1) Can you please introduce yourselves and your company to our readers?
I’m Vincent van Geel lead designer of Iron Grip: Warlord and co-founder of Isotx Inc. We’re a small indie-company which is aiming to create commercial games of high quality, which provide players with the same crazy-fun that mods and retro-games gave during the “good ol days” when it was still all about gameplay.
2) What made you transition from modding to creating your own independent commercial game?
I’ve been making mods ever since I got into playing games a long long time ago, and as I gathered fellow-modding enthusiasts throughout the years we eventually decided it would be cool to try and make a living by doing what we loved to do best; making games…
We were always involved in making wacky and over-the-top gameplay, usually involving a ton of AI opponents to slay, and since a lot of people enjoyed those games, reminding them of the good-ol-days of Half life 1 mods and Metal Slug, we decided that what these established genre’s need is some more retro over-the-top games.
Hence conceptually the Iron Grip series was born, as we wanted to create our own universe so we had total design-freedom and wouldn’t have to worry about realism-fanboys cursing at us with their “omg that FT5234B never had an 8 Inch cannon but a 7.8 Inch omg omg you guys suck!”
We wanted to create games that hinted at realism, but in reality are all just about having fun, without being bogged down by annoying gamerules like; “thy shall not jump more than 3 times a minute or thy will be digitally tired!”.
So while working on various projects we eventually got bits and pieces of funding until we got the chance to create our first commercial game.
3) How hard was this transition for everyone involved?
Extremely hard! When you create mods, you’re only worrying about putting in cool elements that help the gameplay. Usually you get plenty of time afterwards to keep adding stuff and polishing until eventually it’s an awesome polished project.
When doing a commercial game, and people actually have to pay $ for your game, it’s entirely different; you’re game can’t have “occasional crashes” or “unpolished features” it needs to be polished, smooth and awesome as you never get a second chance at a first impression.
In addition, technology-wise it’s a tough fight to get everything to work properly, especially when you’re working outside of the established gameplay modes, and from a management-standpoint, its difficulty when money is involved as you have very limited time and money so efficiency is the key.
4) What were some of your goals with the introduction of your first game, Iron Grip: Warlord?
As an indie-company, you have limited funding, and thus we can’t compete directly with the big boys in making high-profile AAA FPS games. Yet at the same time, we like FPS and RTS so we really wanted to make one.
We decided that if we focused it all on gameplay, and aim for mid to low system requirements we might float right in between markets, as we’re sure there’s a ton of gamers out there who don’t have the top 5% of the computer-hardware yet still love gaming (like most people with laptops).
In addition even some of the top 5% gamers might look past the non-AAA graphics and enjoy the game simply because most AAA are clones of each other, and we were aiming for over-the-top coop casual cooperative fun.
Which was the other goal; single-player or cooperative that wasn’t repetitive or a 1-time run-through like so many FPS games these days; once you’ve played through it once, which seems to be within 6 hours these days, there’s no need to touch the game, and the only gameplay extension players get is a multiplayer pvp mode which seems to be more like a quick afterthought to stretch the lifetime a bit.
We wanted to give players value for their money in that at a reasonable price they can play with their friends, or alone, and can keep coming back to enjoy the unique gameplay experience we were aiming for, without it being repetitive.
5) What have you learned from the development of Iron Grip that you plan on taking with you into future games?
Firstly that gameplay is hard to sell :P people look at screenshots and if they don’t look AAA and it’s an FPS most don’t even bother to read about the game.
The most exposure we got was from our videos; as people saw the gameplay in action, got excited and tried it out, but it’s a tough sell nevertheless.
The conversion-rate once players actually downloaded and played the demo, was pretty good, but the initial “come try out the game!” was a tough one, which is why many companies focus 70% of their attention on the graphical presentation to get fancy screenshots, than actual gameplay experience and longevity.
The second thing is more of a technical thing; we had some big problems due to making some wild assumptions which got us into a bit of trouble.
A lot of it was due to the mix of genre’s; RTS and FPS, in which most engines don’t work well when you want hundreds of guys roaming the map.
Apart from the casual cooperative aim at mid to low system requirements, having such enormous weight on the player’s hardware due to vast AI presence in an open-world, meant we had the challenge to save resources somewhere so it was playable on our goal-hardware, hence choosing a lower-tech lightweight engine was the choice.
While doing Iron Grip: The Oppression, which had a different gameplay, yet also involved a ton of AI we were always working on “turning things off” in the engine to tone it down so it was playable on mid-range hardware, so we figured starting at “the other end” and only adding what we needed was a better and more efficient starting point for Iron Grip: Warlord.
However, this presented us with a new set of technical problems that most modern engines no longer have :/
At some points, we had to re-invent the wheel, which cost us a lot of valuable development time.
Even though in the end, there’s no perfect choice, and the outcome is always tricky in such situations, having some more solid pre-production is valuable and saves time/money in the end.
In addition to that, with Iron Grip: Warlord we aimed for the design-philosophy of setting up a “game world with a ton of elements, which the player can then handle/deal with as he pleases” -> free / open world scenario.
This can be compared to how the Sim-series works; you give players tools, place him a world with complete freedom, and he’ll create his own unique gameplay experience every time he/she plays.
So the idea was to have a simple setup in which player’s needed to defend the stronghold, the enemy kept attacking with huge waves of infantry and vehicles, like in the Tower Defense webgame series, and then giving the player(s) tools (buy weapons, build structures, lay traps etc) in which the player could choose how and when to engage the hordes, rather than have an almost roller-coaster ride 1-time experience like most games in the genre do.
This obviously greatly added to the enormous technical challenge we already had, since there’s a reason most games in this genre close off player-freedom, carefully managing where and when to throw challenges at the player.
We were aiming to literally have hundreds of items scattered around the map, with tons of AI, and up to 8 players running around building stuff, firing weapons, laying traps etc.
The thought of networking that was frightening and after a ton of trouble we finally got it, though it was a painful road.
6) What do you feel sets your development team apart from the other independent developers out there?
Hm, well I think one difference is that we’re venturing right into the territory of the established market.
Most indie-companies seem to aim for a game that doesn’t fit into any of the established genres, which is a safer bet I think.
Who knows, maybe it’s a smarter one, as they can aim for gameplay without having the trouble of AAA graphics, direct competition, or dealing with player expectations, though we’re kind of stubborn in that we envision a concept which we think is awesome, and even if it’s almighty FPS / RTS / or anything else, we just go and try to build it -> we take huge risks.
7) What other titles do you have planned for the future?
There’s a bunch we hope to do, at the moment we’re looking into possibly making an RTS, though in the near future we’re aiming to expand on Iron Grip: Warlord with new units, game modes, weapons, badguys etc -> there’s a lot of cool stuff we can do with the Warlord concept.
We don’t believe in just dumping a game out on the market and then moving on to the next. Maybe it’s a characteristic we inherited from our modding days.
So atm we’re planning out a string of free expansions/patches trying to push the gameplay as far as we can.
As a hint I’d like to add that we also like to “joke around” so you’ll be seeing some interesting developments soon ;)
For more information, you can head to the Iron Grip: Warlord website at http://igwarlord.isotx.com or the Isotx website at www.isotx.com.
