The CEO of Phoenix Online, Cesar Bittar, opens the door to a world of indie development in this informative and entertaining interview. Cesar discusses the origins of Cognition, how to make it as an indie and much more.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of Cognition.
CB: My name is Cesar Bittar, CEO of Phoenix Online. I’ve been working in the industry for a bit, previously with Activision and Telltale Games. I’m the producer and one of the designers/directors for Cognition.
How did you get started in developing PC games?
CB: We came together as a team that wanted to do a sequel for our beloved King’s Quest. That resulted in The Silver Lining (http://www.tsl-game.com), which debuted in 2010, and 4 out of 5 episodes are currently released. During this time, I also worked with Telltale for a bit, and then around 2011, we decided we were ready to make the jump to our own company, and here we are.
Where did the idea for Cognition come from?
CB: We acquired some art assets from a Dutch studio. Romano Moleenar, an established comic book artist, had done a lot of work for Erica Reed, and we were inspired by the gorgeous characters and backgrounds he had created. Inspired by that, we wrote a full story to fit that setting, also getting inspiration from TV shows like Dexter and movies like Se7en.
What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing Cognition?
CB: I think that we managed to create a very interesting world that most people seem to love. Erica is an extremely likeable character, and that’s very important in this kind of game. For some, we successfully recreated the feeling of some Sierra adventures like Gabriel Knight, and to me, that’s enough to consider it very successful. From the actual side of development, we managed to not only work on and release a game for the first time as a full time studio, but to do it right. We learn and get better by the day and a lot of that has benefitted our newer products such as the upcoming Moebius by Jane Jensen.
On the failure side, I’d say we underestimated the time it’d take us to do something from scratch, while at the same time creating tools to work with, and training a new team. But I don’t consider this much a failure as much as I consider it a learning process. Today, we’re managing to stay on time in general with our Moebius milestones and that only makes me feel that we have a bright future.
In its current form, how close is Cognition to your initial vision?
CB: Very close. I think in ways it surpasses what I originally thought we’d be able to pull off. The tense sequences really do a good job at making people feel on the edge of their seats and in this kind of game that’s one of the hardest things to pull off. I wondered if we could do it without doing crazy sequences like some of the stuff we did for The Silver Lining (which would have been very expensive and time consuming) and we did! As far as the story goes, we changed the details as we gave more shape to the episodes but in general it’s pretty much the story we wrote initially.
Some devs admitted their games were too hard upon release because they became experts as they developed the game. Talk about setting the difficulty levels for Cognition and if you faced a similar challenge.
CB: We learned a lot during the time we worked on The Silver Lining to ensure that we didn’t unnecessarily frustrate our players. It’s a fine line to walk between giving them enough clues for them to figure out the puzzles without necessarily giving them the solution. Sometimes we succeed better than others, but Cognition has been very well received on the gameplay level, some people actually claim that it might be too easy, but generally, people say it’s the right amount of difficulty.
Were there any challenges you faced in ensuring Cognition would run on the various PC system configurations?
CB: We still have them sometimes. PC can be difficult to develop for because you have no idea how many configurations are out there, but we make sure we can run it on a low end machine, and then in some different Windows versions. It has been very successful so far, with very few people telling us they haven’t been able to run the game at all.
Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for Cognition.
CB: Like I said before, the art was established by Romano Molenaar, who’s a comic artist with a lot of good projects to his name. Recently, he’s been doing Batman for DC Comics, and before that, he did X-men and Tomb Raider. His art style was definitely right for the game and everyone praises it, and our internal art team has taken to it extremely well.
As far as design, my co-designer Katie Hallahan and I had a lot of fun developing the game. The “cognition” mechanics have been very well received and everyone says that’s what makes the game stand out. Being able to play with how to read memories, digging into people’s minds, and seeing the past gives room for some very interesting puzzles.
As for the music, we are blessed to have Austin Haynes on board with us, and the soundtrack for Cognition has gone on to win awards and is always singled out as being an amazing soundtrack, so we are very happy for that.
Outside of creating the game itself, what is the toughest aspect of being an indie developer?
CB: Staying afloat! You have to prove yourself to the world, make connections, get people to trust you, both in the actual industry and in the consumer market. It’s all about creating loyalty to the brand and to who we are and what we can do. If we weren’t indie as we are, or if we had a couple of games already done, we probably wouldn’t be fighting so hard on Greenlight. Getting onto Steam is going to be very important to us because they have a big piece of the market, and even if we can survive for now without them, those are the challenges that any new indie developer has to face.
How did you go about funding Cognition and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?
CB: We ran a Kickstarter campaign and raised almost 35k—back before Tim Schafer made Kickstarter cool. We then put in money out of our own pockets, and some of our directors have put quite a lot of money into the company. We still haven’t made all of that money back, but we are lucky to be working with Jane Jensen on Moebius, and that partnership has done a lot of good for the company. My family has always been very supportive of my work, and that’s always a plus. It’s the same with the families of most if not all of our team members.
Tell us about the process of submitting Cognition to the various digital distribution platforms and if you encountered resistance in doing so.
CB: As I mentioned before, sometimes. Especially on the platforms where we really want to be. Greenlight has not been the best experience for us, even when we are very high in the roster (right now at 45 out of over 1300 games there) with over 26,000 votes. I really cannot imagine how it is for new people submitting their game. It’s taken us a long time to gather that many votes and the more time we are in Greenlight, the more votes we’ll have, so I feel bad for newcomers.
We are still not on GOG because they don’t have a model for episodic games, but we’ve been talking to them for a while, and will soon release Cognition once all 4 episodes are out, so that’s great. I really like those guys and I can’t wait to finally have our game on their platform.
Did you research similar titles when trying to come up with the launch price?
CB: Yes. I play a lot of games, so I’m always looking at what’s in the market, what people are liking. That’s where I get most of my ideas not only for game development, but also for the business side of things. I’m always researching, whether that’s reading sites like Joystiq for news, or reading gaming forums to see what people are loving.
Can you tell us why you chose to release a demo for Cognition?
CB: I think it’s a good idea to release a demo for any game, period, and especially when you are talking about new IP, it’s very important. People have a LOT of choices today in gaming, and you have to give them reasons to choose you. So we actually made the demo very tight to make sure it fully reflected what Cognition is all about.
How important is it to get instant feedback about Cognition from users through online message boards and other social networking sites?
CB: Very. Especially in episodic development. We are always listening to feedback and seeing how we can make the next episode better than the last. It’s because we listened during The Silver Lining that Cognition has turned out great!
How much value do you place on the opinions of those who review Cognition professionally?
CB: Again, very. I read every review of every one of our games. And even if I don’t agree with some of the things said in some of the reviews, I’m always very appreciative of feedback. When you are working on a game for so long, you lose perspective of what’s good and bad in your game, and so it’s always nice to hear people that respect game development criticize it in a good way.
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?
CB: We have! I think they are great ways to get people to know your game. We have been in quite a bit of those actually and a lot of people have learned about Cognition who otherwise wouldn’t know about the game. We wish we could be in the Humble Bundle, but they haven’t wanted to take the game yet. Maybe you guys can convince them for us? 
What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?
CB: It’s a tough subject. We had DRM on the first episode of the game and I think it worked against us, but we still have problems of piracy, and I wish that wasn’t the case. Some people will try your game and then buy it, but that’s not true of most people. We had this guy recently coming to our site asking us for a torrent because he didn’t have money to buy the game. Hey, at least he was honest, but seriously!
How do you feel about individuals posting videos of Cognition?
CB: Love it, and want everyone to do it. I think “Let’s Plays” are becoming as important as the press itself these days. The more people exposed to our games, the better!
How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?
CB: For adventure games it’s harder to have DLC because it’s not really the right genre for it, but I’m always looking for ways to advance what we do. So, for our next in-house project, I think we are going to try to implement some DLC, and see how it goes.
How do you feel about the online modding community in general and specifically if mods were created for Cognition?
CB: No, it’s really not the right game for something like that. I guess people could change the models to whatever they wanted, but I don’t think that would be very successful in Cognition.
What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?
CB: Never give up! It’s a hard road full of sacrifices, but if you really believe in what you do and you work hard to attain it, good things will always come to you. Keep your games small, work on a great concept, try to make your game stand out from the rest of the crowd. Run a Kickstarter! Consider PR and Marketing in everything you do. And overall, never stop having fun and loving what you guys are doing, because you are going to spend a long time struggling with it.
We would like to thank Cesar and everyone at Phoenix Online. You can grab Cognition from the official site.
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Steven S
