GamesBeat: The size of the battle arenas, is that constrained by the hardware or by your own design?
Cousins: It’s partly that we wanted to have smaller, manageable spaces for two-minute rounds. It’s partly because we could have more detailed vistas in a smaller environment, just because of the limitations of the hardware. But actually, some of the environments that we’re experimenting with for the next episode are more like normal first-person shooter levels, where you’re moving through a corridor and encountering enemies that come at you, rather than just being in an arena. We’re interested in exploring different gameplay patterns. We think this one is really nice, but maybe later on we’ll have a two-minute journey through a sewer system, or something else more like a chunk of a Halo level. Not the whole of Halo, but maybe a two-minute section of a traditional shooter.
GamesBeat: Tell us what you’re showing.
Cousins: What I’ll show you here is the first 10 minutes of the game, the tutorial. The important thing is, we’re trying to strike a balance with the opening of the game, to give it a console feel in terms of the quality of the visuals and the mystery of the world and the sense of being in the action, but it’s very short. We don’t really give you any backstory. We don’t explain where you are or who you are or what those monsters are. We feel like someone playing on a mobile device wants to get into the game fast.
This shows the control system. Tapping two fingers to shoot. Being able to shoot at any pixel on screen with those two fingers. Not having to move a camera around the screen with a crosshair in the middle. Swiping the screen anywhere to look. We’re using all these gestures that we’re used to from touch devices, rather than creating a virtualization of sticks.
We’re proud of the way that you can move around this world with one finger, and yet you can do pretty much everything you could do in a console game. We stop your movement when you shoot in the tutorial, but you can turn that off in the menu if you want. People have often asked, following the release of our controls video, how do you backpedal? You just tap to move and press the 180 turn and then you’re backpedaling.
GamesBeat: What’s in the tutorial?
Cousins: We’ve got slow-moving monsters here in the tutorial. But now we’ve got this little cutscene. You get attacked by a creature and there’s a woman’s voice off-screen. She saves your life. This introduces the only other real main character in the game, a character who’s only ever shown in these 2D paintings. She’s called Charlotte. She’s kind of a tough mechanic/gunsmith who lives in this post-apocalyptic world. The game’s set in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. where you’ve crashed your boat on this island. You’ve lost all your gear. There’s been this oil spill and the zombies have taken over the world. You’re trying to build your gear up. Charlotte’s the person who helps you do that
Here she’s introducing you to this scavenging mechanic. You’ve scared off the creatures. You’d better scavenge the area before they return. This comes directly from the Japanese-style freemium games, the gacha mechanic. I’m getting random items. If you play Rage of Bahamut, you get random cards at different points in the game. We give you random parts. Here, I’ve got three chances to scavenge. I find a box of arrows, some bolts, and some string. Charlotte says, “Follow me to my workshop.” She can craft new weapons or improve my current weapons. There are 50 weapons in the game. As the game starts, you’ve got one pistol, and these spots fill up with weapons, up to super amped-up customized rocket launchers and miniguns.
How upgrading weapons works, you just tap the weapon, tap upgrade, and these parts that I found are a currency in this post-apocalyptic world. Bolts and springs and arrows are useful. You give them to Charlotte as payment and she’ll upgrade your weapon. New weapons go up to 20 or 25 levels. A level 25 Glock is a lot more powerful than the one you start with.
GamesBeat: What else happens in the early part?
Cousins: The next thing we introduce is this home base up on the hill. An old guy used to live there. If you clear the zombies out, it’ll make a good base. This is the first real game round. Rounds last two minutes. What to do in those two minutes is get as much score as possible, which you get by being skilled — headshots, shooting zombies when they’re distracted, chaining your kills, getting to frenzy mode. In that frenzy mode, you get higher scores for every kill. I’m a good player, so I’ll show you some of the techniques you might use.
Pistol gameplay is short range. Here, I get a headshot, and that fills up the frenzy bar. Another couple of those and I’m in frenzy mode. Now every kill gets me more score. The zombies are kind of dumb. They’re not super-intelligent opponents. Every time I kill one, it drops something. It might be extra score, extra frenzy bar, or another chance to scavenge the environment when the round is complete. We do an interesting thing with the music. We know the game rounds are two minutes, so we’re able to construct music around what we know will happen in the game round, instead of having to use an adaptive system. You hear the music rising in intensity toward the end.
You can see the fluency that I’m playing with. I’m able to move around, set these guys up, take them out, get headshots, and control the environment. It’s not easy. I’m not landing every shot. I think some people see the tap to shoot system and assume it’s very easy to hit your target. It requires some hand-eye coordination and some strategy. In the same way that you play a round of Bejeweled Blitz in two minutes, or you play a round of Angry Birds in two minutes, you can play a shooter here.
This guy that’s talking now is kind of a mysterious character. He’s dead, but he’s left notes around the world to lead you on a quest. The first stage of the quest is giving you access to this home base. He says that if you fix this broken motorbike, maybe you can go further on into the environment. His notes are everywhere and he leads you through the story.
There are two dimensions of progress in the game. There’s unlocking the weapons and leveling up all the weapons, but then there’s also learning more about the story. We think a different type of player is going to be interested in each.
GamesBeat: Can you buy things with real money, too? As a way of getting parts.
Cousins: Yeah, exactly. The scavenge mode I showed you only had three rounds. You can spend to increase that to 10 rounds or 20 rounds. If I’ve only got two minutes and I just want to find one part to finish a weapon, I can spend money to spin the gacha, as we say, and try to find that part. What you can’t do in this game is buy a weapon outright.
This is one of the monetization areas in the game here. Charlotte has a space behind her workshop where you can rummage around through broken weapons. Those are better than the broken weapons you’ll find in normal gameplay, but they’re still broken. You can’t just go to the store and say, “Give me a rocket launcher.” You go to Charlotte’s junkyard and you spend money for a chance to get a better weapon. You’ll always get something good, but you don’t know exactly what it is. You might get a really good sniper rifle or a rocket launcher or machine gun. But you only get the broken version of the weapon. Then you have to go into the game and find all the parts to complete it.
There’s always gameplay involved. You can never buy your way to success directly. This comes from our experiences in Japan. Engaged consumers who are playing the game as well as spending are happier and more loyal customers.
GamesBeat: What do you have to watch out for on gacha now, since the Japanese government put limits on it because it is too similar to gambling?
Cousins: There’s a thing called “complete gacha,” a particular version of gacha which we don’t have in this game. The Japanese publishers volunteered to take it out of their games after there was some governmental pressure. In complete gacha, you buy every spin of the gacha. Here you get spins for free.
This Glock here is working. This hunting rifle, I have some of the parts for it, but I need to go into the game and find more. In order for Charlotte to build it out, I need a broken scope. If I tap on the scope here, it shows me where in the game world it exists. That scope is in a part of the map I haven’t gotten to yet. I tap the question mark here and it tells me I need the motorcycle to get to that location. To get the motorcycle I need some other parts. We have this game loop of finding the broken version of a vehicle, which unlocks other environments, or a weapon, which makes you more powerful. Finding a broken item leads to finding the broken parts to fix it. Charlotte will fix it and you move on forward. It’s very different from a game where you just pick something up off the ground. It has more of an RPG feel, where you find parts and construct them and level them up.
I want that hunting rifle, so I need the motorcycle to go find the broken scope, so I need some parts to fix the motorcycle. One of those is the chain. I can get the chain back on the beach. We tell the player where all the parts are in the world. Now, there are two game modes I can play here on the beach. They’re both the same in terms of their energy cost and how long you play for, but one is an attack and one is a defense.
GamesBeat: What can you do with multiplayer?
Cousins: This is something interesting, which I’ll just talk you through. It’s our event system. There was a talk at GDC today about Blood Brothers and how time-limited events are driving the success of their game. We have the same kind of events that Blood Brothers had. It’s something called a raid boss. Randomly, as you’re playing the game, you can come across these monsters and opt to try and attack them. I’d go into a game level with this big monster there and try to take it out with my pistol. I probably wouldn’t be able to do it in one round, because he’s got a lot of hit points. If I don’t kill him, I can ask for help. I’m broadcasting to all the other players of The Drowning at the moment, that they can try to find this guy to take him out as well. It’s an asynchronous experience, with all of us individually trying to stop this raid boss. When he’s eventually killed, after 10 or 15 people attack him, we share the rewards. We all get points and cash-value items and an opportunity to get the broken version of a rare weapon.
Let’s go into defend mode. You saw the attack mode where I’m running around and I’m in control of the action. I’m killing monsters and I can go anywhere on the map. The defend mode is a bit more like a typical zombie defense you might have in a console game. I’m in a fort with these entrance points and I have to prevent those from getting damaged. This is an early one in the game. It’s fairly easy to manage it. You can see these icons over the top of the screen showing each of the respective barriers. The great thing about the touch screen is that I can just touch that icon to point me at the barrier that’s under attack. In a console game, I’d have to see the icon flashing and work out where to go from there.
GamesBeat: Are you running out of ammo here?
Cousins: We have infinite ammo. Because you’re limited by time, we don’t limit the ammo. You couldn’t possibly spend a huge amount of ammo in just two minutes, so we’ve decided that ammo is a plentiful resource in this particular post-apocalypse. Here, you can see that a couple of the barriers have gone down. You can’t rebuild them. I get a bonus for every barrier that hasn’t gone down at the end of two minutes.
In the final level of the game, we’ve got five different enemy types – big monsters, medium-sized monsters, monsters that throw stuff. All hell is breaking loose and you’ve got really powerful weapons to fight back with by that point. You’re trying to juggle this extremely frantic gameplay with all these attacks coming from every angle.
There, I’ve got 3,175 points. I get a barricade bonus of 1,000 because one of the barricades wasn’t destroyed. That adds up to five opportunities to scavenge the battlefield, and I’ve found that chain I needed for the motorbike. Here’s another monetization point. We give you some flares at the start of the game. Those give me another opportunity to scavenge. That’s for the player who’s money-rich and time-poor. He just wants to play one round and find some items. But all those parts are accessible to the free player if they want to put the time in.
Charlotte can craft the motorcycle and I can unlock some new environments. In those new environments will be new parts, and those parts will construct new weapons.
You can see how the game loop works. As you play through the game, you unlock more of those story cutscenes. You find out more information. You fill up this huge raft of weapons. You level up those weapons. You get new environments. You meet new creatures. At the end of it, we tease the next episode of the game, which the team is already working on. It’ll be moving to a new part of the world with new types of gameplay.
Here’s a video of The Drowning.
TheDrowning Controls from VentureBeat on Vimeo.