Ben Cousins made the move from AAA console games to mobile entertainment. But he refused to leave first-person shooters behind, even though it’s exceedingly hard to make a shooter that can be controlled with a touchscreen on a smartphone or tablet. But at DeNA’s Scattered Entertainment studio in Stockholm, Cousins’ team of former Battlefield game developers has done just that with a title that they call The Drowning.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":710794,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']The Drowning uses some unique controls that make it simpler to play a shooter game on a tablet. You tap on the screen with two fingers, and that lets you fire a bullet at the mid-point between your fingers. You tap with one finger to move to a location on the screen. And you swipe to turn your head. That simplifies the way you shoot a bunch of zombies at the same time. After more than a year of development, The Drowning is nearing its launch date.
We caught up with Cousins at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where he gave a talk on The Drowning and showed us how the game monetizes through its random scavenger reward system. The game is looking quite polished, and it has been tailored to mobile devices in a clever way. Here’s our edited transcript of our interview with Cousins, which included an in-depth demo. And be sure to check out the video at the end.
Ben Cousins: A lot of the decisions were made before I even had a team in place. It goes through my journey of deciding what type of game I should work on. Should I work on PC? Should I work on mobile? What sort of game should I create? What sort of audience should I target? My bible for all these decisions was Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, which is something I always talk about. I think he’s a genius. This concept of disruptive innovation is important at the moment in the games industry.
What we’re seeing happen is what happened hundreds of times in other industries. It’s been codified and analyzed and proven by Christensen. People who followed his writings are going to be successful in the current games industry and the tech industry as a whole. Steve Jobs was a big fan. Apple’s trajectory since 1997 is very much informed by The Innovator’s Dilemma.
The talk is about The Drowning and The Innovator’s Dilemma and how that book influenced a lot of my high-level decisions. It’s not really about the development of the game, but it’s about those decisions. I want to show the game as well. I’m proud of it.
GamesBeat: What if you didn’t do some of these things you tried here? Like if you didn’t have the two-minute limit for the battles with the zombies in the limited-size arenas. This limits make the action play out in a very short time. If you didn’t have these limits, it would be a very different kind of game then.
Cousins: Yeah. I go into this in my talk. We decided to play to the strengths of the platform. Rather than try to create a direct competitor with a Call of Duty or a Halo, we decided to create a shooter you can play in the moments when there isn’t an Xbox around. We think we’ll be able to compete with them in the future, but at the moment, the two-minute game rounds, the inventory management, the simpler story, the 2D cutscenes, all of those elements try to play to the strengths of the platform. We’re creating a game you can play when you’re waiting for a meeting or when you’re on the train or when your kids have capsized the TV.
[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":710794,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']
We’re very influenced by other mobile games. Some of the biggest influences here, as I mentioned, are games like Angry Birds or Bejeweled Blitz, or the DeNA mobile games like Blood Brothers and Kaito Royale.
GamesBeat: You know Puzzle & Dragons? I’ve been thinking over why it’s so addictive. It’s got that Bejeweled gameplay in it.
Cousins: Puzzle & Dragons actually has one of the same mechanics as our game, which is you’re spinning a gacha to collect sets of things. Kenji Kobayashi, who’s one of the top guys at DeNA in Japan, played our game and said, “Ah, it’s a bit like Puzzle & Dragons.” It’s a really addictive game. You have fun gameplay in the puzzle element, but there’s also that addictive gacha mechanism (sort of like a slot machine wheel) mixed in. The great Japanese games are about excitement, chance, the unexpected, and taking risks. The monetization is all around those emotions, unlike a western game, which is about going to a store and buying a better gun to go be powerful. It’s a very different approach.
GamesBeat: The violence level doesn’t seem as high as some of the other zombie games. It’s not so much of a splatterfest. Is that because of the platform again, because this is a broader platform?
[aditude-amp id="medium2" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":710794,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']
Cousins: I wanted a game that would not be rated mature on iOS, because that reaches a broader audience. This game was on the expo floor at SXSW, and it was great to see kids playing the game. They loved it. But also, a lot of it just falls out of our intention not to make a typical zombie game. We didn’t want to have viruses and a city environment and a guy in a business suit with blood dripping out of his mouth. We wanted to break some of those clichés and hopefully have some of the stuff that’s exciting about zombie and post-apocalyptic settings, but without the, “Oh, okay, here we go again. It’s a George Romero game.” That ended up giving us a different violence level.
Things are still being destroyed and blowing up into parts, but there isn’t any red blood. It isn’t someone who was obviously previously a human being. It feels quite good to have a violent game, but not a gory or gross kind of game.
GamesBeat: It seems like zombie games got into that kind of arms race, trying to be…
[aditude-amp id="medium3" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":710794,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']
Cousins: …the most outrageous, yeah. More blood, more exploding body parts.
GamesBeat: Do you have a sense for what the market is like for an action title? Is it going to appeal to different crowds?
Cousins: It’s probably going to see the most success with the audience in the west. I’m excited about the potential of China and Korea for a game like this, though, because shooters are big over there. I’ve done games that were released in Korea with EA. Guns and zombies and shooters are really popular in those markets. In Japan, not so much, but maybe the gacha elements and the collection elements might appeal to a Japanese audience. The Japanese guys at DeNA are split down the middle on this game. Some of them are like, “That feels a little more western,” but some of the guys in Japan really love the game.
GamesBeat: Is the touch screen doing everything you want it to do, or are there some improvements that could still be made?
[aditude-amp id="medium4" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":710794,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']
Cousins: The touch screen itself is great. We’re not missing gestures or dealing with latency or anything like that. It’s a nice interface. I’m excited to do more touch screen games. We just want more powerful tablets. The team being who they are, they want the biggest CPUs and the biggest GPUs.
GamesBeat: Do you think the graphics level hits a mark where you could compare it to console or PC games?
Cousins: We’ve got high-dynamic range lighting. We’ve got color grading. We’ve got bloom. We’ve got normal maps and specular maps. Most of the techniques that you would use on a console are here, although maybe not a high-end PC game. It’s just that we’ve got less geometry. If you fit an Xbox game on this screen, it would be taking that many pixels. I’m not exaggerating. These are sub-720p games, so we’ve got to balance things out a bit.
GamesBeat: Is it harder to move fast, then?
[aditude-amp id="medium5" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":710794,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"B"}']
Cousins: Things like fill rates, that particular computational task, are more difficult if you’ve got lots of pixels. At the same time, this has got more RAM than a PS3 or Xbox, so we can have high-resolution textures. It swings around and around. What we’re looking for, and I think we’re quite close to it — a game like Real Racing is close to it as well — is the point at which you say, “This is alright. This is okay. This is what I need. I don’t need a PS4. I don’t need an Xbox. This is good enough. This is more convenient and it’s free.” We want a certain console consumer to be thinking in that way.
We believe that there is an opportunity there. To see a game like Real Racing be a success—That’s the biggest download size for a free-to-play game. This is a 600 or 700 megabyte download like they are, and there haven’t been many freemium games on mobile that are that size. We feel like there’s a group of developers all moving in the same direction. We’re excited about everyone that’s going there, whether it’s NaturalMotion or Chair and Epic. We’re starting to see many more of these games coming through. It’s about time, I think.
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.