GamesBeat: How did you deal with what might seem like the biggest problems? Mobile devices aren’t as powerful and their network connections can be dodgy.
Citron: We dealt with the power of the devices through clever artwork. The game environment is this lush forest. When you look at it, it looks like you’re in a 3D space. And it is, but it’s sort of fake. If you took the camera and moved it behind the character, you’d see something like a stage set. It only looks real because you look at it from a particular angle. A lot of the trees and the forest are just flat squares with textures, but it looks correct because it’s painted to seem like 3D from your viewing angle. It lets us get that painterly look at a very low CPU and GPU cost. We did a lot of things like that. It’s all creative art direction and art implementation, so we can get a lot of mileage out of the devices.
As far as networking, part of the reason why we chose to make the game for tablets only is because most people use their tablets with wi-fi. That addresses a lot of the issue. But we’ve built a networking stack of our own on top of Unity that’s basically what Valve does inside of DOTA 2. It’s a robust networking layer that works on LTE really well and works on wi-fi really well. You can play on 3G, but the latency there creates some inherent lag. We don’t recommend it. We have some smart engineering that makes it work on internet connections that aren’t amazing, but more important, we designed the game to be played on a device that tends to have a good internet connection.
Above: Fates Forever character
GamesBeat: Is that something you foresee changing? Could it be extended to 4G devices like phones?
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Citron: The game works great on a 4G LTE connection today. If you have an iPad with a Verizon LTE chip in it, you can play Fates Forever and it’ll work great. It’s not quite as good as a broadband connection at home, but unless you’re playing competitively, you’re not going to notice much difference. It works on 3G, but it’s not optimal. You can play it if you really want to play.
That’s one of those things that touches the issue of device power as well. The rate at which GPU and CPU and cell phone technology are improving is so fast that by next year, Apple won’t have any devices that won’t run the game at 50 frames per second. Especially with Metal coming in iOS 8. That’s going to be a huge improvement.
GamesBeat: Did you cut off some of the low-end devices as far as what you were shooting for? You mentioned phones. Did you also deliberately shoot above the original iPad?
Citron: Yeah. Right now Fates Forever works on every iPad except for the original generation. It runs at 50 frames per second on the iPad Air, Mini Retina, and iPad 4. It runs at 30 on the first-gen iPad Mini, iPad 2, and iPad 3.
iPad 3 is actually the worst of all the devices, which is funny. The issue is, it’s the first iPad that added the Retina screen. They quadrupled the number of pixels on the screen, but the GPU and CPU power didn’t scale up to compensate. Basically, if you want to render at Retina resolution on iPad 3, it just uses too much GPU time. A lot of games downscale so it runs at, say, 65 percent of Retina. It’s better than not Retina, but not quite the same. We haven’t done that, because the number of people using iPad 3s is small enough – Apple doesn’t sell them anymore – that it’s not a priority.
GamesBeat: The art style and the character design — who were they designed to appeal to?
Citron: To gamers, to people who like fantasy, in a way that doesn’t exclude kids and women. It’s not that women can’t like fantasy, but a lot of times you get games where the women have their breasts spilling out of their clothes and stuff like that.
We wanted to make the game something where if a parent got the game for a younger kid, they wouldn’t feel like it was inappropriate because of the art style. A lot of kids, especially tweens and teens, are getting tablets now. We wanted to make sure the game was approachable for those kids – 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds – and for women as well. My wife plays a lot of video games, and she always finds it obnoxious that all these women run around with plate armor covering their boobs and nothing else. So we didn’t make it that way.
GamesBeat: Where did the animal side of things come from?
Citron: That was all our art director, Brandon. He’s our concept artist and designs the characters. He came in one day and said, “What do you think of all this?” and I just thought it was awesome. I don’t really know where he got the idea, though. We had conversations about making a sort of Lord of the Rings aesthetic, but he came back and just said, “Well, what if we had this pig warrior?”
He may have been influenced by the kind of art he grew up loving as a kid. He was really into that show Thundercats. Legend of Zelda has all kinds of interesting animal characters. Things like that.
GamesBeat: Did you test out that art style with your players in some way?
Citron: Yeah, we did. We did a lot of stealth testing early on with character design. Mostly on Reddit. You can probably still find the posts there if you look. I’d post different concept art on Reddit and just try to see which ones got the most upvotes and comments, seeing how people responded to things, and we’d tweak stuff.
We went through probably five different art styles before we landed on this one. Ultimately it was more a qualitative decision. But the differences between the tests we did were not as great as you might expect. We ended up essentially just picking the one we thought that was the coolest, within the goals we were trying to hit as far as product positioning.
GamesBeat: There were some other, shorter mobile MOBA titles that debuted before yours, like Zynga’s. Did you learn anything from the games that went before you?
Citron: There were two MOBA titles that came out before Fates Forever. Zynga had one and Gameoft made one. Zynga’s game was shorter. They changed some of the fundamental pieces of what makes a MOBA. In doing that, I think they made the game not fun. If I learned anything from Zynga’s game, it was that we shouldn’t make the changes they did, and that our direction and instinct were correct.
Gameloft’s game, no disrespect to them, but their strategy is generally to make mediocre clones of popular games. That’s just not what we do. I guess what I learned from there is that a mediocre clone of a MOBA can do decently, so a well-done MOBA should do really well.
GamesBeat: This category is extremely crowded. Were you concerned about that? It’s mostly crowded on the PC side. I don’t know if that meant you had something to worry about on the mobile side.
Citron: We weren’t worried about it. We certainly talked about it and contemplated what it meant. Some people just don’t feel comfortable playing a game like that on their PC. They feel intimidated because there are however many 100-plus heroes to pick from. The cognitive load of those games on PC is very high. They’re designed that way. It’s part of what makes them amazing. But what we were going for was specifically the people who didn’t have the time to sit down and spend an hour playing a MOBA.
A match in Fates Forever takes 14 minutes on average, compared to League of Legends at something like 50 minutes. Our game is simpler to get into. There’s less stuff to choose, less stuff going on, but not to the detriment of making it no longer fun.
Lots of people are growing up with tablets instead of PCs, all over the world. If you look at the next five or 10 years, there’s this opportunity where people will be playing their first games on tablets. League of Legends isn’t there. I think they’re different markets. People who play PC MOBAs will not, en masse, switch to MOBAs on a tablet and play Fates Forever, although we do have a lot of players who play both games.
Above: Fates Forever
GamesBeat: People have a lot of time when they’re not at their PC or a laptop.
Citron: Right. The time and convenience factor of a tablet is what makes it work as a device. Why do you check your email on your tablet? You could sit in front of your computer and do that, but not when you’re lying in bed or hanging out somewhere or unwinding at the end of the day. Do you want to relax on the couch and get into a game for a bit? Fates Forever. We find that a lot of people do that.
The tablet use case is just different from the PC. People play games where they are, where they’re spending their time, on the devices that are convenient. People spend a lot of time with just their tablet.
GamesBeat: How much updating are you going to do?
Citron: A lot. We’ve released something like 15 updates since we launched the beta last July. Since we launched for real last week, we had one update that went live two days ago. We added a new feature we call spectating, so that when you’re dead and waiting to come back to life and rejoin the game, you can watch your teammates and see what they’re doing. It’s a small feature, but our players asked for it. We also did a bunch of performance fixes.
We have a lot more stuff coming. We’ll be introducing new characters, improvements to performance, balance changes. It’s typical live ops. We stream on Twitch.tv three days a week as well. Players can come watch and hang out with each other. We have a nice community forum. We’re trying to foster community through new features and engagement. We’ll seriously get into eSports sometime soon.