Want to launch a new development house? It’s probably a good idea to tap two of the minds behind the X-Wing and Crysis games.
Today, Impeller Studios came out stealth mode, touting two experienced and impressive names: creative director Jack Mamais (he was the lead designer for Crysis and Far Cry, and his game credits stretch back to MechWarrior 2 expansions) and lead designer David Wessman (who was one of the main devs behind all of the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Secrets of the Luftwaffe games at LucasArts). It will announce its first project — an online multiplayer game for the hardcore audience — on May 5.
Impeller enters a gaming arena in which fans, not game publishers, are increasingly setting the terms. Crowdfunding and Steam’s Early Access have had a profound effect on how studios make games — giving them a chance to incorporate fan feedback and funding as they develop their works. Star Citizen has raised more than $77 million in crowdfunding as of this report.
This new studio has angel investor support at the moment, not crowdfunding. And it’s got some hot new tech to help make its secret project happen.
Bootstrapping an odd couple
Above: Jack Mamais has worked on games such as MechWarrior 2 and Crysis.
Pairing Mamais and Wessman may not seem like a natural fit. Wessman helped designed the most iconic starfighter franchise ever made, and Mamais’s most recent work includes first-person shooters. But it makes sense, especially when you take MechWarrior and Crysis into account.
“All of my professional career, I’ve been motivated by working on projects that provide the player with absolute immersion. As technology has progressed, it has become much more achievable to really portray convincing photorealistic experiences,” Mamais said in via e-mail. “I believe it is similar to the Mech 2 franchise and Crysis in the way we are going to push the extremes of what it really means to be a pilot in a fighter, just as we worked hard to make players believe they were in 75-ton mechs or advanced Delta Force Operators. It’s going to be different in the way we are approaching the core concept.”
Coray Seifert, the executive producer and head writer for Impeller’s yet-announced game, shared how be became associated with the project in an interview at the Game Developers Conference 2015.
“They approached me and said, ‘Hey, Dave Wessman, the designer of X-Wing is –‘ and I accepted. That was a far as we got. Whatever Dave’s doing, I’m in.”
Design started early in 2014. Seifert has game credits of his own with Frontlines: Fuel of War (a producer, writer, and a bit of design work), and others on the Impeller team came from Desert Combat or were modders. Right now, it’s in bootstrap mode with 15 members on the core team. It does have two “very small” angel investors.
“At this point, we’re polishing our core experience and then assessing. Do we want to talk to a big publisher? Do we want to talk to investors? Do we want to crowdfund? Do we want to do Early Access [on the Steam digital distribution platform]?” Seifert said. “For us, we want to listen to the fans. That’s what made Desert Combat great. We have really great access to our core community. If they tell us don’t go to a publisher — they’re going to be too risk-averse — then we probably won’t do that. If they say, ‘Don’t go to Kickstarter because you’ll spend all your time making T-shirts,’ we probably won’t do that.”
And it has a prototype, using the new Autodesk Stingray game engine — something Seifert said his team is really excited about, being one of the first licensees. “We’re pretty bullish on it,” he said, though when this interview took place, he couldn’t say any more about it. Earlier prototypes were in Unreal. Impeller is pursuing virtual reality as well, and on the hardware side, it’s partnered with Nvidia and Logitech.
Above: If you’ve played any of the X-Wing games, you’ve sampled Dave Wessman’s work.
The most recent game listed in Wessman’s credits is 2006’s Saints Row, for which he was the lead designer. He consulted on the aborted Six Days in Fallujah, and he worked on the Judgmental Shooter Simulation for the U.S. intelligence community. “Both projects shared technology and tools, and the features developed for JSS were going to be rolled into a commercial entertainment project about covert operations that was also cancelled –sadly – it had a lot of innovative features,” Wessman said via e-mail.
But gaming has changed a great deal since 2006. But when it comes to making a game, Wessman said that “in terms of methodologies, it doesn’t seem that game development has changed that dramatically.”
The differences, he points out, are in product development. And this includes Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Early Access on Steam.
“In terms of product development, there has been incredible change. There is a much larger audience with more diverse tastes than ever. There is a much wider variety of platforms that people play games on and the business models have morphed and mutated all over the place,” he said. “The most exciting change from a developer point of view is crowdfunding because it lets us make our case directly to players. The nice thing about a successful crowdfunding drive is that it demonstrates viability to publishers that in the past would pass on a project like this as ‘too risky.'”
How can a studio working in stealth mode and just announcing its existence to the public today already have fans?
“We have this core, tight-knit community that we’ve assembled. It’s secret right now,” Seifert said as I laughed. “We have a friends-and-family community and an early fan community.”
Physics fanboys
Mamais and Wessman may seem like an odd pairing, but they both share a deep love of physics — a field that’s pertinent to game designers who have both worked on franchises with advanced tech.
During staff meetings, Seifert said that four out of 10 ended up becoming “Jack and David arguing about physics.” The duo spent a great deal of the early days of development in 2014 hashing out physics while working as educators (Mamais at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Wessman at the Netherlands’ NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences). They talked to people who make rockets. Wessman has talked to Space X.
“It really does lead to a unique gameplay experience,” Seifert said.