Today, I'm delighted to share an interview with the team at Ambitious Games, who are working on the third-person MOBA shooter REVN.
This game has a really interesting story of being developed as a blend of other genres for several years before pivoting to become a lane-pushing game.
I spoke with Silas, Creative Director at Ambitious Games, to learn more about how that happened...
Softmints: Silas, it's great to have you here today — how are you doing?
Silas: I'm doing great; thanks for having me Sean!
Before we dive into questions about the game, I'd like to get a sense of your background and how this whole journey started. Where did you get started with gaming?
Silas: For me it started with RTS games, which were really the first PC games I had the pleasure of playing as a child. We didn't have a console, Xbox, or Playstation in the house; we did have a couple of PCs. My mom worked on PCs, she did medical transcription and so we always had a PC in the house for that.
I got into playing some WW2 RTS games, the Lord of the Rings RTS game, and that was my first experience gaming. I've always had a place in my heart for the strategy genre.
Funnily enough my second genre after that was shooters, so you can see where we ended up with a MOBA shooter already. I started playing Battlefront 2... from before EA, it was Pandemic Studios.
Throughout high school, I started to get more and more into PC gaming. I played a little bit of Paragon, and a lot of Planetside 2. I had a love of strategic team games, I really liked the teamwork side of Planetside 2 where you had all these players coordinating together to accomplish a single objective.
Then I went to college for a degree in computer science and digital art, and immediately as I got into college I was celebrating a birthday with some friends, and we were talking about how cool it would be if we made a video game. We've all been friends throughout high school, and we talked about "what kind of game do we want to make?"
For us, it was originally an RPG! We wanted to make a co-op multiplayer RPG. Back in 2016 there were fewer of those, you had Borderlands and a few others but you didn't have as many co-op RPGs as you do today.
We started working on it. I took some online courses in Unreal Engine while I was starting to go to college, and after about 6 months of Ambitious Games working on that RPG we found ourselves making a game we couldn't finish. We knew that when we started... hence why we called the company Ambitious Games. We knew it was likely to be unfinishable with the small team we had.
But in the process of creating that RPG and doing the design work and beginning to program it, we had also been developing a PvP mode. While we had been coming up with a storyline and worldbuilding, we had also talked about, "how cool would it be if we could do PvP?"
An invasion mode, like Dark Souls-esque, or maybe doing PvP matches... we weren't sure exactly what that would look like but we tossed around a lot of ideas.
After those 6 months, we called the team together and said: "look, we're never going to finish this RPG."
RPGs are extremely difficult to make for a small studio of the size we had at the time, which was 3 people. We said: "we've got this really good idea for a PvP mode, let's focus on that."
We highlighted a couple of pillars we wanted to build the game around. One of those being, we wanted it to be fair. We wanted a lot of competitive integrity. We wanted to make sure that someone who had been playing for 300 hours would not have a numerical, objective advantage over a new player.
So no leveling up your guns to deal more damage match after match. We wanted it to be very chess-like, a predictable game, a strategic game. Keeping things that were chance-based or luck-based out of the game were important to us.
Around that time, 2017 or so, was when Battle Royales were becoming super-popular. We pretty much wanted to make the exact opposite!
A Battle Royale has random people you're playing against, possibly dropping at a random place on the map, random weapons, random circles... all of that randomness was the opposite of what we wanted to make.
Not that we were trying to make an anti-Battle Royale, but we looked at a lot of the mechanics there and we said we're going to do things differently from that because we weren't enjoying that sort of chaos, we wanted more structure to our PvP.
That's one pillar. The other we were looking at was that we wanted an unprecedented level of player customisation for their characters.
Originally that took the place of gun modding, where players could craft and modify their gun with like 5 different attachments and switch a bunch of things on there. Also, being able to choose different abilities.
From the beginning we said we're not going to do a class or hero shooter, we're not doing Overwatch or Paladins or SMITE or Paragon. We're going to let players create their own character by selecting the weapons and abilities their characters can use, and let's just create a giant LEGO bin of all these pieces and tell players: "you can choose this many pieces, make whatever you want with it!"
That was daunting from the balance side. We thought: "no-one else is doing this, it must be a really bad idea..." but four years later, I think we made the right choice on that. We've found it's actually fairly easy to balance all those items. You just treat every piece of that puzzle as if it was a champion in another game.
You look at it and say, "is this over-performing?" Then you balance it accordingly. There are more combinations of things, but you can balance on an individual component level the same way you would in any other game.
Originally we didn't label the game as a MOBA. We knew it would be a team-based shooter, we knew it was going to be classless, and very competitive.
That's where we jumped into developing mechanics and the gameplay, and we knew that the final structure and genre of the game would come together once we had some pieces to play with and could find the fun around those mechanics.
We built all the shooting mechanics, and the crafting, and once we had that in place we started experimenting with different game modes. We did a capture-the-flag mode, a conquest mode where you would hold different zones around the map to hold points.
That conquest mode was pretty successful, and the main issue was the size of the map and the number of players. We were settling around 5 players per team and the map was too big, there wasn't a lot of action going on and the map felt empty.
We started to add AI, we had always kind of wanted to have AI. At one point it was very RTS-like or squad-based. Each player had four AI and a command wheel to order them around...
You're talking about almost a melting-pot of genres that you and the team put together!
It seems like there's influence from the RTS side with the strategy; there's shooters coming in through basic attacks and being able to wield guns. There's a little bit of influence from Battle Royale, which I'm inferring from there being a lot of guns and customisation options.
You're looking at giving people those tools and letting them put them together in a way they would like, and can plan around.
Silas: A lot of the designers on the team are huge Magic: the Gathering fans. That deckbuilding element is something we're very familiar with. We rely on that when we talk about character customisation.
In those games, in most of them, the player is told "you can have whatever cards you want in your deck". There are some rules you have to follow; in Magic you have to have at least 60 cards in your deck.
If you're playing Commander EDH (which is the format that I play in Magic), you have to have exactly 100 cards in your deck, one has to be a commander, you can only have one copy of every card except for lands... there's all these rules but you can really build whatever you want inside that framework. It's up to the player to determine their best deck.
That theory-crafting is the meta-game around playing the game. You spend hours and hours going through forums and theorising and talking with people. You can have entire communities around how to play the game most effectively.
We love that side of it, that feeling of "this is my personalised customised arsenal, my deck, my character, this is something I created out of all the possibilities in there".
We took that and we really like the AI and squads we put into the game. It made the game feel more alive. We played with that for months, and what we found was there was a lot of micro-managing that went into the squad AI. Ultimately that made it not very fun. We switched to lanes, and that's where we ended up being a lane-pushing game.
Squad AI made the game feel alive, but the amount of management a player had to do to coordinate their squad with the other players' squads... there were all these questions like:
- Do squads spawn automatically?
- Do you have to choose which ones spawn and where?
- Can you split them up?
- Can you command someone else's squad?
- What if someone isn't using their squad effectively?
Once we switched to a lane-pushing format where minions spawn automatically and go down a predetermined path, that's when the game came alive and everything was functioning as it should be. There's always a battle happening somewhere on the map.
We tried one lane, two lanes, three lanes; three lanes worked really well for five players and every MOBA has found that at this point.
We experimented with conquest-style zones which could be captured and recaptured, which led to matches going on for long periods of time. Having destructible objectives adds some permanent progress towards winning the match, and is important towards having shorter match times.
From there, it was a process of asking ourselves: "why do other MOBAs or shooters have these mechanics, and do we need these mechanics?"
I was adamant from early on that we didn't just copy and paste every mechanic out of a MOBA. We needed to know why it was in that shooter or MOBA or strategy game, and ask ourselves: "is this solving a problem that we have?"
What I'm getting from this is there's a really interesting transition that's been taking place. From my era starting in 2003, we were seeing the RTS genre make the transition to the lane-pushing genre: where automating some of what was going on was allowing what was a typically 1v1 game in RTS, to expand to become a 5v5 game.
It's almost like you're going through a similar transition with a shooter as the base, and exploring from that direction, which is really cool.
Silas: We've always identified ourselves as cousins of the MOBA genre.
Even if we weren't going to be a MOBA, we were borrowing a lot of RTS elements when we had squad AI, you could create buildings to generate resources for your team, you could create turrets. That's something we've taken out of the game because it's too much work and a lot of players wouldn't interact with it.
Eventually we realised we want to be a MOBA. We have so much in common with them, and the final differences were things we decided to accept into the game. It started to become a very clear direction for where we wanted to go with the game.
I appreciate and value that you've taken a subtractive design approach with this: nothing's going to get in unless it's solving a problem. From the way you're talking about this, you're not afraid to continue evolving and testing where those boundaries are.
You're finding this place for yourself that's drawing on some MOBA stuff, it's under that umbrella right now but if you needed to or saw an opportunity, you could be moving on, or bringing the umbrella with you!
Silas: It's been an incredible journey so far. The sheer number of play styles in the game right now; there's 40 abilities in the game and you choose any 3 of those... it's a lot of possible characters.
There's some shared abilities among them, maybe two characters have an invisibility cloaking type thing — but you look at other MOBAs and they have the same thing.
In terms of other MOBAs, my main experience to-date is with League of Legends. I played Paragon quite a bit, though sadly not since 2018. If you look at League of Legends, you've got Twitch, Akshan and Pyke, they all have a camouflage or invisibility thing they can do.
If you compare that to REVN where we've got 40 abilities and 50,000 possible champions, maybe 100 have an invisibility cloak. When you compare that to other MOBAs that have shared abilities or shared mechanics across champions, that's pretty similar.
I think it's really cool that we have so many possible characters in the game. Every time we add one new ability, that's 40 new combinations to the game.
One of the things I'm curious about is that you're in the hybrid space between third person shooter and MOBA. Third-person shooters have a lot of flexibility around having interesting level design. You can do all kinds of arenas and battlefields which can create emergent gameplay.
With REVN, you've clearly got a large selection of abilities. What has it been like designing a level to be the stage for all of that action?
Silas: That vertical element and emergent gameplay is incredible in REVN.
The two most popular abilities have been the jetpack and the grapple hook. The main reason is that it allows you to explore the 3D space in the best way possible.
We want to be adding more mobility-type abilities to the game. Right now, those are the two big map-swinging things you can do. We're working on teleports and things like that to let people access different areas they might not normally be able to get to.
With things like jetpack, the fact that it's the most popular ability in the game right now shows that having a three-dimensional advantage over your opponent is incredibly powerful. Being able to fly above them and around them and do those flanks is incredible. It's fun, it opens possibilities for coordinating with your team.
In terms of level design, we realised early on that jetpack would be powerful. It's one of the first four abilities we put in the game. The others were an energy shield, orbital bombardment, and a healing ability.
When we started doing level design, one of our tenets was that everywhere a jetpack could get to, should be accessible to a character without any abilities. If there's a sniper nest and a jetpack player can fly there and no-one else can get there to flush them out, that's bad.
We made sure to add staircases and catwalks around the map so a player stuck on the ground can still get to good sight positions. There are some places a jetpack or grapple hook player can get to where an enemy might not be able to get to their position, but they can get somewhere that has a line of sight on that position to attack them and force them to move on.
By doing our map design in a way that ground-locked players can get everywhere important and that they have vertical options as well, we've evened the playing field. There's still huge advantages to be had by taking a movement ability because you can get to that sniper nest faster.
I've noticed in some of the gameplay footage that you have buildings, it's like an urban jungle. There's bridges, you can even see ones that go over a lane! You could be up on a bridge shooting down at a lane.
Does having all these new ways to interact create any problems that you've had to solve?
Silas: One thing we've found challenging is the engagement distance. Compared to ranged champions in other MOBAs, our ranged champions (which is every champion) are in a completely different playing field.
If you play League of Legends and you play Jhin or Kaitlyn or Ashe, or if you're playing Paragon and were a Wraith main like I was, those characters attack an enemy who is still on your screen if you're playing a top-down MOBA.
If you measure it, it's 20 meters, or 60 meters even. That's the pistol range in our game; that's close quarters. It's the equivalent to a melee champ in other games.
Melee is a whole other discussion we could get into about how we see that playing out in REVN, we currently don't have it but it's something we'd like to add eventually and it will completely change the game in new ways.
When you have a sniper rifle in the game that could effectively attack someone up to 200-300 metres away, that's halfway down a lane or halfway across the map. You can be hitting someone, applying a DoT effect, and whittling someone's health bar down.
That's been a huge challenge for level design, thinking about sight lines. Can someone in the top lane attack someone in the mid lane? We have to place buildings in such a way that there are not effective sight lines.
Another challenge we've faced has been movement speed. Our players can move around the map a lot faster than you can in say League of Legends or Dota. Rotating between lanes is about twice as fast as League.
To go from top lane down to bottom lane or mid lane, you're getting there in a matter of seconds. You can go from one lane to mid lane in probably 4-5 seconds; in another game it might take 10 seconds.
Those rotation times completely change a lot of how you play the game. What we find is players don't lock into a lane in the same way they do in other games. You can't afford to; it's not safe to do that.
If you choose to go down mid lane and only stay there... you really can't. You can be clearing waves and you can divide your team to clear specific lanes, but it is also incredibly easy to clear your wave in mid and rotate to a side lane, gank the enemy, force a 2v1, get a kill, and get back to your lane without missing any wave. You don't miss any CS by doing that.
That's informed our decisions to design the jungle in the way that we have. The way the jungle works, it's very team based. It's a way that you increase your entire team's fighting capabilities, instead of just your jungler's.
There's 10 camps in the jungle, each with a small assortment of AI you can kill. Killing those AI gives the jungler some resources, and when they've cleared the camp they can capture a terminal that is located there. They hack that terminal by standing there for 5-7 seconds, and their team gets a resource boost for the next minute until the camp respawns.
That extra boost of resources stacks: you can capture 5 or up to 10 of these terminals that increase your entire team's resource, and you're watching the timers on those to try and maximise your team's income.
Similar to other lane-pushing games, clearing a jungle is very important, counter-jungling and invading is important. But it's no longer about funneling one player, it's about boosting your entire team's income.
It's easy to have a situation where you have a tank in a side lane, he clears his wave and gets his CS, then goes to the jungle and clears a camp. He's not taking resources away from a dedicated jungler, he's capturing that terminal which gives his entire team a resource boost.
The fact that your laners are taking camps in the jungle is no longer a bad thing, it's seen as a collaborative boost to your team.
It reminds me of inspiration from the shooter space.
If you think of something like Quake, there are spawns that come up at particular times and you're chasing to be there at that moment with the gun, getting the resource, so you can keep rotating. There's always something to be doing and something to contest.
Silas: Yeah, there's always a camp to go after. You want to be in the lanes to push the enemy tower, but what we've found is that being in lane is more about going on the offence and attacking a tower rather than farming. Farming happens a lot more in the jungle.
It has also led to a lot more team-fighting. If everyone is constantly rotating, you end up getting packs of players and chance encounters where people run into each other crossing a lane or going through the same camp that just came up.
As you mentioned, in games like League of Legends you have a certain attack range maxing out at about a screen.
In REVN it's different. You've got so much range! You can be sitting in your base with a sniper rifle, plinking away at enemy troops! What is it like to lane in this game? What does successful laning look like?
Silas: Laning is very different depending on your character's loadout. One very effective laning strategy is exactly what you've mentioned: taking a sniper rifle and building a lot of crit so each of your shots has potential to deal lots of damage. You can be at your tower, farming minions under the enemy tower.
That strategy basically says "I'm going to play safe, I'm not going to put myself in danger of getting ganked or having to trade with an enemy laner. I'm going to farm those resources and maybe rotate into another lane or the jungle, playing safe to scale towards a mid-to-late game build where crit damage is coming online".
Other playstyles look very different. With say a caster, someone who relies more on high-damage abilities to clear waves and attack enemies, it can be very different.
You can have AoE abilities like Orbital Bombardment — the one from the original four abilities, it's still in the game and it's still one of the best abilities. You can cast it every 2 seconds and hit the entire wave with it.
Do that a couple of times and you can clear the wave! It's very effective AoE damage. The issue is your energy drops out, and you end up having to rotate to the jungle while your energy recovers.
Tanks are maybe going to have a short-range weapon, a rifle or LMG, or maybe an assassin build with a shotgun. With a shotgun, you're right up there with the wave trying to clear it out before you take a lot of damage, you're building lifesteal to try and sustain through it.
Waveclearing is vastly different from player to player and playstyle to playstyle. We've found it happens a lot faster than it does in other MOBAs, which frees you up to rotate into the jungle or to another lane.
There's very few scenarios where you're laning and following a wave for two minutes, trading blows with an enemy laner. If you are with your wave in a lane and you see an enemy: you have to trade with them.
You can't rely on kiting away, because everyone has the option to have an assault rifle! You have to assess the situation: "Am I strong enough to win this trade, or do I need to retreat and take cover — and I'm going to lose some health while retreating and miss out on farm."
It's a more aggressive laning phase than you see in other MOBAs.
It's almost like those chance encounters where you both turn around and see each-other, and if you don't start shooting, they'll start shooting, so you might as well get to it!
The lanes are creating a heartbeat of those encounters, around which the rest of the game can fill in the gaps.
Silas: If there are no jungle camps, you always have the option to find a lane, push that into the enemy tower, and make some progress there.
We do have some large, epic jungle bosses, similar to Dragon and Baron in League. One of those, the Hunter boss, awards your entire team 1000 resources. The other, the Angel boss, gives your team super minions.
Speaking about level design, we realised sniper rifles were a huge concern. In League of Legends, one of the signature clutch plays is stealing the boss, like with Ashe arrow or Lux beam. Smite-stealing is a big hype moment in these games.
For us, once everyone has the ability to shoot something from 50 to 100 metres away, how do you try and secure an objective?
What we ended up doing is those two bosses drop a pickup that you have to physically walk over and touch to get that buff for your team. You can be the team that kills the boss, and it drops this orb on the ground, and whichever team is closer can walk up and get it.
That has forced players into fighting each-other, they can't all sit far away.
That was the big question from earlier; why shouldn't we all sit in base with sniper rifles and plink away at the troops and never lose?
Silas: The bosses are one of the solutions to that; you have to have a player who has the capability to run in there and grab the ball. You have to have someone who can go invisible, or dash, or teleport. Or you have a tanky team that can sustain through it. Maybe four of your players go in and fight it, and zone out the enemy team.
The other aspect is taking the towers; you need to be somewhat close to towers to damage them.
Originally you could shoot towers from far away and never take any damage. We added a hitbox toggle to towers. They have an aggro state and a passive state; while they're passive they're invulnerable, the towers cannot take damage unless they're dealing damage to an enemy. There's like an Eye of Sauron sphere that rises up and fires a laser beam at the minions or players under it.
That's one way we've forced players to actually move across the map: you need to get your wave under the tower. Sometimes a player themselves needs to go under as well and take a couple of shots while they finish it off.
We're seeing a select number of MOBA mechanics are working together in a way that synergises with this long engagement range and all the guns and the special powers. That's really cool.
I mentioned a melting pot analogy earlier, but it feels like there's refinement because there aren't more objectives than there need to be.
Each objective has a purpose: pulling players away from the extremes of five sniper rifles and saying: "you need to come into the game and engage with all that we have to offer".
Silas: It's very important that teams have some diversity across the board in their loadouts. You need one player who's kind of tanky, someone who's fast.
We've found you don't necessarily need five very different things, you can have some grouping. You can have a team with 2-3 tanks, but 5 tanks is not viable.
That's reflected in our damage types; you have physical damage and energy damage. Your tank can build armour, but a caster with Orbital Strike or Flamethrower is completely ignoring the armour.
That means they have to build energy resistance which means putting less resources into armour, and taking more damage from guns and minions. There's always a trade-off where if you hyper-specialise too far, you'll be extremely weak to something else.
One way we've designed around that is our item slots. Your character has three abilities, five items, and two weapons: a primary and a sidearm. The items define your class in the game more than anything else.
I want to talk a little about why we chose five item slots. Originally we had four, and four was not quite enough for expressing unique combinations of items with passive effects. Five really hit the sweet spot for us.
There's three core playstyles in REVN: tank, weapons specialist, and caster. Jungle and support are the traditional roles in other MOBAs, and we've found that they don't fit into that same framework.
A jungler is a roaming player, but you could be a roaming caster or weapons specialist. Playing support is saying "I'll have some abilities or passives that boost my team, but I still need an identity of my own".
Support is like a subclass, you take it as like "I'm playing tank but I've got the ability to help out my team with healing or damage boosting".
Within those three core playstyles, there is a rock-paper-scissors balance to it. The tank beats the ADC, the caster beats the tank through alternative damage types and crowd control, and the ADC beats the caster who is not building for the defenses. That's our balance triangle.
What we aim for with our balance is that you need to build three items in a playstyle to be effective in that play style, so three tank items to be a tank. The other two items are really up to the player; they could build two weapon items to become a bruiser, or you could go for cooldown reduction and energy regen to become a battle mage.
Your abilities synergise well with different play styles or classes or items. Going back to Orbital Strike, it does not synergise well unless you have a large pool of energy to cast it. It's designed for someone who's building energy regen or max energy or ability power or cooldown reduction. A caster would want to build three items which give a mix of those important stats.
That sort of balance forces players to make decisions. If we had six item slots, you could build 3 tank items and 3 ADC items and you're equally good at both roles.
Having five also seems good for inter-team communication. I can look at what my team is building and see the "three tank items", and now I know this is what my ally is going for.
I understand Ambitious Games has been putting out a patch every week for the last year and a half? That's quite a pace!
Silas: I think it might even be two years at this point... I think we launched the alpha in October 2018? It's almost three years of weekly patches.
The only times we missed a patch were the week we went to TwitchCon in 2019, and one other time we had some god-awful bug in our code where it wouldn't compile and it took 5 extra days so we rolled it into the next week.
Otherwise, it's happened every single week. Every Monday, patch goes out and we playtest it on Wednesday. We've been doing those playtests every Wednesday evening for the last two almost three years as well.
That's the beating heart of the game and the company: that cycle. We talk about how the lanes and minions are like the heartbeat of the gameplay, but for the game itself and the company, that patch cycle and playtesting cycle for our community is what keeps this game going.
We should talk about that!
Should more games do it?
Silas: Absolutely. That tight feedback loop we have is incredible and I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world. We actually used to do two playtests a week to accommodate different schedules, but Saturdays were not as well attended and also Saturday is of course the weekend and we try to give our team a little bit of free time because we can't ask them to work 24/7!
I think more games should be doing this really fast cycle. We playtest on Wednesday and take feedback and notes, and it may take a week or two to address it, but we've already got something new coming out the next week.
Once you buffer into that, you're in the cycle and it's amazing. Your players are coming back every week expecting some new content and stat changes and possibilities and art.
One of the things I'm picking up on is that because you've constructed REVN in such a modular fashion, you aren't shipping a large piece of content like "here's the new character".
You're shipping individual pieces and they're all going into the pool of things someone can play with. In a way, the way you've constructed REVN as a game and designed it is supporting you in having this weekly patch cycle.
Silas: Absolutely, that's a very accurate observation.
Going into the full release of the game, I think we will be releasing in larger chunks. I think we will continue to have weekly updates on a public test server, where some of that content may start to get pooled together into seasonal releases where we can hype it up and bring everything out in a big burst of new content.
That will be important for the health of the game's balance. We recognise if the game is released and there's a ranked ladder, putting out new abilities every week might cause too much instability.
For us to support the game as a competitive game, we're planning to slow down and chunk everything. It's season one, you're getting 10 new abilities, season two you get 12 new abilities and some new guns.
At the outset when you started Ambitious Games and were talking about making this RPG, the feeling was "we're going to pursue this project where we know it's above our heads".
Now, it seems like there's been a huge transformation in terms of how you approach things. What was the pivot point where somebody on the team said, "we want to change things — lets release small and often"?
Silas: It's hard for me to pinpoint that. There was a day in June 2017 where we had that all-hands meeting and said: "hey, we're not going to make the RPG, we're going to make this PvP game instead". After that meeting, it turned into "how fast can we get a playable prototype?"
We had it by end-of-year, in 2017. I remember I was going to college at the time and had been living in the dorms on campus. It was winter break so I couldn't stay in the dorms so I was staying with a family friend living in their guest bedroom and brought my desktop PC with me from the dorms.
I had it propped up on the ricketiest card table imaginable that was the tiniest little desk, and I had a stack of books next to the desk to put my second monitor on. My mouse pad was on my lap because I didn't have desk space for it and it was awful.
I was staying there trying to get things finished and I remember it was New Years Eve rolling into 2018. I'm sitting there working on this thing and I finished whatever the last piece was, I think it was crafting for abilities and I got that working, where you could craft and cast abilities and had an energy bar. I remember going: "this is playable, I did it, this is a playable game!"
From that point on, we were focused on how fast we could get this in front of players. It took us 10 months to get everything working that we wanted to have, and I guess that's really where that transition went: from "let's do something crazy that we don't know if we can do" to "let's ship as often and fast as possible to do things that are very achievable".
Another aspect I haven't mentioned at all is Twitch. When I started this, I was starting to create a twitch channel and figure out what I wanted to do on it; I was very interested in streaming. I started streaming game development and that's where our community sprung from.
People would watch me working on the game throughout 2018, and when we decided to launch closed alpha in October we had a few dozen or few hundred people who had heard of the game and had seen me building it.
That community transparency where they could literally watch me writing the code and making the animations and models meant they knew exactly how much work was going into the game, they knew how fast it would be coming out, they knew what to expect.
The interview continues in Part 2, where we cover more about community goals, development challenges, and what future features might be coming to the game.
Silas
Add new comment