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VGC interviews Lee Hickey of Games Faction

RSS by Matt Schnackenberg on 07 October 2008, 2167 views
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Earlier this week, VGChartz' Corporate Relations Manager Matt Schnackenberg contacted Lee Hickey, co-owner of Games Faction, to tell us about their game Project Aftermath, future projects, and his company.

 

[VGChartz] How about you introduce yourself to our readers and give some background on how Games Faction came to be.


[Lee Hickey] Hi, my name's Lee Hickey and I'm the co-founder and Managing Director of Games Faction. That's my official title anyway; my real job is as the sole programmer on Project Aftermath. Before setting up Games Faction in April 2006, I worked for a couple of other UK-based games studios for a total of 10 years. The company came into being when Malcolm Reed and I realised that we were both tired of making games for other people and felt that we could do things better ourselves. We realised that with the advent of digital distribution, now was a great time to go-it-alone and try to do something a little different and also to see if we could make a game that was comparable to the stuff being produced by the mainstream games industry but at a fraction of the price.



[VGC] How many developers worked on Project Aftermath?


[LH] There were only three developers. I did all of the programming, including building our own in-house engine from scratch, Malcolm did all the artwork including 2D, 3D and animation, and Mike Faraday did the design, writing and the sound. We did use a few other people on a contract basis for things like voice-over work but 99.9% was done by the three of us. We were lucky that each of us has a lot of industry experience so we were able to pull it off. It goes without saying we've been working extremely hard to try and cram it all in in the 2 years and 2 months since we started.



[VGC] What was the inspiration behind the game? Did the game turn out as originally envisioned?


[LH] The original vision was to try and make RTS games more accessible and immediate. For inspiration, we looked back to a lot of earlier games; Cannon Fodder, Syndicate Wars, UFO series, Myth, Ground Control and so on. We wanted to try and get a sense of character progression in there too. I wouldn't go as far as saying we wanted RPG elements, but vague whiffs of growing a character over the course of the game. It's fair to say that the development was very organic. We changed so much from the original design but I think, in the end, we have achieved what we originally set out to do.



[VGC] What is the most unique thing you have done in this game that sets it apart from the others?


[LH] If I had to choose one element, it would be the scoring system we have come up with. In a way, we have replaced resource gathering with a points system we call GOOP (Genetic Outfitting and Operational Plasma). When you start a level, you are given an amount of GOOP to spend on equipping. Each hero costs, each trooper costs, each weapon, piece of armour, augmentation and special weapon costs too; however, we don't stop you from over-spending. If you spend 10,000 more than we give you then you start the level with -10,000 score. Start a level 3,000 under budget and you'll be on 3,000 score before you've killed your first grunt. You then gain GOOP from the level itself by killing enemies, capturing bases and completing objectives. We think this quite neatly unifies two otherwise disparate systems and allows the player to set their own difficulty level. If, for instance, you don't care what score you get, you can take in a crazily expensive load-out and just have fun blowing things up. If you really want to challenge for the top spot on the leaderboard, then best to think carefully about your load-out and try and optimise it for each level.


[VGC] How was the comic book style cutscenes for the story thought up?


[LH] There were two reasons we decided on using comics to present the back-story. The first reason is because sci-fi really has its origin in books and then comics. We wanted another nod to the origins of sci-fi and retro-futurism of the 1950s so it seemed a natural choice, especially as we used a number of 1950s sci-fi comics for visual inspiration. The second reason is because usual FMV cutscenes are simply too time-consuming and expensive for us to even have attempted. Also, they tend to be a little over-used and it was nice to do things in a different way.



[VGC] Will there ever be a multiplayer expansion to Project Aftermath?


[LH] Yes, very much so. Multiplayer considerations have influenced the game design quite deeply as we always intended adding it in. The scoring system particularly will work very well in multiplayer as it will let experienced players play against novices, simply by using a different initial GOOP allocation. We are planning on having both competitive and cooperative play. We aren't quite sure when a multiplayer version will be ready as we haven't started work on it yet but I expect it some time in 2009. We want to make sure we get it right though so we won't be rushing anything.



[VGC] The game is available on Steam. How was it getting the game onto Steam? difficult?


[LH] Getting the game onto Steam really could not have been any easier. It, and the guys over at Steam, have been a real joy to work with. They're very knowledgeable about their market so have lots of great advice and their systems are now quite mature so it really was a very smooth process.




[VGC] Are there any future RTS games planned for development by Games Factions or are you going to expand into other genres?


[LH] Yes. Apart from the multiplayer version I've already mentioned, we do have quite a number of ideas for other RTS-style games. We stumbled upon the term Arcade-RTS to describe Project Aftermath, and I think it fits rather well, so we'd like to continue focussing on games in that style. One thing that is really important for us though is to always try and do something that is new, even if it is only one feature. I don't envision us ever churning out games that are carbon-copies of something else.



[VGC] Any final words you would like to say to our readers?


[LH] I really hope your readers enjoy playing Project Aftermath and think that we have, in some way, achieved our goals. It'd be great for them to support indie games across the board if possible because it's often from small indie studios that the really innovative ideas and mechanics spring. It's a very difficult business competing against the multi-million dollar, international, Goliath development studios that get most of the exposure and play-time, but every sale of an indie game adds another pebble to David's sling.

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