Gadgetory

we're here at space-time studios in Austin Texas to talk to the team behind the Legends series of Android mmo's organ you take a look at what goes into making these games and where the company goes from here arcane legends arcane legends is the fourth in the Legend series of games we started years ago with game called Pocket legends and Pocket Legends did extremely well for spacetime Studios we followed up with a couple of other legends titles refining the kind of gameplay the sort of experience that you could have various features in the game and wound up in a position for arcane legends where we could take the best of everything an extremely fast extremely responsive action-oriented combat system really deep skill trees and an addition of companions and we have pets now in the game that make it an incredible and different experience in arcane legends is our best-in-class mobile MMO it's extremely easy to get into extremely fun to play but has an enormous depth the sort of depth that you would expect from the kinds of games that we make long cycle lots of quests lots of things for you to do player 2 player adventures both cooperatively and against your buddies you know arcane legends really is so far our finest date our finest multiplayer game my finest MMO and by far one of the best mobile games I think anybody's going to play it's a really rich title how long did it take you or the people that you work with it's waste time to decide on arcane legends as the fourth installment for their any other ideas being floated around and it you honed in on archaeology as the chief visionary officer for space-time it's my responsibility to bring products to the fore and in the case of something like arcane legends it felt like a really natural progression for the team I work at a couple of different levels I have partners that founded space-time and together and we work through some of the more difficult creative issues but I have an incredible team of game designers Eli holding the design director Nicholas Johansen for instance they'e the head of content and game systems and these guys really understand these kinds of products and had an idea that we would make the ultimate mobile MMO and that we would take the best part of our combat of the most explosive and interesting aspects of being these characters and then the richness of the quest and content everything else that we've done over three previous mobile hem memos and essentially moosh it all together into something extremely badass there were a number of different products that we thought about along the way and they're all within our wheelhouse the team is extremely good at multiplayer real-time and so there are all kinds of products that really exploited that in our history involves things like spaceships four or five people driving a spaceship spaceship to ground combat and that kind of thing so a lot of that came up and we love racing we love vehicles it's pretty much any time we also love more patient and strategic games too and in the process before we decided that we were committed to arcane legends we did think of a bunch of different other properties but realistically when we compared those and how successful how fun that would be to making really what would be the very best legends kind of game it just arcane legends just stood out over everything else the most fun easily the most accessible game for us but also we knew we would make it extremely extremely fun dark legends came out how long did it or how long did it take for y'all to decide that you were ready for a fourth installment and see along with that how long did it take from deciding on the concept to but actually appearing we moved pretty quickly around here at space-time so the decision to move forward with arcane legends really took about six weeks maybe a month or so so in the process of creating an MMO game in the way that we do it we get towards the end of our development and the game is playable and the game is fun maybe has some issues and we're working out those issues it's very different phase months prior to this like for dark legends which launched early this year we're working very hard just to make sure all the content was in all various game system with all the items and all that kind of stuff but that really starts to tail down quickly prior to the release of the game and we're just doing bug fixes and we're just we're just refining the product so it's in that period that all the creatives within the business here start to say well I'd love to do a game like this or why don't we do racing why don't we go into space and you know how about monsters and all that kind of stuff starts to happen and while that's happening we're finalizing dark legends we're getting ready for it to release on all the various platforms and so we have a few good ideas then and then probably right after dark legends made its debut we started seriously looking at the fourth legends title and looking at what decisions we made around dark legends that that we liked and what we didn't there are things about dark legends in particular that we we've really adored the combat we wanted to do something in a multiplayer context that nobody really done before we wanted to do action-oriented charging skills no auto-locking target no Wight damage loop we wanted it to feel really visceral and from dark legends we succeeded with that we wanted to see that in a magical and evil context where I could be different player classes that you understand but then now doing stuff that's just really different when I'm charging up in order to get various combos from my player skills and my weapons and you know that just that just felt like an awesome opportunity for us there with arcane legends but from that point Chika's puts us in the very early part of this year it took us between I would say about five maybe six months to move from the idea we're gonna do it to all right it's done we've got a lot of stuff in the game it looks a certain way we've got items dropping so on and so forth and yeah that was a significant amount of work but you know the team team knows what they're doing the team knows how to make these kinds of products extremely well so making the basics and the general population the basic AI basic weapons all of that moves very fast from us it was about the distinctive qualities the pet system and how the companions grow with you how the skills and the skill trees work all of the stuff that was a huge improvement on the existing legend stuffs that really took the time but a few months worth of development and we had a functional very fun MMO and we just needed to start adding those features that were gonna make arcane legends distinctly arcane legends when I look at pocket which was the first installment religion series setting wise do you think that there are some similarities and how are they similar how are they different and what did the designers do to make our King legends distinctly different and fresh well we have a style as a studio and that's something that I'm very proud of when we do medieval fantasy we have sort of a a snarky kind of funny look at what medieval fantasy is all about and when we decided to make pocket legends in Pocket Legends is very much what now in the first few days pocket legends was a lot like arcane legends is today it's a lot more serious humans in a world of evil you know humans and the power of goodness in life all kind of stuff but it was pretty pretty quickly in the process we decided that we're gonna go with animals and this sort of its own story with pocket legends and that world though that world is still a medieval fantasy world that's more of a storybook more of a fractured fairy tales and less of a serious and dark fantasy and that's that's something that's just as a studio we do so when we decided we were going to go back to medieval fantasy for our fourth a legends title we knew we needed to do some stuff to freshen head up and so we took a little bit more of a serious approach not to the to the tone but to the way we told the story in Pocket legends the story is told in a pretty haphazard way where it's just the quest dialogue and a handful of cinematics for arcane legends we wanted to treat the story with a lot of respect because we worked very hard in order to create characters that you could understand with motivations that make sense and so we invested really heavily in a cinematic system in conversations in ambient barks and the way in which the world reacts to the players progress to the world and we feel like that's that's um that's a major change of just how the technology and how the design team has decided to how to change the way that the world works but watching what we wanted to do what you wanted to bring the focus back to you know believable story motivations and having evil characters who have their root have dysfunctions that you can understand and that as a hero your opportunities to win the day are pretty clear and that's the way the story begins some of the key differences between arcane legends and pocket legends it just deals with the depth of the story and the kinds of characters that are involved trying to move the world forward one of the things that we from the very GetGo of our Payne legends though is to make the pet companions critical to the story we have this vision where the world in arcane legends is seething with this arcane magic and that magic is available to the player but its availability has a lot to do with the companions in fact the destiny of this entire world is tied up with these pets the kid cat and the dog and the bird and all that they actually have an epic destiny that you're a part of and we're not revealing anything about where that goes but that's really the critical distinction three classes in arcane legends in the warrior the road and the sorcerer what do they bring to the table and how did y'all decide that these were the best food in classes technically from our perspective it's a a classic trilogy so those the the Trinity with the classic Trinity of those three classes makes it fun for us to create content where you know there's monsters that are going to eat a lot of health points so it's important today it's gonna be monsters that are going to have a lot of defense ability that are going to need to be locked down then you need to crowd control that you're going to need to put certain VPS moves on in order to defeat them that's all really fun and keeping it to those three you know making a cord out of the tanking the DPS and support feels like we can make a bunch of different kinds of content that make the player groups really entertained entertain those groups of three and four entertained as one or two as well and you know that's really where all that comes from I know you briefly touched on this earlier in terms of like extra character classes or the destiny of these pets in our colleges but can you can you hint at any other features that you've got planned in arcane legends even if they're just like you know Santa Christmas gay we're working on there are holiday content right now we've got a couple of ideas and I don't know where the team is with that but I think there are a couple of different things that we really enjoy like for instance in in dark legends there's a ghost that pops out sometimes when you're destroying stuff we've got one idea where there's this sort of evil elf that shows up when you swing stuff and maybe he's got some things for you I don't know but it's gonna be fun and that's that's the main thing is that the team is is having a blast coming up with ideas and ultimately the ideas that's gonna make it are the ones that we know are going to be really fun for the people playing it with arcane legends we now see four games in the Legend series pocket star dark and arcane how long before we see the fifth installment in the legend series have internal discussions already started and space time see themselves moving potentially in another direction finding another mind sure like another genre you know whether we want to go back to harbor where with one experience you know something modern or science fiction you know those things are on the table but there's not a lot of urgency surrounding them and I think it has to do with the fact that we're in love with our King right now and unlike the previous game both star and dark were immediately looking at next titles this one I want to hang out with quite a while I'd like to see where the next campaign goes really want to pay off some of the stories stuff that we've built into it and really try to try to make it an epic upon epic experience any last words before we wrap up oh well thank you very much for coming I appreciate you spending the time to talk it's always great to talk about space time I'm really proud that I work here and that's my partners and I've we've gone through a lot and the team that has been here that has put out so much effort and he's given us so much of their time and their talent it's humbling I mean working in independent games from coming from a corporate game reality every day is a it's a reason to be thankful