Interview With Rogue Rocket Games, Developers Of First Wonder

Yesterday, I sat down with Rogue Rocket Games founders Nick Bruty and Richard Sun to talk about their Kickstarter game, First Wonder, hailed as a successor to Giants: Citizen Kabuto. We talked Giants, how First Wonder is an evolution of it, and more. We also talked a bit about their engine choice, how the Kickstarter is going, and why they chose Kickstarter for First Wonder in the first place.

Me: How do the cutaways that show other players work?

Bruty: The picture in picture, that’s something that you wouldn’t actually start with at the beginning of the game. It’s a device that the Cargonauts have, and it’s basically a video drone. What they need to do at the start of the game is assign a couple of players to go and find Monstro. Because you don’t know where he is at the beginning of the game so he could attack at any time.

So you send out some scouts to tag him with a video drone. From that point onwards you can see where he’s at at all times. And he’s able to get rid of that video drone. He doesn’t know it’s on him but if he walks through any rain or fire that would burn it off then he’d be free of it again. But he doesn’t know it’s there, so it’s definitely a tactic for the Cargonauts to use early on.

And then likewise, Monstro can actually see the Cargonauts when they’re using a particular type of fuel that he can sense. It’s like a common resource on the islands, this fuel that they both share. Whenever they’re using it, his senses can pick it up and he can see them.

Sun: Yeah, basically the idea was that we have these really large environments. So we didn’t want the game to be too much about hunting around aimlessly because it’s so big. So we were like, we need at least little UI pips. But then Nick, one day was like “you know what would be cool? It would be cool if you could also see them moving around, doing stuff.” We put it in and it was pretty cool. So that’s why it is the way it is today.

Bruty: Yes, it’s important to know what he’s doing because that’s sort of pivotal to the game. Monstro is on a prophecy and he’s going around performing different rituals. So it’s important for them to know what he’s up to. It will definitely dictate how the game flows.

So Monstro has these rituals that he has and he has to perform them on each of the different islands around the world. And every time he does that he also becomes a little more powerful and a little more self aware of what he’s actually about. But when he performs a ritual, that’s when he’s at his weakest because he has to stop and he’s out in the open. He has to perform something and he’s a bigger target for the Cargonauts. So if they can work out where he’s going to be to perform these rituals ahead of time then they can get there and lay a trap for him. So knowing what he’s up to and where he’s going is sort of key to the game.

There’s also little clues we have around the island, these cave paintings that talk to Monstro’s prophecy and the type of things he has to do in the level. And that might be that he has to destroy a village or eat a bunch of virgins or whatever that might be. But it gives you a clue to where he’s going to have to be at a certain point in the game. So if you know he’s going to have to go to a certain island and destroy a certain village—when you see him headed that way—you want to try and get there ahead of time. Because he’s much stronger than you to start with. You’re heavily overmatched. So any advantage that you can gain in the field positionally or tactically, you want to take advantage of that.

Is the single-player campaign going to have the same overall feel as multiplayer, where there are different rituals that you have to find and stop?

Bruty: Yes. There’s a story to that and, in the single-player campaign, you will play as both characters as the story weaves backwards and forwards. Because you don’t know whether Monstro is a good guy or bad character. He’s just woken up from a couple million of years. He’s a little pissed off and he’s trying to work things out, leading to casualties, the Majorcans, and a lot of destruction. But you’re trying to work out what he’s really about. The mystery sort of unravels through the story and the campaign.

So rather than the campaign having elements of multiplayer, it’s really that we have this single-player campaign with all these stories and elements and we’re bringing a bunch of those into the multiplayer. Because we want the multiplayer to have a real sense of adventure to it. And that’s all an arc, rather than head-to-head combat, which you can engage in if you want to try that. But really, because Monstro is so powerful when you start, you’re using the landscape, working out what he’s doing, trying to restrict his movement, and taking away his powers before you actually go in for an attack.

I always liken it to a twelve-round heavyweight championship fight, in which case someone can take each other out at any time, but it could go to the twelfth round and be very dramatic and exciting.

Are single-player and multiplayer going to take place on the same map?

Bruty: On the same set of islands, yeah. There’s going to be a number of islands that make up the single-player campaign. But each island of the multiplayer has a particular puzzle. Each one can show Monstro how he can leap island to island, such as the volcano we showed in the demo. But there are other ways of doing that on other islands, as you discover the mystery of each island and unlock it. And when you do, the island will aid the player. So it’s worthwhile spending time exploring the islands because there’s lots of hidden secrets and that will help you improve your player experience.

So the secrets will just be hidden in little nooks and places like that?

Bruty: Yeah, there’s some stuff that’s going to be more accessible to the Cargonauts and some stuff that will be more accessible to Monstro.

So I mentioned before that there’s this resource, this extra sort of fuel that’s natural to these lands. It’s usually found down in underground wells that only the Cargonauts can get to. So for the Cargonauts, when they use the fuel in all their equipment, it boosts the power of everything. It’s very unpredictable. It’s like putting nitroglycerin in your tank. It’ll definitely boost you but, if you overdo it, it could be disastrous at the same time.

But to Monstro, it’s like an elixir. It transforms him and gives him extra powers that can help him perform some of his rituals faster and stronger. But Monstro can’t get at it. So he has to wait until he sees one of the Cargonauts get it, but as soon as they start using it he becomes aware. You know, the picture-in-pictures pop up and that makes it easier for him to hunt them down. And if he gets a hold of that Cargonaut and consumes that Cargonaut, then he becomes imbued with the powers for a period of time.

And there’s a lot of other sub-goals on the island. We have the locals, the Majorcans, and we always—just for fun—put them in high positions. Whenever Monstro comes by they’re always terrified and always throw themselves off like lemmings.

The Cargonauts' equipment is very modular and they can change their equipment pack. And one of those packs will simply be a giant net that deploys whenever there are falling Majorcans around. So you always get bonus points or rewards for rescuing Majorcans from any sort of dangerous situation.

There’s also cave paintings that you’ve also got to find that highlight where Monstro has to go. And there are a bunch of other mini-tasks along the way, whether it could be like defending a village from Monstro or saving a number of Majorcans, etc.

Will that have any effect on the multiplayer or will multiplayer mostly be the objective-based gameplay?

Bruty: It’s going to have an effect on the multiplayer. Exactly how, I’m still working out some of those details. It’s still pretty early on.

The multiplayer clearly has its very strong objectives where you ultimately have got to stop Monstro from fulfilling his prophecy. If he does, then he becomes...well, we don’t quite know what he becomes but something is going to happen to him. So those are his main goals. But then, with the multiplayer, we could break it down and have lots of other mini-goals along the way so that it’s worthwhile for you to be exploring in a session to learn how certain islands work. And you can use that to your advantage.

At this point, their first session has ended and I am a bit confused.

So what just happened at the end there?

Sun: Basically, that was our demo set piece example of our prophecy goal stuff that Nick was talking about. That little glowy weird thing was like a prophecy item. So he gets up to it and he starts powering up. And that’s where you get that thing that Nick was talking about where he’s vulnerable. And then Keith actually shot the crystal at the top of the cave, which crashed down upon me. It’s really just to show an idea of how it’s less about just shooting him in the head all the time and more about exploring, discovering, and looking for things in the environment that change the odds to your favor.

So who won that one, then?

Sun: In that case...I mean, it’s really just a set piece example. It’s not meant to really demonstrate what it might be like in the final game because it’s so rigged. It’s really just to show an idea. In that case, I guess you could say the Cargonauts won because they were able to take out Monstro while he was vulnerable.

So Monstro would have died there, then?

Sun: Yeah, he would have lost.

Bruty: It would have been a much bigger event because Monstro would have been prepped for something going on there and he would have cleared out the area. And the Cargonauts, rather than being there flying, they would have had to have gone in there ahead of time and set up traps that Monstro would have triggered himself.

So there’s a lot more to it. We’re really just showing the broad points. This is like a 3-month demo and we’re deciding, “what’s the best thing that we can show?” And rather than show one highly polished thing, we took a broad approach and said “okay, structurally, this is how the game is going to play.” We wanted to show a little bit of everything.

Sun: In that scenario, if they didn’t knock down that crystal fast enough then he would have achieved that goal. And maybe in that level he would move on to the next goal until he reaches the final goal of that level, as an example.

I see that you can get multiple rockets on your jetpack but it kind of automatically adds them in quick succession. Is it going to be more limited in the future?

Sun: Well, right now, there’s five hardpoints and you can’t get more than that. And right now, we only have 3 different types of equipment. Like you can use the rockets as bombs. The trade-off is you lose thrust. But you can drop them down on him.

So that’s why you almost instantly get a full set of rockets.

Bruty: Yeah, the idea is that you can use the equipment in different ways, especially the big booster rockets. They’re a little uncontrollable in tight areas. So you really use them to island hop. But once you get there, you want to discard them because they’re really heavy to carry around. But when you do discard them you can use them as bombs, like carpetbombing Monstro in the air.

Or, you can actually stack them up and build a fuel supply or a huge bomb. And that’s what we’re talking about, where if you know where Monstro’s going to be, you can load up with all these heavy duty boosters and fly over to a town and litter your bombs all over that town. The idea is also that you’re not just—as a Cargonaut—set in one mode. You’re not just “I’m the medic,” or “I’m the sniper,” or this sort of archetype. You’re modular, you can change, and you can swap with your other guys when you’re far away from your rig. You might need some other piece of equipment and someone can bring that to you and drop it off.

Sun: So the crane. We talked a bit about how you’re using your environment to your advantage and this is less of a set piece, but you saw him jumping in that volcano earlier. With the crane, you can grab a rock and drag it over to the volcano—it’s intentionally unruly because it’s a big giant rock—and you can drop it in there.

So that’s an example of how we’re using the environment to block his abilities.

Bruty: So now Rich is trapped as Monstro on the island for a short while. And these are things that the Cargonauts are going to have to discover. So, as an example, we just gave you rocks for the demo because it’s easy, but we want you to have to find those things. It might be a ship in the ocean somewhere. It might be a building that you have to destroy and you take its roof. You kind of look around to see what’s the right thing to fit.

On each of these islands there’s a way for Monstro to transport himself and you’ve got to work out what that is and find the thing to use to trap him there.

You said it was temporary. Does the rock eventually get destroyed or does Monstro have to break it apart?

Bruty: Break it apart. For example, when you get in that x-fire, the mysterious fluid that the island has, if Monstro gets a hold of a Cargonaut that has that, then he can boost his power up and go clear the volcano.

Does the idea for this game go back to the days of Giants?

Bruty: Well, I had plans to do Giants 2, 3, and onwards, so there are a lot of ideas left over from there. But really, that was quite a long time ago and this game has expanded much more beyond that. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. So there are obviously elements and this game is similar in structure to it.

I’ve said this is a spiritual successor to MDK and Giants and I’ve had some people go, “well, what’s the connection to MDK?” And what I meant was that was my first 3D game on the PC, where I started to find the type of game that I wanted, which is a blend of action but also exploration and mystery and fun. I always keep a tone of fun about it. And that was just a single-player game. When we moved to Giants, it was the same thing but broader and multiplayer. And so First Wonder is the next evolutionary step from where I was going with Giants. So the worlds have expanded. Rather than just a single island and the combat being limited, it’s now multiple islands that introduce tactical play and lead to combat.

Because I’m not a great first-person shooter player and I always like to explore the worlds I really like building worlds and I like to see what people come up with. Sometimes, when you play these games you’re running through landscapes so quickly without getting time to invest play into them. I actually think, probably, I like some Nintendo games because I like the worlds and I like learning about them. They make me a better player. And I like that. The landscape is the “third character” for me and that’s the goal for me with this game. That you get to learn these islands and you get to learn all the little tricks that they have.

And it’s not like it works for you every time. It requires skill to pull it off. It requires skill for Monstro to use the volcano slide. It’s not just a given, where you hit a button or something. So these things are there for you to learn and the more you play the better you get at them, and the faster you move around these islands. And I like that investment of time in design and gameplay, spending that time on your landscape.

With First Wonder—and Giants sort of touched on it in a sense—it’s all linear gameplay but with a much wider box to it, where there’s more options in how you play. Because I definitely want to tell the story and I want there to be a sense of progression. It’s still very much an action game. But I still want to have all those elements and make it a richer, more fun experience.

You said that this an evolution of your overall design from the days of MDK and Giants. What inspired you to remove the third faction?

Bruty: Well, I haven’t. There is a third faction. But in the scope of what we can expect from a successful Kickstarter it would be a bit too much to try and pull everything off. So they are written into the story. My story arc covers a number of titles for this. And they’re designed to come in around the second release.

It’s layered in there. We’ve got it planned. They’re very important to the whole story, they provide a dramatic twist. But I don’t want to talk about them too much because I don’t want to reveal anything because they’re connected to everything. They’re connected to the monster and the land. I hold my cards close to my chest. But there will be, ultimately, at least three races.

Sun: Some important information is we don’t know how much we can get off of Kickstarter because it’s all new frontier stuff, right? So it’s important to not overpromise. It doesn’t serve anyone well to promise things when we don’t know if we’ll have the resources to build them. Obviously that changes if people go bananas and we get like $5 million or something. But it was a calculated thing to not come out right away and say three races.

Bruty: And also, I really like the idea of building upon an initial launch. I’ve had some talks about the IP and not being able to get the IP to do Giants 2. Because usually, you know, if these games aren’t successful enough for a publisher at the time they still might be for an independent developer. It’s not that there isn’t profit there or something couldn't be built up.

So if I had managed to retain the IP for Giants I would have had more incremental updates, even if they were small ones, and I’d gradually build the world. Because it’s an investment in a world to me, rather than just a game. The game just takes place in this world. And I’d want to continually build upon it.

So the same is true here. The plans for the third race and many other plans to keep expanding out. It’s almost like a hobby for me.

You said that you want to do an initial release and then build on it. Does that mean Early Access is something you’re planning or is it just that you’d like to keep going after launch?

Sun: More the second thing. I mean, there may be Early Access but that’s an independent decision from the one we’ve been talking about. Specifically, it’s not that we’re saying we’re going to do Early Access and then, depending on how that goes, we’ll add a race. It’s more like, Early Access is a decision on whether or not the game, as planned, will be available before it’s done.

What Nick’s talking about is actually whether the game is an independent, cohesive game already. And then, depending on what happens later on, we’re going to layer new things on top of it. Over the course of the product life cycle, if you will.

Given that, would there be expansions, free updates?

Sun: I think it’s a little too early to know. But the idea is that this is not anything like a free-to-play game, to answer a more specific question. We don’t have grand plans to sell add-on packs. That’s not what we’re thinking. But what shape that does take is a little bit up in the air.

I think we like the notion of things growing organically and making the right choices based on how things happen. We really believe strongly that part of doing a Kickstarter is involving the community in your decision-making. We have a community site that’s all super modern and cool, and we’re going to have all of our backers there, contributing to the conversation. And this is one of those things that probably falls in that category.

What happens if the Kickstarter fails?

Sun: We’ve heard that one a bunch of times. To be honest, Kickstarter is so much work that we haven’t committed any energy to thinking about that. It’s just not constructive energy right now. You’ve probably read by now that Kickstarter is a lot of work. That’s all we’ve been using our energy on. It doesn’t seem fruitful to the goal to overplan that outcome.

So we talk a lot to our friends that have done this stuff: Brian Fargo, Tim Schafer, we just met the Larian Studios guys who are super nice and they gave us a nice shoutout on their Kickstarter this morning. But yeah, the message has been, “stay focused, stay at it, don’t give up and keep going” so that’s what we’ve been doing.

The big concern is that it will just sort of disappear if the Kickstarter fails.

Sun: Well, I mean, that’s valid, but not terribly worth worrying about until it happens. In terms of backer suppor, it doesn’t change much. If it doesn’t succeed, then no one’s money went away anyway, except maybe ours. But that’s not really for the backers’ concern.

But there are other avenues. Some new potential things came up in the last couple days that’s pretty cool. But I can’t really talk about those. I probably have to just leave it at that, just as a matter of confidentiality.

How did you manage to capture the same style as Giants? Is this a lighting trick that you guys do?

Bruty: Just having done the Giants artwork myself. It’s a continuation of the style I like. When I did MDK I wanted to do a colorful, sci-fi, imaginative game because I was looking at a bunch of Doom clones at that time, and games that run down endless pipe-like corridors and I was like “where’s the sci-fi? Where’s the imagination I grew up reading as a kid?” And that’s why I wanted to do that.

And when it came to Giants, I was quite tired at the time due to having to finish a bunch of deadlines and I thought, “Wow, I’d really like to go on vacation right now.” And so, I set the Giants world in a bunch of tropical islands because I thought, “Well, that’s a nice place to work on if I can’t actually be there right now.” And that sort of stuck with me. It’s something I wanted to go further with. And so this continues that particular look because I definitely have more work to do there.

In terms of how the game looks right now, it’s only about 30-40% towards its targeted look. That’s because, in particular, I’ve only been using Unreal for the past 3-4 months and I’m still getting a feel for how to establish my own style over its own natural graphical tendencies. Because it comes with a lot of stuff out of the box that we used to get the demo up and running. But I don’t have full control over the palette the way I want yet. So that’s something that, hopefully once I have a production budget, we can invest in. I can do my shaders, and I can start painting my own skies again instead of them all being fogged out right now.

So we captured part of the look, just with the basic color ranges. But there’s a lot of work left there.

So you are trying to capture the same kind of look?

Bruty: I’m not trying to capture the same look. I’m just going with a look that’s particularly my style. It just happens, obviously, to be the same because Giants is one of my previous games. But I tend to prefer being in brighter lit adventurous worlds. I like openness. I like seeing the horizon. It’s my natural preference.

I just saw the Majorcans again in the stream. Is saving them going to have any real bearing on multiplayer other than avoiding maybe a ritual?

Bruty: They don’t have a deeper involvement from that aspect. They have a much stronger involvement in the campaign story. I’m not sure how much more I’ll bring into the multiplayer at this point because it’s a bit too advanced right now. We’re focusing more on player mechanics because we’ve got quite a lot of things going on already. They definitely have a deeper involvement in the story, so we’ll have to see where that goes.

It’s been a while since Giants. What made you decide to go back to this style of gameplay now?

Bruty: About a year, two years ago, when Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo were having their success. You know, Brian Fargo was a publisher of Giants, MDK, Earthworm Jim back in those days. I was really interested in seeing how successful he was and it made me think, “Oh, is there a chance I could bring my style of game back? Is anyone interested?”

You know, because you built those games in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, when you had these mid-tier publishers who would take the risk to fund these kind of projects when the budgets weren’t too large. Then that really dried up and everyone became risk averse and it became “AAA or nothing really” budget. There wasn’t any place for these games to be developed. And I literally stopped making them. But I always wanted to and was always looking for an avenue for that. So I was really excited to see crowdfunding become a possibility.

Having the Kickstarter and having these cheaper engines is sort of the other part of the piece. We couldn’t do this without Unity 5 or Unreal available for the new cost structure. Remember, Unreal used to be crazy expensive. That would make it unfeasible. But now, for just a certain slice of the revenue. We’ve been using Unity for a couple of years now but we decided to try Unreal for this demo just to see how the scale of production would be so we could make sure we budget appropriately from that.

Do you think you guys are going to stick with it?

Sun: I think there’s a high chance that that’s the case.

Bruty: We’ve got to go back and check out Unity because it deployed as we were beginning this.

Sun: Primarily the multiplayer stuff. One of the reasons we decided to build a multiplayer demo is because, with Kickstarters, one of the primary things I see is, “Oh yeah, you’ve got great ideas but how do I know you can actually build a game with the exception of people that have already done it?”

So we just thought it would be good to go out and show people we could build a game. And building a network-supported game is no joke. So once we decided that it became obvious that we needed to give Unreal a try. I’ve built multiple games with the older Unreal engines. I knew that it was pretty likely that the networking was going to be working well out of the box, whereas I knew that the older Unity networking wasn’t really, shall we say, ready for this kind of interaction in multiplayer.

Are you going to push for cross-platform play?

Sun: No. It’s not something that I’ve seen work particularly well yet. It’s been tried multiple times and it’s largely not been met with particular success. And it’s challenging. So, especially when we’re not even quite sure what our resource load is going to be, it seems pretty dangerous from my project management point of view to even attempt that.

It’s been asked a couple of times. But it is a challenging enough problem. Not even just technically, but from a vendor relationship point of view, too. It’s a little too much to handle. Unless everything changes for some reason, the world freaks out and hands us an enormous amount of money. But until that happens, I’m not going to worry about it.

So are you guys content with how the Kickstarter has been going so far?

Sun: A loaded question. Nice. It’s a little slower than we like it. TwitchCon was kind of an odd beast. We had grand plans there. But nobody quite knew what TwitchCon was going to be. And it was pretty cool but people weren’t going around looking at any games. People were going around looking for Twitch streamers and lining up for expensive sweaters, which was like a four hour long line.

Bruty: We definitely know that we’ve got a challenge finding all of our old fans. Because there wasn’t any sort of direct communities that gathered together. So it takes us a long time to track them down. Or for them to find us, actually.

You said earlier that there were plans for Giants 2 and 3 at one point. If this is successful, are there plans to turn it into a series or will you just keep adding to it like you said earlier?

Bruty: Overall, I’ve planned a series for it story-wise. I’ve kind of planned three in my head. Like Richard was saying, in terms of whether there would be updates, there would definitely be clear releases but we’ll just need to see at the time. What I wanted to say is I really want to continue to support this. That’s why we went the crowdfunding route. So we could retain ownership of the IP and, therefore, we can choose what we do with it. Even if it’s a small team supporting it, that way we’re still supporting it. At a large publisher house, if the game isn’t successful enough, it just ends up being shelved and the IP gets frozen. Just like Giants got shelved, or MDK, or Earthworm Jim. All those IPs are locked away.

For me, creating these worlds is an investment of time and I’m very patient. These things grow and mature over years. I have a different model than a publisher does.

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Those interested can back First Wonder on Kickstarter. A $25 pledge entitles you to a copy on Steam with beta access. At the time of this writing, the Kickstarter is at $32,389 of a goal of $500,000 with 25 days left.