Q: Can you introduce "Exile - The game"? What players will find in the game and what are its general features?

Gidd: Exile is a Flash-based, fully online action RPG. I say ‘fully’ online as you don’t have to download any software to play the game as you do with other online RPG’s. Players who will enjoy the game most I think will be any Action RPG fans, any fans of Dungeons and Dragons, and hopefully anyone who enjoys playing flash games regularly.

Gidd: The general features include all of the features you will find in stereotypical RPGs, you have a number of hero characters to choose from with different statistics. You have a starter weapon with the opportunity to upgrade at certain points through the game. You can increase your Rank through Experience points. The gameplay revolves around a combination of combat and exploration, which we have tried to include equally.

Q: How did it all get started?

Gidd: Ooh… let’s think back. I got the idea in January this year (2004). I have always been interested in game development and have always been a fan of RPG’s. I have know Martz for a long time and asked him if he would like to look into the Actionscripting for this type of game. So we put our heads together and came up with some concepts. I did some drawings and ideas of layouts and together with a lot of influences came up with what you see today.

Q: Tell us about the team that developed the game

Gidd: This is always a funny one as a lot of people expect a development team behind the game, but it is just the two of us.

Gidd: I am responsible for the main concepts of the game, storyline, character design (along with Joe Ketterer of Creative Pen and Mouse in Florida), graphics, animation, and main flash layout.

Martz: I am the programmer for Exile. My role in the team is to get all of our ideas working, creating the code for movement, attacking, special moves, monster AI etc. the list goes on. I am also responsible for data management throughout.

Q: How much time did it take to develop "Exile"?

Gidd: We got the idea and concepts thought through in January / February this year and started hands on work with the game in March. We got the first version with 3 levels done for September, but then decided to take it back to the drawing board and improve a lot of it. The new game and site went Live early November which comes to about 8 months worth of work… approx. 2000 man hours.

Martz: Yeah, as Gidd says, we had the game fully up and running in September but we weren’t completely happy with the gameplay. We then decided that we would prefer to hold back a couple of months and get it right rather than release a game that we weren’t happy with. I’m glad that we did, the changes that we implemented have made the game much more fun to play, whilst keeping the original Action RPG feel that we wanted.

Q: Is "Exile" a commercial project?

Gidd: The demo and Campaign1 are Free to play, with the Full Subscription costing just £5 (approx 9 US Dollars). This is a one-off fee and goes towards server costs and giving us a little bit of an incentive to carry on developing the game :) We see the subscription as a compulsory donation rather than a pay to play thing, that is why it is so low and why we don’t charge per month or per year… its just once per player.

Q: A free demo is available online. What players need to do to play the full game?

Gidd: Campaign one is Free to play and all players need to do is Register some brief details to play – username, password and email address. We don’t even validate the email address as we just use it to keep players up to date with the game.

Martz: We ask people to register as all progress is saved on a personal, level by level basis. On registering, users are simply setting up their own personal characters to use throughout the game.

Q: Can you name some of the games or other sources that inspired you for "Exile - The Game"?

Gidd: Good question :) Although I am a big fantasy novel fan (David Gemmell, Terry Pratchett) and RPG fan, I don’t really like modern games. I think newer games are too in-depth and too complicated. If you break any game down you come to a basic concept e.g. RPG, shoot-em-up, beat-em-up, puzzle… whatever. I am a big fan of older games such as Gauntlet and I think Gauntlet was probably a main influence to the game. I was also strongly influenced by the Games Workshop games and especially the Warhammer series.

Martz: As we first set out Gauntlet was high in our minds, hence the top down viewpoint. Gidd was the instigator in slowing the game down a bit from the hectic, huge number of monsters in Gauntlet and taking on much more of an RPG role.

Q: What about the artworks? Did you use bitmaps, vector art or both of them?

Gidd: Firstly let me give credit to Joe Ketter of Creative Pen and Mouse in Florida – www.creativepenandmouse.com. He was responsible for the character sketches we used on the intros and through the site. Everything else I did in either Flash or Photoshop. The levels, objects, furniture etc. were designed and put together in Photoshop, with the whole thing being built in flash. The only Vector graphics used really worth mentioning are the Hero characters. This is because we scale them depending on the room they are in, and we didn’t want to lose image quality. For example if you had a closed room indoors you would want to zoom in close and get a lot of detail, if you are in a forest scene you want to zoom out a lot giving more viewing potential.

Martz: We started using Vector graphics for all of the on-screen characters, including the monsters but unfortunately this slowed the game down far too much. We decided to change the monsters to jpeg’s but keep the heroes as Vectors to keep the sharpness in the character. (listen to me talking about graphics and sounding like I know what I’m talking about, I’m sure Gidd will correct me if I’m wrong!)

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the game story and its characters ?

Gidd: The story comes complete from our own little warped minds, with influences from David Gemmell’s Drenai novel series, the Games Workshop Warhammer series, Lord of the Rings (naturally) etc. Character names in the majority were taken from David Gemmell’s books (of which I highly recommend).

Gidd: Also, RPG’s have specific unwritten rules… you generally have 4 characters: a wizard type, a fighter, a rogue, and a dwarf (or something like that). We kept to them loosely but up’d it to 6 characters to begin with. We gave them historical storylines, and all characters fit into the game somehow. We chose a fighter (sword) and an archer (elf) to depict long range and short range combat situations to begin with. I don’t want to give too much away but the other characters all have their own advantages and disadvantages in later stages e.g. different levels will be more easily completable with certain characters than others. This encourages players to use more than one character increasing their overall score.

Gidd: Also, you begin the game with just 2 characters. The others are built into the storyline and unlocked as the story evolves.

Q: How did you create the game levels? Do you use an editor?

Gidd: The graphics were mainly done in photoshop and then imported into Flash. We tailored our own system to do the levels as we weren’t positive where we wanted to take the game in the future. This way we can do what we want.

Martz: We don’t have a level editor, we created a template file that has all of the core workings of a level and we tailor each one individually. This, as Gidd says, is because we don’t want the levels to be the same. We are planning to constantly evolve the game and puzzles for each campaign.

Q: What version of Flash was used to develop Exile?

Gidd: We are still on Flash MX I’m afraid and publishing in Flash 6. I have always thought that if something can be done as well in a previous version of flash it should be.

Q: Did you use Actionscript 1 or 2.0? Which one do you prefer/use?

Martz: Exile is built in Actionscript 1.0. As this is my first foray into actionscript I decided that the hill to climb for 1.0 wasn’t as steep as 2.0 and from what I hear the benefits of 2.0 are not significant enough at this stage as to make it the must use choice. On saying that, now that I am more flash aware, I would like to look into AS 2.0 for future projects to find out what the real benefits are.

Q: What were the limitations (if any) you had to face during the development and how did you solve them?

Gidd: Time LOL. We have recently got it down to a 2 week period for 1 Campaign. Apart from that our only major problem was that we couldn’t have a mass of monsters like you had in gauntlet without compromising on quality. We drew a line under about 4 or 5 monsters per room before it started to slow down on slower machines.

Q: What are the system requirements for "Exile"?

Gidd: Exile is currently tested on an I-mac G4 1.25 Ghz, and a PC Celeron 2.4Ghz. We reckon a PC with a 1Ghz processor copes nicely though. Also, due to the large rastered files used for each of the rooms in the game, and we don’t comprimise on quality, we recommend a player has a broadband connection. Each level is coming in at about 1.5Mb.

Q: How did you fine tune the gameplay? Do you have beta testers?

Gidd: In the beginning we had a lot of people testing it around September but this was mainly due to gameplay and what they thought of it. We put a lot of them into practice. The main problem we found though was people compared it to other PC games as opposed to online Flash Games. This was a major compliment, but we are still confined by the realms of Flash.

Gidd: We have also given out a few free accounts to early players who have registered with us from the start, in return for their constant feedback to help improve the game.

Q: Talking about sound production we've noticed those moody soundtracks during the game, who composed them?

Gidd: Ha ha! That is the quality work of Justin Durban of Edgen in the States – www.edgen.com He has been really helpful in providing soundtracks for the games as well as letting us use one of his commercial pieces for the website. I highly recommend anyone who like the music to listen to his music on his site. He also has 2 CD’s for sale on there (I bought them both :)

Q: The Flash player speed was recently enhanced with version 7. Do you think its performance is enough for games?

Gidd: I think it’s getting better definitely. They seemed to have fine tuned it, and made it more strict (e.g. AS2 lowercase / uppercase thing). But I also think you really need to build something from scratch in it to benefit fully.

Gidd: Regards the player I can’t really comment on Flash 6 files or whatever. I’m on a Mac and flash plays pants STILL on them. Not as good as Pc’s.

Martz: As has been said a couple of times, we have hit problems with the game slowing down if we have too much character movement on the screen. I have not tested the performance difference between player 6 and player 7 in this case, but I hope that player 8 can help us out!

Q: Flash player 6 still seems to be the most popular player around. Do you think games should be compiled for that player in order to be backward compatible?

Gidd: I think it helps, but I would hope that most people who play online games would always have the latest plug-ins.

Martz: Exile is compiled for Player 6, but obviously we recommend 7

Q: What do you see in the future of the web gaming market ?

Gidd: I see it being split into 2 main areas:

Gidd: I have recently been playing the beta test of World Of Warcraft on the US servers. The game is awesome. I cannot see it getting beaten by anyone else as long as it is continuously developed. The downside to these types of games is that they cost a lot (£25 to buy, plus $15 per month). They also take a LOT of time to learn and take a LOT of time to play. I read a while back about this guy in Korea who died at his desk after playing an MMORPG for 3 days straight. Stupid.

Gidd: On the other side I see Flash and shockwave and other plug-ins uniting somewhere. I don’t really like shockwave, as to utilise its full power you really need to look into 3D packages etc. I like flash, I like the interface, and I think sometimes simple is sometimes best (like Gauntlet). This will enable Exile and other future games like it to target the type of audience who don’t want to spend £150 per year on a video game, who want to just play a game for 30 minutes on their lunch break, but continue a game, rather than playing a 5 minute puzzle game. That is what Exile does… we aimed it at people being able to play 1 level per day on their lunch break :)

Q: Can you unveil some of your future projects?

Gidd: At the moment we just have Exile on our mind. However by that I mean Exile The BRAND. We want to look into other sub-games e.g. Exile online Card games (like Top Trumps) etc.

Gidd: We will also undoubtedly develop Exile into a Multi-user platform, enabling everyone to log onto the server and play at the same time. You will still have your own missions and have monsters to fight, but you will be able to band together and help each other, or even fight each other. The game will move more into a less structured platform, allowing players to CHOOSE what they want to do next.

Martz: Yeah, the next big thing is multiplayer. We are still at a very early stage in thinking about that one but already its exciting, watch this space!

Q: And now for the last, inevitable question: what would you expect from the next version of Flash ? Any wishlist ?

Gidd: Primarily I would like to see all the previous Mac problems fixed… both the player and interface run slower on a Mac than on a PC, and im sure any designer will agree. Some other little thing like improved AI on shape tweening (nothing major)
Martz: The main aspect that I would benefit from is more direct database access with some form of SQL coding built into Flash. This would allow me to keep all of my coding in the flash file instead of having to call external pages.