Max Schaefer Talks Torchlight

19 Nov 2009 at 13:04:39 by Tim McDonald

With the rabid success of Torchlight, we sent Eric Bruce (Flux)  part-time IncGamers contributor and full-time DIII.net wizard - to ask Max Schaefer, the CEO of Torchlight developer Runic Games, a lot of questions. What follows is the text transcript of that fateful meeting. Read on or listen to the interview.

Okay, we're rolling. This is Flux, talking to Max Schaefer for a podcast about Torchlight. Say hello, Max.

Hello everybody, good to be here.

I thought you'd actually say “Hello Max!”

Hello, Max. *laughs*

How's the new dog today?

The dog is a total spaz. I got a new dog the other day and boy, it's a lot of work.

Okay, you've taken a break from your puppy training to answer some questions for us. One of the forum questions – we had forum questions! We're eager to know! - people are looking at the success of Torchlight and how well it's doing as a quick game. Did you guys ever consider doing that with Hellgate?

Um, we actually considered doing it with Mythos, and it just didn't seem to be on the cards, so it was a great opportunity to just kick something out quick and get something into player hands as fast as possible.

The amazing speed of Torchlight's development – how were you able to do it so fast? Just using existing tools on all the animation?

Actually, we had to start over with absolutely nothing, from scratch, which saved some time in a lot of ways. First, we used the Ogre3D engine which is an open-source graphics engine. We wrote a really good toolset around it, and that really sped up production. I think the biggest thing is that we had a two-year dry-run in making Mythos, and that was good practice. *laughs* We had pretty much the same exact team come over from Flagship Studios that was working on Mythos, so it was a team that was already used to making this sort of game, that had already gotten through all the trials and tribulations, and we actually got to apply a lot of the lessons we learned from that in Torchlight. So yeah, it was very efficient.

Do you think, looking back, that if you could do – you know, games like Hellgate and Diablo 2 and other such games that take four or five years to make – could you apply any of the lessons you've learned with Torchlight to those sort of titles?

Yeah, I think so. I think that the era of the five-year, eighty-million dollar project is largely over.

Tell that to Blizzard!

Well not for Blizzard! *laughs* They have their own rules over there, for sure. But as far as the economy downturn and a lot of failed projects out there, people are looking for faster, quicker development and cheaper development and less risk, and I think that there's a pretty good gap in the market right now between the casual game and the super-big budget project, and I think that customers will like it, especially since you can get a lot more product out.

That's definitely true. What're you drinking, by the way?

I'm having a... Crystal Geyser Juice Squeeze Mountain Raspberry.

That's what all the CEOs drink at home. Keep that in mind, kids. Could you imagine, if you went back and made Diablo 2 or Hellgate right now, could we shave a year off this in some way?

I think that if we started over with Diablo 2 right now, we could have easily shaved a year off. That would've saved some marriages, by the way. *Laughs* But yeah, we didn't have anywhere near the kind of tools that we do now, and that really makes a huge difference. If a level designer, a quest designer, a particle designer, an item balancer, and all these people can get their work in without having to bug a whole staff of programmers and wait a day for the build to see if it works – that's a huge time-saver.

Well, good to know for the future, perhaps. One question a lot of the fans have, with the speed of Torchlight's development – it's just amazing that you guys made it in under a year, when it seems like it takes Blizzard two years to roll over and do anything. But of course, it's a much bigger team, etc. Was Torchlight a rush project? If you'd had six months, could you have done more? Would you have done more?

I don't think it was a rush project. I think it was a good way to get the Torchlight IP out there. It's a pretty slick and fun little game, and we almost risk – given the design we had – almost bloating the design a little, adding too many unnecessary things, and ruining the simplicity of it. So I think in some ways the short schedule helped us focus on what we were doing, and get the important things into the game and leave the fluff out.

So you guys are happy with how Torchlight is now? You weren't looking to - “If we could have just had a little more time, we could have put another character, or more monsters, or more tilesets, or...”

Okay, two things. I think one thing we would have done if we'd had maybe a year more would be to do some co-op multiplayer, which is obviously what a lot of people want. But it would have added a year, it would've added expense, we wouldn't have been able to do a $20 USD download, it wouldn't sit on your computer so nicely, and so I think that it was about right. We are releasing the mod tools, and we expect the modding community to supply a lot of end-game content, and some more cool things that we never thought of.

That actually leads onto our next question. The only real complaint I've seen about Torchlight is the lack of the multiplayer, and I was going to ask how much longer that would've taken to have done. Many many months, much more code, much more programming, who hosts the game, where do you get secure servers...?

Exactly. People say “We just want simple co-op,” but there's no way we could do a client-server model that's secure and uncheatable without adding years to the project, and many, many millions of dollars of expense. Even if you do just simple co-op, people would want matchmaking of some sort. You start to go down the road and you realise that it's not a trivial undertaking at all, which is why we figured that it would be best to just leave the multiplayer for the MMO that we're making next, and to do it right for that instead of just doing a half-assed version now.

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