AI War, the co-op RTS/4x title from Arcen Games, LLC, has been out for some time now, but the game is about to hit a major milestone this Wednesday. Not only will the game hit version 2.0, which will include new features and a few bug fixes, but it will also be available on Steam with 129 Steam achievements and online leaderboards. We chatted with Christopher Park, CEO, Lead Programmer, and Lead Designer for Arcen, about this unique co-op game, how the taking on the AI with a group can be more satisfying than going alone, and the power of co-op gaming.
The number and types of planets are randomly generated for every game to keep each campaign fresh
Co-Optimus: How long have you been working on the game and how many people are involved?
Christopher: I originally started tossing around ideas for the game with my dad at our July 4th cookout in 2008, but I was working on the game Alden Ridge at the time, and so didn't actually start on AI War until early November 2008. The game was then in development until April 2009, when we went into a beta testing cycle, and in May we released version 1.0 on our website and Impulse. Since May, we've been going through an incredibly extensive post-release process, culminating in our big 2.0 release that is just now coming out on Steam and Direct2Drive. Fan reaction to my requests for feedback was such that this game has just grown and grown and grown, far beyond what I had ever imagined.
Originally it was just I working on the game, with my three alpha testers (my normal co-op RTS playgroup: my dad, my uncle, and one of my uncle's colleagues) providing feedback each week. In March 2009, Pablo Vega signed on as our composer. There were around a dozen beta testers who provided excellent feedback about the game in April, most notably Lars Bull, who in June joined the team as for forum moderation/support and as the lead designer for another upcoming Arcen title (a casual puzzle game -- with 4 player online co-op, by the way). In July, Phil Chabot joined the team as our new artist, and began the long process of upgrading the game's graphics, which you see the culmination of in our 2.0 release. Before that point, all of our art was from free sources (most notably Daniel Cook's work, which players may recognize from the classic game Tyrian), or stuff that I had cobbled together myself. One of the AI War forum regulars, Calvin Southwood, joined us in August to help with our growing needs for support/forum moderation, and to create a printable game manual (prior to that there was only our extensive online wiki).
So how many people really created this game? Several magazines have called this a "one man passion project," and in some senses that is true -- I'm the only designer and programmer and the main person on support and marketing and everything else -- but as you can see it really does take a lot more people to make even a "one man" project successful these days. I couldn't be happier with how the team has turned out.
Players who don’t rely upon their teammates for support will quickly be overwhelmed by the AI
Co-Optimus: Any inspiration from Sins of a Solar Empire or Galactic Civilizations?
Christopher: To be honest, not really... My inspirations were more Supreme Commander, the Age of Empires series, the Rise of Nations series, and the original Empire Earth. Those were the games that I most enjoyed playing co-op "comp stomp" in over the last decade or so. Civilization IV was also a major inspiration, so a lot of the 4X influence comes from that side.
Co-Optimus: In "The Case for Co-Op Games," you cite the creation of an unbalanced team in the player’s favor as one reason why co-op works as it allows players of varying skill levels to enjoy the game equally. How is this design concept implemented in the game to allow first time players the same easy access as seasoned vets?
Christopher: AI War is primarily geared at people who already love strategy games (RTS or otherwise), but want more -- for the single player game, that's pretty much our core audience. For solo play, having really robust, informative, and fun tutorials, as well as tool tips all over the place in the game itself, is how we basically have made things accessible for people who might be newer to the genre. When it comes to a single player game -- or competitive, for that matter, which AI War is not -- I think that's about as much as anyone can hope to do. And honestly, that approach works pretty well in the main, as there have been a lot more new-to-RTS players writing in to the forums than I had expected. However, this is one of the places where any co-op game really shows the power of the co-op model. I have even more forum members who enjoy RTS games in general and who tried out AI War solo, and who are then drafting friends and family who aren't really into the genre much at all. The initial players get a feel for the game through the tutorials and a bit of solo play, and then can't wait to get others in to the experience. The draftees usually don't go through the tutorials, but get some on-the-fly explanations from the expert players that got them into the game. This works amazingly well, and I don't think it's because of anything I've done in particular with the game, other than designing it in such a way that new players can have handicaps or easier starting positions. The experienced players can give better territory to the weaker players, or can avoid putting them on the most hostile parts of the perimeter, etc, and that gives the new players time to catch up, but other than that it's all down to the peer explanations and enthusiasm to carry them fully into the game.
I think a lot of other developers could take advantage of this sort of concept in a co-op scenario without having to go overboard with new design concepts to support it; the very nature of co-op gaming is in support of this sort of "new player bootstrapping," so long as the game design supports having the experienced player take more of the difficulty load. When I was finally able to get my wife to play the game during late alpha, she quickly became quite enamored of it, which surprised us both. She's a fairly hardcore gamer, but not into strategy gaming at all, so for me that was an early indication that I was on the right track.
From the lobby screen, you can determine just how difficult you wish to make your AI foe
Co-Optimus: There’s been a lot of talk of the AI portion of AI War and how you took a different approach than some of the more traditional RTS games, which you go into in great detail on your blog. Were there challenges in creating an AI that would have to respond to up to 8 players all targeting it instead of just one or two?
Christopher: I think that playing in co-op just brings a general problem with RTS AI into sharper relief -- in other words, I think the problems are already there, but that co-op play tends to expose them more heavily. The main problem is that of having the AIs be able to handle enough fronts at once to respond to 8 players, since those 8 players might even be managing 2-3 fronts each if they are all very expert. So that could conceivably be 24 different areas the AI is having to pay attention to at once if it is faced by a very formidable opponent, and there's not any other AI around that I have seen that really handles that well. I tend to play 4-player co-op in every RTS I play, and in most of them the AI is only doing one or two things at once, which makes it a bit too easy for us to defend. Even if the AI is attacking with multiple groups of guys at once, they all tend to bunch together in a way that works sometimes, but which becomes increasingly uninteresting over the long haul.
The core problem, there, is how to divide units up, and how to make them both pursue their own agendas and respond to player actions. The more players you have, the more of a problem that is, although a single player who is clever and uses multi-frontal attacks can run into the same issues. With AI War, I therefore went with a really hybrid AI, with a lot of unit independence and emergent behavior at the tactical level. So that way, however many fronts the players can muster, the AIs can easily respond to all of them at once. By having the individual units largely act independently, but with some flocking-style behavior that leads to emergence, you wind up with a situation where they can combine and divide their forces as needed. This can be pretty unsettling, and really makes players feel like they are facing off against an AI or alien opponent, something from sci-fi novels but not just a human opponent with similar abilities to their own. Paired with heuristic tendencies to make the AI do multi-frontal attacks of its own (with more fronts as more human players are added), this makes for an experience that gets a lot more interesting the more players you have. I'm actually kind of surprised no one has ever asked me this question before!
Battles like these are typical, as the game can support 30,000 ships onscreen at once
Co-Optimus: Many RTS titles have presented players with the opportunity to do some form of co-op, what some might call "comp stomping." What did you set out to do with AI War to make it different?
Christopher: I feel like most RTS titles are either focused on solo play, or competitive multiplayer, and co-op comes as an afterthought. And it generally shows. Usually the "comp stomp" involves playing teams on the skirmish mode, with AI players against the human players. This works pretty well in the main, and my play group has been enjoying that sort of play on a weekly basis since 1998, but the idea for AI War basically came out of my group's growing frustration with the weaknesses of that approach. Often those games are really short and repetitive -- an hour or two at absolute most -- whereas with co-op often you have a stable group of players and it is nice to be able to play a longer game over more sessions. There are more opportunities for growth and variety that way, and having long-term consequences to every decision is really cool. But many recent RTS titles have not even had multiplayer save games, which pretty much kills the longer co-op experience.
The other big problem we were having with the standard model was that the AI simply wasn't good enough to hold my playgroup's interest for longer than 6 months to a year (and even with that, we would be getting pretty bored with it by much sooner). Part of that was the AI, but part of that was that the variety just wasn't enough. Competitive multiplayer games are often touted as having near infinite replayability because you never know what the other team will do, and that provides variety even on non-random maps. I used to be big into competitive FPS play, so I know that largely does hold true. But with co-op games, they largely have the same replayability challenges of single player games.
My goal with AI War was to try to provide that same sort of longevity found in the competitive multiplayer scene, only in a solo/co-op context. That meant having random/procedural scenarios with a large amount of variety, and having an AI that would be much more interesting even at an expert level of play. Part of that involves having AIs that play really differently from human players, rather than just having them be a poor-man's stand-in for a real human opponent, which is what most RTS AI seems to be designed around. That makes for a really asymmetrical system, with a lot of scenario design possibilities that are foreign in the RTS space, but utterly common in many other genres: FPS, Platformer, etc. AI War is one of the few games where it would not be more interesting if there was a human opponent controlling the opposition instead of the AI, which I think is a key differentiator from "comp stomps."
Believe it or not, yes, all those ships are needed to take on that AI outpost
Co-Optimus: One thing you mention regarding the AI is how it uses "behaviorlets" to determine tactical actions, such as flanking or choosing target. Are there some co-op behaviors included in there?
Christopher: The thing to remember with this game is that the primary way that I play it is co-op. So all of the behaviorlets, as well as all of the gameplay mechanics in general, were designed with co-op play in mind. If it didn't work well in co-op, it got cut from the game. And some of the AI types, such as Bully and Assassin for instance, really only make sense in a co-op context, because they go for the weakest and strongest players respectively, and in a solo game that doesn't have any meaning. I think this may be one fundamental difference between myself and a lot of other game designers -- I'm not just a proponent of co-op, I'm not just tacking it on because intellectually I believe it's a good idea, but rather this is the primary way that I play games whenever they support it. 75% or more of our alpha testing was done while playing co-op, and I'm not sure there's another game around that could say that! I don't feel like co-op is the number one selling factor for AI War in the general marketplace, since most genre fans play solo, but I built this primarily for my playgroup and myself, so co-op has always been at the very forefront when it comes to design.
Co-Optimus: Your first big expansion to the game, The Zenith Remnant, is slated to come out within the next couple of months, which will include new ships, new AI styles, and a new faction. Any plans for specific co-op updates or features via the free monthly DLC after that expansion goes live?
Christopher: Here again, the first thing to remember is that most of the core testing is going to be done in co-op, so everything is going to be aimed at augmenting and improving the co-op experience. Beyond that, we are going to be adding in online matchmaking through a couple of services, so if players are having trouble finding people to play co-op with, hopefully that will help. We'll also be retroactively giving that matchmaking functionality to existing customers for free, because we think it does add a lot of value. I do also expect to see some refinement of the recent "Manage Players" feature that allows for co-op dropin/dropout. That's something that is already seeing some refinement between our 1.301 and 2.0 releases, actually...
Beyond those two large items, I think we'll continue to see a large number of small co-op-specific enhancements. The 2.0 release has a fair number of those, such as the ability to see the resource stores/income/outflows for allies by hovering over your own resource information in the HUD, and improvements to the gifting interface that shows when ships can't be gifted between players for whatever reason... Those sort of incremental small improvements are ongoing, and will continue via free DLC as players make suggestions or as new ideas occur to me through my own play sessions (as with those ideas in 2.0). I don't want to put items that are too vital for co-op into paid expansions, because I don't want to force co-op players to upgrade to the expansion in order to get the most out of it. The free monthly DLC is also going to be something that we continue to do for years; even after multiple expansions all of the free DLC will still be available for customers of just the base game.
An early screenshot from the Alden Ridge mid-alpha build
Co-Optimus: You’ve been working on an undead adventure/puzzle-type game, Alden Ridge, for some time now that includes local co-op, with a tentative release date of some time in the mid-2010 time frame. Any chance that the release of AI War on Steam could happen with Alden Ridge and the local co-op could expand to include online as well?
Christopher: Through AI War, Arcen Games now has relationships with a lot of digital distribution channels, and we've proved our mettle to a certain extent to them, so I think there's a very good chance you'll be seeing all of our future titles more widely distributed at launch. There's also a number of retail deals in the works for AI War, and that will also hopefully continue to expand with future titles as we grow our audience.
As for online co-op in Alden Ridge, all of our games are going to support co-op in some fashion -- that's part of the Arcen Games credo, and is simply in line with how I play games in the first place, as I've mentioned. Whether co-op is local or is online is going to depend on each specific game and how it plays. Alden Ridge was built from the ground up as having local co-op only, and it may have to stay that way simply because of technical reasons with that engine. AI War was my first experience with programming networked multiplayer games, and it's a very different style of coding in general. It depends on what all is going on next year, for this title specifically and the state of Arcen's financials, how much breathing room we have at that time, etc, as to whether Alden Ridge will make the jump to online co-op as well as local. It's certainly something that I'd be interested in doing, and now that I've done it with AI War and know what I'm doing, this is something that is a no-brainer for other future projects that aren't already so far along. Our upcoming puzzle game Feedback will have online co-op (no local because it is mouse-based), for instance. We also have a tower defense game planned before Alden Ridge, actually, and that will almost certainly feature both local and online co-op.
Right now the plan is The Zenith Remnant out within a few months, Feedback (the puzzler) out within the February/March timeframe, our unnamed tower defense game out in perhaps Q3, and then Alden Ridge will come after that, perhaps pushed back as far as early 2011. Alden Ridge is already a pretty good game, and is quite fun, but there are some issues with the adventure aspects that I want to make sure and take time to address -- and for me, that means letting it fallow a bit. That's one of the nice things about being an indie developer: if a project is looking promising, but is not yet at the level it needs to be to be really great, I can set it aside until such time as I'm ready to come back and really turn it into something extra special. My wife and I still play Alden Ridge together from time to time even now, though, that said. It's a special game to me, I just want to make sure and give it the time to get it done really right.
There are a lot of exciting projects on the horizon for Arcen, and I'm excited about all of them. Even beyond the titles listed, I'm one of those people who has just rafts and rafts of fairly detailed ideas about games I want to create. I've been creating levels and content and mods for other developers' games since I was around 11 years old, and I've had a growing list of games I want to make ever since that time. Interestingly, ever since I was a kid, co-op was at the center of what I wanted. I really wanted Mario 2 and Mario 3 to support two players simultaneously, like Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers did. After playing Chip and Dale on the NES, and Demon Stalkers on the PC, young me couldn't understand why this wasn't a feature of all games. Twenty years later, I couldn't be more excited about New Super Mario Bros. Wii, because that means that Miyamoto has finally made the game that I've been wanting since 1989. Hopefully other developers will get on board and really turn co-op modes into a more pervasive fixture of gaming.
Thanks again to Christopher for taking the time to answer all our questions, and for being such a vocal proponent of co-op gaming! AI War is available now from Stardock’s Impulse, Direct2Drive.com or the Arcen Games website, and will be available tomorrow from Steam. Copies of the game purchased from Impulse, Direct2Drive or Arcen Games can be integrated with Steam by using the license keys you receive from those outlets.