Feature: Interview met Positech Games
Door Tom_V op 25-10-2013 om 08:39
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Bron: Gamed
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Eerder deze maand bracht Positech Games de politieke simulator "Democracy 3" op de markt. Toegegeven, het vergt een speciaal soort gamer om zich in de rol van Mark Rutte of Barack Obama te willen wringen. Maar wacht toch nog even met weg klikken...
Gamed: First things first: the main reason we desperatly wanted to do this item about Positech Games is that yours is a one man company. That's something you don't see very often. Can you talk us through your typical working day?
Cliff Harris: Well I used to leap out of bed and work really early, now I tend to start later and work later, but first thing is always dealing with emails, and that's probably an hour of admin each day, I have contractors i talk to, news sites to check, advertising campaigns to manage etc. Then I pretty much work solidly through the day till about 7PM, either coding, testing or debugging. I'll then treat myself to some Eve Online or Battlefield, and I'll keep checking in with email and forum stuff right up until I crash out at the end of the day. I often end up interrupting the day, because I have this weird countryside lifestyle where in the summer I stop to do some archery in the garden, and in the winter I stop to chop some firewood :D Work-wise it's pretty much 7 days a week 365 days a year. I never go a day without checking work email, unless I'm on holiday in a rainforest and there is no internet.
Gamed: You've worked for companies like Lionhead and Maxis and now you're fully independent. What are the pros and cons for you working like this?
C.H.: The big pro is working from home plus creative freedom. Having no boss is just an awesome state of affairs, and it means I get to work on exactly what I like, which is such a great thing to be able to say. The cons are probably stress and worry. You never know when the next paycheck is coming, and you cannot blame anything on anyone else, or hand any tough problem to anyone else. if I have a totally evil nightmare bug the only person who will be fixing it is me, and if I make a really bad design or business decision it's entirely my fault. You never really switch off, so you end up working to some extent 24 hours a day.
Gamed: For some of our readers becoming a game designer is what they are longing for. Any hints and tips for them?
C.H.: It's HARD! People think they can write a design document and that makes a decent game design. It doesn't. No plan survives contact with the enemy. You have to actually MAKE games to be a designer, even if the code and art sucks, you need that 'complete game life-cycle experience'. That's a general tip. Also, I'd say think hard about why each feature is in the game. if you can't think why it's in there, it probably shouldn't be. And make sure you do other things other than game. Read some books, listen to music, travel, learn a foreign language. The best games are made by people who bring influences from outside gaming into their designs.
Gamed: Outside life should indeed be an influence in every job you do. What were your biggest influences that made you the entrepreneur you are today?
C.H.: Oh many and varied, the music of Dream Theater, the movie Pride and Prejudice, Pink Floyd, the work of Iain M Banks, the life story of Duncan Bannatyne, videos of Korean Olympic archers, Sim City, Elite, Churchills war diaries... there are so many inspirations that I have that indirectly end up in my games, and you can't detect any of them openly, but I know when I look at some games out there, that the designer has only ever read Lord Of The Rings and only ever seen sci fi on TV.
Gamed: What we do as a gaming website is provide our readers with the latest news and reviews about the latest and most hyped games. But we also make room for indies and rightfully so, because your games are an example of why independent games should have a place reserved on everyone's hard drive. Kudos 2 for example is a game everyone should give a chance. It's like Sims but without the gibberish moaning. What was your motivation behind the Kudos games?
C.H.: I am a bit of a stereotype geek in that I have attributes that are slightly like sheldon cooper, of Big Bang fame, and I do tend to look at the world around me and my life in general as some sort of strategy game. it just surprised me that nobody had made 'life' as a strategy game. II was disappointed that the sims played as an arcade game, rather than a strategy game, and I wanted to fill that gap and show how the sims could work if it was coded by a startegy game stats-obsessive like me :D
Gamed: A game our readers should also know about is Redshirt, which you are publishing for Mitu Khandaker's The Tiniest Shark. We're not too sure how to describe it but from what we've seen, we'd say Mass Effect meets Facebook. What's your take on the game?
C.H.: I think of it as more like twitter meets star trek, but it's best described as a life-sim/social networking/comedy/RPG/sci-fi strategy game. It's a mashup of all kinds of interesting ideas. I guess what mitu is doing is taking what people like about social networking, and setting it in a very geek-aware and funny sci-fi universe. It's for people who find it amusing to snub their tentacled alien friends for lunch because they are busy exercising on the holo-suite to get that promotion out of the transporter-cleanup department. It's a very cool, and very addictive game, and there is nothing else really like it.
Gamed: You have just released Democracy 3. A game that puts players in the hotseat of their country and lets them take all political decisions. It's kind of like letting everyone put their money where their mouth is. It's one thing to say that you would cut taxes, but it's a whole other thing to see all factors that would be influenced by that tax cut. Why did you make this political gaming series?
C.H.: I like political debate and political argument, but only in the true intellectual and 'pure' sense. These days politics is all tactics and bluster and name-calling and very little debate about the actual issues. We end up hearing about Obama's birth certificate or Mitt Romney's bank balance, neither of which are really relevant to what amounts to a small-state vs big-state debate. I thought it would be good to use a game to give the player a 'sandbox' to play about with political and economic theories without getting distracted by all that name-calling and mud-slinging. It frustrates me that when you engage people in proper political debate, politely, they often turn out to have totally different views to those they claim to hold due to party allegiances. Democracy 3 strips all that 'emotion' away and lets you see how different political policies actually 'work' rather than surrounding them with hype, and I think that's a worthy goal for a game :D
Gamed: Your games do often evolve around stats and figures while a minority in the industry tries to get more emotion involved, like the good folks at Quantic Dream for example. What's your view on the industry's future. What could or should we be expecting in 10 years? Is the mainstream heading for mindblowing photorealistic games or do you think it will be an evolution in a whole different direction?"
C.H.: I'd like to think we could look forward to vast leaps forward in AI, or to have much deeper and more believable interactions with NPC's, but the pessimist in me will predict ever tinier stpes towards photorealism, and a trend towards even more blatant monetization so you end up buying each character in an adventure, and paying to reload your gun in an FPS. Hopefully not!
Gamed: Apart from your games, is there any indie title that you think all of our readers should give a try?
C.H.: It depends heavily on what sort of game you like, but people who enjoy amazing looking retro-ish shooters should really check out puppygames. They make amazing retro shooters with modern effects. 7 Grand Steps is also a game worth looking into.
Gamed: We'll have a look. Thanks for having this interview!
C.H.: Cheers!
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Wapkaak
op 25-10-2013 om 13:14
[Niv: 49 / Exp: 2426]
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Geniale man dus :p
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Louis Tinner
op 27-10-2013 om 01:57
[Niv: 201 / Exp: 10063]
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Cool zo'n interview, en nog een interessante ook nog 
Ik zal die games eens uitchecken en keep up the good work gamed!
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