Born of Competition: An Interview with Dag-Erling Jensen

Dag-Erling Jensen, Game Designer of Process Games, answers questions about how the small company was formed, details on how they designed a game in nine days, and a look ahead for Process Games.

Valenka: Tell me a little bit about the team – how was Process Games formed?

Dag-Erling: We formed last year; actually, it started off with two of us, kind of just wanting to get back into game design. We started prototyping one of our games that we will hopefully make one day, but we kind of put it on the shelf for now. We’re trying to get more funding and more experience before we make it. The competition last year came up and we invited a couple of the other guys – a coder, a graphics artist, and our sound guy – and we entered the competition with the team.

We reached the finals, but Booooo didn’t win, but we were pretty happy with the result of it all and how we worked together and how much we produced when we worked together. So we got together and said, “Let’s go ahead and form a company out of us six,” and that’s how we formed up. We re-entered [the Norwegian Gameplay Championship] this year with Agents vs Villain with the same six people, but with a new animator. We won and we got even more of a confidence boost.

We know we have a solid team that can work really well together, so now our challenges are making sure that we get enough funding and have the money to be able to continue working together. That’s a real struggle for many indie developers out there, especially the Norwegian ones.

Valenka: What are your goals as an independent game studio?

Dag-Erling: We have several game ideas that we want to test out, but we do know that we need to build up experience and a steady team that can work on this 100%, all the time for our projects to be good. That’s our first step. Our long term vision is to create a studio that – and it’s a vision that many studios have, so it’s not that unique – ensures that we create quality games that respect the players, no advertisements, no pay-to-win, nothing. Just straightforward, premium games. My personal vision is to have a company that can support around fifteen or twenty people that can work full-time, creating games.

http://i.imgur.com/PHGJz7o....

Valenka: How did Agents vs Villain come to be?

Dag-Erling: Let me start off with how the competition works; the organization called NFI (Norwegian Film Institute) is in charge of government funding of movies and computer games. We’re very lucky in our own way that we can actually apply for free money to develop our product, which is very unique. Every year they have the competition where they invite all the developers, with nine days to complete it, with a theme given on the first day. Last year was temperature and this year was resistance. That’s the only word you get. You have to make a game with “resistance.”

I told the team, “We’ll spend two days brainstorming ideas and following different paths, but at the end of the second day, we must have an idea that we can go with and we will never look back from that point. We ended up spending the first day with nothing, absolutely nothing. On the second day, we went back to brainstorming. We started finding synonyms for the term ‘resistance’ like ‘opposition’ or ‘competition.’ We talked about games that have a lot of opposition, like a board game called Descent. We talked about how fun it was and it was one player against many.

After that, we ended up with an agents theme because we wanted resistance from everything, from all sides in the game. So we tested out an idea where one player plays the villain, a typical James Bond villain and the other players are agents from different bureaus like the KGB, CIA and MI6. Their goal is to reach the villain first and whoever reaches the villain first wins. But the villain controls all these traps on the map like flamethrowers, spikes, walls that will close and crush the agents. Agents can kick each other into traps and sabotage each other. At the end, the villain becomes a boss and it becomes like your typical Mega Man boss fight where he has abilities and the agents will have to find a way to kill him. They’re kind of cooperating, but not really at the same time. It’s almost like the James Bond movies The Spy Who Loved Me where Bond and the KGB are both trying to get the same villain, so they’re kind of allies, but they’re not. That’s the theme we went for in the game and we were happy with our understanding of the theme that they wanted us to make.

Valenka: Did you have to make any significant sacrifices during development?

Dag-Erling: There was the boss fight; it didn’t end up being as epic as we would like, because we ran out of time. Our coder – we have a very good coder – had to completely rewrite the collision system for GameMaker, like a custom one for the project, because it couldn’t handle the way we wanted the collision system to work. So there were some sacrifices, but not from the core. Both the graphics artist and the coder and everyone on the team, well... kicked ass. They delivered beyond what anyone would expect.

Valenka: What about the development process since the prototype? Can you talk more about that?

Dag-Erling: We haven’t worked on it at all since the prototype. We’re finishing off the Spooked project, which we are renaming to “Booooo” instead, with a new logo. We’re looking at getting more funding in and making sure we can start a pre-production and making sure we can scope the project in a realistic way. Hopefully, we’ll be able to recreate the game with all the core features. One of the reasons why we haven’t touched it is that we’re super happy with the core features. There’s really nothing that we want to add to the game that isn’t already there.

http://i.imgur.com/eNFQz4Q....

Valenka: Were there any behind the scenes influences for the project?

Dag-Erling: There was a game, well actually it’s a mod in Garry’s Mod and one of the team members told me about it where basically there’s one guy who had to run gauntlets while another would trigger traps and try to kill him as many times as possible. It was a lot of fun so we we’re like, “well it would probably be a lot more fun if it were more chaotic.” So that’s one of the major inspirations. Then there’s James Bond and Spy vs Spy.

Valenka: I have to ask, with a game inspired in part by James Bond, are there any 007 themed nods or references, like any villain or agents with spinoff names?

Dag-Erling: They don’t have names yet, they’re just called MI6, CIA and KGB. We’ll probably name them and work more on the characters, since they’re really basic, but we’re really happy with them, with how they work and their simplicity. When it comes to the villain, we did discuss that a lot. Our animator was doing concepts on the villain and had several drawings in Photoshop and there was a cat in one of the drawings. In a spoof, he drew the cat on the villain’s head and I said, “That’s the villain. The cat is the villain.” Supervillains in many movies have a cat, so the cat is the one controlling all of this and the cat is the one who travels around, creating these villains.

Valenka: Is that part of the plot in Agents vs Villain?

Dag-Erling: The story plot will be this evil cat traveling in time creating villains and you have to stop the cat. That’s why all the villains have cats. I actually have to credit a guy I met here in Oslo for that. He told me the idea and I said, “I’m going to steal that,” and he said, “Okay.”

Valenka: How did winning the Norwegian Gameplay Championship affect the development for Agents vs Villain?

Dag-Erling: I think the main thing it’s given us is the reassurance that it has a lot of potential if we do this right. We had a little test group in the middle of the competition; we had a group of kids from a local library who had this game club. We invited them up to the office and we sat them down and they played the mock-up levels and they loved it. At that point, I realized that we have something that people think is really cool. I mean, they have this mock-up, grey-boxed level, so I knew that when we had the art in place, it would be even better. Very few people have heard of the competition; it’s very well known in Norway, but it doesn’t have the merit you’d think a competition like this would have abroad, which is a little disappointing, but if it were a bigger competition, there would be a lot more people entering and someone else might have won. So there’s a bit of mixed feelings there. But we have a product that people think is fun and that’s what drives us forward.

http://i.imgur.com/9xsyNvC....

Valenka: Let’s talk a little about Booooo (previously called Spooked) – how did that project come about?

Dag-Erling: It was just like Agents vs Villain, because we entered it in the competition last year and the theme was temperature. So it was like, “How do you make a game themed around temperature?” We ended up brainstorming and at some point, one guy said, “What if it’s about ghosts?” and the other said, “What if it’s about seeing hot spots and temperature?” That’s where it clicked for me and I said, “Well, what if you are a ghost and you have to avoid the heat?” That’s where the basic inspiration came from. We realized later, we’ll make this ghost that’s kind of an introverted character, so you don’t want people around. You’re not evil, you just want to be alone in darkness. That’s the theme. So when you start a level, people will be coming in and turning lights on and you have to scare them out by possessing objects and doing ghost things, for lack of a better explanation. You’ll have to do it before you die and you could die if you spend all your ghost power and can’t regenerate in illuminated spots.

Valenka: Earlier, you mentioned that Process Games came to be when the team all came together for the Norwegian Gameplay Championship last year. Would that mean that Booooo is the first project developed?

Dag-Erling: Yeah, it’s Process’ first project, but we are a team of experienced designers. Personally, I’ve been a world designer and system designer for Age of Conan back when Funcom made that. I’m also hired under another company for a children’s learning MMO. We do have a lot of project experience and we know how to get things out, but under the Process name, that is our first project, yes.

Valenka: With Agents vs Villain, what are your plans for release? What is it being developed for primarily?

Dag-Erling: We will develop it primarily for consoles and maybe PC. It’ll be pretty easy to develop for. We’re also trying to figure out what kind of tablet technology will exist within a year or so. We’ve taken a bit of a look at the NVIDIA Shield and transmitting games to your TV and having your phone as a controller, like an Xbox controller. So with a tablet, you can connect it to the TV and have your phone as a controller. That’s something we’re sniffing at. But first, we’ll try and get Microsoft on board and make sure they want it for Xbox. I think it’ll be somewhat easier in the near future when the Xbox One starts running Windows 10, which should open a lot of doors for indie development. We’ll see what happens. Sony might be a little difficult with getting our foot in the door, but we’re also looking at Nintendo. It’s a very simple game, the mechanics are really simple and it would fit any kind of device. We aim for quality graphics, but it might not be like super 3D, real-time lighting, AAA graphics, but more simplistic so it can run on a tablet without any problems.

http://i.imgur.com/LVWiAqZ....

Valenka: What’s next for Process Games?

Dag-Erling: We do have the concept for a more of a sci-fi strategy game, which is a game we’ve been prototyping for quite some time. We might start it off as a board game first and then see if we can convert it with easy to use mechanics. Have it be simplistic but still have some depth to it.

Valenka: Since Booooo is closer to being ready for release, is there a release date planned?

Dag-Erling: We’ll release it when it’s done; right now it’s technically done, but we added some new elements. We wanted more story – we do think story is important. Even though the game is small, the story is what drives the player forward. We’re wrapping up some comics that you get in between the levels and making sure the menus and the UI have the same polish level that the rest of the game has right now. If I’m super optimistic, it should be released when Indie Month hits or shortly thereafter. It’s hard to estimate the last stretch, but right now, it’s a fully working product.

Booooo will be releasing soon, first on Android, then on iOS and Windows Phone.

Day 3 | Process Games