Conducted by – Adam Ames
Adam Ames managed to track down Neil Sorens, the creative director for Pinball FX2, to talk about the surprising amount of intricacies involved in developing a pinball game. Read on to learn about their research on DLC and user expectations, and to peruse Neil’s own written work on the two year development cycle of his game.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of Pinball FX2.
My name is Neil Sorens. As the creative director at Zen Studios, I take credit for all the good design and assign blame for the bad, making other people do the real work that keeps the company afloat while I mess around talking to people and doing interviews. It’s a lot like being a politician, actually.
How did you get started in developing PC games?
Back in the early 2000s, before console development was even really a thing in Hungary, we did some PC work as Rubik Interactive. But that was the year 2 B.S. (Before Steam), when pirates roamed the earth, plundering PC developers and turning the platform into a wasteland. As a result, when we finally started making our own stuff in 2005, we’d settled on gaming consoles as an appropriate target for our pinball ambitions. And it worked out pretty well. But almost all of us are long-time PC gamers, not to mention bandwagon-jumpers, so here we are on Steam after promising it for the better part of three years.
Where did the idea for Pinball FX2 come from?
It was originally going to be an update for the original Pinball FX. But our list of features kept growing, well beyond the paltry 4MB patch limit on XBLA, and we soon realized that we’d have to make an entirely new game. Plus, gamers love two things more than anything else: sequels and achievements, and we’d hit the limit for achievements in the existing game.
So we made a sequel, which allowed us a bunch of new achievements for current and future tables for all the achievements whores to chase. And speaking of whores, our PR guy must have done a great job “behind the scenes” because we ended up with 99 available achievements on the XBLA version compared with 15 on the previous one. We’re still working on probing the achievement limits of Steam, and of course our PR guy is going to be working Gaben to make sure we get the full monty.
What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing Pinball FX2?
I actually wrote an article for Gamasutra on this very subject, here. In terms of additional stuff for the Steam version, we’re still figuring out the subtleties of user expectations and habits. We went in with the same business model we’ve successfully used elsewhere (free download, demo any table, buy the ones you want), and there was a big backlash because the “free to play” tag had somehow gotten affixed to it, and we obviously didn’t offer full access to any content like a F2P game should.
And then there were the complaints about the prices, etc. from gamers who didn’t understand the depth and complexity of a good pinball table or the difference in effort needed to produce a quality pinball table vs. producing the proverbial horse armor – it’s all “DLC” to them and thus not worth the $9 per table pack we were asking. And since we launched with an overabundance of tables (23, or about 5 years’ worth), each table seemed less valuable in that context.
So we’ve had to go back and think about how we present our products in the future to make sure that people immediately understand what we’re doing and the value proposition of the content we’re offering. And send the PR guy around to people’s homes to make personal apologies. Rough job. I couldn’t do it. Or instead of doing all that work, maybe we’ll just make a free TF2 hat for people. That’s probably the more effective solution, anyway.
In its current form, how close is Pinball FX2 to your initial vision?
It’s pretty close. We didn’t know that people would keep buying tables indefinitely, though, so our table selection interface is getting pretty cramped. And we’ve still got a lot of features we want to add to the PC version – mostly stuff related to configuration, customization, and pincabs.
Were there any challenges you faced in ensuring Pinball FX2 would run on the various PC system configurations?
Nothing too daunting. We actually have been using PC as a development platform for years, even if the PC builds were never of release quality. And PC hardware is a lot more standardized these days than when I had to type in device driver file names manually into my config.sys and hope that I still had enough conventional memory to get Star Control II running. Back in the Dark Ages, before MS-DOS 6.0 and memmaker.
It’s not perfect, of course, and we’re updating the game as we find those individualized problems that a few people are having.
Please talk about developing the table designs, sound FX and music for Pinball FX2.
I’m not too knowledgeable about the sound FX and music. There is a guy who does them, and then we put them in the game. It sounds really easy the way I described it, so it must be.
The table designs are the product of brainstorming based on the theme of the table. The designer comes up with a bunch of ideas for table features, modes, playfield toys, and a basic layout. And then gets rid of the ideas that suck. This last step is was a critical omission from the Extreme table, which will be conspicuously missing from the Steam version forever. After that, we work (and when I say “we”, I mean “they”, obviously) on building mockups of table art, put together the basic geometry, and start knocking the ball around to see if it’s fun, and making adjustments.
Then comes the full design and scripting of the modes, full production of art assets -textures, 3d models and animations, effects, etc. It is usually around this point when the whippings start.
Outside of creating the game itself, what is the toughest aspect of being an indie developer?
For me, dealing with groupies. For the PR guy, well, I’ve already described his travails. For the development teams, probably the long hours and Hungarian fast food. Fortunately, we’re at the point where we have enough stability that we don’t have to worry if the company will be around next month.
We’re also facing the same problem a lot of companies are right now: the games business is going through massive disruption, largely from mobile and social platforms and free-to-play games. Shades of 1983. Seriously, read the Wikipedia entry and ask yourself how many of the factors in that crash are present right now.
How did you go about funding Pinball FX2 and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?
It was funded with the loot from Pinball FX, which in turn was self-funded from the two investors who founded the company. They had the dough from their existing business endeavors, but I believe there were a lot of nice furnishings and paintings sold to keep the company afloat until Pinball FX started making money.
Tell us about the process of submitting Pinball FX2 to the various digital distribution platforms and if you encountered resistance in doing so.
It was a breeze at Microsoft to publish on XBLA and Win 8, since they’d already published Pinball FX (which itself only got approved because we included support for the Live Vision Camera).
With Steam, we submitted the game for approval in early 2011 and figured with no good pinball games on Steam and an 88 Metacritic score, it would be easy. Nope, rejected, no explanation, no way to resubmit or talk to them about what they were looking for. So we went back to the platforms that loved us for who we were and didn’t make us feel sad. Eventually, we got around the approvals process, which changed to Greenlight in the meantime, by having Microsoft publish the game.
How much value do you place on the opinions of those who review Pinball FX2 professionally?
It depends. Obviously, every review is a gamer’s opinion and thus is important to us. Especially if the score goes on Metacritic, since a fair amount of people use that to make decisions on what to play. But the professional reviews that we take to heart the most are the ones written by people who know a little something about pinball and who can clearly express valid criticisms.
How do you feel about the various indie bundle promotions and the “Pay What You Want” pricing methodology? Would you be interested in contributing to a project like that in the future?
Yes, the Humble Bundle stuff is great, and we’ve talked to them. But without a standard game structure or a Mac/Linux build that we can bundle, our options for participation are limited. I hope we’ll be able to figure something out.
What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?
As a developer, I think platforms like Steam, Green Man Gaming, Good Old Games, etc. are doing a good job of reducing piracy by providing maximum convenience and value. I don’t really blame the publishers who adopt a more aggressive DRM for their AAA games, since those are the ones that lose the most to piracy. At least they are bringing those games to PC now, which wasn’t the case a few years ago. As a gamer, I find them only mildly annoying, assuming the DRM is actually working properly, since I’m already connected and my internet is up 99.99% of the time.
What does bother me is stuff like Diablo 3 and SimCity where they force online play, no doubt partly as a de facto anti-piracy scheme. Then you have to deal with frequent maintenance, lag, and unplanned outages just to play a single player game. DRM servers can have problems, too, of course, but it’s a much rarer issue.
How do you feel about individuals posting videos of Pinball FX2?
Great! As long as it’s not of the Extreme table.
How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?
I think it allows new business models to succeed. And new business models mean new design possibilities. So that’s good. But there are some games where my the completionist part of my brain gets annoyed that I don’t have all the DLC and makes me want to buy the crappy and unnecessary stuff, and then the rest of my brain gets annoyed at the publisher for exploiting human nature. But not as annoyed as it gets at the typical free-to-play game for the same reason.
How do you feel about the online modding community in general and specifically if mods were created for Pinball FX2?
As long as they’re not modding in wall hacks and such, I’m a big fan of mods. I kind of have to be as someone who plays Elder Scrolls games. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to build proper modding tools for end users, or we’d be doing the Steam Workshop thing.
What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?
Don’t count on your game getting onto Steam – have alternate platforms to fall back on, even non-PC ones like mobile and PS3/PS4/Vita. The most important thing is to get your first product out somewhere, even if it’s not the optimal location.
We would like to thank Neil for taking the time to answer our questions. You can find Pinball FX 2 on Steam with a limited demo to whet your appetite.
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