever been that interested in, and it’s not something that the AI War engine is built around. I’ve always been more of a fan of terrestrial RTS games like Age of Empires or Supreme Commander for example, and in those cases the model is a lot of smaller units that you use together to achieve your goals. Certainly when you are talking archers and musketeers, the idea of unit customization makes less sense. Instead of customizing individual units, in that model, you’re customizing your working groups of units by adjusting your unit mix. To me, the net effect to gameplay and strategy is much the same except that you don’t have the players spending a bunch of time in complex subscreens — in general, my goal with AI War is as few subscreens as possible, and right now we have almost none, which I see as a huge plus to the flow of the game.

I’ll never say never, but right now I just don’t see any real incentives other than the “cool factor” of customizing a big capital ship with complex functions and loadouts — and since that’s the premise of games like Sins of a Solar Empire or Gratuitous Space Battles already, to my understanding, I feel like it would just be apeing those guys to try to take it too much in that direction. Their developers are clearly fans of that sort of gameplay, and they’ve built their engines from the ground up with that sort of thing in mind, so I think they’re positioned to do a much better job of crafting a really awesome experience with that sort of game style. As a general rule, I try to stick to my strengths, meaning the styles of games that I play personally, since that’s where I really have the knowledge of the market to do something new and interesting. Otherwise the best I can do is just make a derivative version of what someone else has already done, since I don’t have enough first-hand knowledge to really have detailed opinions of my own.

Do you think the implementation of ‘Heroes’ in the game would be possible? So, for example, perhaps you’d have a Battlestar Commander, lets call him ‘Bill Odama’ for arguments sake, who can affect the efficacy of the support ships in the immediate vicinity. Perhaps he can be captured by the enemy, or he can grow in experience and power during a game?

This is another thing that is a potential for a future expansion, but it’s something I am on the fence about. Again, I don’t want to do something just because other popular games in the same genre are doing it. In general, AI War already has ships that are “centerpieces” of sorts, in the same sense that your Queen in Chess might be a centerpiece to a certain degree. These are big, powerful ships that you need to preserve and that in many cases do give a boost to the ships around them. The golems in the first expansion are really that sort of thing to an extreme degree, and most of the larger starships in the base game could be considered to follow that pattern, too.

The question, then, is really of naming them and having them gain experience, etc. The naming is a bit on the cosmetic side for me for what I hope to accomplish with AI War — it’s really more about a grander scale than learning the names of individual units, in my opinion. But there could be some interest in having ships that are invincible-but-capturable/disable-able (as with the heroes in Age of Empires III, which I thought worked very well), or which gain experience like in the Warcraft series. It really boils down to what does it add to the gameplay — how does this extend the decision space and really change the game?

If it’s just cosmetic or just adds more micromanagement for players without any real payoff, then that’s the sort of thing I tend to shy away from. EXP is really kind of an abstract concept, and is not super visible in a game with the scale of AI War, so I have a feeling it wouldn’t be too great a fit. But I think that having an increasing variety of “centerpiece” units is definitely a goal, as those can have far-ranging strategic implications and really expand the game in interesting ways.

The methods of fleet management in AI War are quite straight forward, selecting ships of the same type or box selecting them on the screen, have you any plans to create a mechanism by which you can control custom fleet formations, say a Starship, six Cruisers, and enough supporting Bombers and Fighters, that the custom fleet is controlled as an entity, and the player can set up these almost heirarchical composite specialised combat groups.

(At the moment, you can throw a lot of ships together, and set them to auto-defense, but my thoughts on creating self contained groups of custom armadas means you set these things up, and then they’d patrol as one group, or you could arrange a strike force with engineer support, sort of custom group loadouts rather than having to manually get these together using the simple selection techniques.)

Again, this really drives into realms of the genre that I don’t typically frequent. My model for the interface, overall, is terrestrial RTS games, and so this sort of space-game-centric control system isn’t something I have interacted with a whole lot in the past. One thing that we do have planned is a Carrier type ship that can have a custom loadout of ships (say 20 cruisers, 11 bombers, and 60 fighters, or whatever), and it rebuilds lost ships when the originals are lost, etc.

That sort of interface expansion will be more of a specific sub-argumentation to the existing interface, not too much a wholesale reimagining. The interface that is currently in place is pretty battle-tested overall, though I do see refining many parts of it over time (and there are several significant refinements inwork presently, including a new unified command queue for units and some new galaxy map filter/search enhancements for capturables).

My general feeling is that once an interface is powerful enough to do what you need to do, it should generally be pretty invisible and stay out of your way. Most of the changes that I see making to the interface are for when players maybe find themselves fighting some aspect of it a bit, and then a refinement comes along to address that issue and make the experience smoother. That sort of extreme polish is important to me, but otherwise my main goals moving forward are gameplay and strategic options. Getting too nitty-gritty with fleet construction, beyond what is planned with the Carriers, I think would take more time for players to manage than it would provide benefit, largely because of the short lifespan of many individual ships in AI War. But time will tell where it all ends up, I imagine the game will look very different in many regards a year from now compared to how it is now!

Have you considered a game replay feature, so that people can store and post up their best game efforts? Or perhaps slice out encounters and allow others to load them up and watch them?

This was originally on my feature list, actually. The premise of a replay feature is that since RTS games are deterministic, if you know the starting seed and have all of the player inputs, you can just store that and then use it to make a replay. This works great, but there are a few fatal flaws with it for using that approach with AI War.

First, even with other RTS games, each patch breaks the past replays — because even just changing unit balance causes the deterministic simulation to give a different result. That’s no problem if your dev team has largely moved on and the game only gets a new patch very 3+ months. But with the rate of changes to AI War, it would make any replays have a super short lifespan. The other problem is with the scale of the game — with so many more units receiving commands, and with such longer games, these replay files would get into the hundreds of megs in size. And having replays that are split across multiple sessions is not something that anyone has solved as a technical challenge yet, to my knowledge.

On the bright side, we’re fully compatible with programs like FRAPs or XFire, which let you take video of DirectX programs and upload the results. So that’s a cool way for users to share videos of what they have done, even if it’s not a game-integrated replay feature in the sense of, say, Age of Empires II. Replays were a feature that I really personally wanted to have, so I was a bit bummed to come up against those insurmountable technical hurdles, but I suppose that’s the breaks when you increase the scale of a game 10x to 100x compared to the rest of its genre!

Your Tutorial Videos are, in my opinion, invaluable to someone starting out in AI Wars, and your recently updated videos on Basic Tactics along with the glimpse of mid-game commentary on 4 player co-operative play have provided an insight to the bigger strategies employed within the game. Are you planning on creating a video school for AI Wars players, and possibly using the videos to introduce new ships and new tactics that can be employed with them?

I definitely have plans for more videos, ranging from more advanced tactics to specific game activities such as scouting. I doubt I will formalize this too heavily, insofar as creating a “video school” out of it, but I do expect to have a growing library indexed by topic. Mainly I want to cover topics there that aren’t easily covered by in-game tutorials or by the wiki. Sometimes there’s just no better way to learn something than by watching someone else do it.

With some of the more unusual ships and related strategies that are coming up in expansions, I might well make some videos for them specifically, but I haven’t finalized any plans for that yet. Part of it depends on how much time I have available for that sort of thing!

Whats your favourite ship in the game (you’re allowed to pick one thats in the expansion or not even fully realised yet)?

Oh goodness, that’s a tough question! I tend to play with all of the various ships in the game, partly for testing and partly because I enjoy the variety of all of them. But if I had to pick one favorite, I think at the moment that would be the new “Armored Golem” from the expansion. It looks vaguely like an Ohm from the classic Miyazaki film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which endears the unit to me immediately, but it’s also a really exciting unit to play with. It’s super powerful, to the point where you might actually think it is overpowered at first, but using it enrages the AI enough that you wind up with a lot of epic battles with the golem as the centerpiece.

Do you plan to take the AI War franchise into any other games, perhaps for the mobile market, with say a Tower defence game on handhelds or a flash based web game? Any plans to make “attention grabbing” mini-games to draw players towards AI War?

AI War is a game that I plan to keep growing for a long time, and expanding in a great many ways within its own feature set (as mentioned already), but I don’t see ever making a sequel or any spinoffs. With a sequel you lose all of the existing content, and with spinoffs there are various challenges — mainly regarding how to adapt the AI War franchise and gameplay to some other platform or genre. It’s like trying to turn Starcraft into a tower defense game or something. You can certainly make a Starcraft-themed tower defense game, but I think I’d find that more creatively limiting than just having a blank slate and a new franchise.

Generally speaking, I really want to take a model sort of like the PixelJunk series of games. There is something about all of their games that lets you say “that’s a PixelJunk game,” but the games themselves don’t share much in the way of genre, gameplay, game ideas, or even art styles in many cases. Our next games after the first AI War expansion are going to be a casual puzzle title, a tower defense game, another expansion for AI War, and then either a platformer, a JRPG, or a rougelike, depending on the situation at the time. Each one of those will have a certain “Arcen Games feel” to them, but will be an individual franchise in and of themselves.

Some of those will see sequels or spinoffs or ports to other platforms, I’m sure, but in the context of a hardcore PC RTS I feel like continuous free DLC and expansions are the way to really serve the player community the best — at least in the case of AI War. In the end, I don’t want to wind up being “typecast” as a company, which is part of why our upcoming games are such departures from AI War. I play pretty much every genre of game to some degree, even sports games to a very small extent, and there’s a lot of genres that I really love and have at least as strong a background in as RTS. I have what I feel like are a lot of solid and unique ideas for all of them, and I want to explore that space with them while also continuing to develop AI War over the next while. A lot of indie developers get known for one title only, or a small series of very similar games, but that’s not at all what I want to do.

With a small team of people at Arcengames now, can you outline your future projects in addition to AI Wars and air your hopes and fears for them?

Well, now we’ve got a fulltime composer/sound designer and a fulltime artist, as well as some part-time staff to help with technical writing, QA, design assistance, etc, so that’s certainly a huge improvement over when I was originally creating AI War. I created AI War version 1.0 largely by myself in 7 months, while working a day job. I expect to see future projects go much more quickly, and at the same time come out at a level of quality much more like AI War 2.0 or better. So that’s one advantage of having the larger team, and certainly also we’ve got a growing library of technical assets and other tools that make creating new games easier than it was in the past.

In my background developing business software, I’m used to having a small team and doing something huge in a short amount of time, so that sort of attitude has carried over to here, I think. Within the next year, I expect to put out The Zenith Remnant, our casual puzzle game, our tower defense game (which, true to Arcen form, is not just an also-ran “me too” entry into a crowded genre; expect some cool stuff with that), as well as then the second expansion to AI War itself. And I’m hoping to at least get started on the next project after those within a year period. That’s a lot of projects for one year, right? But it fits with the sort of timetables I have historically always had as a software developer, and with now having the larger team right from the start I think we will be able to really push the envelope further than I’ve been able to in the past.

On the other hand, we’re not huge in terms of our cash reserves. Our upcoming games have to be great, and have to find some measure of audience, for us to stay in business. Mediocre is not going to cut it for us, even if we were inclined to try to just crank out something derivative. So that means that we have to be both fast and excellent, and we can’t just rest on our laurels and bask in the success of a past product. That’s daunting, but I also think it’s doable.

What happens if one or more of our upcoming titles doesn’t see the sort of success that we need from it? Well, that’s a challenge. In a lot of very real senses, the next year is going to make or break the future of Arcen Games. I’m a cautious sort of guy, so I’m making sure that there are always multiple paths to success for us when possible, but there’s still a possibility that we could flop and then disappear. That’s a risk for any developer, I think — developers disappear all the time, even the really big ones with amazing games on their resume. I think the key for anyone is to just keep making great games. If our audience reacts to our upcoming titles as they have to AI War, we should be okay. We just can’t afford a “sophomore slump,” and so keeping an eye to quality and creativity is always going to be paramount for us.

On a personal note, when you go full time game developer in December this year, do you think it will change your enthusiasm and motivation for creating games, once the hobby/pastime becomes a job? Do you see yourself remaining at the helm of the design and coding for the foreseeable future?

Over the past few years, I’ve been working really insane hours in order to build Arcen while also having a day job. Launching a new company — in any line of business — is a gargantuan and time consuming task; just ask the owner of any new retail store, for example. But over time those sorts of things settle out, and with my coming on fulltime that will let my focus be less split. That should be a positive thing for my state of mind, and my personal life to boot.

After this shift I hope to be working a more sane amount of hours, and accomplishing more with the time that I do spend. Working something more like 40 or 50 hours a week would be so awesome, rather than being up there in the 80 or 90 hours range all the time. And I think that’s doable, even while increasing output for the company. Working really long hours has a negative effect on pretty much anyone, and that’s something I’d never want to require from my staff, or, in the long term, from myself.

I’ve managed really huge software projects in the past (in terms of what is created, not in terms of staff), and have always done it without requiring overtime from staff. I really don’t see why game development should be any different — the current working conditions at many development shops are just inhumane and nonsensical, in my opinion. My goal is to create a working environment that is very focused, creative, and positive, and that requires letting people have a normal personal life. I don’t want myself or my staff to burn out of this business before we hit our 40s, and that requires a different way of treating people than the industry norms.

December’s going to be a major step forward for Arcen in a lot of respects, but mainly for me it’s insurance that I’m not going to just flame out in the coming year. In the last two years I’ve definitely had a few rough patches where I’ve just collapsed from exhaustion or where my motivation was really low because I was so overburdened. Mostly I’ve kept that private, but it’s a very real risk when you overwork yourself, and from a purely practical point of view it harms work output, too. That’s primarily what I hope to eliminate come December.

As far as my own enthusiasm goes, I think that’s basically been a constant since I was a kid. For a very long time I thought I wanted to be a novelist, and I do enjoy writing novels, but the actual writing is brutal hard and doesn’t quite match well enough with my talents and experience. By contrast I’ve been creating levels, mods, and so forth for… I guess around 16 or more years now, and I’ve only gotten more excited by it over time as my skillset has grown, rather than losing interest. There’s so many possibilities in this medium, and it seems like we’re only scratching the surface despite how many games get made these days.

For me, being involved in the programming and game design aspects of game creation are what I love. Arcen’s upcoming puzzle game has a guest lead designer on it, my friend Lars Bull, but that’s basically a collaboration based on his deep knowledge and love of puzzle games paired with my enthusiasm for playing a subset of them — I wouldn’t be a very good lead designer for that specific genre, but I loved his ideas and wanted to make one of them in a collaboration with him. After that project, I’ll be back to design lead on future projects including the tower defense game, etc, and that’s how I see things continuing for the foreseeable future. I expect to collaborate with other designers especially for content in games, versus trying to do every last thing myself forever, but I’ll likely remain the creative lead.

Who is the best AI War player on your weekly alpha testing team?

That team consists of my dad, my uncle, my uncle’s colleague, and myself. Generally speaking, I’m the best at AI War out of the group, and have typically been at or near the top of the group at the other games we’ve played in the past. However, the others are quite good, and I don’t always have the highest score. My uncle is more aggressive and tends to like early raiding and using big starships and such, and so he can rack up a lot of kills that way — but he takes more losses, too. My dad is more defensive, and tends to have big fortresses and things; he tends to fill a support role most of the time, often coming in to fill a key role in one or more offensives that someone else initiated. He’s the most collaborative out of the four of us, I’d say.

My uncle’s colleague is fairly aggressive, but also likes to shore himself up more. He’s the most likely out of the group to go lone-gunning, and he often takes some useful territory that way. He also gets himself into riskier situations sometimes, but tends to work it out himself, thus being occupied on his own in part of the galaxy while the other three are busy with a different objective. I tend to go wherever is needed, and handle most of the scouting and the push for advanced research stations. I also handle some of the communal defense of our planets, but usually that falls more to my dad and uncle in their territory. Various ones of us will often pair up for a little while on some offensive or defensive raid, and often we’ll have three or four major activities going at once, with various pairs or trios of us at each of those activity points.

In many ways, the score in AI War (or any other co-op game, really) is misleading. My score tends to be higher because I tend to be a faster player and emphasize my economy, and thus wind up fighting more. My dad and uncle are not fast-clickers at all, so in some other RTS games that really hurt their ability to play at the best level, but with AI War that’s not a handicap. It does keep their scores lower than mine sometimes, but everyone on the team fulfills vital roles throughout each galaxy map. If someone wasn’t holding up their end, that would be the point where we’d lose due to the breach in our defenses.

Can you tell The Claw an AI War (or Arcengames) Secret?

Haha, this is a tough one because I tend to be very open about what’s going on. But I think I’ve got a good one for you. Basically, I was working on designing/coding the game Alden Ridge through most of 2008, right? That’s still on the schedule, but probably not until 2011 or so for various reasons. I’ve talked about that before, and the fact that the idea for AI War came up at an Independence Day barbecue in the middle of 2008, when I was still mostly involved in Alden Ridge.

What I haven’t ever mentioned is the fact that I really viewed AI War as a side project, a one-off departure from the roster of games that I would usually be creating. When I started actually coding/designing the game in November 2008, I figured I would spend 6-12 months making it, and then I would put it out on the market, but that my real focus would then quickly revert to Alden Ridge and my other “core” games.

My motivation for creating AI War was not so much actually to create a game for other people to play, but to have the sort of game that my RTS play group (my alpha testers) would want to play together. I designed it with the idea of it being a professional product from the start, don’t misunderstand, but I just didn’t think there would be all that much of a market for yet another strategy game. AI War evolved into something much more unique than the “cooperative SupCom-like RTS with better AI” that I had originally imagined it to be, and by the time it was released I knew I had something much more special on my hands. But at the start of the project, I saw Alden Ridge as being much more innovative and interesting.

Really, all of my projects come about out of a dual personal/business motivation. I make games that I want to play, and try to do so in a way that will make it accessible and interesting for other people to play, too. This is what I want to do for a living, but it’s also scratching a number of personal itches, so to speak. Alden Ridge came about because my wife and I love playing Lode Runner: The Legend Returns, but there’s a limit to what you can really do with that game after a while. That sort of “cooperative trap-laying-while-being-pursued” design was the foundation of Alden Ridge, even though it also evolved into something much more.

All of the other titles planned for Arcen fill some particular void that I’ve perceived in various genres. All my life, I’ve been thinking “why doesn’t anyone make a game like X?” at various times. I’ve kind of kept a mental list of those things, and now I’m going back and making all of them myself, since no one else seems inclined to do so (and because I enjoy the creation process just as much as the actual final product). AI War was something that I originally saw as being outside that pattern, because there have been so many RTS games that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, and until I really started designing AI War I hadn’t fully articulated to myself what was missing in those other titles. As it turned out, AI War fit right into my pattern of “I’ll do it because no one else has yet and I’d like to play that,” but it started out as just a vehicle for me to make a rather generic RTS with better AI, which was (incorrectly) what I’d initially assumed was the only thing lacking in what I wanted from the genre.

Well our first Wave Interview and it was an EPIC one!

A massive thanks to Chris for his undivided attention over a period of 3 or 4 days, hopefully this dip into the Warp Gates of Chris’s AI War Universe has enlightened some, and delighted his fans.

Heres hoping AI War continues for many years and Arcengames is bestowed with a meteoric success in its game developing pursuits!

Time to prize your claw like grip apart and take on the AI horde of AI War. Check out our original AI War Review.