Inside Axis Game Factory: an Interview With Heavy Water
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief, with information provided by Stephen Grose, Heavy Water producer
World-builder games, such as the “RPG Maker” series, exist because most of us at some point have stared at the television screen and thought, “I could do better than that.”
The problem, of course, is that even if you could, you’d have to sacrifice years of your life learning indecipherable programming languages, while your kidneys build up stones the size of Olympus Mons thanks to night after night of Mountain Dew-fueled coding, just to prove your point.
That’s when you realize: creating a game is hard work. Properly hard work. You might have the greatest idea for a game ever, but unless you can back it up with the proper training, you’re going to have about as much success at building a game as Jeremy Clarkson has at building a car.
Enter Heavy Water, and the Axis Game Factory.
Axis Game Factory isn’t the first world-builder game ever created. It may, however, be the easiest and most comprehensive to use. And that’s important, because its existence is predicated entirely on how well it can sell its message directly to the general public: it’s a Kickstarter initiative.
HomeStation chatted with Heavy Water about this new venture.
HSM: Let’s begin with where the genesis for this idea came from. What prompted the creation of Axis Game Factory?
HW: Matt McDonald has always seen game creation as being made too difficult with lackluster development kits and scene editors. He came up with the idea to create the most simple, yet powerful, game designing tool that the general public could pick up and create to their hearts content – just like he loves to do himself.
HSM: A world-builder game as a Kickstarter project is ambitious; Heavy Water has to sell consumers not just a conventional game concept, but a meta-game in which the consumer has to build their own game. Why take such a gamble?
HW: To be honest, it doesn’t seem like a gamble to us. Like you said, everyone has the notion “I can do better than that,” or they might have a concept that no one has thought of and this could be their launching off point to creating a great new gaming experience or even a Machinima narrative. What we hope people understand is that Axis Game Factory isn’t a video game but an endless creative sandbox that can only get better with community involvement and what a better way to create a community than right from the very beginning with Kickstarter.
HSM: Heavy Water has, in recent years, focused considerable development assets into PlayStation Home. Yet Home won’t be around forever, and every third-party Home developer faces the same conundrum: how to introduce their audiences to non-Home projects. Does Heavy Water believe that a world-builder game will have greater appeal to its brand-loyal consumers that were built up on the Home platform, or is there simply a larger overall opportunity for this sort of game to exist right now?
HW: Having spent the last 4+ years on Home we have seen demand for customization and a passion for creation. Axis Game Factory should have a broad appeal to Home users; look at Blueprint Home and Home Tycoon. People on Home love to create and share; and that is exactly what Axis Game Factory is all about, but without the limitations of the Home platform. We believe Axis Game Factory has a wide appeal to all those interested in creating games, design, Machinima, and building a community.
HSM: For the Home consumer who’s loyal to the Heavy Water brand, why should they invest in this non-Home experience? What makes it uniquely Heavy Water?
HW: Heavy Water has always brought experiences that are unique and unlike most on PlayStation®Home and we are doing that again with Axis Game Factory. We are bringing a unique tool for others to build their own games instead of just creating a singular game. I think an infinite number of games from one project is better than one game from one project! And Home users should invest in this non-Home experience because they can create a Home network within the community and share new things with the same friends without the limitations of the Home platform.
HSM: Let’s talk about Axis Game Factory itself. One of the challenges with world-building games is that casual gamers with no programming background at all quickly discover there are a lot more moving pieces than they initially anticipated. So how has Heavy Water built AGF so that the experience of actually building a game is still fun and engrossing, in order to keep the player encouraged to continue?
HW: Everything is designed around the concept that a child will be using these tools to create his or her games. All the interfaces are clean and simple with drag-and-drop for placing together your models or environments. Once you have the environment, you can place in the more “complicated” pieces like NPCs, enemies, collectibles, trigger points, etc. Each will be dropped in like anything else, but each will have a pop-up of properties that you can modify via sliders or toggles. Set the aggressiveness of an enemy or decide what amount your collectible should be with a simple swipe! Connect a new scene to a trigger point to have the user launch into a new scene – a dungeon perhaps? We are still in the very early phases of development and these are the things we are positive we can provide but plan on have as many customizable features as possible within the toolset.
HSM: How will this game monetize? Purchasing a starter kit unlocks the game’s “Deluxe Mode,” whereas the Basic Mode is free. Has the pricing spectrum for Axis Game Factory’s add-ons been determined yet, and if so, can you give us a rough idea at this point?
HW: The Axis Game Factory is all about catering to personal styles and tastes. You can play with the free version that has most of the basic features with basic building blocks, or you can purchase asset packs like the Starter Pak to get a myriad of assets in the style of your choosing: medieval, urban combat, post-apocalyptic, etc. Or buy them all and create something that crosses genres and forces people to suspend their belief and really challenge them to broaden their idea of what is possible! There is no set pricing scheme for the assets currently, but we see releasing Paks of multiple items as low as $1, while Mega Paks will obviously be more expensive.
HSM: Much has been written about Kickstarter since its inception. What are the potential advantages to Heavy Water for utilizing Kickstarter, and how might you have gone about securing funding for this game if Kickstarter wasn’t an option?
HW: People have been saying that 2012 was the year for games on Kickstarter. A lot of big names used it to successfully fund their projects and we definitely see that the gaming community is paying attention to Kickstarter so it made sense for us to bring Axis Game Factory there.
The good news, if there wasn’t a Kickstarter, is that we have had tremendous outreach thus far from industry partners, publishers, and entertainment partners alike regarding Axis Game Factory. The idea is a solid one and others are recognizing that, but we hoped to have the users help us really define what they want by putting it out there on Kickstarter!
HSM: No one creates a world without a desire to show it off. What resources has Heavy Water created to foster, support and spotlight user-created worlds that emerge from Axis Game Factory?
HW: We will have a general forum for discussions and sharing, as well as a main area that highlights new creations, popular creations, top creators, genre specific games, Machinma spotlight, etc, etc. We have spoken of creating a ranking system and giving players credit for the amount of play-throughs, plus any ratings, and their consistency of valuable games that they may create to name a few.
HSM: For the slightly more advanced consumer – someone who aspires to a career in the games industry, for instance – is Axis Game Factory purely a recreational exercise, or can someone create a game worthy of a CV credit with these tools?
HW: We believe that you can use Axis Game Factory as a recreational tool, or you can really plan out levels, gameplay, and environments that show your eye for design. The best part is those environments and games are made to be shared so it would be easy for an industry professional to review your creation and evaluate your potential! To me, it is like showing a prospective employer a MOD you worked on.
HSM: Axis Game Factory is UNITY-based and designed for PC, Mac and Linux. Yet you’ve also publicly disclosed that you’d like to introduce a version to the PlayStation Network as well. Assuming the Kickstarter initiative is a success, what is the full scope of platforms you hope to see this game introduced to?
HW: We would love to see Axis Game Factory be accessible on every platform: iOS, Android [Mobile and OUYA], PSN, XBOX, PC, MAC, Linux, and perhaps even the Wii U – using the Wii U tablet like the iPad version could be a really easy way to develop compared to using a standard controller!
HSM: Final thoughts on Axis Game Factory as it stands right now. What’s the key selling point to this experience?
HW: Axis Game Factory as it stands now is still a prototype. A very powerful prototype. We have created what you see in the Kickstarter video with very few resources in a very short amount of time, so getting the right amount of funding and launching in October will see Axis Game Factory become one slick beast of a game designing tool that is easy to use and share! I believe the key selling point is the ability to share your creations with your friends and the community at large. It’s like LBP2. So many creative people live out there and we want them to be empowered to make really incredible experiences for us all! And of course, kickass Zelda clones!
You may be thinking that it’s somewhat unusual for HomeStation to cover a story that isn’t somehow related to Home — in fact, it’s not even related to the PlayStation Network. Except that this is nothing new for us, having run stories on Ralph Baer, Richard Garriott and James Arnold Taylor in the past, amongst others. Also, we must remember that 2013 is the year when several Home developers are going to branch out with non-Home projects, as Home’s golden age comes to a close along with the last florid phase of the current console generation. As consumers who must inevitably in time look beyond Home, the most logical place to start is with the third-party developers we’re already familiar with.
On this front, Heavy Water is off to a remarkable start with Axis Game Factory. If you want to support its Kickstarter initiative, you can do so here. And we wish them the best of luck. What sort of world are you looking forward to building with the Axis Game Factory?
January 7th, 2013 by NorseGamer | 2 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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This is a very cool gaming platform that allows you to be extremely creative. I think if they can pull off the funding it will be a force to be reckoned with in the PC gaming industry, especially for young people. It taps into those creative juices and will possibly help create new game creators of the future. I hope that Heavy Water is successful in this endeavor it will be well worth it if they are.
I like the idea or at least the dream. It reminds me a little of the Vic20 and Commodore64 (both of which which I had) and Apple. There used to be a magazine called Compute! which had games in it written in Basic (I think) which if we readers took the time we could type the code and presto! we’d have nice little game. I knew a little Basic and took a stab at creating a game and I think most of us wrote out programs, often using coding created by others in the magazine usually adapting it… or getting the coding out of a manual. Some of the magazine games put out games converted to what was called machine language. It wasn’t true machine language in that 1’s and 0’s weren’t used but 4 digit numbers. It was certainly fast!!! at least for that time. (Basic could perhaps be compared with html. I remember IF THEN statements.) I still have some old Compute! magazines from the mid-80s.
Now this adventure that Heavy Water (Axis)is on sounds like something with potential and from what I have gathered other companies have done except that Heavy Water is using the KISS principle. No basic, no html, no machine language or programming to learn.
It sounds interesting and makes me think and that is a good thing.
I wonder if Axis Game Factory can make a baseball game. Rhetorical thought, I doubt it.
When Home Tycoon had a meeting at the Train Station, I asked if they were coming out with a baseball stadium. I (we actually, someone else asked too) was told no because they couldn’t get the dimensions right. Seems like there’s a lot to this programming. And when they said Home Tycoon would probably be getting helicopters in the future, I said, “I used to fix helicopters, but I’m not a programmer.”
Now it seems it may be possible to make games without being a programmer. I can’t help financially I don’t think but they have my best wishes. And who knows, maybe these games will make their way to PS3’s Home.
Ain’t it fun to dream?