Co-Optimus: It’s hard to believe that it’s only been a little over 3 years since we last did an interview with you, and in that time, your studio has released five games: A.I. War (2009), Tidalis (2010), A Valley Without Wind (2012), A Valley Without Wind 2 (2013), and Shattered Haven (2013). Don’t you guys ever get tired, or take a break? How do you keep the momentum going?
Chris Park: Wow, has it been that long? Time sure flies when you’re busy, I guess. When it comes to making games, I think the big advantage that we have on speed mainly comes from having a really streamlined process. I come from a business coding background, and we had very rigorous standards when it came to code organization and reuse and design patterns. These things all speed up coding, and I carried those over into Arcen. And as we’ve been proceeding, we’ve been gathering up more and more engine components that get carried forward into our newer games.
But further than that, as these years have progressed, we’ve also grown as a company. What started out as literally just me is now six fulltime staff, a contract art studio, and a couple of other direct contractors. I haven’t been actively soliciting for positions in general, but have just taken the opportunity to snap up individuals that stood out to me whenever I encountered them and had a potential opening. Having a dedicated team of self-motivated, talented individuals really makes a big difference.
Designing with a team to toss ideas around, rather than one person sitting alone and doing it, also helps enormously. On all fronts, things move much faster now than they did three years ago, and we’re actually able to do two projects at once rather than just one at a time, now. That helps keep things fresh -- each project helps improve the other when you have two to focus on.
Co-Optimus: Of course those five games don’t include the constant support, patches, and - in the case of A.I. War - expansions you provide after release. Arcen really has been great with incorporating player feedback into its games. Has working with fans made the development process more complex, or does feedback cause nothing but warm fuzzy feelings all over?
Chris: Yeah, we definitely keep busy. In terms of fans making the development process more complex, I would actually say the opposite: it makes it vastly, hugely simpler. When you are sitting by yourself in a vacuum, it’s easy to overlook things. We make complicated games, and there’s just no way we could make them in that scope without the support of our playerbase.
It’s the constant feedback (not all of it warm and fuzzy) that helps keep us refining our ideas until they really shine. Having each game go through that process really gives me much more confidence that the end result is good. When it’s something that is being worked on behind closed doors, I’m always a bit antsy to get it into the hands of players and start collecting diverse opinions.
Arcen Games first came onto the scene with A.I. War - a strategy game that featured a unique approach to enemy AI
Co-Optimus: There are two themes that I feel have really been consistent in Arcen Games. The first is that you’re not going to get a “insert genre here” game. They’re often an amalgam of different ideas and genres, which can lead to some very good innovations and ideas in gaming. However, do you ever feel that some of these blends might be going a bit far? Has there been a moment in development of any game where you wish you could simplify things, but you’re just too far in to make that happen?
Chris: Definitely, that’s a big theme for us. Our games tend to exist in the space between multiple genres. Sometimes that works out more successfully than others. With Valley 1, we struggled for a year and a half trying to make all those elements gel. In the end we had to cut a lot, and the end design drifted a lot from the original intent we had when we first set out. In the end that was something where I felt like the final Valley 1 design was solid, but we had taken it as far as we could because we were backed into a corner by how the design had evolved.
So what we did was basically fork the project: we started Valley 2, and went back to our earlier conceptions with all that we had learned about the genre genre space we were occupying during the year and a half prior to that. We didn’t just patch Valley 1 because that would have really erased that game -- it is unique and interesting in its own right, and nothing like Valley 2. But I felt like we were able to really execute a tighter, more interesting design with Valley 2.
Co-Optimus: Do you find the lack of a clear label for your games hurts their popularity or sales? That people get turned off when they can’t say “oh, it’s a really good shooter” and instead have to go along the lines of “well, there are platform elements, but first you play this kind of strategy board game”?
Chris: Maybe sometimes, but it’s hard to say. With Tidalis I think that hurt us some, because it’s a really deep puzzle game that was also trying to put on a cute face and still be accessible to the casual players. That wound up being a turnoff to the hardcore players, who thought it was more shallow than it remotely was; and then all that depth scared away the casual players. So that was a misstep, although the game itself is one of our best.
When it comes to our other titles, I think that it’s a lot less clear. To a large degree we have to do things that are odd and different -- almost all indies do -- because if you just wanted a great shooter, the AAA companies can do that better. They have the manpower to crank out something with production values an indie could never match. So we’re competing on innovation and design.
With a few rare exceptions, indies are all serving niche audiences of some sort: the lesson here is that, so long as you keep your budget to an appropriate scope for your audience, it’s a very viable business strategy. It’s the sort of thing that also lets us make the kinds of games we want to make, and that gives players something they’ve never quite seen before with each game.
Tidalis was, at first glance, a puzzle game in the vein of Bejewled; but there was more lurking under the surface...
Co-Optimus: So the other theme is a personal favorite of ours at this site: the inclusion of co-op. Why do it? Doesn’t that make things harder?
Chris: I actually wrote a lengthy blog post about this back in 2009, and you guys quoted me quite a bit in an article you wrote in ‘09 or ‘10 on the same subject. It’s a complex topic.
That said, the high points are: players just aren’t playing in isolation anymore, because large segments are growing up, getting married, having kids, etc. Often the choice is “play together or not at all,” so co-op to me seems very near to a required feature.
To me it doesn’t need to be something grandly different from the solo experience. It’s just “I see you playing that, and I want to play too.” Not “I see you playing that, and let’s play a watered-down version of that that together, and then later you can go back to playing solo.” I think sometimes developers are making it more complex than it needs to be, trying to make the co-op experience something distinct from solo. Just let me and my wife both play through the main game together!
In terms of co-op making development harder, naturally it does. Networked multiplayer is a huge bugbear, and something a lot of indies don’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole. However, once you’ve done it once or twice, it becomes pretty routine. It’s still the largest source of bugs, and by far the largest source of tech support requests (people requesting router/ISP/config help, not reporting bugs). But to me it’s worth it.
Co-Optimus: Any chance we’ll see a console port of any of Arcen Games’ titles?
A: There’s definitely a chance, although there’s nothing in the works right now. We’ve had some great conversations with Sony as well as some various major publishers about everything from Playstation to Vita to Wii U. Nothing has really come of that yet, but we have some great contacts that we keep in touch with every so often.
My main point of resistance is that I don’t personally have much motivation to work on ports. I’m a game designer and a coder, and the thought of spending months on just a port is a bit... well, depressing. It would be a new source of revenue, sure, but there are a lot of hoops to jump through for that revenue on any console, and a lot of time spent not focusing on what we do best: designing and implementing games.
I recall Introversion mentioning how getting bogged down in endless ports was really a major stumbling block for them, and I’ve always taken that to heart. With the right partners, or with being able to take on staff dedicated to ports without impacting our core development team, I’d certainly be all for ports. I’d absolutely love to see our games on consoles, tablets, and phones. But really doing that right takes a lot of time, and in that same amount of time we can make a good chunk of a new game.
Arcen's next big game was the cryptically named "A Valley Without Wind"
Co-Optimus: Ok, the broad/general questions out of the way, let’s focus a little more on A Valley Without Wind 2. What did you learn from A Valley Without Wind that went into making the sequel?
Chris: Valley 1 started out with a design much more similar to Valley 2. However, we couldn’t really figure out the best way to get the strategic elements to gel with the main gameplay, so that kind of sloughed off during early beta of Valley 1. We also started putting in a bunch of crafting mechanics, which weren’t in the original design, because I thought that would be fun and interesting. It was -- but it also really took over the flow of the game and turned it into something that I hadn’t expected.
There are people who prefer Valley 1, and goodness knows I really enjoy the game as well. But it was a lot more of a sandbox than I had intended, without any real overarching plot of significance, or any satisfying conclusion. It was just an endless sandbox: great fun for a large number of hours, but then at some point you just have to put it down without feeling like you “finished,” because there is no finish.
With Valley 2, we stripped away the endless nature, the generic characters affected by permadeath, and all the crafting and sandboxiness. Instead we focused on tighter, more tactical combat with higher stakes for a single character that you control throughout the whole game. There’s a lot more individual character progression on a defined arc that has a specific beginning, middle, and end.
There are lots of loadout customization choices (50, in fact), but it’s not completely freeform. This actually makes for more interesting spells, because we can balance the loadouts against one another rather than each of 200 spells against every other loadout. That was something I much preferred to the crafting approach, in the end. And then of course we finally figured out how to integrate the strategy portions properly, and came up with a much better strategy design in general. Valley 2 is larger in scope than Valley 1 in most respects, but it’s also a lot more focused.
Co-Optimus: Why didn’t these improvements just go into a patch or an update of the original?
Chris: Mainly because these were so starkly different from the first game that if we did that, it would have erased the first game entirely. These weren’t just improvements to an existing game, it was a straight-up reconceptualization. Valley 2 is more different from Valley 1 than most sequels are. To make that many changes to a game that many people already loved would have caused an enormous (and well-justified) uproar! In the end we split the difference and gave the sequel for free to to all the owners of Valley 1 (and vice-versa).
AVWW2 was a more straightforward game than its predecessor, but still retained many elements that made AVWW unique
Co-Optimus: Did you ever debate simplifying A Valley Without Wind 2 as a whole? Maybe just making it a straightforward 16-bit action-platformer?
Chris: Actually, no -- building a “straightforward {X}” type of game just isn’t in our DNA as a company. There are plenty of other developers who heavily focus on one genre and try to perfect it, and they’re already doing an admirable job. I don’t really feel that Arcen has anything to offer in that sort of space. We’re built around making things that are more experimental and unusual. We’re set up much more like an R&D shop than most developers.
Co-Optimus: How do you feel after the release of this title as opposed to after A Valley Without Wind? Is there more of a feeling that you “got right?” Are there things you’re already looking over again to figure out how to improve or expand upon?
Chris: Valley 2 is a game I’m immensely proud of, and I play it most nights with my son, who is two and a half. “Daddy, do you have a game?” is pretty much what he asks every night before bed, hinting to play it. Playing through it in that context, not testing the game or having any sort of pressure, but just playing it ten or twenty minutes a night, is something I really enjoy. It’s a fun game, it’s well-balanced and interesting, and it has a great amount of content.
For any author of any creative work, there’s always stuff that you might want to change. Novelists read their works and notice slightly weak wording here, or a comma splice there, or something that wasn’t quite as clear as they wanted to make it. But by and large, past a certain point it’s time to just let the work stand on its own. You could fiddle with it endlessly, but past a certain point all that fiddling actually starts to tear at the fabric a bit.
The more distance I have from Valley 2, honestly the less I think it needs anything more, or even any expansions. It and Tidalis are probably Arcen’s two big “complete” works. There’s more that could be done in either space, naturally, if there is a big demand for additional content. But both games already have such a ridiculous amount of content for their respective genres that that’s a fairly niche audience who wants even more. Right now our focus is on new games, but we may return to Environ in the future. For now it’s just minor fixes and tweaks as they come up.
Co-Optimus: The last question I have about a Valley Without Wind 2 I have to fully credit to our senior editor, Andrew Gaskill, who apparently spends his free time trolling graduate student thesis presentations. The words "A Valley Without Wind” seem to imply a stagnant, silent world; a place where change, as in 'the winds of change" are not only absent, but are forever cut off from this "valley." What was the thought behind the game’s title? Are there any specific elements of the game that are reflections of this?
Chris: I’m as much into that sort of thing as he is! To me, I took a different interpretation of the word “wind,” however. Wind isn’t always a positive thing, and in fact in my personal life I’ve lived through multiple tornados, two major hurricanes, and a multitude of smaller hurricanes.
The destruction that these things can wreak is absolutely terrifying: I remember when I was around four years old, seeing a K-Mart in a shopping center near our house that was just flattened. There were some boards, and the concrete of the ground left, but everything else had been pushed down the hill. Or about a year and a half ago, a major tornado came through the area, but was a good five miles away from our house. Wreckage from that landed in our yard as well as 20 miles north of us. We had pieces of other people’s houses dropped on us from two towns over.
I love a good breeze as much of the next person, but when I think of wind I don’t think of it as a benevolent, positive thing. “A Valley Without Wind,” to me, refers more to finding shelter from the storm. I can remember huddling in various houses listening to the winds rage outside, with huge thumps on the outside wall as debris is flung at 80 miles per hour into the outside of your shelter. That sort of sense of an immensely scary and dangerous world, in which you’ve carved out a small bit of semi-safety and peace, is what that title represents to me.
Stay tuned to Co-Optimus for the second part of our interview with Chris where we discuss Shattered Haven and what's next for Arcen Games!