Interview with Legion Arena developer Iain McNeil

The strategy/world-building experts go MMORPS?
By Russell D. Carroll [February 23, 2005]

Q: For everyone reading out there, who are you and what was your involvement with Legion Arena?
A: My name is Iain McNeil. I do the game design, scenario design, coordination, marketing, some selling etc. As we are such a small team there is a lot of overlap and we don’t have the clearly defined roles that you get in a larger developer.

Q: What do you think makes Independent games distinctive?
A: Obviously indies don’t have the resources and brands that large publishers & developers have, so the downside is the games are usually not as polished or fully featured as AAA games. The advantages of being indie are that you can easily try new things and react very fast. In a large developer it can take weeks or months for an idea to go from conception to finally get approval. For us, it usually happens the next day. We don’t have to worry about green light committees and pleasing shareholders.

What does this all mean? Well it means that indie games can afford to be more experimental. They don’t have the huge following of fans to please, so can try something new without running the risk of alienating their fan base. It doesn’t mean that all indie games are completely wacky. For example, Legion Arena is not a completely revolutionary idea. It is instead a combination of tried and tested ideas in an unusual way. We’ve seen MMOPG’s before and we’ve seen RTS games before, but this is the first time you’ve had the chance to take control of an army and nurture it all online. We like to think of it as MMORPS or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Strategy.

Q: How did your studio get your start in working with independent games?
A: We’ve always been independent and want to stay that way. We all come from backgrounds of working at large developers, who work on other people's IP for milestone payments. When a project ends, the publisher stops paying, but the developer still has salaries to pay, so [it] sets about finding another publisher to work for. All of the profit made on one game gets eaten up creating the demo for the next contract. If the next contract doesn’t come soon enough, it’s all over for the developer. We’ve seen it happen so many times in recent years.

We decided that we would instead put all our effort into making a game, whose IP we owned and then set about selling that game to publishers. This means we had to fund it ourselves and be independent. It wasn’t easy, but now we’ve released 5 games to retail and have established a reputation for ourselves.

Q: What is the most innovative feature of Legion Arena and how is it innovative in your mind?
A: There are so many new thins that it’s hard to know where to start. The client/server system we’ve created is probably the most important and allows us to do all sorts of cool stuff. It lets us rank the progress of every player and compare results, tracking stats on every unit, army, map and player. Most importantly it lets us give away the client for free as the server is used to authentic membership. Players can play for free as long as they like, but to recruit tougher troops and buy equipment they need in game currency, which is bought with real cash. This is how we make our money. This system means players can play as little or as often as they like & they wont feel cheated as they often do with a monthly subscription. Some players will never feel the need to buy any equipment while others will want everything they can get!

There are also cool things like being able to name each squad and choose their textures so your army looks very individual.

Q: What do gamers appreciate most about Legion Arena?
A: Arena has not released yet, but based on beta testers and our own experience I’d say “progression”. You start with a small band of raw recruits and as you fight they gain experience. You can recruit more men and equip them. As they gain levels you allocate them skills. You can specialise units in attack and defence or balance their skills. You can train them in skills that make squads easier to control in battle or teach them new formations and fighting doctrines. Every time you win a battle you are rewarded and it’s this feeling of progression that really drives players to play more.

Q: What was the single most difficult part of Legion Arena to program?
A: That’s another tricky one. The client server code was obviously tricky, but so was the 3D engine. Probably the hardest part was the unit behaviour in battles. People know from films how things should look and making unit behave in a realistic way is extremely difficult. They hold formation too much or not enough, these guys should work around the flank, these guys should wait until there is room, these guys turn to slow or fast etc etc. It’s a job that requires endless testing and tweaking. We’ve been through 3 fundamentally different systems to get it where it is today, and it’s looking pretty good :).

Q: Other than your own game did any one of the IGF finalists or Student Showcase games stand out to you? Why?
A: Sorry – same response as last year. We’re in the process of trying to gold master Legion Arena and haven’t had time to play anyone else's games for the last few months :(.

Q: How do you think Independent Games will evolve in the future?
A: As large publishers consolidate I can see opportunities appearing. These mega publishers are not interested in a game that sells 10,000 units, or even one that does 100,000. These games may be profitable but the mega publishers don’t look at anything below a million. This will allow smaller publisher to emerge again or maybe just developers self-publishing through digital downloads. I see digital distribution as the home of the indie going forwards, at least until they get established.

Q: What is the biggest challenge facing Independent games?
A: I think the biggest challenge is just running a business. Making the games is only a part of what we do. Between 25-50% of our man-hours are spent selling the games to publishers, working on marketing and all the other non-game related issues.

Q: As one of the leaders of Independent Games, what is next for you?
A: It’s good to know we’re a leading indie :) After the online version of Arena we’ll be looking at a one player version. A number of publisher have expressed interest and it looks like Legion Arena is going to be much more successful than we had expected! After that we’ll be looking at Legion II – Civilization & Empire. It takes the battle engine we have developed for Legion Arena and adds in a campaign game. We’ve got really big hopes for Legion II :).