The people behind Satellite Reign

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in 5LS on August 20th, 2013.

Here is a little bit of information about each one of the 5LS team, and a few others who are involved in the making of Satellite Reign. All information is from public sources like LinkedIn profiles, Wikipedia, personal webpages or interviews.

Chris Conte – The man with the ‘distinctly fondle-worthy’ beard is the designer on the team, which means that he will be in charge of gameplay mechanics, thinking up skills and abilities, balancing etc. He has previously worked as a Senior Environment Artist at Sega Studios Australia and as Senior Mesh Builder. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been in the business for around 10 years and is most experienced with console work, having developed for PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. Notable games he has worked on are Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole and Viva Piñata: Party Animals. His official title as given in the Kickstarter video is “Designer / Beard Cultivator”.

Mike Diskett – Technical director at 5LS and industry veteran, Mike Diskett is the most senior team member. Before going on to found 5 Lives Studios, he worked as a Senior Engine Programmer at Sega Studios Australia, as Senior AI/Gameplay programmer at THQ StudioOZ, at Rockstar North and a bunch of other studios. According to this developer BIO at MobyGames, he started programming computer games at the age of 13. He is obviously best known for his work on Syndicate (where he did the Amiga conversion) and Syndicate Wars (where he was the game director), but worked on a multitude of other games as well, including Theme Park, Startopia, Urban Chaos, Blade 2 and GTA4. In 1997 he co-founded the studio Mucky Foot Productions Ltd, which was however closed down in 2003. His highest expertise appears to be in the area of C++ programming and Artificial Intelligence, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Brent Waller – Brent is the Environment Artist on Satellite Reign and will be in charge of making sure the city and everything in it looks and feels the way it’s supposed to. He was previously a Senior Environment Artist at Sega Studios Australia and Lead Environment Artist at Kmm Games. Brent has 12 years of experience in the games industry according to LinkedIn, and his skills include mastering graphics tools like Maya, Photoshop and 3D Studio Max, among others. Brent has a background in the modding community and used to work on Quake 2 and Quake 3 maps / total conversions. You can check out some of his work on his personal website.

Dean Ferguson – Dean used to be a Lead Artist / Character Artist at Sega Studios Australia. He studied at Qantm College Australia and has been working in the business for ca. 10 years. He worked on a variety of games, including some Star Wars console games. His specialities appear to be Texturing and other 3D graphics stuff.

Mitch Clifford – Mitch is a specialist for Character Animation and Modelling. He got a Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment, Animation Major from Qantm College and appears to be working in the games industry since 2006. His most recent position was Animator at Sega Studios Australia. According to his LinkedIn profile, his tools of the trade are Maya, 3D Studio Max, Motionbuilder and Zbrush. Notable games he has worked on are Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Viva Piñata: Party Animals, Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse, and he did some contract work on LA Noir and Darksiders 2.

Other people who are involved in the making of Satellite Reign, but who are not members of 5 Lives Studios:

Russell Shaw – Famous enough to have his own Wikipedia entry, Russell Shaw has been in charge of sound and music for many video games. He has worked on Syndicate, Syndicate Wars, Dungeon Keeper, Populous, Theme Park and the Fable series, to mention just a few. Russell Shaw is on board as sound designer and composer thanks to the fact that the Kickstarter campaign reached its first stretch goal!

Russell Zimmerman – Writer Russell Zimmerman will be in charge of the Satellite Reign Novella offered to some of the higher tier backers. There’s also still a possibility that he will be brought on board for writing the game’s story, although it requires the fundraising for Satellite Reign to hit the next stretch goal of £500’000. Russell Zimmerman is well known for his work in the cyberpunk genre and has recently published the Shadowrun Novella NEAT.

Jeremy Love – One of the concept artist that 5 Lives Studios has been contracting out to is Jeremy Love. He made this magnificent piece of art that served as the main background / logo of the Kickstarter campaign. You may want to keep an eye on his blog for more Satellite Reign related art.

Duncan Mattocks – Artist who does paintings for Satellite Reign (backer reward oil paintings). He maintains a blog here, and there you can read a post about the ‘Hammerhead’ paintings he made for the Satellite Reign Kickstarter campaign.

Bruno Rime – Bruno Rime works at Photon Workshop. Some of his work on shaders and post effects for the Unity engine will be featured in Satellite Reign. You can check out some of it in this impressive reflections tech demo. Check this for some more information about the technology.


Backer involvement

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in backer involvement, game assets on August 17th, 2013.

In the first update after the end of the Kickstarter campaign, 5 Lives Studios mentioned that they want the backers to be actively involved in the making of the game:

We want everyone who’s backed us to get involved. We’ll be organising the backer surveys to send out over the next few weeks and setting up the backers-only forum so everyone can jump in and have their say. We want the community involved in everything, from choosing T-Shirt designs and the look of the elite backer skins, to directly contributing to the design of logos and signage in the game, propaganda slogans and more.

Since then, a discussion has been going on on the official forums on the topic of backer created indoor areas. It was suggested that 5LS could provide a sort of level editor, which the backers could use to produce some indoor areas. The thread got a reply by Chris today, and although we still don’t know any details, we know at least a bit more about what the backer involvement will be like:

Hey everyone.. as MikesTeam said; we are using Unity to build the game, so we already have our level editor ready to use for us… to make another editor that was built into the game for everyone else to use would be way to expensive for us to develop… but we do want peoples input/help :D … we are looking into something others have suggested with the unity asset store and letting backers create assets and textures that could be used in the game… the Wasteland project used this and it seems to have worked out well for them …is that something that you guys would want?
:)
– Chris

Letting backers contribute logos, slogans, textures and so on sounds great to me. They are a small team after all and it’s clever to use the ‘hivemind’ of the backer-crowd to their advantage. Some good stuff may come out of it, even if – realistically – only a small fraction of the contributions can be expected to be good enough to be usable in the game.


New interview on VideoGameRebellion

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in funding, interview, press coverage on August 15th, 2013.

There’s a new interview with Chris Conte up on Video Game Rebellion. No real news, but we do learn that the funding total is now at £482,620, and Chris has the following to say about the team’s next steps:

We are in the process of setting up an office at the moment. Getting the internet connected, power, moving everything and setting everything up. The boring stuff. Once we have all that sorted we move straight into pre production where we set up a lot of the base functionality like controlling the 4 agents (movement, shooting, and special abilities) and test out some different approaches to some of the systems we need to develop like streaming systems and ai simulation systems.

Read the rest of the interview here.


Matters of perspective

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in gameplay, perspective on August 14th, 2013.

Syndicate Wars differed from the original Syndicate in a number of areas, the most significant change undoubtedly being the jump from 2D to 3D graphics. It was very early days for 3D and although groundbreaking at the time, the 3D implementation did bring some problems. One issue is that the freely rotating camera made it much easier to get disoriented. For me at least it was often confusing and hard to remember which way was up and which way down, let alone remembering which way I came from a minute ago – I could never really get a ‘feel’ for what is where on the map. The inability to zoom in and out freely didn’t help, either (the zoom level was for some reason dependent on your current weapon). Unlike Syndicate Wars, Satellite Reign is going to have a fixed isometric perspective. The environment is of course going to be in 3D, but it will have a fixed perspective, similar to Starcraft II (of which Mike Diskett is reportedly a fan). This means that the perspective / orientation will feel more like the original Syndicate, which I think is great news.

However, there is of course another aspect to this. The reason why Syndicate Wars went with a freely rotating camera was most likely the fact that there are a lot of tall buildings in the city, and with a fixed perspective, you would not have seen what’s going on half of the time because it all happened behind the walls of a skyscraper. Actually, that was still a problem in Syndicate Wars at times.


Can you see what's going on on the street?

Can you see what’s going on on the street?


So at this point you may be asking yourself: How did the original Syndicate do it, since it had a fixed perspective? Well, it’s actually quite simple: That game didn’t have tall buildings for the most part. The buildings tended to be rather flat, and you could often walk on the roof. It was of course possible to walk behind (or inside) a building where you could not see the agents for a moment, and sometimes even in tunnels underground, but you still had an overview of the situation and it was never really a problem.

Buildings in Syndicate tend to be flat

Buildings in Syndicate tend to be flat

This approach would not have worked for Syndicate Wars, which had a ton of skyscrapers and other tall buildings with narrow streets in between. Since it looks like Satellite Reign will have a lot of tall buildings, too, 5LS is bound to run into the same problems. It’s certainly not an easy problem to solve, and it will be interesting to see how the team deals with it. Let’s go through the options:

  1. Make only flat buildings, Syndicate style. Seems like a clean solution but doesn’t go well with the skyscraper dark city theme. Note that Starcraft II with a similar fixed isometric perspective doesn’t have tall buildings / highly elevated areas (mountain tops etc.) at all.
  2. Find ways for the player to see through buildings. This was implemented in Syndicate Wars in the following way: you could hide the buildings completely by pressing ‘B’. However, that solution is not ideal because you will end up not seeing most of the actual level design and it will take away from the atmosphere. It’s also clearly meant for use in specific moments only (hence the need to keep the button pressed). One idea could be to make buildings partially transparent if an agent is behind them, or perhaps at least the parts of the building above the ground floor. Some games ease the problem by showing a silhouette of characters when behind an obstacle (like this).
  3. Change the perspective to a top-down view (bird’s view). Think GTA2. However, this would give the game a totally different feel and doesn’t seem right.
  4. …?

I also vaguely remember Mike Diskett saying in an interview somewhere that there may be a way to temporarily change the camera angle. I’m guessing it would probably work like the ‘B’ button in Syndicate Wars, i.e. it will be effective only as long as you hold down a button (think the occasional ‘reverse angle’ shots on sports TV). I can imagine that it would help in some cases, but could also be annoying to fiddle with in the heat of battle, and it probably still won’t work in all cases (e.g. with many narrow streets between skyscrapers).

So how would you go about it, if you were in charge of the game yourself? Let us know in the comments below.


Syndicate fan art #1

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in fanart on August 13th, 2013.

Over on deviantart, there’s a number of nice Syndicate fanart pieces. So during times when there is not much news on the game itself, I will from time to time post some Syndicate fanart here. The first one is simply titled ‘Syndicate’ and was uploaded to deviantart in 2008 by ~PitchBlackYetis. What you see here is a miniaturized version, click on the picture to see the original directly on deviantart.


Syndicate by ~PitchBlackYetis

Syndicate by ~PitchBlackYetis

The second one for today is a vector graphics rendering of the EUROCORP logo by user ~WaNgeL-SaTaR:


EUROCORP logo by ~WaNgeL-SaTaR

EUROCORP logo by ~WaNgeL-SaTaR


The Death Penalty

1 comment on this article Posted by Lou in developer chats, gameplay on August 11th, 2013.

One of the topics discussed in the second developer chat was the death of an agent. As you know, in Syndicate and Syndicate Wars there was perma-death, which means that once an agent is dead, her or she is gone, and you have to recruit a new one from the cryo chamber. The penalty is that you have to buy new equipment and mods, and there is also a danger of running out of agents before the game is completed. Of course the death is permanent only in the sense that you have to reload and replay a mission if you don’t want to accept the loss.

In Satellite Reign, you will not lose an agent completely when he or she dies. Instead, you will be able to recover their mind and ‘upload’ it to a new body. This will preserve the agent’s skills and abilities, but you will lose the equipment and body mods. The reasoning for this is probably that the agents will be more customized than before, especially with skills and abilities, so it would be too punishing to lose them permanently.

Bureaucracy lady downloading Bender's brain onto a 3.5'' floppy disk

Bureaucracy lady downloading Bender’s brain onto a 3.5” floppy disk

In order to upload a deceased agent’s mind, you will need to acquire a new body to host it; that body is then cloned and the agent’s mind ‘installed’ on it. One way to obtain a body is to harvest it from the population. In the bullet point summary on the Kickstarter update (but curiously not in the video itself), the devs also mention the possibility of purchasing bodies on the black market.

5LS go on to explain that although you will generally lose the body mods, it may not necessarily be a total loss:

Agents lost in the field will lose their augmentations and equipment but if you are fast enough you can salvage the corpse for spare parts or we have multiple insurance packages available to suit your needs.

What’s more, there are some hints that the loss of the body may not be complete, either. Chris says at one point in the video:

parts of society, they’ve all, they’re all effectively kind of immortal. Because every time their body dies they can, um, you know, clone… clone that body or get a new body or whatever. But they can take their consciousness out and shove it into a new body

…which, as I understand it, implies that bodies can still be cloned after a person is deceased. It is not entirely clear, though, whether that means that dead agents’ bodies can still be cloned after their death, which would essentially mean that you can ‘reincarnate’ the mind into the same body again as before (or, to be more precise, into another body with the same features as the previous one).

So does that mean that there will be almost no penalty for death in Satellite Reign? Not so, says Chris in the comment section:

[…] we definitely want there to be a penalty for dying. It will be as hendawg_ofthemiddle explains: each time your agent dies and a new clone is created the clone will degrade and lose some of its stats. You will also lose all of your augmentations and weapons. When we are in production we will play with the degrading of the agents stats and loss of money and maybe xp to see what the best option is.
– Chris

So overall it seems that Satellite Reign will be more forgiving with regards to agent death. The death penalty will be money / XP loss and stat degrading on the clones, and you will have to go through the trouble of finding a new body, but you will never lose the agent completely. Note that this is a difference to the recent X-COM title, which had a similar concept of upgrading and customizing soldiers in your squad, but where you would lose a deceased soldier permanently.


On the road towards stretch goal #4

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in funding, stretch goals on August 9th, 2013.

The latest official number we have for the total amount of funding is £481,739.75. That number is from August 6th and it includes errored Kickstarter pledges. The PayPal-pledges have probably gone up a bit since then, however we can’t calculate an exact number at this point because it is not known how many of the Kickstarter pledges failed to process. All in all it appears that there is about £18k missing to the next stretch goal, #4, which would bring on Russell (yes, another Russell) Zimmerman as a writer as well as new factions/districts.

The stretch goals reached so far are:

  1. Russell Shaw as composer
  2. Localisation / Translation
  3. Environmental Destruction

It seems likely that #4 will be reached over the coming weeks and months, however the remaining goals #5 (more factions/districts), #6 (multiplayer coop) and the enigmatic #7 (???) are probably out of reach.

And here’s a quote from Mike Diskett for those of you who are wondering whether reaching (more) stretch goals would delay the release of the game:

[…]

BTW the stretch goals allow us to hire more staff so don’t actually lengthen the dev time..

.MikeD


Green light for Satellite Reign on Steam

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in Uncategorized on August 8th, 2013.

Hot on the heels of the news that Satellite Reign has advanced to position #4 on the Steam Greenlight program, the game has been officially greenlit today.

The team’s reaction on Twitter:

@SatelliteReign: Greenlit on steam! Oh yeah! :)


5 Lives Studios setting up shop

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in Uncategorized on August 6th, 2013.

5 Lives Studios, the team behind Satellite Reign, revealed in a recent Kickstarter update that they have been scouting for office space and that they have found a promising one, hoping to get set up there by the end of August. They are also talking to “accountants and lawyers” and moving furniture.


Could the Kickstarter have gone better with a lower base price?

0 comments on this article Posted by Lou in funding, pricing on August 2nd, 2013.

There has been a bit of controversy over reward tier pricing of Satellite Reign. The impetus of the discussion came from an article on RPS, where the author criticized the pricing model in strong words:

5 Live Studios horrendously screwed up their reward tiers, and frankly they’re lucky to be funded at all. Starting game-purchasing pledges at £13, and then limiting it to only 1,000 people, was ridiculous. Making the regular price of the game £16/$25 just ensured that they were going to struggle. Firstly, it’s infuriating to someone just learning of the Kickstarter for the first time to discover that they have to pay more because… because of what? So that puts people off. Secondly, $25 as an entry price is really pushing its luck for a game that’s still ideas on paper. The daft thing is, if they’d put the entry tier at $15 and made it 5 or 10,000, and then the regular price at $20, they’d have been funded long ago, and right now be counting off the stretch goals. Hopefully others will learn from this – lower prices means bigger sales, more money, more profit, and that’s never more true than with Kickstarter of strong potential.

The main criticism (besides the low number of “early bird” slots) is therefore that the base price was supposedly too high. This issue was also brought up on the Kickstarter comment section, where a backer wrote:

It’s a real shame about that price point. $25 USD for a level that includes a copy of the game. While I was willing to part with that for this risk, most people will not be. That is a very rare price-point. Even the popular well-known franchises from known studios with known people on the project promising huge experiences are usually $10 to $15 USD. If this had a $15 USD price-point, you would have blown so far past your goals.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of projects with the attitude that they have to “hold on to everything” as if by giving it at a lower price than you’ll eventually sell it for, you’re somehow losing money. In reality (as proved-out by Steam’s sales, in fact) you would get much more by going fairly lower priced. […]

Mike Diskett replied with the following statement:

[…] here’s why I think they might be wrong. (I posted this on another thread)

We have 60,000 views of our kick starter video, and 13000 backers.
That’s a conversion rate of 21% which is astronomical.
Had we overpriced I think we would have seen a far lower conversion rate.
Also we get a ton of email feedback out of literally thousands of emails not one that I can think of has said they won’t back us because we are overcharging.
I know we made a lot of mistakes but I don’t believe the price of the pledge tier for the game was one of them.

.MikeD

The conversion rate is certainly impressive, which suggests that the pitch was fine, but simply didn’t reach enough people. So what do you people think – could a lower base price have brought in more funds overall?


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