With a dangerous addiction to Defence Grid: The Awakening looming in the background, we got in contact with the developer Hidden Path Entertainment’s CEO- Jeff Pobst.
He takes some time out to chat to us about DLC, a CEOs fortune telling ability; and how to deal with those pesky decoy units.…
Thanks for taking the time to have a chat with us Jeff. Could you tell us a little about yourself and your role within Hidden Path Entertainment?
Jeff Pobst: Sure thing, I’m Jeff Pobst and I’m CEO of Hidden Path Entertainment. Our studio was founded by Mark Terrano, Dave McCoy, Micheal Austin, Jim Garbarini, and myself four years ago and has been making games such as Defense Grid on our own. We have also had the fortunate opportunity to work with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo on other game projects. The team is a veteran one where our 25 or so employees average 11 years in the game industry. It’s a solid team that typically works on more than one game at a time.
My personal background is mostly of producing games and also at first programming on them. I started at Sierra on the last of the King’s Quest series and ended up working in the Half-Life, Homeworld, and Lord of the Rings franchises among others. After Sierra I started working closely with the other founders as we were all part of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group which was a game development consulting, support and relationship group who’s goal was to help developers worldwide make their games better on the Xbox (and Xbox Live, Xbox 360) than they would be on other platforms.
We worked well together and spun off to form Hidden Path after shipping the Xbox 360 and helping out with the suite of launch titles. At Hidden Path, I am something of an executive producer, a business development guy, a furniture assembler, a part-time IT guy, a negotiator, a relationship manager, and I attempt to be a fortune teller at times. It’s a team effort and everyone pitches in to help on all our projects. That’s part of being at a small studio.
Sounds like the type of CEO everyone needs! Fortune telling could become useful too. You’ve been in the industry for quite some time in various different roles also. Have you got any particular personal highlights?
I’ve been really fortunate I think. I entered the game industry as it was moving to 3D and there was a lot of change in the air at the time. I got to work with a great team internally and then start working externall and spend time with some exceptional development studios early on: Valve, Gearbox, and Relic for example. I really got to work with a tremendous number of great game developers. It is the people that make this industry such an exciting and vibrant one.
Later when at Microsoft we got to work with and interact with developers all over the globe, and one very exciting time I remember well was going out on the road with my colleagues and disclosing the super-secret information about the upcoming Xbox 360 for the first time to game developers that could possibly participate in the launch of the console on a 40 day, 30 developer, 7 country whirlwind trip two years before the launch of the Xbox 360. The interactions, feedback, and energy around that experience (and the two years that followed) were quite something to be a part of.
Fantastic. It must have been exciting to be around the launch development.
Last year’s Defence Grid: The Awakening met with plenty of praise across the board, winning various Editor’s choice awards and high scores from the likes of PC Gamer, IGN, and Rock, Paper Shotgun. What inspired you to run with the ‘tower defence’ format that arguably had been milked more than a dairy farm in a boom at that stage?
It’s funny. We started on Defense Grid / Defence Grid (sorry about the American spelling) in May of 2007 and at the time, we did a study and a taxonomy and found 84 different flash games and mods to great products like Starcraft and WarCraft III. We felt though, that while pretty completely developed in the domain of the amateur game developer or mod maker, we didn’t see anyone bringing this addictive and fun gameplay to the professional market at that time. We basically asked ourselves what would the definitive tower defense game look like, and as we talked about it more and more we saw a vision of something that we felt should be made and that hopefully we could do well. We focused on having just the right balance of features and options that we had seen in other TD games (often less was better in our opinion), but then we asked a lot of questions about the emotional curve that one experiences as they go through a TD level or as one progress from level to level.
We pulled from our past experiences making AAA games and realized that we didn’t see anyone out there spending time on strong intentional support to the emotional arc locally or globally, the balance for many different kinds of players, progression, immersion, visualizations, etc. that are a part of making a large retail game, and we decided that we should make an effort to fill that void. Also, the new channel for downloadable games on the consoles and the increase in popularity of PC download channels like Steam opened up new opportunities where we felt that we could really deliver something different than what others were doing.
We felt like there were a couple of opportunities as well for some new changes in the TD experience. Prior to Defense Grid we found TD games that were either all open-map experiences or all fixed-path experiences. As we looked deeper at that we found that the learning curve for fixed-path was much easier and opened up the gameplay to a larger audience. We agreed however, that open-map presented a more creative challenge and allowed one to really get deeper into the gameplay. We decided to mix both map types in our game and not only have both, but actually have fixed paths connected to open areas in interesting level designs, and over time allow the player to learn some of the nuances of playing in both types of systems. We found that this hybrid-map approach seemed to bring something new to the table.
The newest thing we brought to the table was the idea that the incoming enemies were there to “steal” something rather than just trying to get from point A to point B. This had several positive impacts on the game experience. For one, the emotional curve was now multi-peaked. There was an emotional increase as the aliens got closer and closer to your cores (similar to when the aliens would get close to the exit in other TD experiences), but then there was a second emotional experience from the time they actually got a core (and the music swelled up more), to the time where they would or wouldn’t be prevented from escaping with that core. There now was a mid-game experience of stress and response where the player knew a bad thing had happened, but it wasn’t the end of the world, and there were steps they could still take to prevent it from hurting them further.
In addition the core “hand off” mechanic turned out be a great gameplay experience as well in that it helped keep the map fresh preventing easy “front-loaded” or “back-loaded” solutions, as the main hot spot on the map where you need to be preventing enemies from escaping could move around as the cores were stolen and then passed off to other aliens when an enemy died.
One other great thing about the cores is that by providing 24 possible things to be stolen, and setting up our rule that you could progress to the next level as long as you kept 1 of them, the levels could be self-balancing for different players of different skill sets. Novice players saw the cores as “lives” and worked hard to keep that last life in order to be able to continue through the game. We could balance this to be difficult to do appropriately for novice players, but not hugely difficult or impossible as many TD games could seem to be to people at the time. Meanwhile we could keep the more serious players engaged by awarding achievements or medals for retaining all of the cores at the end of a level which was much more difficult to accomplish. In this way the same level had different objectives for players of different skills.
As you’ve mentioned in regards to the core hand-off, that can almost be a tactic within itself. An intercepted core can totally ruin a level. Or, it can help divide a group of enemies making them easier to deal with.
Absolutely, at first the core hand off mechanic is something that tends to induce panic – it is another bump along the emotional journey of completing a level – but as you improve over time and start to intuitively see how things may happen with your towers and the aliens, I have seen very good players let the core hand off happen to get separation of aliens from each other. Perhaps the towers they have at that location are more single alien focused (cannon, laser) and they have other areas that are more area of effect focused (concussion, inferno). It’s difficult to do truly intentionally, but there can be times one lets hand offs happen so that you can concentrate your “killing zones” in certain other places.
Have you got any strategy tips for players? I particularly struggle with decoy units. They don’t seem to die, like ever!
Ah decoy units – yes, I tend not to like them very much either, and I think I know why: probably like you, I tend to prefer longer-range towers when I can use them. Just like most aliens in Defense Grid, decoy’s are designed to prevent the one-strategy solves everything solution and their special power is that they can’t be seen by towers that are more than a grid or two away from them.
Meteor towers pretty much never see them, and Cannon’s often aren’t very effective against them since both those tower types have an inner radius of fire as well as an outer radius (so they can’t shoot at an alien when it is too close to them – and in this case they can’t see it unless it is close to them). There are a couple good anti-decoy strategies. The obvious one is to have more gun, inferno, tesla, concussion and laser towers around which will see them and shoot at them when they are near. Also, combining those or other short-range towers with a temporal tower to slow down the decoys is good so that they can get a lot of damage done to them while they are near a set of short-range towers. Secondly, command towers not only help provide more resources in an area, but they also illuminate decoys so that other towers can see the decoys – even from far away – when they’re near the command tower. So, a small killing zone with some short range towers, a temporal tower, and a command tower, not only do a lot of damage to a decoy, but they also allow cannons and meteors in the other parts of the map to see the decoys and attack when they’re near the command tower as well. This typically can do the trick.
Thanks for the advice. You mentioned that Defence Grid: Resurgence is due to come out soon, could you tell us a little more about it?
Defense Grid: Resurgence is a set of 8 new maps for Defense Grid that will be releasing in the near future for both Xbox 360 and PC on Steam. We expect these levels to also make their way to other PC channels as well soon afterwards.
Each map has the standard campaign & campaign challenge mode and then three other modes that take the best advantage of the strengths of that map. There should be a lot of fun in there and some new strategies and approaches needed as well. The free Defense Grid: Borderlands map expansion included 4 maps that were pretty difficult, and were closer to the challenge presented in the last 3 or 4 maps of the original game, while the DG: Resurgence levels are a bit more forgiving and are closer to the average difficulty of the last 7 or 8 levels in the game.
For those looking for a real challenge, the campaign challenge modes are definitely difficult to beat. We think about these levels in pairs actually, and see four groups of two, each as their own experience. We look forward to sharing these with fans of Defense Grid very soon.
Can we expect more achievements?
Yes, there will be some new achievements for both the Xbox 360 and Steam for these new levels. It’s always good to reward those players who are playing through all of the content.
Obviously being an arcade/steam title, you’ve worked exclusively so far within the boundaries of DLC. Taking into consideration your experience and product knowledge, do you see us reaching an ultimatum sometime soon between the physical ownership of a disk or a download?
Personally, I think we make a mistake when we focus on the “or” with download vs. disk. I think the biggest thing we’ve seen over the last few years is much more of an “and” situation. Retail is still doing quite well, it’s going strong, and people are buying tremendous numbers of disks for games that they really want.
In addition, people are also now downloading games that weren’t available before because the budgets didn’t warrant the full retail distribution, or the game experiences weren’t as long or as complex as one got when they purchased a retail game. There is a small percentage of us who may today download games that are also available at retail, but we prefer to get them online, and yes, that percentage is growing. What isn’t clear though (and often people forget to ask) is if that growth is less than or greater than the overall growth of the market. I think the data is still unclear on how much downloading is hurting retail sales.
According to the folks at Valve, the opposite is actually true. They say that online purchasing actually helps sell more of their games at retail than took place before you could buy their games online. This might not be intutitve to people, but it is something to watch. According to Valve if they put Left for Dead 2 on sale online, even if it isn’t on sale at retail, during the online sale, it sells more copies at retail. Why is that and what does that mean in the retail vs. download discussion? I think the real answer is that the more ways games are available to more people is great for gaming, it’s great for the variety and types of games that can be made available, and it’s great for our whole industry. Someday, perhaps, there may be a more dominant way to purchase games, but I think that discussion is premature, and there are a lot of factors at work here in providing game players access to great products that create great opportunity for large and small game developers.
On a seperate note, the imminent general election in the UK means that tax breaks for our industry have been prominent in the news recently. Does the US government offer any sort of similar aid in your local community?
Different parts of the US have different incentives for game developers. It turns out when local governments look at our industry they find the types of jobs they want in their city with creative or technically minded people making good salaries and spending that salary in their community. That does make game industry companies desireable to have in your city.
That said, most of the communities in the US are not as aggressive as some areas in Canada, UK, Australia, and France in supporting game development, so no, we likely don’t get the kind of tax breaks and government support for our game development that some other game developers do in other countries. It definitely is not something that has been in the news here, unfortunately.
On a brighter note, are there any particular titles within the Xbox Live Arcade/Indie communities which have caught your eye recently?
Oh sure. We not only love making games, we love playing games too. I would say right now, the the most recent indie games that have caught our attention are on Steam and the PC. In the tower defense side of things, Sol Survivor has been fun to play. We are big fans of the work by Introversion Software (Darwinia / Defcon), AudioSurf is always a favorite. We love 2d boy’s World of Goo. Torchlight from Runic is a blast, and Trine is great fun as well. Falling pretty darn fun in Aaaaaa…as well.
What’s getting played in the studio at the moment?
Right now I hear a lot about Mass Effect 2, Dragin Age Origins, Assassin’s Creed 2, Heavy Rain, and Uncharted 2. Folks play a lot of Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike: Source as well.
I like to ask this of everyone I interview, because I adore Harmonix a little too much: Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
We know folks at both places, (and of course both games started at Harmonix), but yes, we’re big fans too of the Harmonix folks and are probably more of a Rock Band shop here than a Guitar Hero one (at least these days). We do own both though and folks here can and do play either one.
Another point for Boston! What’s next for the studio? Can we look forward to more Defence Grid DLC, or are you scheming up a new project?
There have been a lot of projects that we’ve had the opportunity to work on that I can’t really talk about, some will come out in the future, some are on hold as happens in our industry, and some are about ready to start, so there’s always cool and exciting projects taking place at Hidden Path. I look forward to being able to talk more about those projects in the future. For now, we can’t be more excited to share more Defense Grid with the folks who love the game, and look forward to the release of Defense Grid: Resurgence coming out soon!
Thanks a million to Jeff for taking the time to chat with us. We wish Hidden Path Entertainment all the best for thier future endeveors and look forward to more content. Keep in the loop with thier latest news and developments over at www.hiddenpath.com
Im a long haired, metal loving, rock n roll, plastic instrument talented gamer! I've worked in games retail for 7 years and have been caught up in all the politics associated with it. My neighbour loves my plastic drum kit and when i start singing.... "
