Indie games are off the radar of most gamers. Like indie films, they may not have the star power, huge adversting budget or mega-slick production values but sometimes they can make an impact not anticipated. That's where Jay Barnson, founder of Rampant Games comes in. Void War is the result of a core team of five working part time on a project near a dear to their hearts and not overridden by greed. We ask Jay about the project: where it came from, graphics, feeding the technology beast, and a host of other topics. Thanks for your time, Jay!

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Jay Barnson (Void War) Q&A

We’ll start at the beginning. Who are you? What’s your background? How did you get into the games industry and how long have you been involved? What other projects have you worked on?

I’m Jay Barnson, founder of Rampant Games. I got hooked on videogames and around 1981, particularly the arcade classics like Asteroids, Pac-Man, Defender, and Tempest. Trying to turn my addiction into a productive hobby, my father bought me a computer so I could turn my talents to learning programming and writing games rather than just squandering my hard-earned money in the arcades. It didn’t quite work – I still blew everything I had on games, but then I’d turn around and try to write my own versions of them on the computer.

I ended up getting a degree in Computer Science. Upon graduation, I figured I might as well shoot for a ‘dream job’ in the games industry first before settling down into something more conventional. I got lucky, and landed in a position in the fall of 1994 with a tiny start-up called SingleTrac that had just barely gotten funding from Sony to produce two launch titles for their upcoming game console. I was lucky enough to be on both teams, and got to share in the credits for two very successful titles: Twisted Metal and Warhawk.

I continued working in the games industry for six years. Finally I was lured away by the opportunity to work for more pay and less psycho hours… with the side benefit of being able to continue to work on games on the side. It took me a couple of years to get around to it, but Rampant Games and Void War is the result.

In a nutshell what is Void War all about?

Space dogfighting! I’ve been a big fan of space combat games, from the old arcade vector-graphics games to the Wing Commander series, on through the more scarce recent offerings in the genre. I always wanted to get into dogfights with real, live players in a true test of skill. Unfortunately, the multiplayer modes in these games were more about managing complex flight systems and completing mission objectives. Strip all that away and get down to pure combat between fighters, and it’s pretty boring. Point your nose at the other ship and hope you are more accurate than he is.

The story behind Void War is a long one. Why bring it to fruition now?

We got tired of waiting for someone else to create the game we wanted to play, so we built it ourselves. There’s not much happening in the “space-sim” genre right now, with most of the notable efforts coming from small, independent studios.

How large is the development team?

That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. We’ve contracted out for help with lots of elements of the game. But I’d say the “core” team is five members, all working on Void War part-time.

The graphics seem to be on the average side in comparison to major studio releases. Is this analogous to indie films versus major Hollywood releases?

Definitely. Most indies have budgets that are dwarfed by that of the major studios and publishers. You just can’t compete in terms of production quality or content. Just like independent film can’t have giant special-effects budgets, tons of locations, or an all-star cast.

But in some ways, it’s liberating as well as restrictive. For one thing, you can not only afford to take risks with more innovative ideas, but I think you are forced into doing so – you can’t just compete head-to-head with the latest $10 million super-game. You also learn to develop a focus for where to put your resources – you need to zero in on exactly what makes the game rock, and put your attention and effort into maximizing that. After all, it’s the gameplay and entertainment value that matters. All elements of your game must be of high enough quality that they support that, but beyond that you have to really focus on what elements are most important and will give the player the greatest enjoyment out of his gaming dollar. I don’t think that comes with a multimillion-dollar price-tag.

There are obvious Wing Commander influences in Void War. What other games can be “seen” in Void War?

The old 2-D vector graphics space shooters provided a huge inspiration. Our physics model was directly inspired from the one found in Asteroids, SpaceWar (in all it’s 1960’s mini-computer glory), and similar games. We wanted to do that in 3D. We had to tone it down a bit to make it fun to play, but the taste of Newtonian physics is fully there. We also have several levels in the campaign game with asteroids that can be blown into smaller pieces – for bonus score points. That was a small tribute to the classic Asteroids series. Spacewar’s “heavy star” inspired the hypergravity well (“grav-well”) in Void War.

You don’t have to look too hard to see elements from the Star Control series, the X-Wing series, and first-person shooters. I once heard that the secret to creativity is to hide your sources – well, now I’ve proven how uncreative I am. We really did end up forging our own course for Void War and ended up with something very new and unique, but we stood on the shoulders of giants.

You may also recognize a tiny bit of an obscure console side-shooter in the campaign game…

How are the Void War’s levels setup? What about mission variety?

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We have a campaign mode which follows a somewhat tongue-in-cheek adventure of a mercenary fighter pilot trying to get his girlfriend out of trouble. The tongue-in-cheek part is my fault – after trying to explain waves of enemy fighters and cool ‘boss’ ships with unique powers in a serious manner, I decided to embrace the clichés rather than avoid them. But the main character, Lance Dawson, just refuses to play it straight.

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For the most part, the player fights increasingly dangerous waves of enemy fighters across multiple battlefields. About every third level he encounters a unique ‘boss’ ship with some unusual powers he needs to combat. Void War is not really mission-based, but we do throw in some more unusual battles to keep things exciting – like defending another ship, disabling a vehicle without destroying it, and so forth.

Besides the pure satisfaction of it, what do you hope to achieve with Void War?

I tell the rest of the team that my goal is to exceed break-even on dev costs enough to afford to throw a big pizza party for all involved! And, of course, we want to be able to afford to keep making games.

I hope to see a large community of potential victims… er, I mean players… online who I can play Void War with. Before they learn to gang up on me, as my dev team already has (fume!).

Some flight sim/action fans will tell you the most important aspect of the genre is control. What kind of control will Void War feature?

I’m one of those fans! So I’d better listen to me, or I’m gonna get really upset with me.

One of my big crusades is against control complexity. If I could figure out a good way to play the entire game with nothing but a mouse or a joystick, I would do it. I think one of the reasons the genre has lost steam in recent years is that each successive game has added a new layer of complexity to challenge the experienced fan. The problem is that the number of controls required to competently play the game becomes bewildering to the newcomer.

We wanted Void War to be easy to learn, but more difficult to master. Wherever possible, we simplified controls but increased the demands on the player’s being able to perform it well. One example is rolling to avoid missiles. It’s cheesy, but we decided to give rolling your ship a good chance to confuse incoming missiles. It gave the player an additional defense he could take against missiles, and it provided a use for otherwise fairly useless controls. It’s also very hard to fly accurately while rolling like that – most players will be pretty defensive while dodging a missile like that, but a skilled player will be able to accurately steer his ship and at least prepare an offense. It’s a small thing, but it shows the kind of thought processes we put into the game to achieve our goals for the game.

What aspect of Void War are you most proud of?

I could (and have) answered this “gameplay.” We tried to do something risky and new with a ‘dying’ genre, and I believe we pulled it off.

But the thing I’m really proudest of is watching people totally get into the game in multiplayer, trash-talking and coming up with all kinds of wild tactics to destroy each other. They don’t want to quit. And when they finally do quit, they don’t want to stop talking about it. They swap stories, justify their failures, brag about their successes, and wave their hands in the air to describe how they managed to pull off what kind of stunt in the game that allowed them to survive or defeat their opponents. They’ve lived in the Void War universe for a while, had a great time, and their hearts are still there afterwards.

THAT is what I’m really the most proud of.

What kind of distribution will you have for Void War? Would you want a big publisher like Electronic Arts involved?

Void War will be released as shareware at a budget price-point. If a big publisher were interested in becoming involved, we’d be happy to make a deal that made sense to us. Being an independent doesn’t mean you live in a world without big publishers and portals. It simply means that you don’t have to depend on them in order to finish or sell your game.

I think a game like Void War – with its experimental gameplay in a genre the big publishers have mostly given up for dead – is unlikely to appeal to a large publisher unless it first proves itself in the marketplace. It would be considered a high-risk project, and the industry is increasingly risk-averse.

The movie industry seems to have a thriving indie scene but in the game industry, outside of the occasional mod (like Counter-Strike), you don’t often see a small budget game reach the gaming equivalent of The Blair Witch Project or My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Why not more indie games?

There have been some. Bejewelled and Roller-Coaster Tycoon are the ones that spring to my mind. But point well taken: Why not more?

The problem is marketing and distribution, of course. When I first started getting involved in independent game development, I had no idea how much was out there, nor did I realize what the level of quality was for many of the top titles. There wasn’t much of a channel to introduce consumers to the games they want to play. There are a few now – like Real and Big Fish – but their focus is on the extremely casual action-puzzle games.

Indie games really need some kind of champion that can gather attention from consumers. There are a ton of games out there that players would play and enjoy if they only knew they existed. The indie movie industry has Cannes and Sundance, not to mention the Academy Awards, which often ends up spotlighting independent films in spite of itself. Games have things like the IGF, but that barely gains industry recognition, let alone public notice. I think it’s something that will happen eventually, but only after indie games have proven themselves for a while and built upon their own successes.

With technology as powerful as it is now, why are most development teams so large?

Because you need to feed the technology beast! Somebody needs to create those millions of triangles your machine is now capable of producing. If you look at the screenshots of the Unreal 3 engine, I’d guess there is more work that went into producing that one courtyard scene than went into an entire level of the original Doom. Our tools are getting better – true – but they aren’t catching up.

Just how much math do you need to know to develop a career in game development?

Depends on what you want to do in the games industry. Artists need some fluency in trigonometry when working on 3D models, but nothing too extreme. But if you are working on advanced 3D engines or AI as a programmer, you’ll definitely need a firm background in algebra, trig, matrix math, predicate logic, and computer theory. Some reasonable amount of background in calculus can be helpful as well. But you can’t be afraid of rotating a vector around an arbitrary axis, or start having convulsions when someone talks about implementing a finite state machine.

What’s the first game you think of when someone says “original” and “idea” in the same sentence? Why?

The Sims. Talk about a stupid, off-beat idea! Who the heck wants to direct tiny people doing the same kind of mundane, boring stuff that they have to do in real life every day? It doesn’t even fit into any of these nice, industry-approved genres – how the heck do you market something like that? I’m not sure what I respect Will Wright more for… inventing and executing such a crazy idea, or managing to push it through numerous blockades and attempted cancellations to become the best-selling PC game of all time.

(October 6, 2004)


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