Robot Rising Interview – Chatting With Executive Producer Michael Fitch

FEZ: On top of the complexes, you also have a base, or town. What was the motivation behind making your base customizable, versus one that’s pre-fab, ready to go, like in other, similar games?

MF: What we found is that going through complexes is a very satisfying short gameplay loop that lets you jump in, blow up some robots, get some stuff, feel good about what you’ve accomplished. Get in, get out. Browser-based gameplay caters to that experience, you may want to play a game for an hour on your lunch hour, but maybe not two or three hours at a time. And in the morning, when you’re getting for work and you’ve got ten minutes to play, we wanted something that suited that kind of time frame. The base gameplay is more about the long-term: the strategic options and the choices you’re making to develop and grow. For example, You’ve got three different styles of chassis that you can build for your robot. The lights are faster, more mobile, do more damage, but the heavies are slower, they’re more kinda tank-y, have more hit points, they have more armor slots, and the base is where you make the decision to go after a specific kind of robot. What kind of weapon are you going to research? What kind of armor do I want to spec in this kind of chassis, that kind of chassis… and so they’re more about thoughtful, reflective kind of action while the complexes are about having fun in the moment.

FEZ: Is there a way you can then set the base for ‘auto’ and just spend your time going through the complexes blowing up stuff? What’s the point in investing in your base when you’re just gonna find cooler stuff as soon as you step back into the complexes?

MF: There’s no sort of ‘auto’ on the base, it requires player input. If you’re not making decisions, then nothing happens in there. At the same time, most of the stuff that you may want is something you get in the complex. The one thing you can’t get through the complex are new chassis. If you want to change the core of your robot, if you want to change your style, you have to build up your robotics factory and unlock that research to get that new chassis. One of the cool things we can do about robots that you can’t do in a swords and sorcery kind of game is that you can adjust the hard points and put different weapons on your robot and you unlock that through your chassis. For players that are having bad luck with drops, you can always use the base to fill in your missing portions of loot that you don’t get through drops. One thing that’s frustrating as an MMO player was where you can kinda grind for weeks and months in dungeons and never find that key drop that you wanted. There, the crafting system would never give you quite what you could find in the loot system. So we put our crafting between those two poles where you can get some type of components through crafting versus getting through drops.

FEZ: How are you monetizing?

MF: We’re going to monetize in a variety of ways. We’ve got an energy system, kinda like putting quarters in an arcade machine, you can play for a certain amount a day for free. If that’s all you want to play, great. You come back hours later, you’ve got a fresh pool of energy. But if you’ve really into the experience, you can put a quarter into the machine, get a few more energy, play it that way. If you’re impatient and you really want to upgrade your base really fast, we allow you to buy the resources you need, we allow you to speed up the timers in the game. If you’re missing components, we allow you to purchase those. We also give you some of the in-game currency for free, just to try out what you like and what you don’t like about it. As you play, we’re going to give you additional currency so if you’re hard set on ‘I don’t want to put any of my own money into this game, but I really need some of that stuff’ it’s kinda like a buffer, you can fall back on that.

FEZ: Without putting a single dime into Robot Rising, how much could I play every day?

MF: I think our current rate is about four hours over two play sessions, but that’s something we’re going to be continuous tweaking.

FEZ: Tencent is a large Chinese gaming company and Robot Rising is Tencent Boston’s first game. What was Tencent’s commission to you in making a game?

MF: Well, Tencent’s goal is pretty straight-forward: We want to make great entertainment that is online for large audiences. If you look at what Tencent is doing in China, they are leading the gaming market in all areas, from advanced casual games to first-person shooters to MMOs. The bottom line is if you provide great entertainment, people will come, so our goal is to make great games that are online for the Western audience and that’s what we know how to do, we make AAA games, and that’s what we’re doing with Robot Rising.

FEZ: How much of the team is Iron Lore Entertainment?

MF: The Iron Lore folks are maybe twenty percent of the people in the studio. We’ve pulled people in from all over the place, from developers like Activision, Turbine, and Mythic. We’ve also got some talent that’s up and coming. Some of our awesome artists, this is their first game job, and they’re passionate about the art that they do.

FEZ: Do you see a retail future for Robot Rising?

MF: No, I don’t think going to retail is where we want to go, or really where the retail industry in general is going. I think you’ve seen with the rise of digital distribution platforms… lots of people aren’t going to stores for that sixty dollar game, more and more they’re getting something from Steam, they’re getting something from XBLA, from PSN, they’re playing on Facebook, they’re playing on destination websites. Facebook is kind of our initial platform for our browser-based game, but it’s certainly not the final place that we wanna go with it.

FEZ: So you think maybe Robot Rising could be an Xbox Live Arcade game? PlayStation Network game? Maybe?

MF: It’s a possibility. The problem there is you get into platform-specific issues. Running something through the development cycle and getting it live on the browser has a very lightweight certification process. If you’re going through a certification with Microsoft, that requires some serious capital outlay just to get a beta, and to get an update out? Yeah, we plan to update the game every couple of weeks, so that would be significant overhead for us. I doubt that we’re going to the console platforms for that reason, but I’m not going to rule anything out. If Microsoft really wants to talk to us, I’m sure we’d take that meeting.

FEZ: What’s the timeline for this game? When can we play it?

MF: We’re in a closed beta process and we’re trying to get as many people playing the game and looking at the game and giving us feedback so we can polish the game and get it to where it’s ready for prime time. We don’t have a set timeline as to when that’s gonna happen, but we have some infometrics that we’re looking at that say when it gets to the quality point where it’s sticking for the audience we have, then that’ll be the time when we open the doors for everybody. We wanna go out with a high quality product, we wanna be a real value proposition for those showing up. The fact that it’s free doesn’t mean that it’s a bad game. The fact that it’s free and awesome should make it the best thing ever.

FEZ: Do you see a stigma around free to play games?

MF: I think there is to some extent, although I think that’s radically shifting. I think people are seeing more games in the free to play space and I think the industry as a whole is moving in that direction. Certainly what we’ve seen in places like China is that free to play is kinda the bomb. You don’t have to worry about a demo, you can just play the full game, you can play the entire thing, and decide if you like it or not it without having to make any sort of investment in it. For us, that process is literally twenty seconds of downloading the game. So there’s going to be plenty of people who love our game and going to be people who don’t like our game, but they’re not having to pay sixty bucks to find out and I think that’s just a killer proposition.

FEZ: What else is Tencent Boston working on?

MF: Nothing we can talk about publicly at the moment.

We’d like to thank Michael Fitch once more for his time and we look forward to seeing more of Robot Rising in the future.