Chris Delay talks about designing DEFCON: Everybody dies

By Trevor Fehrman . October 27, 2006 . 1:13pm

Trevor: First I’d like to offer congratulations on another excellent title. What was the inspiration for DEFCON? Was there a conscious effort to tap into any collective fears your audience might have with regards to the current political state of the world or is large scale thermonuclear war something that you guys consider perennially interesting?

Chris (lead developer): DEFCON was inspired primarily by Wargames – it’s a great movie and it’s definitely one of those films I loved as a child which probably explains why references to it keep popping up in our game ideas. The hacking theme in our first title, Uplink, was inspired by Wargames and watching it again a little later down the line we realised there were still really good ideas coming from it that as far as we knew had never been attempted before. We wanted to create a game that successfully simulated warfare but which wasn’t too heavily strategic (e.g. turn based and stat heavy). I also loved the whole atmosphere of tension and paranoia, so evocative of the Cold War era and thought, with the kind of games we like to make, that we could do something to really recapture that. Shortly after watching Wargames again I saw an episode of ‘24’ and set myself the challenge of creating a game in 24 hours. DEFCON is the result of that, although it’s since had 12 months of polish J.

Our main concern is to produce exciting and innovative games and if a game happens to be topically relevant then that is an added bonus – the fact that nuclear weaponry is such a major talking point within international politics these days adds a sense of drama to the game, especially considering the whole North Korea incident kicked off within days of the DEFCON launch! You are engaging in actions which could feasibly become a reality and that is quite frightening. Quite a few gamers have commented on the way DEFCON is almost brutal in its bare, understated reporting of the facts behind global warfare. You launch a nuke, it decimates your opponent’s city and all you see is a small pop-up indicating the number of dead in one full sweep. You are entirely removed from the horrific reality of the situation and this is probably not far off from the real-life detachment of nuclear warfare. You simply press a button and the deed is done but you are not there to witness, and in this respect, take responsibility for the heinousness of your actions.

Trevor: One of the most interesting things about Introversion to me has always been your ability to make your limitations work for you. With all of your games the simplicity of the presentation is presumably a result of your limited resources when compared to, say, Ubisoft or EA, but Introversion has consistently made that fact enhance the aesthetic of the game. To what extent, if any, do you guys keep these kinds of ideas in mind when in the conceptual phase of any given title? Do you think other smaller development teams could learn from your example?

Chris: Many of the current key trends in the industry, for example the preference for graphical realism, are not really feasible for a dev team of our size. To give you a sort of reference point, Uplink was made with one person, with both Darwinia and DEFCON, we had one, at most, two people working on the game at any one time. In contrast we visited one of the major publishers recently and they showed us around their development studio, and we met some of their artists. Their job was to model weapons at extremely high resolution, with texture maps, bump maps, normal maps, etc. They told us it took a couple of weeks per weapon, and they had something like 3 armies, each with 4 soldier types, each with 4 weapon types. That’s years and years worth of high-resolution weapon modeling, and that was their job.

Over the past five years we’ve tried to better understand how we can make what could potentially be a drawback into a positive asset, so instead of concentrating on creating huge amounts of time-consuming content we focus on the gameplay experience. We spend a lot of time trying to make our games ambient, trying to capture a mood, whether that is through music or graphical styling. We learnt our lesson the hard way with Darwinia – it was a project that should have taken 18 months and ended up taking 3 years primarily because of the large amount of custom content that we had to generate. What is perhaps most frustrating is that some critics later criticized the game for being too short – it had taken us 3 years to produce a game with 10 levels and even the second demo took us 4 months to make!

With DEFCON we purposely tried to simplify things, concentrating far more on the look and feel of the game and really minimizing the need for content. DEFCON was a wonderful project because it’s almost entirely "content free". The world map continent data is publicly available, the world’s major cities are all well known, the icons are simple, there are no custom level designs or cut-scenes or dialog or anything – it’s just a pure game. The only serious content we are producing is the music.

Making games with unique art styles like Darwinia and DEFCON has a big advantage though; your game instantly stands out from the crowd and can be recognized from a single screenshot. Nobody ever confused Darwinia for any other game. We spent ages experimenting with Darwinia and the retro Tron style was something we hit on quite early – it was relatively easy to create with a small team, it looks incredible and I think the stylised graphics of our games has become one of our trademarks. Some companies spend millions of dollars trying to get that exact effect by making their games extremely realistic – but there’s only so far you can go with that.

Trevor: I noticed there were some network hiccups during the inaugural weeks of DEFCON. Although this isn’t unusual for any company, was it a challenge to move into new multiplayer territory in terms of the technical aspects of development.

Chris: Yes the launch of DEFCON was a little bumpy to say the least! We had had an extremely successful pre-order period, which had far exceeded our expectations – our store really took a beating as we approached the launch because people kept on logging on to find out whether their pre-order keys had been issued yet. The problem is we’d set the launch for 6pm GMT, a lot of people in the UK forgot that we were running on BST so the launch was 7pm in the UK. Of course when 6pm came and went in the UK a lot of people started to wonder where their pre-order keys were, customers kept on checking their key page every 20 secs to see if it had been updated (even though it was still an hour off), so then the store crashed due to a 100x normal usage spike also.

We were also fairly unlucky: our ISP’s Canadian data centre, which hosted our websites lost all internet connectivity as both its primary and secondary fibre-optic uplinks were severed. We were plagued by the slow DNS update problem over the weekend as we tried to deal with parts of our server farm that had hardware faults, and it didn’t help that our ISP dismantled our largest download server on Sunday morning… What a disaster! It’s hard when you’re small – we can’t afford top tier ISPs which can make dealing with load spikes very tricky.

In terms of creating our first multiplayer DEFCON is actually based on the same multiplayer architecture as Darwinia. Although Darwinia is a single player game it’s actually running a multiplayer style server-client system behind the scenes, and it was originally intended to be multiplayer only. Someday we might create Multiwinia, but for now we are using the same system to provide multiplayer to DEFCON.

Trevor: I think DEFCON is an ideal candidate for Steam. Has Introversion’s relationship with Valve been a boon to you? Do you think Steam’s distribution method and philosophy of title selection is going to work in the long run, or will it go the way of other platforms of its ilk like WON and TEN?

Chris: I think in reflection Introversion has been very fortunate – we arrived on the scene at an increasingly opportune time for independents. The introduction of digital distribution has been Introversion’s saviour and I’m sure it will do the same for many other independents. First of all it allows for greater innovation and experimentation, as games make it onto digital distribution which might never have made it into retails due to the greater financial risks involved. Developers can also profit more directly from each unit sold via digital download because you cut out the middlemen such as retailers and distributors thus, requiring fewer sales to make a profit. Darwinia’s initial release on retail last year was disappointing but its launch on Steam last November has made our future prospects much brighter. We sold more copies of Darwinia via Steam in the first three weeks than we’d managed in the whole prior six month period selling copies via retail on our online store.

Trevor: Although this is admittedly about as broad a question as one could ask, what’s your take on the state of independent game making today? What are some of the one’s you’ve been impressed with as of late? How does the independent game community fit into to the gaming community as a whole in your opinion?

Chris: I think the future for independents is looking a lot more optimistic today than it was when we started five years ago for several reasons, not least because of online digital distribution. When we started we called ourselves the Last of the Bedroom Programmers, because we started the business from our bedrooms and we hoped that we weren’t the last of this kind but at that time it seriously felt like we could be. It seems to us that there has been something of a revival of the independent gaming scene over the past couple of years and our win at the IGF was fantastic, we felt that finally we were gaining some recognition not just for ourselves but for independents generally. The major issue for independents will continue to be getting publishers interested – that’s the bottom line and it can be a real struggle to get yourselves noticed and taken seriously. When Darwinia released, we were big enough to self-publish in the UK, but the US market is around ten times larger and we just didn’t have the staff. It took a success story like the Darwinia launch on Steam for publishers to sit up and take notice and we were very happy to team up with Cinemaware Marquee to launch Darwinia in US retail in early July this year.

Even harder is once you’ve obtained a publisher’s interest to maintain your creative freedom and that is something we feel passionate about at Introversion. We own and always will own our IPs.

It’s also a matter of capturing the attention of gamers who might automatically reach for the blockbuster first-person shooters. Although there seems to be an increasing ambivalence, even antipathy, towards the continual release of franchises and sequels, there is still some way to go in encouraging some gamers to try something new.

Trevor: What’s next for Introversion? C’mon, I won’t tell anyone…

Chris: We have a number of new and exciting projects coming up in the next 18 months – for regular news and updates you can check out www.introversion.co.uk. We’ve got a lot of ideas floating around in our heads for new games, that said, cunning observers of Introversion’s past would probably be able to infer roughly what we plan for the fourth game if they thought about it hard enough. J What we now call "The Fourth Game" was actually the game I was developing immediately after Uplink’s launch, and it was being developed side by side with Darwinia at one point. It was then put on hold while Darwinia was finished and released, and it has remained on hold while this little wargame "DEFCON" was finished. It’s been floating around our company for five years now, and it’s had the most thinking time of all our games so far.

Trevor: Thanks for your time. I wish you and everyone else at the studio the best of luck. May you never get vaporized by a hydrogen bomb.