I'm Jon Shiring, one of the three programmers at S2 Games. This is my first game-related job. I got involved with S2 when one of my friends started working as an artist for the company and I heard they were looking for another programmer. Thankfully, since I had done some OpenGL programming, I got the job back when it was just one programmer (Sam McGrath, our resident genius and Lead Programmer) and two artists.

Since S2 was only two programmers at the time (now we have a mighty third programmer, Jason Morales), I was really all over. I've done chunks of our core engine code, our level editor code, gameplay code, the script-able GUI that the game uses, and a lot of "supporting infrastructure" code (server browser, stats tracking, authentication, buddy system, etc.). I also manage the Linux port. All three programmers are involved in everything though, so to claim sole responsibility for those would be an insult to Sam and Jason. Everyone here at S2 is involved in everything to a large degree.

Savage is a multi-player team-based game. There are two teams, each with one player who plays as the commander, just like in any RTS game. The rest of the team players are the individual units, playing in a first and third person view. The Commander not only manages the battle strategy but he also researches new technologies which he can use to build weapons and items and units, which then become available to the players out on the battlefield. But just like in all RTS games, when you research a new technology you get a new point of weakness. For instance, to research Chemical Technology you build a Chemical Factorium, and if that building is destroyed you lose your Chemical Technology. So they depend on the Commander to keep them well-equipped to fight the enemy, and he depends on them to defend the base. You finally win by destroying the enemy stronghold.

While the idea has been tried before by a couple other games, not in a way that even slightly resembles Savage. I think it's just because the idea of doing a multi-player game is still a little risky, and the idea of making a game rely on teamwork is very scary to a publisher. I don't think focus groups would approve a game concept like Savage's.

Well aside from the obvious answer that they have a higher chance of losing (or more short-term, losing their weapons and technology if the other team storms their base), players want to keep their commander happy. Later in the game you are often low on gold and want to ask him for some money to help you better equip yourself. If you haven't kept him happy, it wouldn't make much sense for him to spend team resources on someone who isn't actually helping the team. Quite often, the commander messages are overwhelmingly helpful. Since the commander has AI units to mine stone, you will very rarely get an order to do something that doesn't directly benefit you. Usually he'll be telling you about an enemy around the corner that you didn't see, or telling you to get together with your teammates to destroy an enemy tower. You are welcome to ignore him, but you'll quickly find that trying to attack the enemy base alone doesn't work very well. So the orders from the commander are often helpful. He has the capability to know more about the battlefield than you and his goals are the same as yours, so commander orders are usually a good thing.

curve, because new players won't be officers, and they'll have people giving them guidance on what to do next. So even though Savage has a lot of depth, you actually get some help figuring it out because the team wants you to catch on and learn how to play so they can win.

No, as with any online game it's an ongoing process, and we're all dedicated to making the game as fun as we can possibly get it to be. Plus, since this is S2's first game as a company (some of the guys who work here have worked on other games before), all of us are overly-critical and want to get every little thing cleaned and polished. Thankfully we'll be doing patches after release to add in new content, maps, fix any bugs that pop up, and anything else we want to add.

With three programmers and three artists, S2 might be pretty close to the top of the list of game companies with the least employees. We have chosen to remain this small, so nobody here would be happier if the company was larger. There's a real sense of pride in doing it ourselves, and we can all really feel happy with taking on a project of this size, even writing our own engine from scratch, and doing it all in about two years. The only good side of being part of a larger company to us would be that some publications and retail chains take you more seriously when you're attached to a big name.

While we have kept our development costs probably as astronomically low as is possible, you still need to spend a lot of money on advertising. Like most games, we have spent more on advertising than we have on actual development. If you want an "A" title you need to spend immense amounts of money on advertising. So while I don't think you could have made this game any cheaper than we have, making a game and getting the name out there is still quite an expensive process.

We have 12 weapons per race, so we probably have more weapons than most games out there. Since we can create and tweak weapons on the fly in-game, we've had an awful lot of abandoned weapons and items throughout the development process. Early on we had a sawgun that would shoot saw-blades - we were all kind of sad to lose that one.

We had our share of joke weapons that we made, such as the peon-gun, the chiprel-gun, and way back from our very first network test, the now-internally-famous Mushroom Bow, which shot over-sized mushrooms because the artists hadn't had a chance to create an arrow model yet.

Mainly our challenges have been about game balance. Trying to balance a game that is played by such a variety of player skills, multiple races, multiple tech tree possibilities, 5 units to choose from on each race, and varying levels of commander skill really poses a problem in deciding what is possibly too powerful or too weak. But after months of testing, we feel that we have a balanced game, and we will be releasing patches to help balance it as soon as we see any problems in the games being played. Since we track all game stats, we can easily tell what weapons are too strong, which maps favor one side, if one race is overpowered, etc.

All along we've been pretty sure that this game is very different in a good way, and that our big hurdle will always just be getting the word out there. It's really hard to introduce a new game type to gamers, and that has been frustrating at times, but overall we're such a small team that nobody has the chance to get discouraged. We're all really excited to make our first game together in a new genre in a field dominated by huge companies and having this kind of success. We've beaten a lot of odds so far, and we hope to continue to do that.

The feedback was amazing. We had about 16 computers set up on a LAN in and hard-to-find booth, but by the second day of E3 the booth was just packed. We had people spending the whole day at our booth and then they'd be back there the next morning. The only complaints we got at E3 this year was just that we should have had even more computers set up for people to play. http://www.slothy.com/e3-001.jpg

The engine that powers Savage is our own cross-platform engine that we have built from scratch called the Silverback Engine. We have spent a lot of development time making the game extremely flexible, so you can do things like modify the guns real-time as I mentioned earlier. We can dynamically change any game setting in the middle of a game totally transparently to the players. We can change accuracy, kickback, damage, range, splash damage, the projectile visual, particle effects; the list is pretty big. As you can tell, we're very very proud of our engine.

Obviously the game runs best on broadband connections, but we have multiple reports of players playing successfully on modems. We are internally developing a new network code patch that we'll be rolling out some time after release that should make it even better to play on a modem, or any other connection for that matter.

All of the music in the game was composed by our Lead Programmer, Sam McGrath, who was a music composition major when he left school to work for S2. He has done a great job of coming up with music that really gives the game a unique feel, and it really works well.

The sound effects were done by Arney Secerkadic. He has worked very hard to create new sound effects for the game, and it has come out really well. All of the items, weapons, buildings, and units have unique sounds that fit within the fantasy setting of the game.

The game does have voice chat binds. You hit 'V' to bring up the voice chats, then use numbers to choose your statement, again, similar to other FPS games. The game is not shipping with integrated microphone voice chat, but we're still looking into this.

S2 was started by our owner, Marc DeForest, with Jesse Hayes and Sam McGrath around December of 2000. I joined in March of 2001. Back then we were just working on a 3D RTS, since really there weren't any yet. In September of 2001 Marc wanted to change the focus of the game to be what it is now. Most of our work we had done was concept art and engine programming, we didn't really have to start over completely, but we did scrap all of our art and a fair amount of game code to recode the engine for an FPS experience. We wanted to the time to do it right, so our game would feel just as fast and responsive as all the "pure" FPS games out there. So really it's taken a little under 2 years since we finalized the game concept.

Absolutely. We are going to be adding new units, props, maps, and other new content to the game. A lot of the things we want to add we haven't talked about yet, because the game already has so much depth that we don't want to scare people off. Just like everything we've tried to add to the game so far, anything we add will be easy to pick up and hard to master. There, you even got a sound bite out of me.

Absolutely! We are going to be releasing an SDK, and we will be working with the mod community to answer questions, offer suggestions, help out, and do anything else we can to any serious mod teams. Since we're all gamers, we fully realize the importance of mods to the game. We've planned for mods from the start, so we hope the mod community gets as excited about this game as we are. There are a lot of great things that people could do with our engine, and we're excited to support any mod teams that are working on Savage mods and content. We are setting up our mod community pages at http://mods.s2games.com/

Since the level editor comes with the game, we're releasing the 3DS Max object exporter, and we're working hard on a modding site, we're hoping for a lot of community-created content. We'll even include the good props/maps in official game patches, and obviously we intend to fully support the modding community for this game.

So through our official content updates we'll be doing, community-created maps and props, and even game mods, we hope to do frequent patches with new content and features. We know that online games can't be neglected or they will start to die off, and we don't want that to happen with Savage.

No, our publisher iGames is actually a sister company to us. We were both started by the same parent company.

We've been working as hard as we could to get the game done. With a game this open-ended it's hard to really say, "we're done", but we finally feel that it's ready for the world. We weren't really worried about what quarter it would be in - we feel the game is strong enough to compete with whatever else is out there at the same time.

Could Savage work well on a console? Say, Xbox?

Although we've only developed it for Windows and Linux, I think the game could work very well on a console, provided the console had good network support. There would of course be some changes to the interface to handle a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard, but definitely the player experience would translate easily. The Commander role would be more of a challenge to work on a controller I think, but by deviating from a standard mouse and keyboard RTS interface, I think you could come up with something a little different that still feels pretty natural. That said, we don't have any plans currently to port it to any console.

No, actually it's a mix of Krispy Kreme donuts and Baja Fresh burritos I think.

The video card is very important to the game right now. Since outdoor games push a lot of geometry to the card, we really depend on AGP support on the card. We have a wide range of graphic options you can enable, which let the game run on older hardware all the way up to today's fastest cards. We have a pretty good range of cards here that we test on, but I use a NVidia GeForce 4 ti-4200 here to do my development. Some of the artists are using the GeForce FX 5900s, some are using Radeon 8500s. The coders try not to hover on the high-end too much to make sure the game runs well on slower hardware.

The game that comes closest to Savage in concept would probably be Microsoft's multi-player space strategy game Allegiance, although obviously the two games are completely different in gameplay. The Half-Life mod Natural Selection is also similar in concept, but close-quarters fighting on a spaceship is very different from Savage. Honestly, Savage is totally unlike any other game out there, and we don't really see ourselves as having any commercial competition. We actually really appreciate Natural Selection's success, since it promotes this new RTSS genre. Remember that we feel that our biggest barrier is getting the word out there about this genre and our game. In that sense, Natural Selection is fighting our battle along side us.

That aside, we feel that our game is exciting not just in tackling this virgin game genre, but we think that we have a lot of new exciting things that nobody else has tried before. We have player-controller siege weapons, player powerups, ranged and siege weapons together. We even have some RPG elements like player gold, NPCs, player levels, gaining abilities with level, and improved melee weapons. We have a whole item system that commanders can research that give players a wide range of possibilities; for example, the beasts can camouflage themselves, but humans can place sensors to counter the camouflage. Even though our game is very different, we still have come up with a lot of new ideas that really add to the teamwork and the strategy of the game.

I imagine the industry will continue to consolidate more and more, and new ideas and risky games will be fewer and farther between. As budgets get bigger and bigger it becomes more and more like Hollywood. But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, what do I know? I'm just a first-time game developer.

As far as S2, we plan to continue as we have so far, with small development teams making great games.

Well first we're going to keep working on Savage and working on the additional content, new features, models, optimizations, etc. After that, we're not saying what we're working on yet, but it will be related to where we've had our success so far.