Bitflip Games Interview

16 Aug 2010 at 17:02:48 by Peter Parrish

IncGamers recently caught up with Bitflip Games' founders Guy Somberg, David Steinwedel and Delaney Gillilan to talk about their new company, backgrounds and the new project codenamed Remnant. The Bitflip team have worked on on many titles you'll recognise including Bioshock 2 and Hellgate London.

You've all had experience working at 'larger' studios, what was the main impetus behind forming your own, smaller, development team?

Dave: Hi Peter. Great question. There are about a million and one reasons why we decided to set out on our own. Since you mentioned that we're small, I'll stick with that theme. When Guy and I were joined Flagship we were an early part of the team, around numbers 16 and 17 (which, when you include Ping0, grew to about 100). There's something special about the closeness and quality of a small, tightly knit team. Each member grows beyond his or her respective role and ends up becoming responsible for the game as a whole. We feel that when everyone on the team cares that much and has the power to do something about it, it makes for better games.

Right now you're working on a project with the working title "Remnant," are there any details you can share about what type of game this will be?

Delaney: Remnant is a title that's too big for the 3 of us to develop on our own. We've created a demo and are shopping it to publishers. Hopefully we can partner with someone who will help us make the game a reality. Since publishers are a bit more secretive than us, we are keeping this one close to the chest for the moment. What I can tell you is that our goal with Remnant is to reboot an entire genre of gaming that is becoming lost to the ages.

The BitFlip site describes Guy and David as providing a "one-two, Programmer-Sound Designer punch" (and you both had audio roles on Bioshock 2,) so can we expect audio aesthetics to play a pretty important role in "Remnant"?

Guy: David and I both learned a lot about audio for games in our roles at 2K Marin and Flagship Studios. The biggest lesson was that we need to learn from all of the work that's been done on Digital Audio Workstations for "offline" processing (for movies, commercials, and other non-interactive media), but keep in mind the fact that we're making a game, and that games are interactive, and work very differently from movies. DAW programs like ProTools or Nuendo provide the sound designers with both fine-grained and coarse power tools to control the mix at every point in time. The challenge with game audio, then, is to provide that same level of control over the runtime mix, while the game state is changing all around you. Even bearing this in mind, the unfortunate part of the whole process is that, if we do a really good job, few people will notice. Good audio is subtle; it enhances the experience so naturally that you don't even notice it if you're not specifically paying attention to it.

Including my time working on slot machines, I have now written six audio engines from the ground up, and I've gotten very good at it. I have grand plans for engine number seven. I will be writing some blog posts about our audio engine on bitflipgames.com, so keep an eye out!

Your site name-checks Tales of Monkey Island, Torchlight and Castle Crashers as inspirations, and the thing they have in common is their downloadable nature. Is this the direction you'll be taking for BitFlip releases?

Dave: Absolutely. We want to be as closely connected as possible to our players and feel that downloadable is a great way to go make that happen. If the player is coming to our website the buy the game, they can also participate in our forums, read the FAQs, see the developer blogs, ask us questions and provide feedback. (Not that we have a game for sale, forums, or a FAQ on our website yet, but these things will come.)

If so, can you say what digital platforms you have in mind (XBLA, PSN, Steam etc?)

Delaney: We are platform agnostic at the moment. XBLA, PSN, and PC/Mac (directly, through Steam, Direct2Drive, and/or other marketplaces) are our primary targets. However, we may start on the mobile platforms (iOS, Android) as we build momentum for the larger platforms.

Sean Murray from Hello Games gave a talk about digital distribution at this years Develop Conference, where he said he felt that Xbox LIVE Arcade was a higher-risk (but also potentially higher success) platform for indie developers than PlayStation Network (where he ultimately released his game, Joe Danger.) Is that something you'd agree with, or take into account for any future releases?

Dave: It's difficult to compare the two platforms head on. Both Sony and Microsoft are coy about releasing hard statistics. However, based on our business research, we estimate that XBLA has about 3 times as many games available as the PSN and a larger number of unit and dollar sales. Theoretically, it's easier to get noticed on the PSN while more money is there to be made on XBLA. However, that doesn't play much (if any) role in a decision about what platforms we are going for. We want our games in the hands of gamers and would prefer it to be as easy for them as possible. That means hitting as many platforms as we can.

At this point, do you think you'll be self-publishing your games? (did this play a part in the decision to go independent?)

Guy: We are currently pursuing both the self-publishing and traditional publishing partner options. Like Delaney said before, Remnant is a larger game than the 3 of us can build on our own and we are currently looking for publisher support. Since pitching a game to publishers does not take all (or even much) of our time, we're also preparing games that we can finish with 3 people and self publish. Where will we end up? Right now even we don't know.

What's the best feature or most impressive moment you've experienced in a recent game?

Guy: My favorite feature in any game is the smooth zooming support in Supreme Commander 1 and 2. That's truly a revolutionary feature, and it's so seamlessly integrated that I was doing it from mission 1 without even thinking about the fact that I was doing it. In fact, it's such a core mechanic that, for me, it has completely replaced the minimap and even the entire process of panning around has been superseded by a zoom out/zoom in.

Delaney: Bad Company 2 is a favorite of mine at the moment. I love hiding in a bush, letting an entire squad go past me, knifing 3 and pistoling 2 more.

Dave: I just got my hands on God of War 3 and I have to say, it's one of the most impressive titles I've played. The seamless transition between gameplay and cutscenes is amazing. However, I still think the moment when a splicer jumps on and tries to tear his way into your bathysphere at the start or Bioshock is one of the finest (and most terrifying) moments I've ever had with a game.

Reading your design philosophy rules, the Data Driven model seems to suggest that your games may be moddable after release - is this something you'd encourage (if it would indeed be feasible)?

Dave: If players love our games enough to want to dive in make mods, consider us flattered.

Guy: It's a bit more complicated than Dave is making things out to be. Making a game explicitly moddable is a big proposition, and can have a lot of different meanings. Think of the Unreal Tournament games, where you can create a radically different game by changing the scripts as well as the content using UnrealEd, as compared to Torchlight, where the core gameplay remains basically unchanged, while still providing a wealth of opportunities to create mods using TorchEd. The big difference between the two is where the game's logic is written. In UT the game logic is mostly in UnrealScript, and the core engine is "just" a renderer and script interpreter (yes, I am vastly oversimplifying this for the purposes of the example). Torchlight, in contrast, has encased the core game mechanics in binary code, and then allowed the data to create the behaviors.

Remnant's engine (the GSD Engine) will more closely resemble the Torchlight model than the Unreal model. The basic operation of the game will be set in stone, but a set of data files will define the actual behavior of the game.

We're still too early on in the process to know whether we'll be providing tools and explicit mod support. We do know that people like games that they can mod, and that large communities and opportunities have sprung up from mods (Counterstrike, anyone?), so we definitely want to keep our options open.

Finally, David and Guy, you both worked a little on the forthcoming XCOM reboot. 2K are being awfully quiet about a lot of aspects people are interested in, like whether there'll be any tactical squad command aspects - I don't suppose you'd be able to provide any confirmation or denial of if that feature will be in there?

Guy: Look over there! Something shiny!

Dave: Nice try Peter! All we can say is that the team working on XCOM is super talented and will put their hearts and souls into making a fantastic game.

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