Mr. Robot

Sharing the same name as the famous science-fiction writer, Asimov is a robot who is undertaken to completing a vital mission: save the humans and his friends. Mr. Robot is about a service android named Asimov who must venture around and about the spaceship Eidolon. His mission is to stop the main computer from destroying hundreds of humans aboard the ship, in cryo sleep. Asimov will have to puzzle-platform, hack, and fend his way through dangerously malfunctioned droids, worker robots, and the corrupted main computer. The game will feature platform hopping, adventure battles, and even an RPG alternate-mode called "Ghost Hacking". To delve even further into the details, Gametunnel conducted a Q&A with Moonpod's Nick Tipping. Check it out below.

[William Usher] - How long has Mr. Robot been in development, and how long was Mr. Robot originally planned to be in development?

Nick Tipping: It's difficult to give you an exact timescale in man months because Mr. Robot already existed in prototype form way before we started on it full time. We try to spend some time each month working on various game prototypes, and a few of the ones that have the most potential end up being taken quite far. Mr. Robot was one of those, and quite a bit of time and effort had already been expended on it.

If you discount any of the preliminary work though, full time development commenced in October 2004, so we are just coming up to its 2 year development anniversary. The game was originally scheduled to take 18 months, but once we came up with the ghost hacking idea and decided we wanted to do it, we had to extend the schedule by another 7 months (Ghost hack is pretty much a complete game in itself). Generally, we make time estimates and then triple those times and it ends up fairly accurate. Although the project has obviously turned into a far larger endeavor than we initially planned, this was predominantly due to the ghost hacking element, so it was at least an addition we scheduled for and decided was well worth the additional time.

[William Usher] - Since Mr. Robot wasn't always a game concept, and was used for other design purposes, could you tell us what those design concepts/purposes were?

Nick Tipping: The great thing about the Mr. Robot back end, is its 'building block' system for creating levels. We use it like a gameplay laboratory; if something comes out of a brainstorming session then we can rapidly test it out and see if it's actually fun. It's a bit like having a playground of lego sets in a game engine environment. As for ideas we've prototyped by their nature they are quite hard to quantify (otherwise we wouldn't need to prototype them), but we've tested out various gameplay from physics based puzzles (but where the physics are a completely invented set of rules from another dimension!) to turn based dungeon rpgs (mainly testing a bizarre battle system Mark came up with) and my personal favourite: a game that looks on the surface a bit like gauntlet, but is more akin to games like paradroid and quazzatron and mixes time based puzzles directly into the action. Actually, on paper, it sounds rubbish! but it's one of those things that's more than the sum of its parts and we've ended up wasting a good few afternoons mucking about with it and actually playing it!

Mr. Robot is a bit like a Swiss army knife of gaming in this respect; the format allows you to throw all kinds of ideas into the mix, and they work really well without seeming out of place as you might expect with any other game style. One of the directions we may use to update it in the future could be by incorporating totally new styles of gameplay. We've already been thinking along the lines of shoot em up rooms (giving the player a laser) and vehicle driving (that one might be a bit hard though!) and we've already had some great suggestions on our forum such as laser beam connection puzzles, and a hydroponics area where you have to grow plants in a similar way to the old Spectrum classic 'PSSST!'

[William Usher] - What made you decide to have the game in 3D, rather than use 2D sprites of 3D models, like many other games out there?

Nick Tipping: We had been working on a 3D engine concurrently with work on Starscape and by the time we started work on Mr. Robot it had reached the point of being production ready and logically we wanted to use it. Sadly, there's a negative perception of 2D games being seen as out of date and 3D is a baseline expectation for most modern PC games. I could rant on about this as it's something of a personal gripe of mine. I've seen mainstream reviewers mark down games for being 2D as if they are somehow inferior (Thankfully, this is something that GT reviewers are intelligent enough to realise is silly!) Perhaps as an artist I rate games graphically on their artistic merits and not their technical accomplishments., but I have to recognise that 3D is expected in this market. Thankfully, Mr. Robot is also a game that really suits being in 3D, though I still hope people evaluate its graphics purely on their artistic merits.

[William Usher] - The models look very good in the game, and each character seems to a tell a story visually. How did you come up with the design(s) for each character and was there any specific inspiration for the designs?

Nick Tipping: I've always been fascinated by robots, in fact I'm pretty much obsessed with them! So Mr. Robot is a bit of a dream job for me and I wanted the characters to have a unique look. I definitely spent far more time designing the characters for this game than on any other game I've worked on, and pushed the schedule out a bit right from the start of development!

To come up with ideas I just spend hours and hours doodling really rough robot pictures. After a while, one will emerge from the pile sometimes just a line out of place will give it some personality, and then I gradually work up more detailed versions that try to capture that little bit of personality. As for influences, there's far too many to list, but the big ones were things like the ABC Warriors (2000AD comic strip), which to me showed how robots could have really unique personalities, movies like 'The Black Hole' and 'Silent Running' and even one of the bad robots has an air of Johnny 5 from 'Short Circuit'. Also books like 'The Complete Robot' and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" gave me ideas (Orgus in the game is how I always imagined 'Marvin' from Hitchhiker's would look just a massive head with tiny arms and legs!). One robot was even inspired by a drawing Mark's 5 year old daughter made for me of a cleaning robot with huge bendy arms. It was such a 'complete' concept I worked it into a final model which was styled like a Dyson vacuum cleaner. I also pop down to the Sheffield space centre (a comic and sci fi emporium) once a month as they always have tons of import Japanese artbooks. I'm sure artbooks from mechanical designers such as Ikuto Yamashita, Kenji Teraoka and Shinobu Tsuneki have been a big influence too. Hopefully that's all added up to something that looks fairly unique :) We've actually had 4 separate enquiries from people wanting to use the characters in their own promotional advertising, so we must be doing something right!

[William Usher] - Given that the game is in 3D, although viewed from an isometric perspective, will the platform action be similar to Mario RPG on the SNES or Mario 64?

Nick Tipping: I'd obviously hesitate to compare ourselves to anything Nintendo have done, but there are obvious parallels with Mario RPG. Mr. Robot however sees the RPG and the action gameplay run concurrently rather than being one and the same. So, for instance, wandering the world and bumping into enemies won't initiate an RPG battle, but remains a purely action based experience. Instead the two run alongside each other as different facets of the same world. Actions in the virtual ghost world affect things in the real world and vice versa bringing everything together. As for Mario64: that's still one of the greatest 3D platformers ever made; Mr Robot is a very different kind of platform experience that would be familiar to anyone who remembers 8bit classics like Head Over Heels and Knight Lore. The game is split into rooms, most fit on a single screen, some span two screens worth of scrolling, nothing exceeds that. The camera is fixed in a pseudo isometric view. The result is a game with a slightly more thoughtful pace; you can see the challenge laid out before you, examine it, decide on your course of action and go. Some rooms contain simple logic style puzzles whilst others are purely platform jumping, enemy avoiding, action. Even the pure platform based rooms can't help but have a puzzle element to them, in terms of deciding on your route and approach to specific obstacles. I think this style of game lapsed into obscurity partly due to the excessive difficulty level common to all 8-bit platformers and partly in the rush to enter freeform 3D. We actually went back and played some of those games under emulation so we could tweak them with memory editors. With the addition of saves, and difficulty tweaks you can unearth a much better experience that had been masked somewhat by the punishing difficulty the original developers had set (presumably to lengthen the gameplay time). Focusing on exploration, gymnastics and camera control like Mario64 did is all well and good, but there is still merit in the room based platformer genre. People just forgot.

[William Usher] - Exactly how did you come up with "Ghost Hacking" for a platform adventure game?

Nick Tipping: What is the point of an indie developer? Is it to ape popular trends and genres in the high street? Is it to design to the expected genre rules that define how a game must look and play? To make poor imitations of the latest and greatest blockbusters? No. The point of indie development is to create games that the big boys have forgotten about or that they haven't thought of yet. Making something utterly unique is extremely difficult. Throwing away our notions of what should and should not be in a specific genre of game and just letting ideas flow where they may is much easier.

We wanted to make a platform game with some puzzle elements, lots of cute robots, a story, a giant space ship and fighting. During development, Mark had been toying with this idea of a pervasive RPG element to the game and had been slowly prototyping the idea and honing the design, but held back from mentioning it to me because he knew it would push the schedule back considerably. We reached a point in development where if we went on further we definitely would not be able to incorporate it, so at that point he decided to show me what he'd been up to. Quite frankly, I was blown away by the concept. It seemed like Mr. Robot had been meant to work like this all along. We mentioned it to a lot of our gamer friends who are also developers and were taken aback by the response. People just got really excited by the idea and kept telling us we had to do it. It's incredibly dangerous to work like that, as you can keep adding features to a game forever, and then you just don't end up finishing it. However, we were completely convinced that this was how the game needed to work. It wasn't a question anymore of whether we would do it, we couldn't do it any other way!

Often we find a game that focuses on one specific idea exclusively will often run out of steam quite quickly and get repetitive. If you mix different fun game activities together then the result tends to be more deeply satisfying for a longer play time. The other benefit is you can keep each activity quite simple so there are more things to do, less to learn and no single aspect of the game needs to get too complicated. Starscape is a good example, it contains research, construction and ship designing; activities familiar to rts players perhaps, but it also contains exploration, boss fights, story, resource harvesting and shootemup action. As a result the research / construction / design bit can stay very simple and fun, it doesn't need to be deeply engaging and enormously sophisticated. If it was it would unbalance the game, people looking for some simple shootemup action would be bogged down when there is no need. If you forget everything about genres then it makes a lot of sense wouldn't it be great to be this little robot running around on a giant space ship with this intriguing story of AI's gone mad and lots of friends to save, new skills to learn and this mixture of real world and cyber space to explore? (Hopefully the answer there is yes ;) )

[William Usher] - Heh, yeah the answer is definitely "yes". However, do you think the concept of expanding on a game's general design, after everything has been laid out, could ever be used in the mainstream market, where time is the crux in the design?

Nick Tipping: One way of programming that lends itself well to game making is the iterative approach known as agile development you create all the various content and code in the game in a way where it is unreliant on other sections of code (where possible). During the first 'iteration' of development you create versions of all those systems which work up to a standard where the game is just playable. With Mr. Robot for instance, that might be to have the game up and running with the different AI types and all the rooms laid out, but all the robots are represented by a single model and you might only have a few scenery objects. From then on, you keep reviewing each aspect of the game, redoing the spec (design document and schedule) and rewriting/polishing bits of the game. You can actually go through many iterations, but the advantage is you'll have the game working early on, and can identify what needs the most work. Quite a lot of mainstream developers do work like this and things often get added to game designs during projects purely to improve the experience. It's hard to work this way as time is a developers greatest asset, and anything you change, add or rework inevitably impacts your schedule.

[William Usher] - Will there be limits for how strong players can level up characters in the "Ghost Hacking" mode?

Nick Tipping: There must always be a framework to guide the player, complete freedom isn't fun and just leads to decision overload with the player usually unsure as to what he/she is meant to do. The goal is to allow the player to take on the game at their own pace so if things are too tough they can go back, reconsider, rearm and try again. Starscape was designed around this idea. Players would sometimes just sit in the first node attempting to harvest, research and build everything possible. That was ok within the game's framework, but only up to a point, certain equipment, enemies, ship types, etc, were only available if the player made forward progress through the game. Finding this balance is very important. So in Mr. Robot players can attempt more difficult hacks sooner if they like or try and complete all the minor hacks possible in one area. They can change their ghost hacking team layout, take different robots or leave some out altogether. They can keep one robot at the front, pour all the damage onto him and let him level faster than the others. They can spend time in non essential hacks just leveling a robot up. Maybe they will simply buy items and not really bother leveling up the robots at all. There are limits though, as a specific enemy becomes less challenging the gains from fighting it will fall, certain items will only be available in certain locations, etc. A balance is sought between player freedom and the framework guiding them onwards.

[William Usher] - Generally, how long will Mr. Robot be? From the sound of things, it seems like it might span through to the 40-hour range.

Nick Tipping: Whilst Mr. Robot features RPG elements, I think the best description that fits it is 'adventure' rather than 'rpg', and as such I would not expect RPG like extensive leveling up times. We always aim for 8 10 hours as we think that's a good amount a fun per dollar and I suspect we will be around that mark. In actuality, Mr. Robot could quite easily be extended out to around 40 hours by making the ghost hacking maps larger so leveling up takes longer or adding more rooms with simple variations on existing puzzles, but artificially inflating the length of gameplay is a pet hate of ours, and we'd rather distill the gameplay down to something shorter but that hopefully never gets repetitive or frustrating. We also don't want to overpower the real world adventure part of the game; it's very important for these two areas of the game to balance out.

It is worth noting that we are also planning an expansion which will be completely free and will feature new content, all made possible by the powerful editor we have built. We are also putting a lot of effort into allowing users to create their own adventures (something our forum community is very excited about) and share them through the game. It supports obtaining a list of user created adventures from our website and seamlessly downloading and launching ones you want to play. Based on the enthusiasm for this feature alone, we secretly have high hopes for getting users involved, and we'll be providing as much help and guidance as we can on our forum to that end.

[William Usher] - Is there any sort of estimate on when the game might be expected to be released?

Nick Tipping: We are nearing the end of the production schedule now, and following that will be a few rounds of bugfixing and extensive testing. Once that's out of the way we'll be running a beta open to our existing customers, and then we are done. I always hesitate to give out release dates for game developers it's akin to saying Macbeth if you are an actor but we are aiming to finish for Christmas.