Games
From construction demo to massive online robo-shooter and unlikely Steam success.
Teetering on the edge of the UK’s south coast, Portsmouth is not readily associated with contemporary industries or the formation of bold, futurist ideas. It’s a place of ships and ancient forts, beset by a consistent invasion of fog, rain and wind and with only a fourth tier football team to hang sporting hopes on. In many ways its atmosphere is still defined by the value it held from the British industrial revolution to the Second World War, the history of the city remaining a domineering force over attempts at modernisation.
Yet, appearances can be deceiving. Get beyond the skin and the underbelly of this maritime beast reveals a different reality. A short walk from its harbour-bound train station, through a gentrified shopping district and up an escalator sandwiched between restaurants and coffee houses, is the office of Freejam, an independent game development studio steadily gaining fame due to the success of its online multiplayer shooter Robocraft.
With over 10 million registered players already, the free-to-play title is a legitimate powerhouse within a UK indie games scene that is growing in stature and output with each passing year.
Robocraft’s primary point of differentiation within the cluttered shooter space is the freedom it gives players to build their own robots. You’re free to decide whether your creation walks or drives or flies, what kinds of weapons it has and whether priority should be assigned to size and strength or agility and speed. It’s Lego with minifigs replaced by mechs, the ultimate example of giving players the option to choose how they want to act and play.
Indeed, the game itself was borne from this interest in player-led construction and creativity.
“In some spare time I produced a demo which was quite simple and based on playing around with some components of a physics engine. That involved things like axels, springs, hinges, motors, friction and gravity. With the prototype we were finding that we could build quite interesting machines and fun things.”
This is Mark Simmons, Freejam CEO, Robotcraft game director and physics enthusiast. Simmons’ construction of this early demo came shortly after he was asked to put together a pitch on how he might bring Minecraft from the PC to another platform, the time he spent with the block-mining and building game playing directly into his early inspiration for his physics-based, robot-constructing demo.
Simmons, working with the other four individuals who would eventually go on to found Freejam, work on adding complexity and scale to the physics demo.
“I built a fully-articulated walking dog that was full of hinges and mechanisms and things like that, it was really incredible and complicated,” explains Robocraft art direct Richard Turner, exhibiting more than a minor amount of glee at the memory. “At that point it was quite like a futuristic version of Besieged.”
At this point, getting what you’d built to move and be interactive was a process that required some serious thought on the players’ part and was not something that was likely to find a large audience. However, taking inspiration from Silicon Valley start-ups, the demo was released onto the internet in this rough form and the young Freejam set about improving it in line with both their own ideas and feedback from users.
Aside from making the game easier to use, the other hurdle that had to be overcome was identifying a motive for players to grasp onto. It’s all very well giving players the ability to create a robot that they can control, but what’s the end goal? What are they building the robot to do and achieve?
“In the end we said ‘let’s make it a PvP game where you build something and you fight other people’s robots’,” says Simmons. “Along with that the other big epiphany we had was to simplify the building part. Ultimately, that meant losing some freedom but we did that intentionally to improve usability.”
Simplification came in the form of relaxing the physics rules applied to players’ creations. This allowed people to think more about what they wanted their robots to do and how they wanted them to look as opposed to forcing them to employ degree-level physics knowledge in order to be able to build something that would work as intended.
Fast forward a few years and this basic concept of designing a robot to fight against other user-generated robots is in full swing. The 10 million players have access to a sophisticated suite of building tools, which has seen everything from ingenious original creations to interpretations of Star Wars TIE fighters and giant replicas of Spongebob Squarepants enter the battle, as well as multiple game modes and the option to pay cash for extra construction materials.
What was previously a case of working out how to streamline the original concept into a form acceptable for a mass audience has now morphed into brainstorming about how to diversify the present offering.
“We have loads of features and content coming to Robocraft over the next months and beyond,” says Simmons. “Custom Games for us is the biggest addition in the near term as it allows our players lot more freedom to play the way they want. For instance, players could conduct clan versus clan matches, competitive leagues and more if they are looking to prove their competitive worth.”
Custom Games could also be used for the less serious business of fun and sheer escapism, with Simmons suggesting that the more open framework would allow players to forego battling each other altogether and instead engage in “races around maps, artbot contests or even recording machinima. With Custom Games, Robocraft’s potential as a sandbox becomes much more real and we can’t wait to see what players make of it.”
This kind of open structure would likely lead to a further spike in interest. The machinima angle is perhaps most intriguing, with creative individuals potential attracted to the idea that they can create robot actors that would then go on to be used in the creation of something else entirely. It would expand Robocraft beyond the competitive space and give it a new side that is in keeping with the original demo’s spirit of experimentation and construction as a means of extracting fun in and of itself.
Player base expansion is being considered in other ways, too, including by bringing the entire enterprise to new platforms.
There are no plans for a console release at the moment, but of course we’d love to see that happen one day.
Like any indie developer, we want our game on as many platforms as possible,” explains Simmons. “Controller support is also something our fans have been asking for since Robocraft first appeared on Steam in 2013 and appearing on consoles would be a great excuse to add it!”
Does the desire to appear on multiple platforms translate to Nintendo’s Switch, too?
“The Switch is awesome and the new Zelda has definitely caused lots of our artists to swoon in the office,” exclaims Simmons. “The portability of the Switch is definitely interesting, but seeing as Robocraft is an online game that always requires an active internet connection we don’t look at it as a viable platform for Robocraft at the moment.”
According to Simmons, he has “thousands of new players coming to the game for the very first time every single day” and that a “significant portion” of the 10 million users are “regularly playing Robocraft”. More players are anticipated to join when the game leaves Early Access later this year, the improved visibility of a full release combining with the Steam publicity push that comes with that likely to result in increased interest.
Almost like Portsmouth itself, then, Robocraft started as a base for construction and is steadily become more involved and important as a place for new forms of creativity to flourish.
Given how far Robocraft has come in a relatively short space of time, it’s difficult to predict anything other than further growth into the future. In time, Freejam could play a key role in turning their south coast city hub into a key locale for the increasing influential UK game community.
Robocraft is in Steam Early Access now on PC. For more gaming coverage, be sure to follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
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