Fractured Soul PC Interview

Conducted By – Adam Ames

The critically-acclaimed 3DS title, Fractured Soul, is coming to PC and Grant Davies from Endgame Studios gives us a grand tour of their PC development process.

 

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of Fractured Soul.

My name is Grant Davies and I came up with the initial idea for Fractured Soul, as well as being involved in the development in a design and programming capacity.

 

How did you get started in developing PC games?

I’ve always been involved in PC games. In the late 90s I wrote some editors for an EA Sports game (Cricket 96 & 97), a plug-in for WinAmp to play Commodore 64 Sid music (SidAmp), and an editor for the game Arcanum. Although I’ve spent the last few years working on Nintendo platforms, with the shift to digital distribution it is more viable to be developing games on PC, and Unity makes it even more appealing these days.

 

Where did the idea for Fractured Soul come from?

Originally it came from a game called Ikaruga. We were initially going to do a shmup game on the two screens of the 3DS. But we always enjoyed platform games and so we started wondering whether a platform game might work across two dimensions instead of a shmup game. To our excitement, it was really fun, so we stuck with it.

 

What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing Fractured Soul?

I could probably go on forever about the things we learned from Fractured Soul. Probably the most important lessons would be trying to find our audience early, as well as trying to keep the level of innovation under control. Too much innovation can scare people away, and these days people don’t have as much time to invest in learning why they should buy a game, so we need to do a better of job of conveying our message faster in future.

 

In its current form, how close is Fractured Soul to your initial vision?

Very different. Apart from us originally envisaging a shmup game, we also initially proposed a geeky main character and a slower moving, more puzzle based game. Also, with such a new idea, new ideas for gameplay evolved during development – so we found some really inspired ideas coming from the team which definitely wasn’t part of the initial thinking. That was awesome to be part of!

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 Fractured Soul and if you faced a similar challenge.

It was definitely an issue for us. The thing with Fractured Soul is that it demands that the player learn a new skill (screen switching). Different people learn the skill at different rates. Before you learn the skill, the game is quite challenging. After you learn the skill, you see the game in a different light and are really eager to use the switching in new ways.

We worked on Fractured Soul for years, and we very much became experts in that time. When we showed the first levels to some other developers for the first time, they told us it was ridiculously hard. We ended up redesigning the entire first world from scratch three times before we felt it was right.

 

Were there any challenges you faced in ensuring Fractured Soul would run on the various PC system configurations?

So far we’ve been reasonably lucky, and we haven’t had too many issues (that we know about at least!). Supporting gamepads is always a bit tricky on PC, since every one is different in some way, but we felt that was very important for a precision platformer like Fractured Soul, so we’ve spent a lot of time on getting that working.

 

Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for Fractured Soul.

For the art style, we wanted a sci-fi style, but more of a modern style similar to that of Fifth Element or Mirror’s Edge. We tried to take those styles and make them fractured, to fit in with the theme of protagonist being fractured. So all the graphics are at different angles to try to convey that notion of being fractured. For the music, in the original DS trailer we used a remix of a Gotye track by Bitrok, and found that people really responded well to it. It fit the unique nature of the game, so we tried to replicate that style of music.

 

Outside of creating the game itself, what is the toughest aspect of being an indie developer?

Well cash flow is always an issue – having the money you need when you need it – but still the most difficult thing is getting the word out about our products. Fractured Soul on 3DS is a great example: we thought we’d secured a lot of good publicity about the game, yet every time I go to an expo like PAX, almost everyone who plays the game tells me they’ve never heard of it before. So we obviously have a lot of work to do in that area.

 

How did you go about funding Fractured Soul and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?

Fractured Soul has been such a long project that funding has come from everywhere. Some money came from government here in Australia (Film Victoria), some came from publishers, and a lot came from doing projects for other developers and publishers over the years. As for emotional support – yes plenty of support from family and friends, but also a fair bit of concern when they see the stress that the project has placed on us at times.

Tell us about the process of submitting Fractured Soul to the various digital distribution platforms and if you encountered resistance in doing so.

To be honest, we’ve only really pursued Amazon, GOG.com, and Steam. Amazon and GOG.com have been great so far – no resistance or problems. The only resistance we’ve encountered from Steam is that we’re struggling to get enough people to check out our Greenlight entry and get us approved! Of course that’s not Valve’s issue as much as ours.

 

Did you research similar titles when trying to come up with the launch price?

We did. However, the most compelling data we referenced were the opinions of people at PAX who played the game, as well as a poll we posted on our Greenlight page. The overwhelming opinion was that $9.99 or even $14.99 was a good deal after playing the game, so we settled on $9.99.

 

Can you tell us why you chose to release a demo for Fractured Soul?

We felt as though Fractured Soul was such a different concept and also quite a difficult looking game that people needed to experience it first hand in order to appreciate it properly.

 

How important is it to get instant feedback about Fractured Soul from users through online message boards and other social networking sites?

User feedback is incredibly important, particularly when developing a unique game like Fractured Soul. I don’t think we showed it to people as early as we should have – we would have benefited hugely from seeing people play it earlier. In truth I think we were victims of our own pride – we never wanted to release anything that wasn’t right. We’ll need to find a way past that in future – we’ll definitely be bringing people into what we’re working on next much sooner.

 

How much value do you place on the opinions of those who review Fractured Soul professionally?

It really depends on the review and the reviewer – reviewers can range wildly from very professional to very amateurish. For example, we had someone from Hardcore Gamer review the game and only play a third of it before declaring it too difficult, giving up, and yet still scoring it! Obviously you can’t take that kind of review too seriously. But we do look for patterns in a bunch of reviews: if a lot of reviewers are saying the same thing, then there is obviously something in that.

 

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?

To be honest, I would never have thought that would work before I saw some of the sales figures. But the proof is in the pudding. I guess it does depend on which bundle carries your game and which other games are in the bundle, but it’s certainly something I’d be interested in pursuing at some stage.

What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?

It’s a difficult issue, and I can sympathize with those who have issues with DRM as well as developers who feel the need to implement it. For us, though, we’re a small indie developer and the reality is we make products for a niche audience. I think piracy as not so widespread within that audience as the mainstream audience – they tend to understand the reason to pay for product is to support the developer to make more games in future. We’ve no ability to stop piracy so we don’t spend too much time dwelling on it.

 

How do you feel about individuals posting videos and receiving monetization of Fractured Soul?

I have no problem with this. If our product is gaining exposure through videos, and if the creator of those videos is making money through advertising or some other third party means, I can’t see any problem with that. I think it would only be a problem if the developer was paying for that promotion without that being disclosed to viewers.

 

How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?

It’s a worry when DLC is being released purely for promotional purposes without adding any merit to the game. The reality is that developers are being encouraged to do this as it’s a common question posed by distributors and publishers. Of course, there’s also plenty of DLC that does add value to the game, and that can be a great way to bridge the game until a sequel is released.

 

How do you feel about the online modding community in general and specifically if mods were created for Fractured Soul?

I’ve dabbled in modding in the past – I think it’s great fun! It’d be fun to see mods released for Fractured Soul (depending on the content I suppose), but I’m not sure how easy Fractured Soul would be to mod.

 

What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?

I’d say get the buzz going for your game as early as possible – enter competitions, get yourself to PAX, talk to the press as much as you can. It’s the best way of determining whether there’s an appetite for your game, and what you might need to change to make it more appealing.

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