Auto Assault Interview

Throughout the course of history there have been many things that looked and sounded ridiculous at first, but eventually went on to do rather well. I’m thinking of those huge black bricks in the eighties that yuppies called cellular phones, or the room-filling computers of the sixties. More contemporary examples of this phenomenon include the Xbox, the first console to be considered in terms of space consumption rather than quality of available software, and Peter Crouch (most Liverpool fans are currently hoping the lanky striker will evolve into a smaller, faster version before his contract expires).

A potential addition to that illustrious list is a post-apocalyptic MMO with vehicular combat that might just leave the genre’s more traditional offerings choking on radiated dust. NetDevil’s quirky take on the increasingly popular MMO space sticks two fingers up at those damned orcs and elves who’ve been running around some popular game I can’t remember right now. Instead, we’ve got Biomeks, Mutants and Humans driving hot-rods of the future in what can only be described as Twisted Metal mashed with Mad Max. The result? Auto Assault, a MMO that’s shaping to be one of the most daring and compelling games Santa will be bringing bemused gamers this Christmas.

Pro-G sat down with NetDevil’s Design Director Ryan Seabury to chat about the game. In part one of our two-part series, we talk about Auto Assault’s origin, the tortuous nature of its early development and, strangely… astronauts.

Pro-G: NetDevil are a small independent developer with only one game under their belt. How did you end up making a huge MMO like Auto Assault?

Ryan: If you back up a step, NetDevil was founded with the whole intent of making massive multiplayer games. We’d seen Ultima Online and Everquest come out a year or two before we actually got NetDevil founded. I don’t know about you, but when I play those games it’s like ‘wow, this is so frikin’ cool!’ There’s this whole world out here and it doesn’t go away when I log out of the game and there’s always other people that I run into.

I’d always thought I’m going to do one of two things with my life. I’m either going to be an astronaut or I’m going to make my own universe – because I was stoned as a kid or something, I don’t know. So I looked into the whole astronaut route and in the States to be an astronaut you have to be in the military or be some ridiculously super rocket scientist, so I’m like ‘well I’m not gonna do that!’

Then I ran across the other two owners at a previous company, Scott Brown and Peter Grundy. We just all came together playing Quake 2 back in those days and just talked about games all the time besides our regular jobs. So, that’s how NetDevil got its roots. That was 1997, when Scott founded it officially. So I would have been 22 at that point. I was a wee lad.

So, at NetDevil we specifically wanted to make online games. And frankly we looked at the market from a business perspective and said, well, it’s really getting hard to make money as a developer independently in the traditional route. But with these new online games, if you can keep developing them there’s actually some percentage chance you can make money. And it was a fascinating topic so it worked on both the creative side and the business side and we were like ‘oh let’s try it.’

So we did JumpGate (NetDevil’s only other title) and that was a big learning experience because there were only five of us when we shipped it, and it was on a shoestring budget. But that got us in the door with NCsoft to do it right with Auto Assault.

Pro-G: How did the deal with NCsoft come about?

Ryan: We had some contacts through JumpGate. We had met Richard Garriot when he was still at Origin and had pitched him JumpGate as a publish deal. He was actually really excited about it but then he handed us off to some business guy there. JumpGate didn’t have a joystick or anything and it was a space-combat sim specifically built around simulating functionality. It wasn’t really keyboard friendly and after five minutes he was done with it. So, it was kind of tragic there. We ended up going with 3DO which sort of sealed the fate of JumpGate with regard to any commercial success.

Auto Assault was actually one of a couple of ideas that we had come up with. Scott was a real big fan of it just because he had played some other car games in the past and old school table-top stuff. Auto Duel, if you remember, was actually a Garriot game as well. And so a car combat game was one of the ideas that we had. A space combat sim and, funnily enough, a superhero game (actually, not a superhero game, which is a trademark, he joked) were the other ideas we had. We pitched the superhero game, the car game and a number of other ideas.

So we pitched those two ideas and I think the third or the fourth idea to NCsoft in around 2001. We had a couple of mutual contacts there since the Garriots moved over there and all that. And they were like, ‘meh, not really high on the superhero idea’, and we were like ‘what the hell, it’s an obvious choice’, and then we found out later that they were talking with Cryptic so it’s like ‘ahhh, ok.’ But then they really, really liked the car idea.

We put together two screenshots and a one page doc that summed it up and they were like, ‘all right, let’s do it.’ Having shipped a game with five people before, they appreciated the quality in the game. You know those guys have been in the industry forever.

Pro-G: In 2001 the MMO genre was still very elitist. What made you think a vehicle based MMO would work in 2001 let alone after four years of development in 2005?

Ryan: To us it was obvious, or it seems obvious – we’ll see when the game actually comes out. Fantasy was all that existed then, pretty much, and fantasy is still mostly what exists now.

Pro-G: Were you worried someone else would have the same idea and beat you to release?

Ryan: Well yeah! We’re shocked still that there’s no real competing product, not anything really close to what we’re doing to this point. We’ve had this announced for two years probably, so somebody could have picked it up and done something similar. But I think until there’s a proven game that actually does it, you know, publisher risk and aversion and all that kind of stuff.

If you look at mass market entertainment, like TV shows, how many of those are fantasy based? Fantasy is actually a pretty niche market, but it has quite a few users in the MMO space. But look at games in general even. How many now are fantasy hack ‘n’ slash? There’s your Need for Speeds or Burnouts coming out. There’s a lot of interesting car games with destruction and action. Those are things that people want to play; those have the highest sales and those are the games that people talk about. We were always big action gamers. The videogaming roots of NetDevil were with Quake and Tribes. Games like that where it was high action, but team based gameplay still. So taking that into a massively multiplayer space with that kind of mechanic and pacing seems like a natural progression.

I honestly think that a big reason why MMOs took so long to open the door for so many people is just because the accessibility wasn’t there – the learning curve was so steep and the core game mechanic is very, very turn-based. The latest incarnations of MMOs are faster, but they’re still turn-based at their core. So we’re trying to say no, real-time, jump to real-time, like action with stats behind that. Car combat is the perfect vehicle, so to speak, to achieve that sort of gaming.

Pro-G: You mentioned you had a staff of five that worked on JumpGate. How has the team evolved throughout Auto Assault’s development?

Ryan: We actually thought it would take us three years to develop the game with a staff of twenty people. We’re moving into a fourth year now and we have a staff of forty-five. And we still don’t have enough people; we’re working around the clock. We have a lot of passionate people on the team. Everybody just busts their asses and pours their blood, sweat and tears into it, so it’s really cool that we have that level of talent and dedication.

The surprise for us was just the scope of the project to begin with. The content development process we didn’t really get from day one, which we fully understand now. And the expectation levels kept rising through the course of development. So it’s really funny for us to look back. Some of our initial builds we saw screenshots from are crap – absolute crap! You look at those and you’re like, ‘what were you thinking?! It’s terrible!’ And then we thought it was like, ‘man this is so awesome this is kick ass! You’re driving a car and stuff!’ But you look back and you’re like, ‘wow, this is just awful.’

So, seeing the progression and knowing the amount of effort it takes to get to the next step of quality and polish, that’s really surprising to me and kind of scary at the same time, because going forward you know that expectation levels are going to keep rising.

Pro-G: What’s been your biggest mistake during the development of Auto Assault?

Ryan: I think the biggest mistake we made early on was that we thought we were gonna hire one map designer and then the rest of the content we were gonna, sort of, do on the side – the three owners and maybe a few other people pitching in. The team size is now 45 and there’s so much specialisation within that team – there’s still not enough people. The content design team is now the largest department at the company. So, how poorly we estimated the amount of effort it would take to get where we wanted to be was the biggest eye opener in this project.

And then there’s the amazing amount of work it takes to get a fully networked physics environment working with the Havok physics engine and having to put cutting edge graphics on top of that – all that in a massively multiplayer space with exploits and all the things that happen in that.

Pro-G: Is an MMO the hardest genre of game to develop in the industry?

Ryan: It’s a bear. But that’s where we hopped in at. We didn’t start with tiny games with 10 hours of content or anything like that. We just set our sights to the top, and said we were going to make the best games ever and these entire universes.

I’m a programmer by heart, Scott’s a programmer by heart and Peter’s an artist through and through. One thing we didn’t really get about generating the kind of content we wanted, is that you have to put a sh*t load of thought into just fictional framework and back-story and things, just to give people a guideline to work on. We have over a thousand pages of line doc, just for the framework of the factions and all their interrelations and stuff, and that’s not even including the content we’ve generated in the game.

Pro-G: Was there ever a point where you felt you had undertaken a job that was slightly beyond you?

Ryan: NetDevil has a pretty can-do attitude – obvious by the hours that we work. We bend over backwards to do what we say we’re going to do. There’s always uncertainty as an independent developer. Until you have a consistent revenue stream coming in from some hit game, or at least a couple of OK games, it’s pretty scary, because all of our money is coming in from one publisher at this point. JumpGate is still active but it’s not by any means a commercial success.

North Korea could just blow the sh*t out of Seoul someday which would destabilise NCsoft because they’re a Korean company. We think about those things. We have to. That would destroy their cash flow and then our project’s gone all of a sudden. Those are the kinds of things that have to enter your mind as part of the cognitive process for an independent developer.

I don’t know if there’s ever been any ‘oh sh*t’ moments. There’s never been a point when we were like, ‘man this sucks, like what have we been doing?’

That’s it for part one of our interview. Check out part two for even more juicy details on the game.