Interstellar Marines Interview with Kim Haar Jorgensen Part 2 of 4

 Part 2 of 4 Interview

   

If you look at the first person shooter gene pool, you'll see that is largely dominated by two entities, Call of Duty and Battlefield. However there is always a section that deserves more attention than it actually receives. These developers are trying to evolve the genre, try something new and give a unique experience to the end user that ultimately supports them.
We were given an opportunity to interview one of these pioneers, Kim Haar Jørgensen is the game director of Interstellar Marines which is a community funded triple 'A' indie title from the humble bunkers of Zero Point Software. Read on to gain an insight to what goes on in the mind of a developer striving to push the fps genre into a new direction

 

GameOn: What are your thoughts on the current growth of indie titles being a lot more popular than the big budget commercial triple A titles. A lot more indie games like Minecraft and Super Meat Boy have been receiving really good praise and almost leaving these triple A titles where they have got large teams in the dust, do you think that this is a trend that is going to carry on and improve?

Kim: I hope that the industry matures in some sense because we have an awful lot of respect for good old indie developers that are just a few guys sitting creating small games and having a small community selling the games to them, having a circle of life that was completed there. Then you’ve got the big publishers developing fantastic, great games but they’re expensive and it takes huge teams. Then you’ve got our type of set up where it’s much more about trying to do something different and being independent about our creative decisions and trying to engage the community in the sense that we know we can make a better game if we listen to people and if we get people’s feedback. So for us it’s just great that the independent movement of games in general are getting more attention and the fact that the internet, communities and social media allow the guys like us with a dream game in the making to communicate that and gather people to a web site and engage people creatively there. So fantastic respect to everybody such as Wolfire with what they’re doing with the Overgrowth, Unknown Worlds with what they are doing with Natural Selection and Notch and the guys at Mojang with Minecraft. I think it’s just fantastic that entertainment matures and we’re constantly finding new ways to get great entertainment to the hands of people wherever they are.

GameOn: Going back just a little bit, Notch, the Minecraft creator, is having tremendous success with his indie game at the moment. Do you see that empowering you guys,for example saying yes – we have got the simplest of ideas here but look at Minecraft, simple ideas can work. Does that give you a positive boost?

Kim: Absolutely, we’ve seen that ourselves in the last couple of months. We’ve just sat down and created the video to try to explain what our visions, ambitions and our motivations are all about. That has been one of the greatest crowd funding pushes we have ever had coming to us. Obviously people have got good content in the sense that the Vault, Bullseye and Running Man demo’s on our site convinced people that this is serious and this is moving forward. We really need people’s help to move this forward. Notch has really showed that he had a fantastic idea with Minecraft but he also showed that if you’ve got something great, people will buy it and you don’t need a multi million dollar marketing set up to make it work. You just need to create a good product and then people through the Internet, through social medias will share it between friends and then it will scale from there. We’re very committed to making the same go for Interstellar Marines.

GameOn: Interstellar Marines is going to be a digital distribution, downloadable title. Do you want to just explain to everyone how exactly your system is going to work?

Kim: It is really not set in stone, obviously we want at some point when we have got more content to have the things that we have available on our site to also also be available on Steam. For example, what we have going on in the browser allows us to share our work pretty easily. I think there is still a great frontier there that needs to evolve to make that happen but for us it doesn’t matter if people download it off our site, have it installed on their computer and connect up to the community to play with others in co-op or multi-player or they play it in the browser because the technology we are using allows that. So for us it’s just about again, creating great content and making it available just where people want it.

GameOn: I just want to give you a quick little challenge, if we may. Everyone knows that there are problems in the current state of the gaming industry. If we gave you the power Kim, for a minute what would you change to make things better in the gaming industry. Would there be more access for developers, more open source engines for example?

Kim: The thing is really not to whine. I know that we have spent an awful lot of money developing Interstellar Marines in Unreal and that portion didn’t work for a lot of reasons, but I think in the end great ideas if spawned in a sense between people of synergy and creativity will become a seed that you can plant on the internet. With the right push and the right commitment from you, you can get it out to the hands of millions of people, so I think people need to focus on pursuing their dreams as much as possible and not letting go. That’s what we’re thinking and talking about every day, that this is really all in for us, we’re just going to create a great experience for people.

GameOn: That is actually a really good answer Kim. You guys are really just focused on this as your dream, this is your baby and you don’t care how long the development time is as long as you have got people who are dedicated to the cause following you and people working on the game who are inspired and want to do more on it. I suppose that’s all you need really,it’s just this family structure around the game to keep it going, to keep it moving.

Kim: Yes – and I think again if you use Minecraft’s example, they have a fantastic set up because he probably had commercial reasons but he had first and foremost a dedication and a great ambition and a cool dream that he just started programming. He gave away his first set up in Java and Minecraft away for free and it just started showing on the programming of the new version and listening to people’s feedback. Posting his efforts on a blog, people could relate to that. It is born out of creativity, I think that there is something really, really powerful in that. If you really strongly believe in something and you have something that people want, it is just a matter of time then enough people are going to be interested or get their sleeves around it.

Third part of the interview coming tomorrow

 www.interstellarmarines.com