Interview with Trese Brothers Games
After a successful Kickstarter for Star Traders 2 RPG and the constant stream of new content for existing titles, we caught up with the developing duo of Andrew and Cory at Trese Brothers Games.
Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions, especially given the time of year. And with the recent release of Star Traders 4X Empires onto Steam, as well as your constant updates to past titles and work on Star Traders 2, you must be swamped.
We’ve been busy, but we love staying busy. Somehow over the four years, we’ve become very comfortable with our weekly rhythm of working on innovating on the newest game, and working to improve a catalog of existing games. We’ve got a lot of exciting things coming, but we’re also really excited about the latest major improvements across the catalog!
First of all, tell us about yourselves - what made you decide to start an indie gaming studio? And how did you come to the decision to go with such an on-the-nose name?
At the time, Cory and I lived on different coasts. Each of us was about six years deep into a job as enterprise software architects and engineering managers. We missed working on projects together, which is how we had spent all of our youth. Cory picked up his phone and decided to make a fun little game we could both enjoy and he broke ground on Star Traders. His deep love for the feeling and freedom that a great sci-fi trading game can give a gamer translated directly into the game and Star Traders was a hit, and continues to be very popular game. Within a few months, we released Star Traders Elite and gamers started paying to play our games. At that point, we started looking at each other and raising eyebrows. “Could we do this as a job?”
Who are your role models in development?
Andrew and I take a great deal of inspiration from other indie developers who are working on exciting new games. The past year has seen a lot of amazing releases, from Monument Valley to This War of Mine, and developers of such high quality work are always great role models to look up to. Both Andrew and I have had some great mentors outside of game development and I know we both consider them as role models. My friend Shawn, who I spent several years working for, was a great role model for me and taught me about the value of objective planning and a lot about execution.
Your first title is still your most popular: Star Traders RPG. What can you tell us about developing it, and why you chose to release to Android first?
From where I stood, I saw Cory build Star Traders RPG on pure game design instinct. It was a beautiful thing. It started as brutally, insanely hard and layer after layer was added until you could survive against all the odds. By the time I could play the game and survive, it was a deep and flexible system that has had amazing lasting popularity. We picked Android because we both had Android phones. Getting into mobile game development was just something we thought we’d pick up as a hobby. We’ve been game developers, game masters, and written pen and paper RPGs all of our lives together. We never imagined we’d have 6 games on Android, iOS, and now on Steam! How did we get there? Hard work, overtime, and nights and weekends.
How have you approached the development of your subsequent titles?
We go in cycles between building on the same version of our game engine, and innovating to level up our game engine core. You can see the major cycle of innovation when we released Heroes of Steel -- it’s a world above the games that came before. We are just starting to go into a new major cycle of innovation for Star Traders 2 RPG, which makes this a very exciting time!
Has it been difficult trying to keep everyone happy and maintain such a high rating on both the iOS App and the Google Play stores?
We practice a special type of customer service that we often call “fall on our sword” customer service. We go to great lengths to help, assist, and go the extra mile for every gamer who tries our games, has an issue, or has feedback to share. It’s time consuming, but it keeps us very close to the fire and with a finger on the pulse. My favorite right now is that GMail tracks the time since you received an email, and I love racing to get back to customers. When you can send out a response with an answer and the customer’s email came in “0 minutes ago” I always feel like I did something really awesome.
What was it about Heroes of Steel that made you decide to create a comic book tie-in for it, rather than one of your other titles?
Heroes of Steel has a great world and story. I spent a year running a pen and paper game in the world with a group during the time when we were releasing Heroes and building the first three episodes. For me, its a very exciting, dangerous place and the comic is a great tie in to help tell parts of the story that are outside of what the four heroes may see. Especially with Episode 4 coming out soon, the comic was a great teaser. By the way, we’ve just released the comic to Google Play! The comic was a great experience for us, and opened up some new avenues that we want to keep expanding. I can say that there are going to be more entries to our Google Books catalog in 2015!
What are your thoughts on such recent gaming debacles as the releases of Assassin's Creed Unity and Halo: Master Chief Collection?
Regarding the problems with matchmaking and network performance, I sympathize with the developers. Those are very hard problems to solve at scale, and I don’t envy the engineering team that is probably working weekends to resolve it. The stakes are very high for games like Halo: Master Chief Collection and Assassin’s Creed -- there are a lot of options for players on those platforms.
How about the Lizard Squad attacks on PlayStation and Xbox over Christmas?
The attacks were certainly well timed to ensure maximum impact on the targeted business. I think that both Microsoft and Sony handled the issues with class, taking extra steps to make sure that their customers received some rebates or compensation.
Do you think such attacks dissuades indie devs from developing for those platforms, as the studio is usually blamed rather than the platform?
I would hope not. Every new platform comes with risks -- the time and investment, the risk of piracy, and backlash from a larger community. But, every platform comes with a lot of new benefits and the more you cover the better your stability I think. If you were just on PlayStation or Xbox and had this kind of issue, that would be scary I think. Maybe this is an argument for being multi-platform to increase the studio’s balance.
When you're not building heavily replayable games, what do you play?
I’m a total nut, and I have to say, ... I only play Trese Brothers games. I catch a lot of flak about this from friends and at times from Cory. I know this means I am not as in touch with the state of the industry, but I try to keep up with all of that through other means than playing games. But I love our games, and I have only so much time in a day. So, I make our games and I play our games.
Thank you very much for answering our questions. We hope you have a productive 2015.
Thank you for you having us! We know both the Trese Brothers and GameGrin are going to have a great 2015!
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