Christian Latour talks Badlands – Max Carnage
Check out the interview below with Christian Latour (@ChrisLatour), Production Manager at SHG Studios (@shgstudiosinc) about their new game Badlands – Max Carnage!
Why did you create a new social collectable RPG instead of continuing with something like Star Pirates?
StarPirates.net and SpyBattle.com have been very successful for SHG. Both have been million dollar games, but more importantly fun for a lot of people over a long period of time. But things change. I would say 95% plus of new casual social players expect their game to be a mobile app now. We have adapted.
The neat thing is we could bring over the core of the experience: RPG, with truly social interactions. Real social interactions is what we do better than anyone else. We achieved some of our goals there with Zombie Moon, but Badlands Max Carnage is at a whole new level.
We could have launched this game months ago. It would have made some people happy, and been commercially successful enough. But we wanted to get it RIGHT. We dedicated ourselves to making a fun and visually pleasing game, the kind our friends, and fans have been asking for which we’d like to play ourselves. Tweaks aside, we believe we did it. Initial numbers from testing back that up.
What are Heroes and how do they work in Badlands?
There are number of characters but they fall into one of three factions. The Heroes are the ones the player first enlists to try and survive in the Badlands. They are reincarnated champions of good from the planet’s past. The Villains each have their own plans that unfold throughout the story. The Outers are beings of strange genetic origins who get pulled into the drama unfolding on the planet.
Through game play you can unlock any and all of the Heroes, Villains and Outers to fight by your side. Each heroes starts with a basic attack and one burst ability. Some burst can heal, some do damage over time, others will silence foes for a time, preventing them from using their own bursts. The interactions between a player’s team and understanding the enemies you’ll face are the core strategic challenge of the game.
As a 90s RPG gamer I felt at home playing Badlands. New spins on 90s gaming seems to be a thing lately with Pokemon Go hitting it big this summer. Was there a deliberate attempt to make Badlands comfortable to millennials who grew up on SNES and 90s games?
It’s funny you say that, we think a lot of reviewers will say “Mad Max on SNES”. Or something like that. Playstyle wise, that was certainly a part of our design strategy. It’s much easier to get someone’s attention with something slightly familiar than with something entirely new. It’s also a lot easier for players to pick up a game that is intuitive to them. Intuition is different per person, but generally based upon what you’ve played before.
In mobile games these days, getting noticed is one of the biggest challenges. We hope a familiar art style and interesting characters will help more people decide to check out the game. That said, while Mad Max is an awesome post-apocalyptic story, there are others: Tank Girl, Judge Dredd, and lots more. Even Spybattle.com and short stories written by our fans. Plus, we do have awesome internal artists and writers who respected the works of the past while creating something new and interesting. But Max is King and you do have to pay homage.
Community has always been a big part of SHG Studios games, going right back to Star Pirates. How will the community factor into Badlands?
Much of our plans are built around scaling the game as the community grows. While we build up our base of players, our focus is on having a fun PvP mode where players can challenge each other. We’ll soon be adding competitive leaderboards that will reset on a rotating schedule so that players who play more often can show off what a bit of effort can achieve.
As the community grows, we’ve already developed some of the required infrastructure for guilds and guild events. This will allow us to create more of a team sport atmosphere where players can help each other.
How long has Badlands Max Carnage been in development? How many people have been working on it?
Like many games these days, Badlands was an iterative process. This has made the development timeline a bit harder to track. I would estimate it around 18 months with a team that shifted between 5-15 people, not all of them full time. Some art work was also outsourced.
What was the most challenging part of making Badlands?
I think what we found most challenging was locking down the mood of the game. The guiding idea that we needed for a consistent look and feel in the various areas of the game.
Games start as wireframes and design documents and then become code with first pass UI. While the game experience was clear to us, the mood we wanted to convey was something where we had so many options and ideas, it slowed some of our progress as different parts of the game went in different directions. About six months ago, we realized this was impacting development and stopped long enough lock down the mood. Once we had that, we were able to bring all the aspects together and actually got extra features into the game thanks to the efficiencies it provided. This is a lesson we are bringing into future titles.
I’ve noticed that SHG Studios staff play Badlands and other games, and interact with the community. Why do you do this?
I think it comes from a desire to lead by example. If you create an open space and don’t take steps to define how it’s intended to be used, it’s easy for someone to set a much different tone than was intended for conversations and interactions. By being part of the early conversations in the game, we assure that we create a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.
It’s also a great way to get direct feedback on how the game is being received. When players know that the dev team is listening, they’ll participate with more enthusiasm and are more likely to help grow the community organically.
Lastly, our games are fun and we like playing them. That’s why we got into the industry!
Given that Badlands is free to play, how will monetization work? Will in-game ads and/or in-game purchases be used?
Both, actually. We work very hard to make our games “pay to accelerate” and avoid the “pay to win” pitfalls of some of our competitors. Because we balance leaderboard status on more than just who’s bigger, it’s very possible to make frequency of participation a bigger factor in leaderboard ranking.
Video ads also allow players to play extra without investing real money but still support the game and allows for new and better features to be developed. We believe that the best approach to player investment is showing that we’ve created a game built for the long haul, a game that players will be able to enjoy for years to come. Instead of trying to get massive amounts of money from a player in the early days, we work at providing long term value to players. We learned this on Starpirates.net — being moral makes for good business. Lucky for us.
How has Badlands been received so far?
For mobile game developers, we usually talk in terms of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). We developed the game with very specific goals in mind and currently our numbers are between conservative and optimistic estimates. That is very good for this stage. We’re getting positive feedback from players who are really enjoying the visuals and storyline of the game. But we’re still in the early days so we feel it’s too small a sample size to give a definitive thumbs up or down
Throughout the fall we’ll be spreading the word more broadly so we can confirm what’s working well and improve what doesn’t meet expectations. This feedback should improve our initial KPIs. Improvement or not, if the initial numbers hold up we have another hit on our hands.
How was testing?
Good. Testing is never truly fun as you want to show your creation to the world.
No matter how much you test internally, Android fragmentation means as you roll out, you will find devices it does not work correctly on, or phone networks, or something else. A slow rollout helps work through those. We feel bad for those first few unsuccessful ones, and try to work with them. Happily that period will be over mid-September.
Android however is still better to build on as the turn around for a fix is about an hour, versus a week for iOS. Our players deserve a LOT better than a week turn around for updates.
Will Badlands be released on iOS in the future?
Yes, but we’ve not set a date yet. Because the Android store has much faster response times for getting a build published, it’s the ideal platform for these early stage builds when it’s still somewhat iterative as we test larger and larger player groups. Once we’ve polished it up a bit more, we’ll be looking to cross over to the Apple store as well.
What are your future plans for Badlands?
Beyond the addition of guilds, we have a number of features we’ve designed for expanding the game through the next year at least. The Heroes Engine we developed for Badlands is also a flexible tool that we’re improving both to help Badlands’ success and to meet our future project needs. We’ve had great success on web by developing engines, not just games, and that remains our goal.
What’s been the most rewarding part of creating games at SHG Studios?
It’s certainly been the team culture that exists. We have some great people we enjoy both working together and playing together. On many occasions I’ve seen multiple people come together to tackle a barrier to the game development and share ideas openly and collaboratively until a solution is found. And as a team, we often stay after hours to play board games or D&D because these are passions we share.
SHG Studios is one of Ontario’s best indie gaming success stories! Do you have any advice for aspiring indie gamers?
Absolutely. Understand your audience — really understand them. Then provide an experience that’s simple to pick up, and hard to put down. Ideally one hooked into the happy memories of being a kid gamer.
We’ve found that as people become busy adults, their game play needs are different than when they were kids killing time on a weekday night. They don’t have a dozen hours to learn a new game. So tapping into the game styles and menu locations they are used to is really important. It needs to be intuitive. As the game unfolds, you can introduce new things, but make the onboarding easy. These are busy people who already have a lot on their mind.
What’s the biggest mistake you see upcoming game developers make?
Making the game for themselves. 99% of game devs start there, and that’s fine if this is a hobby. But if you expect to be able to pay your team, and eat yourself, you better provide fun to a lot more than a single person.
