Interview - Chris Park - Arcen Games (AI War, Tidalis, A Valley Without Wind) - Part 1

For Used Game Reviews, companies like Arcen Games are the future.  Small independent teams like these are still following the traditional "hack" methodology that inspired the first video games decades ago--taking bits of code and piecing them together to create new genres and even change the definition of gaming.

But what often sets these companies apart from others is that they cater exclusively to gamers.  They understand gamers want to play a game that doesn't waste our time (both in time spent playing and time spent earning the money to buy the game).  Small developers like Arcen make great games and offer them at very reasonable prices (Arcen Games titles retail from $29.95 and under).

Chris Park founded Arcen Games in 2009 knowing little more than that he had a neat side-project RTS game called AI War, which allows players to take on the role of a space fleet commander in an effort to annihilate alien factions and colonize their planets.

But AI War was not your usual RTS.  From the get-go, a true Arcen signature has been how they manipulate the computer to do all of the work in creating a unique game experience tailored to you.

Procedural generation has yielded Arcen three astonishingly big titles: AI War has expanded to include several expansions, and is by far the most depth-driven RTS of its kind; their second title, Tidalis, draws upon a unique puzzle dynamic and dozens of custom entities to create puzzles likely to keep you stumped for years if you'll allow it; and most recently, their 2D action sidescroller A Valley Without Wind, a game capable of rendering its own infinite world.

All of these games are "big" in the sense that things like level design, ship creation, puzzle generation and world rendering are all automated and randomized by your PC.

In other words, Arcen Games titles share at least one thing in common: you'll never play the same game twice.

Still, from getting discovered and building a dominant RTS presence to escaping near financial ruin, it's been a wild few years for Arcen Games since their inception in 2009.

In part one of the interview, Chris talks about the trials and tribulations a team of three full-time programmers/musicians/artists endures on the journey from start-up to their recently released A Valley Without Wind beta:

UGR: So tell us about Arcen in the early days.  Here you had Alden Ridge and AI War conceived (and prototyped?); what was the deciding factor in taking the jump and establishing an LLC, especially knowing how competitive the game industry is?

CP: I made Alden Ridge as a hobby, as basically I'd been doing all my life with making games or parts of games.  I made AI War out of frustration that I couldn't find a co-op RTS that met all the criteria for my weekly play group with my dad, my uncle, and my uncle's colleague.  We had been playing weekly for about 11 years at that point, and had gone through so many co-op RTS games, but none of them would last more than six months or a year with us.

So at any rate, I got stuck with Alden Ridge at a point where I wasn't really sure how to complete it -- after 8 months of development -- and I decided to make AI War as a "side project."  After about 4 months of development of AI War, and that taking over my group's weekly RTS play sessions, I realized: "Hey!  I could actually do this for a living." 

I'd never considered game development as a viable career, it was too pie-in-the-sky.  I'd been doing business programming for 9 years at that time, and was trying to make it as a novelist but had several near misses and a lot of frustration trying to find an agent.  Game development wasn't even on my radar, even though it had been my constant hobby since before I was even a teenager.

UGR: At this point, was Arcen just you?

CP: It was at that four-month mark on AI War that I decided to bring in a composer to do some original music for the game, and through my sister I found Pablo Vega, who has been with the company ever since.  That was the time that I also decided to actually form an official LLC, and after another four months AI War 1.0 came out, and it was off to the races from there. 

UGR: How did you come to meet and form the team that makes up Arcen today?

CP: There are three of us -- Pablo, Keith, and myself -- that are fulltime staff for Arcen.  Lars still gives feedback and helps out with support on Tidalis and such, but he works fulltime for a very major software company doing really fancy technical stuff as his main job.  Phil has been fulltime as our artist in the past, and I hope will be again in the future, but for AVWW he's been doing some off and on hourly work while working on other contracts with other indies.  Erik, Keith, Pablo, and myself are the four primaries on AVWW, anyway, though the other two have been contributing.

I was still working fulltime at another job during that period, and so was Pablo; during 2009 I reinvested all my income from AI War into making more improvements to AI War, including contracting Phillipe Chabot to redo the vast majority of the art for AI War 2.0, which was the first version on Steam.  I met Phil simply by putting out a job notice on a number of the indie-development-focused sites, and he was the person that did the work that fit best, as well as had the personality that fit best with the rest of us.  It was a great match, and I was lucky to find him.

Lars Bull and I had been online friends, both amatuer game developers, for ten years at that point.  We've still never met in person (actually, that goes for everyone on the staff except for Pablo and I), but Lars has always been an invaluable source of feedback and refinement on my design ideas.  We decided to do his puzzle game concept together as an Arcen project, and that's where Tidalis came from.

Keith LaMothe joined Arcen part-time in early 2010, when I was remarking on the forums how much work there was and how I'd have to hire another programmer at some point.  He was one of the AI War fans I'd talked to off and on for 6+ months at that point, and we'd had some discussion about business systems programming techniques we each used.  I'd made the comment about hiring a programmer in an off-hand way, thinking of far into the future, but he promptly submitted himself and I realized I definitely needed him.  Since, he's become an invaluable part of the team both in terms of programming and game design.  He just came on fulltime this month, after a year and a half of being about 2/3 time, so that's been very exciting, too.

Erik Johnson is the newest member of the team, and came on about 9 months ago in a half-time basis.  He is a gaming journalist for a number of indie outlets, and I'd known him first as a reviewer that looked at AI War and Tidalis and such.  He had interviewed me at one point, and after the interview we wound up having a long chat about PR and marketing; he had previously worked at a major marketing firm, and wanted to parlay that experience into helping indies.  Nothing came of that for more than a year, but then when we were starting to work on A Valley Without Wind, I knew I wanted to do the PR/marketing side of things better than we had in the past, and got up with Erik.


UGR: How was the initial experience dipping your feet into independent game publishing when AI War 1.0 released?

CP: When we first put out AI War 1.0, we had literally 0 sales for the first two weeks.  Nobody was interested.  When finally Stardock's Impulse platform took an interest, suddenly we had like 50 sales in a couple of days.  We actually were in their top sellers lists pretty regularly over that summer of 2009, and were doing well on GamersGate around that time, too.  All in all that brought in something like $16,000, and I put all of my portion of that toward improving the game, both in terms of art and gameplay, to hit that AI War 2.0 milestone.  It was exhausting, but a lot of fun at the same time, and there were tons of changes based on player feedback.  You can still see the old release notes on those patches, and they total over 40,000 words!  That's half a novel.

UGR: So what went right? What went wrong? What inspired the decision to introduce AI War 2.0 and what lessons have you brought with you from 1.0 through its latest expansion (Light of the Spire)?

CP: AI War was seeing a fair bit of success, and I wanted to keep that going as well as get it to hit the next level.  We started faring really well with reviewers towards late summer, and it was clear that we really had something good going.  Steam and Direct2Drive said they would carry our 2.0 version once that was ready, so in October of 2009 we launched on them.  That almost quintupled our yearly revenue for 2009, and suddenly we were at a point where the monthly income could support both Pablo and myself quitting our day jobs and doing this fulltime.  So we did!

Players of strategy games are really voracious, and so we kept right on cranking out the free DLC and started work on our first paid expansion.  That was also really well received, and bolstered our main game sales even more.  We spent too much money making our puzzle game Tidalis, and too much time, compared to what ultimately that game earned.  I'm still in the hole for over $50,000 on that one, personally -- that's how much money I lost on it, paid for out of money that AI War had earned.  That really was a blow to us as a company, and paired with a rough summer of 2010 sales-wise, I thought the company was in real trouble; if things didn't improve, we were going to be bankrupted in November.

Of course, things didn't turn out that way -- there was a huge outpouring of support from players and press alike, and the winter was really good to us (including AI War's shift to a new engine, the addition of a metric ton of new free DLC, the addition of Mac OSX support, and two new paid expansions, one of which was 100% for the Child's Play charity).  All in all we closed out 2010 at 400% of our 2009 revenue, a really banner year.  But something like 80% of that income came from the last three months of the year.  If we'd have known that was going to happen come October-December, we never would have been so worried in September and we could have saved ourselves a lot of public flap.  But so it goes.  It was still our mistake to invest so much in Tidalis in the first place, even though we are really proud of that game and it's fared really well with the press and with those players who found it.

So far this year things are really looking up, too.  By July we'd already surpassed our entire 2010 income, and that gave us the flexibility to really go the extra mile with our current title, A Valley Without Wind.  Without over-extending ourselves to the degree we did with Tidalis, which is something I never want to do again.  If 2010 taught me anything, it's that you really do want to have 6+ months of operating expenses on hand if you can manage it.  We don't have quite that at the moment, but we're pretty close, and being as conservative as we can so that we don't get into trouble again.  The cliche of having to spend money to make money is very much true, but you also have to be careful.  We tried to grow too far too fast, and that is where we were troubled.  We collapsed back down a bit for AVWW, and then have been growing more slowly back as finances allowed.


UGR: Tidalis is actually a fantastic puzzle game with tons of unique mechanics that appeal to both a casual audience and hardcore puzzle fanatics looking for a challenge.  Still, it was a complete 180 for Arcen Games from having carved a niche as an RTS to producing a puzzle game.  How did AI War players receive Tidalis? What factors have contributed to Tidalis sort of flying under the radar up to this point, and can it be saved?

CP: A lot of AI War fans really liked Tidalis, but definitely it was a subset.  I was really shocked that the reviewers that liked AI War almost unanimously loved Tidalis, though -- a lot of strategy gamers (or at least reviewers) are also big into puzzle games.  That was a really big surprise to me, but it fits with my own self so I guess that shouldn't have been so out of the blue.  We tried to have casual appeal and hardcore depth, and that's sort of a tricky thing to balance.  Some of the more casual folks complained about there being too many options, too much to do, which I thought was just the most surprising thing I'd ever heard.  And then a number of the hardcore gamers were turned off by the casual-friendly visuals and the fact that it looks at first glance like a Match 3 game, when really it's nothing of the sort.

I and the rest of the team really love the visuals on Tidalis -- Phil did an amazing job -- but it was my call to go the more casual route rather than the more hardcore-puzzle-game visual route that Lars had originally been imagining.  I have no idea if Tidalis would have done better financially if it had had a more hardcore-friendly style of visual style, but that ship has kind of sailed.  There's a good chance it would have looked, in static screenshots, too much like a match 3 game.  I know a number of other puzzle games that came out around the same time, and which had a hardcore visual style, didn't really set the world on fire sales-wise.  But I don't know exact numbers. 

I think that's a tricky thing, because unlike hardcore strategy fans, which are organized and out in force on the Internet at many hangouts, there isn't somewhere that "casual" folks go aside from the casual portals, which tend to be flash-only and with really unfavorable terms.  Those places are often about churning their visitors through many games, rather than getting them to latch onto any one specific game, too, from what I can tell.  But anyway, there's not "Casual Gamer Magazine" that you can market to my mom to, or whatever; like a lot of casual gamers, she kind of finds games by word of mouth or what happens to be on the kiosk at Best Buy, etc.  This has been very convincing as a lesson for Arcen to stay away from the casual space, at any rate.  We're a hardcore computer game developer that makes really intricate games for core gamers, and we're going to stick to that -- not to say Tidalis isn't all those things.

UGR: Tidalis has a perfect interface for Android/iOs, and would mesh great with touch controls.  The game market for those platforms is also much more casual.  Is there a Tidalis mobile in the works?

CP: I can't really imagine playing it on my iPhone, to be honest -- just too small of a screen.  But it could work great on a tablet or iPad, for sure.  Honestly I know a number of iOS/Android developers, though, and to me it looks like just the same sort of thing again where it's a glut of games and you have to really be positioned right to make substantial money.  Given it would cost us about $3k to develop it, and a bunch of time doing the port (which is not a fun thing to do in the first place), I basically decided it wasn't worth the hassle.  If the right partner developer comes along and wants to do the port for a revenue split, that's pretty much the only way I could see doing such a port at this time. 

At the end of the day I'm not here to make endless ports or to wring every last cent out of every game we develop; I'm here to make games, and that's what I'd prefer to spend my time on.  Tidalis continues to sell very slowly but steadily, and we've done some recent promotions that have kicked up some interest in it over the summer, but I don't know that it will ever even come close to breaking even.  Sometimes that happens, I guess; for me it's a matter of taking the lessons learned there, and then trying not to repeat the mistakes with our next project.  AVWW is something we tried to make accessible, but in no way cutesy, and it falls more into our core area of expertise for the fulltime staff, as well as into the more traditional core PC genres.  Which is mostly just a matter of luck, because it was the game that we wanted to make next, anyway; we just avoided trying to casual-it-up.  My and Keith's tastes run pretty hardcore-PC-gamer, anyhow.

UGR: You mentioned how there was some public flap around the short period of financial instability around Arcen.  Was that because of your updates on the website telling about the situation?  I'd think for most of your customers, myself included, being so transparent as a company goes a long way...especially when you've got some really fun games we want to keep playing.  What was the general reaction to the updates? Has it changed the way you feel about company transparency at all?

CP: Yeah, the only reason it came up at all is because we mentioned it.  Then PC Gamer did an article on it, RPS had an article on it, it was on Blue's News I think, and all over the place.  There were particularly nasty comments on places like reddit, of all places, where people start trotting out "the will of the market has spoken and Arcen just isn't a good business," or how much smarter they are than I am, or even trying to extrapolate my pay and wondering why it should be what they thought it might be, etc.  Those were by far the minority; we had a lot of players literally donate money to us, as well as a lot of people ardently spreading the word about our games, and the more people knew about us, the more positive and sympathetic they tended to be.

But for folks to whom we were just some random other indie developer, the automatic snark comes out pretty fast -- this is the Internet, after all.  While mostly the whole experience left me feeling distinctly like George Bailey, there were a lot of gut-punch moments there, too.  When you're secretly worried you have made some mis-steps or that the market is not there for your stuff, having strangers compelled to write diatribes on that very subject isn't the best for morale, heh.  Not that I haven't glanced at other companies or whatever in trouble and had the same thoughts myself; so I guess what goes around comes around, though I never said anything.  But the experience has certainly taught me to be a lot more knee-jerk when responding to unfamiliar companies in distress.

UGR: During all of this, Arcen still managed to release the Children of Neinzul expansion for AI War.  With all profits benefiting Child's Play, the effort that has almost raised $30,000 for the charity.  That's a hefty chunk of change for any independent game company.  Especially with the financial wounds of Tidalis still relatively fresh (at the release of the expansion), where does Arcen find the motivation be so generous?

CP:  My original motivation for doing this for Child's Play -- aside from the fact that I've followed and admired it since it started -- was to celebrate the birth of my son, who was born at the start of last September.    We had already announced CoN as our next title before we knew that we were going to have financial troubles, and that's something we just wouldn't go back on.  A lot of the people who didn't know us said we were stupid for doing that when we were in trouble, but the reality is that it wouldn't have made a notable difference to our bottom line at the time.  By the end of 2010 it was only about $10,000 that had been raised -- the rest came later.  $10,000 is a lot of money for an individual, but for a small business with a staff and website expenses and all that, it doesn't even cover a single month's costs.  If Arcen was going to go out of business, it wasn't going to be because we were doing the CoN expansion for charity; and I'd rather have had my last act for Arcen to be to donate a bunch of money rather than renege on the children.  Money comes and goes, but once you give up your integrity you never quite get it back.

UGR: You just recently released the public beta of Arcen Games next title, A Valley Without Wind, which looks to be a massive (infinite?) 2D sidescrolling adventure.  What experiences from AI War and Tidalis are you taking with you into AVWW?

CP: Tidalis doesn't have much influence on AVWW, except in that we're steering very clear of anything cutesy (which is to our tastes, anyway).  But AI War has really taught us a lot about game design in gneeral, procedural content generation, balancing huge systems, and so on.  Experienced players of AI War will see a lot of influences in AVWW -- in some respects, the vaunted "AI Progress" of AI War is analogous to the "Civilization Level" in AVWW.  But instead of the number representing how powerful the enemy is, it represents how powerful you are.  Rather than going on a quest through a variable-difficulty galaxy in AI War to weaken your enemy, in AVWW you're going on a quest through a variable-difficulty infinite world to strengthen yourself and take down your enemies. 

There's a lot of other influences, too, that are more subtle and complex; one of which is our decision to persist most of the AVWW world on disk rather than in memory, since memory was one of the biggest limitations to galaxy growth in AI War.  This makes AVWW able to have billions and billions of entities in it, most of which are just sitting on disk when you aren't near them, rather than AI War which starts having some trouble after a couple of thousand entities, with them sitting semi-idle in memory when you're not near them.  Rather than being one big realtime simulation, we came up with the concept of "rapid aging" in AVWW, which can make it look like things have been progressing while you were gone.  Of course, in practice we've had almost no use for that because of how AVWW's design evolved; but thanks to our experience with AI War, we were able to just shatter all the prior barriers of scale that we'd already sort of shattered with AI War.  AVWW is the pretty darn ambitious, and I don't think there is any way we could have done even what we've already done with it if it hadn't been for our nearly three years of experience making AI War.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where Chris discusses A Valley Without Wind, how it ties into Arcen Games design philosophies, and how procedural generation makes AVWW the first game of its kind.

Posted in: A Valley Without Wind,AI War: Fleet Command,Arcen Games,Charity,Childs Play,Chris Park,Feature,Interview,Mac,News,PC,Tidalis