Interview with Edward Chen, Lead Developer for Cleric, Pt 2

If you recall, we began this series of interviews with Matthew Doyle, CEO for Plutonium Games (Parts 1 and 2), ending recently with Part 1 of an interview with Edward Chen, lead coding and business guy for Plutonium.

Herein lies part 2 of that interview. This time around, we get down to on what he's been working for Plutonium.

Mystery: What have you been working on for the last couple of months?

Edward: Earlier I spent more of my time working on the coding for the demo. I also spent some time evaluating game engines, but most recently, I've been working on the business side of things, developing our game proposal in preparation for pitching our title to publishers and pursuing other funding avenues. I've had to learn who the players are, how they function, how they make their decisions, and what about our title appeals to them, and then take this information and develop a pitch that effectively communicates the sellable aspects of our game in the shortest amount of time possible. If a producer isn't sold on your game in the first 60 seconds, another 10 minutes isn't going to help.

I'm most happy about discovering the right pitch for our title. It's not something that most eager game developers think about-they might expect producers and decision makers think as they do-but the reality is that at some point in the decision making process, someone will gauge the economic risks and rewards for publishing a title, and this is something we think about in advance and weave into our pitch.

Mystery: What sets your game apart from its direct competitors?

Edward: I'm really excited about how strongly the game concept sells. The demo was just icing on the cake. The real challenge for anyone pitching an original IP is going to be the game concept. A derivative game is a hard sell because if it's just like another popular game, it'll be competing with that well-known game franchise. A high-concept game is also hard to sell because publishers have no feel for the market for a new type of game. Cleric takes a familiar-but-new approach that gives players a foundation and a set of expectations, while giving them something brand new, both in story and game play.

I don't see any single aspect of our game as more important than the others when it comes to setting us apart. We do understand which aspects of our game have the strongest resonance with fans and industry people we've spoken to. To me, it's the totality of everything that Cleric is that sets it apart.

Mystery: What initial decisions about the demo got squeezed out in favor of time schedules and technical issues?

Edward: We refocused the demo around the main strengths of the Cleric concept. The earliest versions of the demo were done very quickly (inside 3 months) and it ended up looking and playing a lot like some kind of first-person shooter. The next version of the demo originally featured three subdemos that each showed off a different aspect of the game. Later, as a clearer picture emerged of what made the game attractive to publishing companies, we combined the subdemos back into a single demo. We ended up dropping the "burning house" level which would have depicted high interactivity and stunning graphics and instead added some lush indoor scenes to our cemetery level. We also dropped the third subdemo which was to show off the text-parsing conversation feature.

Mystery: Are you planning on offering the demo for public download, or does it still have a number of versions to go before the public gets a taste of it?

Edward: The current version of the demo will not be made public for various reasons. For one thing, our existing engine licensing agreement does not allow that, and we specifically designed the demo to interest publishers, so it emphasizes the aspects that would interest them, rather than create a story-based experience that would interest players. I also think that it is a very, very bad idea to release an early demo, because it can undercut the marketing efforts spent later when the game goes gold. The current wisdom in the industry is that game demos make sense as the release date approaches, and we will very likely offer a downloadable demo when that time comes.

Mystery: It looks as if you were going to release a total conversion of No One Lives Forever 2 to show off some multiplayer ideas for Cleric. What prompted you to use a total conversion rather than display the mechanics of the Cleric engine?

Edward: The total conversion idea served two purposes: as a way to build public awareness for Cleric, and as a test of multi-player gameplay ideas. The choice of offering a TC of No One Lives Forever 2 was one of convenience, since we were familiar with making mods for that game, and we had assets already ported for that game. However, we had to nix the TC to focus on our demo and building our publisher relations.

Once again, we'd like to extend a thanks to Edward for taking time out of what appears to be a very busy schedule building and promoting Cleric.

If you're interesting it seeing some images from the game, you may want to check out our Cleric Image Gallery.