Recently we talked about SYNTHETIK and why the judges at Tencent GWB thought so highly of it. If you haven't had a chance to read our thoughts yet, we fully suggest checking out the article here. Continuing with our focus on the game, today we have decided to bring you an interview with Alexander Luck the CEO of Flow Fire Games, the studio behind the game. He was kind enough to spare us his time and talk a little but about key gameplay and design decisions, the future of the game, and about how to balance creative freedom with community feedback.

GWB: Thank you for your time. Let us start by talking about the gameplay, and we asked some similar questions to the Barotrauma team…could you tell me why you guys made the game so hard, even at level 1?

FFG: We made this game for hardcore game lovers. The game is a rogue-lite and it's supposed to be played for 20+ hours. The reload mechanic and other mechanics in the game are to provide a challenge for hardcore shooter fans. People can learn and improve while they play and get a different experience each playthrough. We think they will get a lot of fun from these roguelike elements

GWB: At GWB we have seen a few “hardcore” games recently. Why do you think this style of game has made such a strong comeback?

FFG: In my personal view it was simply a mistake by corporate decision makers to assume the correlation more casual [means] more money. There are audiences for both. The casual audience is likely the bigger one but that doesn't mean there is not one for hardcore games. A lot of the big companies who made games for the more core audience moved into [the] casual territory and left the market open for smaller players. As indies, we are foremost interested in making games that we could actually like, and this is rarely a hyper-casual style.

A strong indicator of a swing back from the corporate scene is the astounding success of the WoW Classic launch a few months ago.

GWB: In some rogue-likes players start from scratch every time, like Spelunky, but in a lot of others the player will be constantly upgrading their character and starting their playthrough stronger than in the previous one. Can you tell us about how you decided on your “rogue-lite” approach for this game? 

FFG: Sure, we chose the rogue-lite formula because it fitted our strengths. We are not really interested in the genre per se, but it fits the strengths and weaknesses that we talked about earlier.  Originally the game was planned to be a classical Top-Down Shooter with a fixed progression/campaign but the Rogue-Lite approach allowed us to get a lot more replay value from the content we made. So, we tried to add exactly as much outgame progression (permanent upgrades) as we felt we could get away with without breaking the rogue-lite formula.

GWB: You mentioned when we spoke previously that you only have 2 developers. Do you think that makes it easier or harder to make a game like this?

FFG: A little easier. [When making a game] You can either assess all your team members competencies and only then decide about the features and content, or you can make the list about the game features and content you want and then recruit team members who bring those skills to the table. This may sound obvious but we often see this not done correctly. We chose the first route. For example, neither of us can do character animations so we found freelancers who made a very basic walking loop and one reload animation.  There are no other animations in the game. Synthetik is a product of what we can do and not what we can't do.

GWB: The game is going to be released soon in the future in mainland China - will there be any specific content for Chinese players? And what is your plan about the game?

FFG:  Yes, the review process will hopefully be concluded very soon and the game can be released. It has been a long journey. We just added some specific weapons to the game that should be well known especially with Chinese players. It feels like the game now finally is in a great place and we feel we got the most out of the underlying technology. 

Of course we still have a lot of ideas for future updates but we want to keep some of those for a successor at some point in the future.

Work on our next game has already begun, it's going to be in a different genre but reuse many of the systems and ideas from Synthetik. We want to take the time to look at everything again and improve where we felt we missed the mark with Synthetik.For example, we have various types of ammunition, not just regular ammo but lasers, ion, acid, etc. 

All of them felt cool, but some did not have a very clear use case from a gameplay perspective so we redid the balancing and made it an update for Synthetik as well. 

GWB: Any advice for small team developing indie games? Especially if they are just starting to develop their first title.

FFG: First of all, no advice is universally applicable, so only implement what makes sense to you. Based on our experience, I would start with what I explained earlier - assess the strength of your team. After that, pick something in a game that you would like to do really well. In our case it was to convey the feeling of shooting a very powerful gun, but it could also be something totally different, like how a character with given character attributes experiences a story arc or what a specific environment feels like.

And then make something fun out of it, with all the features players expect from a game like this. But always stick to your initial vision and play to your teams strength and passions.Once you have something fun you should give yourself some time befor the actual release to gather feedback and reflect on it. 

Most of it will have some kernel of truth to it, but you have to filter the feedback through your vision's lens.

GWB: Regarding getting feedback from fans in your discord – how do you maintain creative control and still keep fans happy?

FFG: You need a very clear vision of what the core idea of your game is about. This is needed right from the beginning where you have to decide which features to add and which to leave out. We have what we call a set of design principles and, if we hear about a new idea, we just need to see if it fits those and if we have time to implement it to know if we are going to use it or not. You need to be aware that at least 90% of these ideas (yours or your community's) do not apply [to your basic guidelines] and you can't be shy to dismiss them.

GWB: Thanks for your time

Conclusion

As we mentioned in the previous article SYNTHETIK is available to buy on Steam right now. We suggest you pick it up, if you haven't already. You can follow game updates and news by following the team's twitter (@FlowFireGames) or their website. It will also be coming to the Chinese mainland, courtesy of a local publisher.