We chatted with the team at Industrial Toys - Alex Seropian, Founder and CEO, Aaron Marroquin, art director, and Gabe Wong, 3d artist - about developing mobile games for core gamers and how they're pushing the envelope in storytelling with their latest game, Midnight Star: Renegade.
Tell me about Industrial Toys - how and when did it get started?
Alex: It started a little over 4 years ago with Tim Harris, Brent Pease and myself; Aaron and I had worked together at Wideload and when we needed an art director, he was my first pick. Gabe's been here almost since the beginning as well. The three of us have worked together on Midnight Star which launched last year, and the art staff is currently 7 people on the team for Renegade. The idea behind the studio is to go after the core gamer on mobile by making games that really speak to the enthusiasts: high production value, deep stories, great game mechanics, skill and designs all for mobile devices. We're doing pretty ambitious stuff - shooters on mobile! Who would have thought?!
Have you all worked on AAA console games in the past? What's the biggest change from console game development to mobile development?
Aaron: For building assets I wouldn't say it was a change - it's more like revisiting familiar territory for someone who has worked on game development for the PS2 and the original Xbox era. It's kind of like we're making games for those consoles. With most AAA games now, you can get away making things really big - polygons aren't an issue. Back in the day, the smaller the textures, the better. You really had to keep texture space in mind, a lot of our characters are one-bone weighting or two-bone weighting, whereas nowadays you can have three. So it kind of feels like we're making games for the first few consoles.
Gabe: On the design side, no matter what game project you work on, there's always a set of constraints that you have to design within. In fact, when you find yourself on a project that has no constraints - whether design or content-wise - those projects are more apt to go off the rails. There's no hard set of lines you need to draw between. On mobile, those constraints are different. In some ways, they're similar to earlier consoles as Aaron said, forcing us to figure out how we're going to make our game stand out.
Aaron: There's stuff in the engine now that we can do that you can't do on PS2. So it's like a mixture of old hardware with new techniques.
Image courtesy of Industrial Toys.
What kind of gameplay works best for mobile?
Aaron: We've learned quite a bit with our first title and the one thing that we really have ingrained in our approach is that it's mobile first. We're designing mobile games for core gamers - we're not designing core games for the mobile market. Let's say you're walking to the coffee shop and you've got your phone in your pocket. How many times will you take your phone out of your pocket? We realized that the average person takes their smartphone out of their pocket 100+ times a day. Most of the time, it's not to answer a call, or a text or an email - it's because of some weird social motivation of I don't want to look like I'm lonely, bored, stupid, or whatever - I'm pulling my phone out so I look like I'm doing something. I don't know what I'm going to do when I do pull it out, but once I do, I'll have to decide what icon to tap on. That's the general behavior of a mobile user. Whether you're a grandma or you're a hardcore gamer - we have to design for that. As far as gameplay goes, it's really about creating something that fits within that lifestyle. It doesn't make sense to port a console game to a mobile phone, since you'd have to spend up to 20 minutes in a level alone. So what we've been working on for the last year is taking basic gameplay inputs like tapping, swiping, and pinching - not virtual joysticks - into a design that's structured for those really short sessions of 30 seconds to a minute.
Image courtesy of Industrial Toys.
Tell me about the Midnight Star universe. With your first game, it wasn't just about the game alone. Can we expect more of that this time around?
Alex: In addition to the game last year, we also had a digital graphic novel that was developed in-house. It was called Midnight Rises and it was available in the App Store. It was set in the same storyline as the game and it told the backstory leading up to the events in the game. You'd uncover things in the graphic novel that would unlock new story bits in the game, and you'd have new achievements in the game that would open new content in the graphic novel.
And we're doing something similar this time around; we're working with a company named Bound who is developing the Bound app for interactive fiction. John Scalzi - who wrote Midnight Rises and helped build the Midnight Star universe - will be creating additional stories around Renegade, in collaboration with John Shirley. In this accompanying app, we'll be able to showcase game art and 3d models; this will allow you to get the backstory on components like a particular weapon or item while you're reading the story.
What's the inspiration behind Midnight Star: Renegade?
We're all science fiction fans - I've worked in science-fiction throughout my career, and it's a great playground to be creative and inventive. The kinds of weapons that we have in our game wouldn't exist in a contemporary modern genre or fantasy setting. I've always been fascinated with the possibility of intelligent life in our universe and at some point I'm imagining there's going to be some kind of first contact and telling stories around that is just fascinating in the many ways that can go. Just trying to imagine what humanity's response would be whether it's a galvanizing event or an event that creates competition. Contact (the book) was a tiny bit of inspiration into the Midnight Star universe.
The idea is - what would happen if we had first contact? What if it wasn't the imperial encounter, Columbus-discovering-the-new-world-type of scenario? It wouldn't be what you'd expect - instead it would be something way more mysterious, and it's something that gives us a shot at being a part of something bigger. The story evolves quite a bit - the first game was about a small group of people and there's one person in particular that is transported to another world, and bears witness to a war between two civilizations who are way more advanced than ours. That's where our story started; it's basically a realization that our galaxy is quite a bit bigger than we thought and our part in it has yet to be discovered. Those that came before us came a long time before us and are far more advanced that we could even imagine.
That's the context in which Renegade starts to dabble. It could either turn into glory or ruin. And this time it's up to you the player to be the hero.
Image courtesy of Industrial Toys.
Mobile technologies are constantly changing. How does that impact gameplay for you?
Alex: We've always been into telling stories. In a console game, you'd make glorious cutscenes, you'd deliberately tell that particular story. But with mobile, there are a lot of constraints you're dealing with to tell that same story; you've got to design for that 30 second session of gameplay, and if you have 30 seconds of gameplay, you have zero time left for story-telling. The other challenge is that most people won't be playing with their sound on, so how do you have a character talk to them? You've got to get creative. One of the ways we're doing that is that we're using new technologies like the partnership with Bound - they're developing an entirely new app with which we can tell stories for the players who wants to seek out those stories - it's completely up to the player to fill that experience.
What were some of your inspirations aesthetically?
Gabe: A lot of the art style was inspired by 80s colors and art. With the first game, we went with very detailed stuff, which on a small screen, you lose a lot of. For this one, we decided to try a bolder shade and just focus on color a lot. The color palette comes from early 80s sci-fi, and the design of the armor as well - it's very simple and has a very plastic-y feel.
Alex: It definitely has a retro feel. Have you seen the show Stranger Things? I was watching it and thought "if the characters in our show would play our game... it would totally feel fitting"
I'm definitely feeling the 80s look! What are your everyday creation tools?
Gabe: Our everyday tool for 3d production is 3ds Max. We use it for all our modelling, as well as testing out textures. We also use it for character rigging.
Aaron: We actually use Biped for character rigs! I always tell people - if you can animate in biped, you can animate in anything! It makes people better animators. With a lot of tools, you can actually hide how good an animator you are because the tools take over so much. It's almost like an artist making music with a synthesizer versus a musician with a string instrument. The tool improves the animator; they can't hide behind a lot of stuff, as it forces them to really focus on what they're doing. One time, we had one animator that was able to do something like 400 animations in less than a month - just because of the copy/paste tools.
Image courtesy of Industrial Toys.
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