XCOM Creator Julian Gollop Shares Game Design Tips, Dev Stories and More | The AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook

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Hey everyone, I'm Trent Custers, co -founder and studio director at League of Geeks, and you're listening to The Game Maker's Notebook.

Today, I'm chatting with Julian Golub.

He's a CEO and creative director of Snapshot Games.

But that name may sound familiar.

And if so, it's because he is also a legendary game designer.

That's right, folks.

We're talking to the creator of the original XCOM.

But he has also had an illustrious career spending a number of decades with many other titles in it.

So what do we talk about today?

We dive into his early childhood, hanging out in the arcades the games that impressed him there we talk about playing computer games and tabletop games with his family including the annual board game ritual that his dad had that perhaps led to this entire illustrious game design career we then talk about the company that he founded with his brother Nick and his father Mythos Games that would of course go on to develop XCOM with micro pros as well as a number of other titles we do talk a bit about x -com of course for those of you who are here for that don't worry julian lays out the entire timeline

we dive into design we dive into the actual development of like the world sphere we there's so much there that we talk about uh we even discuss the point of development where the game was cancelled and they had no idea and then we talk about his move to bulgaria where he is now and his time at ubisoft sofia which was an interesting time for julian in his career because it seemed to have a lot of handheld development in it and then we speak about how the kickstarter craze lured him away from ubisoft to again found his own studio this time with partner david k and we speak about chaos reborn its

development we talk about the response to that game and how it actually led to development of something bigger so we talk about scaling up scope and we talk about chip and claws which is their latest game that's coming out soon There's some really interesting stuff that Julian talks to there about constraints, accessibility, rotating IPs who are trying to find the right mix.

His take on when to lean into design conventions and when they can actually be your enemy.

This is a great conversation, folks.

It's a real treat to have him here.

And I just can't wait for you to dive in.

So I'm not going to hold you up any longer.

Without further ado, here's Julian Golub, CEO and Creative Director of Snapshot Games.

Welcome to the Game Maker's Notebook, a podcast featuring a series of in -depth one -on -one conversations between game makers providing a thoughtful, intimate perspective on the business and craft of interactive entertainment.

The Game Maker's Notebook is presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a member -driven organization dedicated to the recognition and advancement of interactive entertainment.

Julian, welcome to The Game Maker's Notebook.

Thank you very much. It's great to be here.

Yeah, it's exciting.

You've had a long storied career and we're going to take it all the way back to the start like we usually do on the podcast. Tell me, Julian, not what was your first video game memory, but what was your first game memory that kind of set your brain alight?

and it might very well be the first as well, but was there one that you can remember like this feeling of games having an impact on you or you might tie all of this wonderful, illustrious and long career that you've had and a life spent with video games back to that as the defining moment that sort of set you on this path?

Oh yeah, that is going back a long way.

But yes, I do remember that I was particularly impressed with the first video game, I guess that I saw and it was one of these little implementations of Pong.

She played with a little sort of twisty paddle -like thing.

It's black and white.

This would have been around 1976, I think, if I remember correctly.

Because 77 was when Pong first went into living rooms, right?

It might have been 77.

Somewhere around that time.

I it's definitely before 1978 put it that way um so because after that I remember you know we used to go to the arcades and you know my favorites there which made a probably a big impression uh were Robotron, Defender, Asteroids um which were in my view very very cool games I think my favorite of those was probably Robotron, I wasn't necessarily very good at them and I didn't actually have enough money to spend on them to get good at them but yeah I was absolutely fascinated especially with the animation graphics, the visual effects, which were all done obviously with very small processor and pixels,

a small amount of colors still impressive what they achieved even to this day And so was this in your early teen years that you were hanging out at the arcade seeing these things go down?

Yeah, so it would have been around 13, 14, I guess.

Yeah, absolutely. And of course your home computers were not a thing at all at that point.

Yeah. A little later we got one of these, again, home consoles which have Pong on them.

It's a binatone thing, sort of console which had sort of Pong and several other variants on it.

Cool. But there you go.

but at that point I was actually more interested in board games, war games and role -playing games.

Right okay is that is that where your journey with making games even like in a hobbyist sense I mean started were you playing making little homebrew games at home or anything or was it just diving in with your friends.

Yeah absolutely in fact I think the first board game that I made was I was around about 11.

it was like a little car racing game and when I made little models of cars with gear sticks in it and the gear you select it gave you a an addition to your dice roll to move but you run the risk of spinning out it's just kind of pretty cool um but yeah i was making games from around that time uh board games my father was actually probably a major influence here because he used to every christmas he would buy a new board game uh we always played car games in particular he was very much into cribbage and uh bridge but we always played a lot of board games at christmas time especially one which kind

of stood out which was a favorite of the entire family which was uh escape from cold it's escape from cold it's i've never heard of it what was the set it up for us what was the board game oh it's a classic uh board game so it's about the famous notorious world war ii german prison at cold it's and you um one player played the the the Germans, the guards, and the other players, could be quite a few players, were trying to cooperate to escape from coldest, escape from the prison.

Incredible. I never heard of this game.

Incredible. A classic you say, yeah.

It is an absolute classic.

Absolutely, yes. Yeah, yeah.

Wow, amazing. And so that was a family favourite of a Sunday evening seeing them breaking out of a German POW camp.

Yep, exactly. I love it.

Amazing. amazing and so this was a central part of your childhood it sounds like games and coming yes yes yes even going back a bit earlier when we're playing chess but even there I I remember trying to invent alternative rules for chess I think I remember one variant where I had to where you had to set up in the corners of the board and we had to change the movement rules for the pawns and everything right that I was doing when I was seven or eight I think so did your father have any homebrew games that he busted out or anything no never doubted the hobbyist uh not really he was he was into the the mainstream

games like i said his favorite ones were probably bridge and cribbage um and the board games again was something he bought for the family like say you buy one new one per year uh at christmas time love it which is cool so when did you you mentioned you know sort of starting off with some board games and tabletop games, but sort of help us chart this kind of teenage Julian standing around the arcades and, you know, playing some role -playing games or whatever.

And then to getting into some development, did you have an eye to study this at school or in college or anything?

When did you sort of find your way to some more serious development?

Well, not really. So when I was at school, I think the first computer that I i acquired was the sinclair zx81 which i bought second hand from a friend in 1982 um and i started to make games on it straight away but my biggest influence even at that point was still mostly the board war games that i was playing particularly from spi the little hex encounters games oh cool um avalon hill it's the other one and there was one particular uh well it was a magazine like strategy tactics um it was a magazine published by spi um called aries magazine which i think first released in 1980 and this was science

fiction themed science fiction and fantasy themed little war games and there was a game in each with each magazine i think they released them monthly um so these things were incredibly influential in my the first games that i was really trying to create um turn -based war games tactics games um games that were influential here were games like sniper which is a world war ii game where you had individual character soldiers that you had to plot the move on a piece of paper simultaneously with your opponents wow uh squad leader is another one um and then some more ambitious fantasy games from spi like

freedom in the galaxy which is essentially a star wars style simulation where you played with uh characters doing missions on planets there was a big sort of galactic army confrontation involved as well so even up to that point when when i first got my computer these were most influential i also have to add dungeons and dragons of course um it's always there somewhere which i played from i don't know 1980 1981 to something we used to play every sunday with my brother and a group of friends right um also very influential in some of my early uh video games so up to that point then i obviously got

my xx81 i actually learned to program on that so i was programming initially in basic it's very limited because it had 1k of memory um i bought a 16k ram pack which i had to basically stick to a big kind of wooden board because any movement in this ram pack would cause the machine to crash wow the dreaded ram pack wobble as it was called um so this one i also learned a little bit of uh assembly language right because basic was very limited on the zx81 it had a z80 processor which is kind of quite advanced in a way for its time um and yeah so i started i did actually make some games for it uh i

didn't really save any of them but you know i can't even remember what they were most of them um just fiddling around at home on it yeah some simple so i try to do little flight sim style thing where you're trying to land an airplane i remember that one yeah i tried to do one which was more of a strategy game simulation in a in a solar system which had planets orbiting the sun stuff like that um but it's very difficult to really do very much in that machine.

I wasn't really able to progress much until I got my next machine, which was the Sinclair Spectrum 48K, which had a massive 48K of memory.

And no wobble, I assume, at that point in time?

No, there was no need for an additional RAM pack there either.

I mean, 48K was a lot.

I mean, it was a very efficiently made machine because you required maybe about 7k for the video memory so you had around 41k of ram to do what you want yeah just to play with right yeah which was like a huge amount to me at the time yeah so you know i i thought i could well i can actually do something more substantial with this one, and I was indeed correct.

So I think the first game that I made for the Spectrum 48k was a game called Nebula, and is kind of like a 4X game, I guess.

Before 4X games were a thing.

You had galactic expansion.

You had to conquer planets, extract resources, resources um deal with threats uh and preview technology um that was almost all programmed actually was entirely programmed in basic by the way interestingly um stuck with the basic yeah well for that yeah so with the 48k spectrum i thought well you know at least i can make a game and basic on this one unlike with the zx81 so yeah it was basic it was it was released and published by redshift so this was a company set up by a group of friends um you're a little older than me um but we had uh so yeah neb bater was published actually i had a couple of other

games published before that which i designed but didn't program because i didn't have my own machine i made a game called time lords which was time travel one loosely based on a doctor who theme yeah game called islandia which was again a little bit of a forex game but this time set at sea with islands and tell us a little bit about the process just quickly of of designing when you say you design those games back there or like what did that mean were you putting together a documentation were you kind of meeting up with these folks and just you know it out or yeah documentation uh yeah no um so actually

with the Time Lords game interestingly it started off as a pencil and paper game yeah right and you required a sort of game master and the game master had a little set of tables by which he constructed the universe uh you have have to roll the dice and it gave you results and you have to fill in the details for like five planets and 15 time zones and then the players can then travel around in time and you tell them game master will tell them what they've encountered and then you might try and influence a war one way or the other so it's a pure pencil and paper game to start with and this is basically

what became the first computer game that i designed uh was implemented again by a school friend of mine on the bbc model b computer this time right okay um so that was how that was done islandia i can't remember the process there i think i probably did create some more documentation for that one but uh yeah so yeah prototyping essentially making them like an analog prototypes yeah yeah yeah and that's something i continue to do actually for quite a while wow Wow, fantastic.

So with my first game that I made for the Spectrum, this was a game called Rebel Star Raiders, which was a two -player only game, interestingly.

And it's a sort of tactical turn -based combat game with a sci -fi setting, which obviously became a sort of running theme with my creations, I guess.

Yeah, I'm noticing that.

Yeah, so that was really cool.

Again, mostly programmed in BASIC and it didn't have an ai so you had to play it with a player with another player right okay um sold reasonably well actually though we didn't get much money from it yeah um at this time for our listeners as well to sort of fill in on this time how are you distributing this are you bagging them up in a little you know with the slips and selling them at a market or are you mailing them out yeah we did so with redshift yeah we used to um they were distributing them to shops you go to these computer fairs as well and sell them there but it was some distribution done

again i wasn't really running the business um i was just making games uh i didn't really quite know exactly how they distributed it but i remember going to some being extracted you know by the man exactly yeah yeah i do remember going to early computer fairs though i mean that was that was very cool and uh yeah literally i remember time lords for example was in a little Ziploc bag with a cardboard insert and a little cassette in there.

And that was it. Yeah, I remember them, how they used to look.

Yep, yep. And so this is, you know, we're talking about a job here.

What, is this literally a job?

Had you finished school at this point?

Are you doing it sort of on the side?

Right, so at the time, yeah, so the time Nebulaire and Rebel Star Raiders were kind of done, I had just left school.

Yeah, okay. And I was taking a year out before going to university at the London School of Economics.

And yeah, I then started, I kind of remember it was just in 1984, beginning of 1984, a game which became Chaos Battle of the Wizards.

And this was based on a board game that I made.

and in the board game you had um uh there was a deck of cards which had your spells on it um you know shuffle those around that we don't allow spells to each player you had a wizard character we had some stats the board was this big sheet of paper with a large grid so when you cast a spell or summoned a creature you literally place the card on the board and then start right moving it around um so this one this was the game that i wanted really wanted to to make uh and it's also the first game that i made using assembly language completely um has some interesting bugs by the way um but it was published

by um games workshop believe it or not um and uh they had just started to produce a few computer games so my friends at redshift had made an adaptation of one of their board games called Apocalypse.

And they actually went on to make a few other adaptations of Games Workshop games, one of which I helped out with, which is called Battle Cars.

I remember doing the car designer module for that.

But actually, yeah, so Chaos is part of the Wizards.

This is mid-'80s, this era, right?

Yeah, we're talking like 1984.

Yes, 1984. I think I finished the game in 1985, and I think Curse was actually published in 1985.

But by that time, I was at college studying for my economics and sociology degree, supposedly.

supposedly um but yeah i don't i think it's i still continue making i remember i was working trying to finish off um chaos um very hard so i can actually go back to attending some of my classes and lectures be a functioning student once again yeah yeah talk to me about um economics and sociology because it's clear that you've been developing games now leading up to this and during it and everything um obviously today folks would naturally probably go into a comp sci degree or something yeah what was it that drew you to economics and sociology i mean i can see the influences of your interest in those

things in your games but what do you mean by college yes uh well i i studied economics at school sociology was something i was interested in probably due to the influence of my mum in particular she also studied sociology and anthropology oh cool uh both subjects are very interesting um so yeah economics was really cool uh yeah politics economics sociology i actually studied several modules at lsc including criminology um but i didn't get very far with that um you know i i also did actually did a computing course as well at least you did it yeah there's one competing course which i thought was was completely

useless to be honest. It didn't teach me anything.

Yeah. I'm sure people weren't shipping their own games in their part time, probably, yeah.

Yeah. Well, the way it was taught is that you, I say that they were using BBC model B micro computers as a kind of dumb terminal to a VAX machine, and the way you had to do your exercises, you had to enter them into like the console, send them off to the Vax machine to compile.

at some point you'll get a result I mean it could be you know many minutes later depending how many people trying to use it and it'll give you some obscure error report you then have to look up the error in a little sort of guide to say oh what error this is yeah then go back to your code fix the errors and then send it off to compile from that is very stupid and very inefficient um yeah and uh you know and they had a perfectly good machine there which is the BBC model b which had a very good implementation of basic and i don't know why they didn't just use that to teach people basic why do you

need to use this vax machine uh this sort of mic big mini computer somewhere wherever it was you know um yeah it was bonkers anyway that was a waste of time um you know but ultimately i was um kind of running out of money um i only had partial state support for my uh you know university studying yeah um so i had the great idea well why don't i just you know make another game so yeah i started working another one while i was in i think my second year at university um so i was kind of going back to the original rebel star raiders theme which is the turn -based tactical sci -fi thing and this is a game

called rebel star um uh it's again was two -player only and i remember taking a demo to um i think it was telecom soft so it was just the publisher set up by british telecom the remains or telecommunications operator yeah um and i said oh this looks great but you know we need to have uh it needs to have a single player mode.

Nobody's going to play this, you know?

I said, oh my goodness, I have to go and work out how to make an AI for this game.

So again, I went back to my college dorm room.

Again, didn't attend any lectures or classes.

People were actually getting worried where I was when I was doing this.

I spent probably about two, three weeks, maybe maximum, figuring out how to implement an AI and proper pathfinding across a large fairly complex map hmm to make this game have a single player mode and I did it and it works and it was not bad do you remember having a Eureka or an aha moment or was it kind of like just this slow rolling snowball effect of putting your brain to the grindstone well i sort of did i remember i had a a big uh very large sheet of square paper which was my map that the game was setting and um uh i basically took that and divided up into rectangles and then i built a table

which says if you want to go from rectangle a to rectangle rectangle b um then you need to head towards this point because i had a very short inefficient short yeah pathfinding could basically just head towards something and maybe navigate around obstacles so if you want to go all the way across the map to this place you must head head first to this spot and when you get which is in the adjacent rectangle once you get to that rectangle again you check the table where you need to get next it's uh yeah it's also a little table area based pathfinding system which was manually entered it's very efficient

very very efficient very quick it's fine I have to do other bits of AI to you know to stop and shoot and enemies they had a little patrolling system so enemies would patrol but yeah so three weeks later that was done took it back to Telecomsoft they said great they published it it's in one of they're very cheap ranges i think it's called uh firebird so this sold for like two pounds wow not very expensive yeah um and i think i was getting something like 10p per copy you know an absolutely atrocious royalty rate but still it sold a lot and i got what i thought was a very large amount of money from it

um and i immediately college age at this point as well right so yeah yeah yeah so wow well a lot of money money it seems like yes so i immediately went out and bought an electric guitar as you do as you do i love it yeah good on you um and i kind of uh i guess at this point um you know my college career was not going well in fact uh even though i you know finished the game i was actually spending a lot of my time at the college bar drinking beer or in some other other place smoking weed or whatever my career college career was not progressing so I kind of flunked most of the exams for my second

year and I thought well okay I should probably think about my career at this point yeah yeah um so uh yeah so I decided to um leave college and try and set up my own company again I was encouraged by a friend of mine um okay back in my hometown of harlow and um graciously my dad decided to put up some money into the company on your dad which is great of him yeah especially after investing in all those board games already which you could say yeah yeah kind of investing in your company as well yeah exactly so it wasn't a lot of money um you know he seemed to think that It didn't actually cost that much

to make computer games, I think.

But he wasn't doing it for free.

I mean, he took a share in the company.

He had like a big share in the company.

So the share was, originally it was my friend and then my brother joined me.

So then it was me and my brother and my father who both had roughly equal shares in this company.

And we actually changed the name of the company as well at that point.

I think we set up a new one called Mythos Games.

games yeah um but anyway so my brother had finished his college degree and he came to work with me he didn't know much about programming at that point either to be honest i had to teach him the basics of um z80 assembly language um but you know he was he was developing with you so you're saying he's actually developing games too didn't come on a business interest or anything like no no no no so the friend i set up the company with originally left then my brother came on board to help the programming development um yeah so i had to teach him the basics of z80 assembly language he learned obviously

very quickly he's very sharp very intelligent um you know he just put his head down and learned it so we made so the next game we made here again is a bit of an evolution again of the the turn -based tactical thing.

Again, it's a bit of a running theme, like I said.

We made Laser Squad, it was called, turn -based tactical game with AI from the get -go this time, and we made it across a whole bunch of machines, actually.

So I was doing the Spectrum version.

My brother Nick was working on the Commodore 64 version, which is a whole new machine that we had to learn.

and i imagine in that time like when you're developing for different platforms i guess you call them now or different different pcs is it from the ground up you're developing or is there just particular things you're doing for that particular environment but the bulk of the work is the same how is it how you approach it well in terms of how we developed it yeah for each one what is our game engine you see yeah it's interesting so uh well the thing about these machines in those days obviously there's no game engine i think we used a few routines in the rom for saving and loading stuff yep okay

um but that was it everything else was hand designed and coded in assembly language there was obviously some my experience working on rebel star and chaos were very good so we had to, you basically have to code everything anything that requires, so printing sprites on the screen or scrolling screen so the big innovation for Laser Squad is, well we had a controller input, I guess one thing we had a little battle preparation where you had to equip the soldiers, it had a scrolling screen, I'd done the scrolling screen in Rebel Star actually Yeah, great.

So yeah, you're building up this little library of routines and functions that you're using.

And we ended up to translate these to the 6502 processor on the Cobra 64, which also had a very different sound chip.

Right. So you are effectively building them up in assembly and then porting them to different PCs.

Yeah. So yeah, from the ground up firstly in Z80 and then porting to 6502.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Um, then we had the Amstrad CPC.

Again, that was a Z80 base, but it had a very different screen format.

So I remember I was working on the, uh, I did a port of Rebel Star for that.

Um, at that point, Amstrad, uh, you know, Alan Sugar made a big move into computers who had already been making these cheap hi -fi things already.

There was an Amstrad home computer.

So they were probably the three biggest home computer formats, the Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC.

The BBC machine was just too expensive for most people.

So then what did we do?

Oh yeah, so we had LaserSquad, so that was released and we published it ourselves.

So we were effectively a publisher.

and yeah right we had to get the box maze the cassettes manufactured and then we had to send these we had to literally do our sales pitch to all of the distributors who distributed the shops we had to ship the games to them they sent to the shops um and we thought we had a really clever idea as well because in our um in our boxes nice manual we had a little coupon at the end which which allowed you to send off for expansions by mail order.

So Laser Squad is decided to divide into scenarios.

I think we're like two tapes in the box and there was like three scenarios.

And the idea is you could send off a coupon, buy a couple of extra missions, extra scenarios for a few pounds.

And we actually did a lot of business that way.

straight to like a mail order yeah yeah like yeah yeah mail order expansions additional content yeah and of course that we obviously bypassed the retail doing that which is cool yeah quite the little enterprise you've got going here i can imagine tell me about the buzz during those days do you remember being like hard work or endlessly tiring or do you remember just being filled with energy and excitement in those early days uh yes can be both as well yes um i yeah were we excited i i guess we were but we actually i mean in terms of business it wasn't great we weren't exactly making a lot of money

and the problem is how do you fund your next project the classic problem yeah exactly at one point we decided we were not that good at marketing so we actually took laser squad to um another publisher and they published it as well uh however they also went bust it didn't help us very much um um i remember we also made we also started doing um 16 -bit programming with the atari st and commodore amiga at that point um which was a lot more work um and it got to the point so we you know, our next game that we did, which is called Lords of Chaos, was a fantasy -themed turn -based game.

Really cool. And we made this for the Cinglo Spectrum and the Color Computer, the Commodore 64, the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga and that was a lot of work.

That was quite hard. Hard in what way?

When you say a lot of work, what was just like the working - yeah.

Three different processes.

And we also adapted the game for the 16 -bit consoles and I was doing all the graphics as well.

As well as - Oh, right.

Okay. Yeah. You're making the sprites and everything, yeah.

Yup. Absolutely. Yeah.

And all the sound effects and everything, yeah.

Yeah. Incredible. Yeah.

And so, is it just still you and your brother developing at this time?

It's just the two of you?

Okay. Wow. And, um, you know, again, uh, because they were published and went bust, um, we were back to square one in terms of financially we had, you know, we had nothing to continue with basically.

Yeah. Um, and I remember at this point I did some very boring computing work for a friend which which paid reasonably well.

While my brother Nick was working on a demo for what we tentatively called Laser Squad 2 with the idea that we would then take this to another publisher.

And we were making the demo on the Atari ST. It was fully assembly language.

It had a nice scrolling map.

And our big innovation with Laser Squad 2 was this three -dimensional space.

Yeah. You know, we had bullets that could not just go left and right.

They could go up and down and we kind of simulated using sprites, this 3D space using isometric graphics, for which I was heavily inspired by an earlier Spectrum 48 game called Night Lore.

Night Lore. Cool name.

I've never heard of it.

Very cool. This was by a company called Ultimate Play the Game, which later became Rare.

Oh wow. Okay. So, yeah, some of my inspiration for...

So in the early days of the Sinclair Spectrum, Rare, or Ultimate Play the Gamers were known, had a big reputation doing very technically advanced games.

And there's a whole bunch of those which I was very impressed with.

Night Lore, Attic Attack, Trans Am.

I think I bought quite a few of their games and they were technically really advanced and also really good games.

Oh, yeah, and I guess the legacy continued into Rare as well.

Yes, because as you know, they became a legendary game developer.

Very much so. But in their early days, they were, you know, they were way ahead of the pack still.

You know, it's quite obvious they had serious talent.

But anyway, Night Law was an isometric puzzle game.

Very cool. Again, they had a three -dimensional model of the actual world.

So in Laser Squad 2, we did this.

We had elevation. We had multiple levels of the game rather than just a two -dimensional grid.

So cool. So the next thing we had to do is decide which publisher were we going to take this demo to, and we had a short list. Top of our list was Microprose for very obvious reasons that we were big fans of Microprose games, and particularly my brother Nick was highly addicted to Civilization, Master of Orion, Master of Magic.

and you know i remember during the day that we were you know we were working on laws of chaos and um you know get to lunchtime nick would start playing one of these games and when i start playing one of my pros games and maybe we would forget about getting back to work sometimes the afternoon just one more turn as they say right exactly exactly so i mean in our opinion and micro pros were you know the best of the best and we thought there's very little chance that they would publish our tiny little game which is called Laser Squad 2 but you know they were still top of our list for companies to

approach so we contacted their UK office which is based in Chipping Sodbury in the west of England and yes they arranged a meeting went over to show it to them and they were kind of impressed.

So there was a guy there called Steve Hand who, fortunately for us, was a big fan of Laser Squad.

Oh, great. Because apparently the others there were somewhat skeptical of this game, but he insisted that we try and publish our game.

So we went then for our next meeting and they handed us a bit of an interesting challenge.

They said, look, we like the game, but We need it to be more like civilization.

You know, we want a tech tree, for example.

We want some kind of progression system.

We want, you know, multiple missions.

And the other thing is the theme is we wanted it more Earth -based.

This is their thing.

They said, look, it's more relatable if it's Earth -based.

So the theme they came up with was UFOs.

and this was actually based on Gerry Anderson's TV series called UFO which I was familiar with, though I hadn't seen much of it Did they have the license, or was it just based on it?

No, just based on the concept, yeah and the main thing they kept saying to us, we need this to be a bigger game, this needs to be as big as Civilization and I thought, oh my goodness me we're supposed to do this yeah um so that was an interesting challenge but i thought it was you know what they did was really great um you know both people on there who was responsible ultimately for commissioning the game and steve hand were really instrumental in um getting uh the game uh approved and contracted so we went away um I did some research. Obviously, I watched a few episodes of UFO.

And for the game, which ultimately became XCOM, although it was initially titled UFO Enemy Unknown.

So the things we took from the TV series was the concept of the organization.

The TV series is called Shadow.

And what they did was they tried to intercept UFOs coming down to Earth.

First, they had moon -based interceptors.

interceptors then they had aircraft baiting interceptors and if the ufo managed to make it all the way to the ground they had these ground -based interceptors which they sent out to try and get the aliens before they did any mischief yeah so we of course used this concept in in xcom uh not with the moon based interceptors but we had this air -based interception system the idea being that ideally you want to shoot the ufo down so it crashes so that you can then send your team into the excavation, into the crash site, and, you know, get what you can from it.

So that was cool. The other inspiration was actually a book, which was called Alien Liaison by Timothy Goode.

And this is based on the UFO sort of conspiracy theory, lore and stuff.

There's a couple of things in there which were really cool.

There was a story by a guy called Bob Lazar who claimed to work at Area 51, one yeah working on where they're supposedly captured and we're trying to reverse engineer um you know alien spacecraft um and this was absolutely a concept that we had in the game that yes you would try and capture their technology you would try and reverse engineer it and then build your own stuff based on their technology as your tech progression that they're looking for right exactly yeah and of course capturing live aliens was also part of it as well yeah so um the other thing that we did was because they said earth

-based this is another innovation was that we we had this uh we called we called the geoscape a big innovation so you had this view of the earth which you could rotate and zoom in on um which is really cool and this was programmed by nick um he did an amazing job programming this by the way because it's you know genuine 3d programming which wasn't very common in those days we're talking 1991 1991 by the way yeah um you know he had to he had to do his little triangle rendering routines and um you know 3d geometry on a sphere all that kind of stuff yeah i remember how impressive it was at the time

like shout out nick because it was blue people's mind seeing it when that screen would load up yeah absolutely and my job in this case was i had to i went and bought a you know know a big atlas and uh of the world and i basically had to draw all over this little triangles to try and you know create a map of triangles for the for a world and then i had to i had to extract the polar coordinates from the atlas and then feed them into a type them into a little data file to build up the actual map of the globe wow um so all these elements were coming into place uh of course we had the the core foundation was still

you know laser squad two with its three -dimensional isometric graphic system which was really cool um another innovation we added to that was the the sort of light and darkness stuff because we had you know had we had a massive 256 colors to play with which was amazing uh on the vga graphics card and what we did there was we divided all those colors up into gradients of 16.

And to create light and darkness, we would basically add and subtract color values for each pixel as we displayed those.

Oh, from the gradients that you set up.

Yeah, basically within that gradient of 16 colors.

So we had the light and darkness there.

Obviously, enemies lurking in the darkness became a major sort of thematic part of XCOM as well.

Yeah, so that's how XCOM initially came together and Microprose became our publisher.

And so you had this meeting with them, they've handed you these very publisher -centric kind of requests, but also quite astute.

Yeah, absolutely. They set you off in this fantastic direction and had you created this historical seminal classic.

Yeah. Tell us about that period.

What was kind of the arrangement at this time?

Were they saying, we will fund it, but these are the things that we need, and you went off and did that after you received the funding?

Or were they like, come back to us once you've done these things, and then we can proceed with the deal?

Yeah. So, yeah, they were funding it.

I mean, we said, look, we need money to fund this fella.

And he says, well, okay, we'll sign a contract with you.

And it was like an 18 -month contract, and we were paid a small amount of money per month with a royalty of around 50 % or whatever.

yeah um so yeah there were a couple yeah the issue with that was that you know we got to the end of 18 months we hadn't finished the game obviously familiar story yeah and uh you know they said well look you know don't worry about this it looks promising let's keep going um so we just continued working on it and i remember our producer was was pretty relaxed he would come and visitors in harlow we go to the pub have a drink uh we give him a a floppy disk with the latest version to take away with him and that was sort of it really um no alien interventions yeah no we had a there were a couple of artists

um based at microprose and chipping soldiery who were working on the project too um like actually on the game itself or on yeah so okay cool on the game on the game so one of them was doing the character sprites and a little animations that required which was quite complex so it had various body parts and stuff um and one guy who was doing the environment graphics and that was it and then it was me and nick doing all the coding so it's essentially a team of four for most of the most of the production uh later on we brought in you know um john broomhole doing the music um guy called andy was doing

the sound effects and sound system coding the sound system coding was pretty horrendous in those days because you had to support multiple sound cards and micropros had their own system which we used um and obviously then the microprose qa team also got involved it was four of them working on it i remember andy like it here was the head of qa at the time so um but it wasn't a large team and we were making it was such an ambitious game you know and when i said to us yeah you make a big game as big as civilization i thought well how the hell just two of us supposed to do this okay boss yeah right

um and so tell me about the game coming together at the end do you remember it was hard to sort of was it hard to put it in a box at the end or did it kind of just oh yes conclusion okay right yeah it was yeah yeah we haven't got to the horror part of the story yet no um you know there were times when the game was nearly cancelled and the the point at which was actually it was cancelled and we didn't know about it at the time but um microprose were um in a bit of financial difficulty one of the original founders bill steely had left they sold a company to spectrum holobyte who specialized mainly

in flight sims by the way okay right uh and they obviously reviewed all of microprocess projects they looked at uh xcom and said what is this crap you've got to cancel this project this money pit over here yeah yeah i mean microprocess uk um i mean pete mall into his credit sort of just said okay to spectrum from holobite but he didn't actually cancel the project he didn't tell us by the way we didn't know anything about this we were blissfully ignorant so um there came a point where um spectrum holobite also wanted to have more releases from microprose uk to for their end of financial quarter

which i think was like march 1994 um what have you got you know And Pete Mullen said, well, you know that game that you said to cancel?

Well, we still got it.

If you want it, we can get this ready for the end of the financial quarter.

And I said, yeah, okay.

But the bad news from our point of view is that the game was really not ready.

It was not in a good shape.

So MicroPro said to us, well, look, you've got to come and work on site with us in Chipping Sobri.

so me and nick shipped off to chipping sorry we stayed in some bed and breakfast and you know every morning we go into microprose office uh early in the morning and we stay there till last thing at night uh seven days a week it was like major crunch period yeah grueling and we probably spent two maybe three months maybe possibly wow doing that just to try and get the game ready for release in the in the time that my pros are committed to spectrum hollow bite doing uh which we did we managed to do it in the end incredible and the yeah the game was published and um you know there you go so it happened

yeah it happens all odds it actually happened i love that moment of him pete coming to you and saying okay so the game was cancelled not cancelled anymore more but also yeah that must have been an interesting conversation yeah he didn't he didn't tell us this until sometime after the game was published yeah smart man um so you know anyway i guess it all worked out in the end now obviously we you know everyone knows of the legacy of xcom and it's hailed as i think ign called it the greatest pc game of all time time it's an absolutely incredible Legacy but tell me about those moments when it first

did release you know back in 1994 for that quarter was the response immediate you know like because obviously game development was done in those days too you're not doing live support or anything like that like tell me about how how it felt after it went out the door and what that process was of seeing it yeah so um you know initially we didn't think that the game was going to be a big success because it was so different to anything else and there's so many new things in it which nobody had ever played before i know it was kind of just very unusual um and uh the first sign that things were you

know taking off was again there was no there's no worldwide web available at the time um well not to most people anyway um so we had something called CompuServe which was like a um sort of online service they had a games channel there um moderated sort of uh games forums and it was like game of the month it was getting a lot of lot of attention on CompuServe that's really the first time that we noticed that things were going well because Microprose weren't saying anything to us about yeah how sales were going or anything Right all right so you you and Nick are trying to figure this out in the dark.

Yeah yeah we were trying to you know because we'd finished work on it, they stopped funding development, and we had no money.

So it was existential to you how well this game was doing as of the utmost importance.

Yeah yeah so we were pretty anxious about it and we were trying to get Microprose to commit to a new project.

you know maybe something which wasn't uh not a sequel to exegon but something different so it's not really until we got our first royalty check and this is many months after the game was released that we realized that actually you know the sales report that we got was was pretty substantial yeah i can imagine um which was did they say anything to you when they gave it to you or did it kind of just arrive and then you're looking at it and going like oh no they didn't really say anything um i'm not quite sure what's going on there i mean there were as it as it turns out there there were some issues

in the contract relating to the rights to the game and particularly the rights to the name x -com interesting um they actually then we actually pitched a bunch of different projects to them but they they actually said well we want a sequel yeah naturally i can can imagine um and i said well okay but you've got to make it in six months and i said well we can't we can't do anything meaningful in six months yeah yeah we probably could employ people to help us you know we had uh they would probably fund the development again but we said we just said flat out it's not possible really to do something

meaningful in six months so they said well okay why don't we do the next sequel in -house here at micropose and you can then work on a third game which became x -com apocalypse and the direct sequel became x -com terror from the deep and this game which they said we had to do in six months was actually made in -house at micropose by a team of around 12 people and it took a year not six months right so vindication but yeah so they they licensed our code um code base so you know we're still getting royalties from this which is great yeah um so yeah so we we uh we did xcom apocalypse which again was a very

complex ambitious game which i probably regret doing but there you go well let's actually talk about some some regrets or some things like looking looking back on XCOM and the series and stuff, because it's obviously gone on to not just be a seminal classic, but then also obviously spark Firaxis' series of XCOM games, which are also much beloved.

Jake Solomon and his crew obviously did incredible work there.

Now, but if you could, thinking about the game, was there anything that you, even after all of these years, you're like, ooh, I would have done that differently.

I wish I could have changed that or we put too much into this or does it kind of in your eyes, does it seem like a perfect project?

How do you feel about it looking back on it, even though it is so beloved?

It was, yeah, it was kind of a perfect project in a way because we basically did this without hardly any interference, shall we say.

Yeah. At the beginning, you know, there was some good feedback from Microprose on the art and some of the alien designs and we just incorporated that and then we just made the game and it was like beginning to end.

And we just got on with it, which is great.

So, that's something that's never happened since.

So, yeah, in a way, it kind of was that ideal situation where we were such a small team working under the radar, again, because in the later stage, it was officially cancelled anyway, and we were just left to get on with it.

At the very final moment, they said, you know, that when the crunch period happened, it was all focused on getting the game finished and they were they were all about supporting that which is great so right um to just make it as smooth as possible yeah yeah we had such minimal interference on everything we're doing the way the game looked the way it designed the way it played it was a hundred percent down to us um never experienced that again since yeah it's incredible what can happen when you just trust the creatives to do their work and give them the resources and support that they need right

um yeah yeah although it's only just about enough resources to live on in this case but all right that's the other that's the missing ingredient you got to keep them hungry yeah yeah yeah the way it was kind of worked in that sense you know it was uh so yeah it was great it would have done things different i probably would have asked for more money so we could have got some more support in terms of the you know you could have the game project could have been done quicker for sure yeah but you know it's just me and nick coding it i mean it took what we thought was an extraordinary long time to

make it around about two and a half years yeah right yeah if we thought was right yeah that was a long time for development back in the you know back then yes yes now another interesting thing about xcom and the legacy that it's gone on to have from a design perspective too in the turn -based sort of genre and stuff like that is is it very much seems like you and then Nick, obviously, once you started making games together, but there's a long, you pointed out yourself, a pattern or a sort of a line from your childhood playing games together.

Obviously, Nick's there playing board games, right, too.

Then heading towards this, what do you think were some of the design principles that contributed to XCOM in your mind being so impressive and just impacting people so intensely when it came out.

Because it does seem like you were moving towards this.

This doesn't feel like a fluke once you look at your ludology, like the games that you've created and that you and Nick were making.

This seemed like the next iteration with a bit of a push from MicroProse.

Yeah, what really contributed it?

so for sure i uh there's definitely a bit of an rpg influence in in there and again which wasn't common in turn -based tactical games so i in particular with the your soldiers and your recruits that you had in the game these little rookies which were like cannon fodder but you know they they developed and they got better and then they they become very precious to you.

And if you lost them, you'd...

So this became a very important feature of the game for many people.

So it had that sort of role -playing element and people would name these characters after their friends or their whatever favourite characters.

It is very much like a squad nurturing simulation as much as anything.

Other influences were trying to get the sense of the unknown.

The fact the enemies were hidden or in darkness there's you know influences especially my favorite film you know at the time was Alien and the sequel Aliens for example there was also that influence from some of the board games I played I love this idea of the the meta game and the tactical game which I tried to incorporate elements of this from what I played in in games like Freedom in in the galaxy where you would have the character level, the galaxy level, different levels in the game.

Something I really wanted to get across.

You were actually a commander of an organization which is responsible for looking after the entire world.

Yeah, so you needed to represent that scale, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was the origin of our attempt to, yeah, let's put the world in the game.

the world is a main feature of the game.

So yeah, those are all the, I guess the influences I think contributed to making it something really interesting and unique.

Yeah. It's definitely mirrored, I think by what people say about the game as well.

I mean, we've got other games and other parts of your career to talk about.

So you went on Mythos.

I think you wrapped up Mythos in around 2001, if I'm correct.

And then founded in kodos in kodo yep and we did um oh actually we did a couple of games there so we did laser squads again back to me and networking um yeah we uh uh we made laser squad nemesis which is a online two -player tactical game which is very cool we run that for a while uh we made a a tombstone tactical game for nemco bandai called rebel star tactical command on the gameboy advance Arts I was very fond of Nintendo handheld consoles and still remain so great yeah yeah yeah yeah I just got my just got my switch to actually yesterday oh fantastic congratulations launch day I worked at a studio

called Taurus Games and Taurus came to fruition or not fruition I should say sort of prominence by just being able to churn out Game Boy Advance games they created this proprietary tech they had this mad otsman who was this incredible programmer called bill mcintosh was the ceo and um him and the tools team they just were incredibly insightful about their engines and their tools and by the time these handheld nintendo consoles rolled around it was just their heyday and they made dozens of them for the advance it was really their era it's just such a such a delightful platform to develop for yeah

i i really liked it i mean it was very heavily inspired by i well very pleased by games like um advance wars particular and fire emblem you know his turn -based games could have life on such a console because you have to remember in the pc game space uh late 90s early 2000s everything was dominated by real -time strategy games you know everybody's saying turn -based games are dead and you know i i found this lovely little game on the game boy advance called advance wars which was fantastic very accessible and fun game to play but still you know at its heart a pretty hardcore turn -based war game and very

cool um and you actually spent a quite a chunk of your career there developing handheld strategy games as well right yeah well especially when i started working at ubisoft I mean, Ubisoft and Sophia here in Bulgaria, we were working on particularly titles for the Nintendo DS.

Actually, the first title they asked me to work on, because I applied to work for them as a game designer.

And the first project they gave me was chess, which I thought was very bizarre, because I thought that the game of chess had actually already been designed.

I went and said game designer.

But what we did was we created a really cool series of mini games based on chess rules, which were cool games in real life, but taught chess rules and maneuvers and stuff.

So, yeah, we did interesting at Ubisoft. Again, I worked on a bunch of titles which were not very interesting.

But just to stop for a moment on that chess, that chess title was Chess Master as well, right?

Yes. a version of chess master which is the most beloved specifically josh waiskin's chess master yes tell me about working with a game like you know you've gone from you developing x -com with you know the rails completely off and now you're given chess as you say a complete zero -sum game essentially right like finished how do you what do you how do you approach that as a designer you said mini games well yeah it was kind of difficult because the the remit that we were given is is it must be it must be like a brain training game that improves your brain and we have to measure how it improves your

brain as well because brain training was all all the craze and um so ubisoft were very much wanted to do their kind of own versions of brain training and somebody they had the bright idea well if we match chess with brain training uh it's bound to be amazingly successful so we had to invent some kind of brain score system for completing all these little mini games and stuff right um which is a bit silly looking back on it but nonetheless it was it was kind of fun little project i guess yeah none of us escape the uh the crazes when they find their way through right i remember there was a i worked

for this incredibly talented gentleman at one point who had done everything in the industry had been an executive and a qa guy and like a designer and a producer and um just one of these people that just have so much experience in a range of different places and he was telling me about i can't remember if it was ea or ubisoft or something where he was working but um they had made a pets game and they had made a fashion game and they were saying like that one of the execs was coming down to the dev floor and they're like oh if we have to make another pets or another fashion game game i'm gonna quit

and he came to the floor and he's like we've got the next big thing folks it's pets fashion and it was like i just quit that day that was it i had enough but it was the perfect of just matching the two yes so it comes for us all well you know we all have to pay our penance every now and then to design these video games yeah yeah i mean it's interesting working for ubisoft because it's yeah i've never you know i've never had a job in my life you know always been self -employed yeah I never worked for anyone else up to this point I mean ever up until this point that I applied for this job at Ubisoft

I do remember I did apply for a job with Virgin Games at once though I applied as a an artist I think bizarrely rather than the game designer because I didn't think game designers actually existed as a job the jury was out at that point yeah so I didn't get that job but anyway um yeah so it's very interesting seeing working for for ubisoft especially an organization as large as ubisoft um you know about how much resources they put into projects which ultimately go nowhere and they're often explorations somebody has some marketing angle for but has no idea how to implement or somebody wants to

implement something which is has no marketing basis what's it's kind of very it He seemed like for an organization so large, it seemed quite hit and miss in many respects.

But of course, you normally don't get to see that.

You don't get to know about even all the projects that were canceled.

Nobody talks about them.

And I certainly worked on my fair share of those.

Only a few people are told where the bodies are buried, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, to get to a point where I remember I pitched to the editorial team at Ubisoft a game which was basically, I was basically taking an IP and we took one of the Tom Clancy's IPs Ghost Recon.

Ghost Recon meets XCOM but for the Nintendo DS was the basic elevator pitch. Great concept, yeah.

Which they really liked and I said, yeah, go for it.

And we started working in this game.

It was again quite a troubled development, because at one point we had to switch from Nintendo DS development to 3DS, which was of course Nintendo's new console, which is tip -top secret at the time.

And I said, you must be a launch title for the 3DS, so we had this really hard deadline.

And even our initial sort of prototype that we showed to the Ubisoft editorial team at what they call their first publisher playable meeting, which is basically they had the sort of kickoff green light meeting for the project they said that what we produced then was rubbish you had to go away and redo it but um uh well they did have a point i mean what they were saying was well you need to make it more like um advanced wars because that's what people expect on the ds and i said well all right fair comment so we sort of reverse engineered the the Advance Wars kind of UI system, their control system.

We then obviously tweaked it and modified it, and this became Ghost Recon Shadow Wars, which we did manage to get done for the launch of the Nintendo 3DS and was actually a pretty good turn -based game, believe it or not.

Yeah, I'm looking at it now.

It looks fantastic.

I love the art style, the art directions.

Incredible, really cool.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the art director in that, Bobby, works with me here at Snapshot Games to this day as an art director here.

Yeah, yeah. Very cool.

Well, what a perfect segue.

So now let's talk about Snapshot Games because I think it was around 2013 that Snapshot came about.

Tell me about how that happened and then, you know, your first kind of foray into the world, if I'm correct, was via Chaos and Kickstarter, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, this was the beginning of the Kickstarter revolution.

evolution and you know i i'd heard about and read about double fine adventure which was you know the big notable kickstarter success for you know tim schafer and double fine games and i thought well maybe i could do this if i was gonna sort of bootstrap a company this seems like the ideal way to do it yeah slingshot you know off the back of this kickstarter stuff yeah so um i took the plunge and left um ubisoft and started to figure out how to you know what project i should work on um it was a bit of a risk obviously you know i um i had two young children um one year old at the time i was leaving

a secure job uh to become an entrepreneur again you know with an uncertain future um but what can you do i'm just an addict um so it's uh so i settled on on doing a remake of the original chaos because i thought well that would at least reach an audience because people still remember the game and that became our first kickstarter project chaos reborn which was the turn -based wizard fighting combat game um and uh together with my business partner who was david k from the us he helped me set stuff up um we set up snapshot games um and here in sofia in bulgaria i had you know bobby from ubisoft um

got a programmer guy in sergey who was still our cto to this day started with a very small team and um uh had a successful kickstarter campaign um and it was it was still a little bit touch and go um it's still not easy to uh get noticed and get an audience but we managed to just about get our cow funding goal um and it was kind of a good time for doing you know the indie scene was was getting big yeah um actually remember actually your game aramella was also doing yes similar time right about same at a similar time because i remember it very distinctly also very successful kickstarter yeah yeah

we had the same idea as you yeah so we'd actually been tinkering for a little bit on it and we were waiting we were trying to find a way to do it but it hadn't launched in australia you had to launch like an american an llc yes exactly yes around the time that you did it it had opened up in australia as well and so we're like oh so that's what prompted yeah yeah yeah i mean it was yeah it's a great time and of course steam was also opening up because yes they were also very close they they had they had a new system where you could um you know get votes from the public to get your game on steve's

steam green light exactly yes so that was came out after roughly the same time and this is these two things alone i think really gave a huge boost to the to the indie scene um so yeah fortunate to be the right place at the right time for that one so you got your money you're you're often running with a team um give us a little snapshot of chaos reborn's development you know because it did actually set up the foundations for the studio as you're saying that's gone on to develop phoenix point and now obviously chips and claws is coming coming out yeah it did so um again probably a bit too ambitious

we had a whole online mode we had a little um sort of venture creation system we had user generated content it's quite quite big and adventurous um it was still a little bit probably too multiplayer focused because a single player experience it wasn't that brilliant right but you know um as a multiplayer game it's still still Still great, by the way.

It's still really good.

There were some controversial aspects in terms of the way randomness is used in the game because a lot of video game players do not like randomness.

We run amok of that one as well.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, board game players, D &D players, role playing game players are absolutely used to it and fine with it.

But any element of randomness you get, a certain portion of the player base are extremely negative towards it.

um and it's kind of an interesting piece of psychology how that that works it really is even the difference i know soren johnson has spoken a lot about input randomness versus output randomness as well it's like when when it's affecting you and when it's benefiting you and yeah we learned i think we waded into because we were just like we love tabletop games and we're going to bring them to life and we were that crowd that you were that you mentioned that we're fine with it and so we were very surprised when we encountered that that community yeah where not interesting not okay with it but we're

like a mortal crime had been committed against them in the name of video games you know yeah yeah yeah and of course obviously our mellow is is is like it is a board game which is implemented in a computer very beautiful looking game yeah but still you can see you know it is essentially a board game design at heart yeah um we probably we prototyped the whole thing on paper for months that's how it's done there you go there you go yeah it is interesting that um so yeah that was an issue we actually made a version of the game which had reduced um uh randomness in it but we probably should have done

something to compromise that initially as well it's kind of like it's very you know something that you learn after the after the after the event i guess in some ways yeah um but you know there you go um so yeah that was i say moderately successful for us and getting into our next game um i know david in particular was keen that we do something more ambitious and he wanted to do let's you know let's revive xcom in some way and this is how we came up phoenix point um and again we did another crowdfunding campaign for this although on a different platform called fig uh the interesting thing about this platform

is that people could also invest in the game by buying a share in the profits of the game which is a very interesting idea uh it kind of worked out quite well for us because we sold all of our shares so to speak in the game so it raised some extra cash um but it was a very wildly ambitious project um and we had to build the studio on the basis of this as well ultimately we again the usual problem ran out of money so we managed to get some good deals again being in the right place at the right time we actually got a deal for game pass with Microsoft and a deal with Epic Games to have a one -year

exclusive on their brand new platform right which helped us get to the finishing line although that was quite controversial at the time because the the initial launch of the epic game store was uh somewhat surrounded in controversy and accusations of chinese spyware and all the rest of it yeah wild times yeah i remember a dev team who will remain unnamed um calling me an indie team small indie team and they had been offered epic exclusivity for millions of dollars and they called me and they asked whether they should do it because you know I'd spoken to them and you know I'm offering Indy's advice

on random stuff every now and then I don't know why but they some of them come to me and I was and they were concerned particularly about this controversy yeah and I was just like the controversy will go away but it will take much longer for that money to leave your bank account so say yes to the deal and they're like okay yeah we needed to hear that yeah yeah sound advice so yeah I mean in reality I mean Steam had become so dominant it is at least good that there is some challenge to this you know and in you know epic game game store you know even if you didn't take an exclusive deal was at least

offering a better deal to to uh small developers um so no competition is needed it's not i mean people obviously were that the old conspiracy theories were were rife um yeah it's good there's not much you can do to you can't really really argue against it is just as you say it will die away over time yeah absolutely so you you've gotten it to the finish line um i imagine a battle hard one and then you release the game how does it how does it perform what's the how do you how you yeah so we released it um it was a bit of a buggy mess to be honest um it really needed a lot of fixes uh we did fix

a bunch of stuff for the steam release which came a year later um but the problem is that we'd already committed to working on a lot of dlc and you know the dlc took priority rather than fixing the game which is probably something that i regret because in reality we we needed to fix the fundamentals before uh working all these dlcs uh which ultimately there were at least five of them that we made um but still even though the reception was somewhat mixed from players you know people loved the tactical combat system but the actual progression through the game was not great especially in the later

stages um but despite all that it was very profitable for us very successful um and to the extent that you know we um gained the attention of Embracer at that point you know And we sold the company to Embracer, which we saw as a way to somewhat securing the future of the studio, because when you're responsible for nearly 60 people, it's a lot different than just me and Nick working together, for example.

I can endure poverty every now and again, but it's not something you can willingly inflict on other people, unfortunately.

I know, there's a very unique experience that comes with being a founder that scales as a company, which is the shock and amazement that you have at how much the monthly or even fortnightly burn rate goes up seemingly exponentially.

You're like, just, well that's, you know, I would get the pay run from our finance manager.

And you're like, I'm seeing everything that's going out of the company, but that is, that's, and she's like, yeah, that's what it's setting up to.

I'm like, wow. Okay.

That's how burn rate.

All right. Yep. Yep.

I noticed, you know, you know, the difficulty of game development is the fact that projects have very different requirements at different stages you know you normally don't want a big team for a lot of the time developing actually then you want everybody to like coming you don't have it's very difficult to ramp up ramp down projects um um while still maintaining the same roughly the same size like studio i mean it's incredibly difficult to manage um so yeah there's that point where you're going beyond just indie where it becomes becomes actually quite a bit more difficult yeah absolutely especially

as you know you're saying um David and your your team's priority with this one was to be more ambitious right it's to like push that push that scope push that quality level yeah they're each that next stage it's everything comes along with that right yep yep so you've um you've sold to Embracer you've you've now got the ability to continue on you've secured the stability of the studio yeah uh you're Is this when development of Chips and Claws begins?

Well, that began actually quite a few years ago because initially it was, again, just a prototype.

So, yeah, my friend Dean, Dean Calver, is working on this.

He actually worked with me back at Mythos Games in 2000.

But, yes, he actually joined us.

We were working on a prototype for this in 2020, which we left for a while.

Originally, the prototype was initially to explore what we could do with the Unreal Engine because up to that point, we've been working in Unity exclusively.

We came back to it.

Embracer said, yeah, the game's interesting, but you need to find an IP.

You've got to use an IP for this.

And we explored multiple IPs.

We did several different versions of the game, different skins, different characters and everything.

Then ultimately came back to Saber Interactive then, who was our immediate boss in the overall structure.

Yeah, right. So I said, well, OK, let's just get it to release and do your own IP.

So the fourth version of the game is actually what Chip and Claws currently is.

And yeah, this is a very interesting design because it's what we call an action -strategy game.

And it has conventional action elements in the sense you have a third -person character control.

but it has some very interesting strategy real -time strategy elements too as well you have resource collection building um controlling your different uh minions that you summon through these buildings and so on yeah the you know looking at the gameplay videos and the trailers uh there's the only thing that i could think is sort of close to it is um brutal legend had these these kind of moments where you would run around and kind of RTS elements to it as well.

It was kind of bringing that kind of nostalgia back a little.

Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't played Brutal Legend.

I must admit, before we made the original version of Chippin' Claws.

Now, I did play it later because, you know, it has, again, this kind of, you know, character -based strategy game, if you want to call it that, immersive strategy game.

um oh yes yeah our implementation is somewhat different to brutal legend um in a way with chip and claws we actually stripped down quite a lot we you know we removed a lot of stuff we thought was getting in the way of of efficiently directing your troops because you know the the battles are very quick if you're doing a pvp battle it's like you know five to ten minutes and players need to be able to direct their forces very quickly so we have a very simple system it's constrained it's always has limitations you have four rally beacons you can place them they direct the four types of forces that you've

got you have a little command view which you little cat the camera zips up and you can see the battlefield very clearly so this will work very nicely and we got rid of the mini -map we got rid of any complex commands So everything had to work very efficiently and quick through a controller setup.

Yeah. And it kind of works.

It's really interesting.

Gameplay is really frantic.

Multiplayer is huge fun.

And the team did a great job also with the single player experience.

We have a whole bunch of very different styles of missions.

We have tower defense style missions.

We have escort missions.

We have very puzzle -based missions games because um one influence you know initially was the uh again another nintendo game pikmin one of my favorites was a bit of an influence here as well with chip and claws so yeah it's turned out to be a really cool project very fun to work on yeah the challenges must have been um incredibly enjoyable to work through in regards to the these real -time strategy elements that usually we're just, we have this bird's eye kind of God -leveled overview of a map, right?

And you're able to whip a mouse quickly around some games like StarCraft. That is the entire game.

You're right. You're just this Twitch gameplay on 10 ,000 feet in the sky.

Tell me specifically about the view of the play space and how you adapted that to being third third person and any interesting sort of design outcomes from there yeah so it was an interesting challenge you know the temptation was to to to fall back on conventions so when we were developing the game initially uh we didn't have for example a mini map or an overhead map people says oh i need an overhead map and we thought why do you need an overhead map like we put one in and i thought oh this is a bit crap let's take that again um somebody suggested um well you know why don't you just zip the camera up

so you can see from your point of view so it doesn't upset your sense of where you are but you can see most of the battlefield you know i thought okay this works fine um and obviously in terms of where the level design works our levels are not huge and you can generally see most of the battlefield uh if not all of it at least in multiplayer player matches uh fairly easily and yeah it kind of really worked here's a nice sort of schematic view of the battlefield but it's still relatable from you know your position as a character in the in the within the environment um so yeah very cool system um

but yeah you know we added to it and then we took stuff away to to get to where we are and it's that's usually potentially a very um good process in in design um yeah the courage to take things away right like because once you've committed it to the game people's work there's a sunk cost fallacy that so many of us feel once we're faced with those tough decisions yeah yeah i mean we we've trained to think most of our changes were to make the game uh easier for players to understand more accessible um and to avoid you know if there's a problem with the way something works can we just Just, you know,

cut it out of the game entirely, for example.

So, yeah, we saw a situation where resources were needed to spawn all your minions from the buildings.

But actually change that to once you placed a building, it would spawn minions endlessly.

It would just replace the ones that were lost, but it would support a group of three of them so that you didn't have to worry about more of the complex economic stuff going on at the game um so yeah a lot of the changes we made were ultimately to try to yeah to simplify the game to get to the essence of what actually makes it kind of fun i guess you you said something interesting before which is uh you know people would put in would lean on conventions uh to solve problems as an air media kind of like off -the -shelf things now i find that interesting especially in you know through your lens i can imagine

you started developing games well as you said there's no game engines you're doing everything you're rendering the sprites on screen right like there is no not a single library basically for you to start with even but now we have developers or you know kids when they're first learning game engines they have a shooter out of the box with all the bells and whistles and physics and everything and And it puts them so far down the development path that it almost creates this style of thinking about game development and a frame of mind where there is this ease of accessibility and we're putting things

together. And then you have decades of design conventions and everything that have been refined and iterated over time.

It is so hard not to reach for them at every point.

How do you find yourself and whether it's when you're working with younger game designers or even you yourself wanting to lean on them?

How do you know when the moment is right to grab something that is, you know, like a tried and true convention that might be a soul for this versus finding your own bespoke path through a solution or through a problem or solution?

Good question. It is always a balance because to some extent, you don't want to do something so completely new that players just don't understand, can't understand what it is, can't understand what you're trying to do.

there is good case to be said that you you've got to find something relatable that players kind of know and the innovative bits are the things where you want to lead them you take them from where they are and where you want to go so yeah using existing design conventions and tropes is is absolutely valid um because that gives you the hook where players can relate to that and they understand it um and the innovative But the true appeal of what you're doing is the innovative stuff, which is actually more difficult to explain to a player.

I mean, as you know, there's so many highly defined genres within video games.

I mean, there's a lot of them and there's a huge diverse player community, but still there is usually the attempt to, players want to know exactly, what genre is this game?

What is it? Is it a MOBA?

Is it a shooter? Is it an extraction shooter?

whatever the latest genre is they they want has to fit within you know the established one that's kind of difficult so it's very difficult to if you want to do something innovative to break out of some of these uh constraints or straitjackets that the sort of the industry is sort of created you know spontaneously in some ways um it's it's difficult to navigate game um i usually want to do at least something innovative when i'm making a new game but i do understand you know the the reason yeah you need to build on what's gone before you need something which has a foundation which players can relate

to to start with i think is there anything that you're playing at the moment or have played recently that has you know felt truly innovative to you or in maybe even in a small way or in the way that it's presented in a big way oh it's an interesting question um it's okay to say no as well if you're not impressed by anything that's come by recently not a lot i mean the only one that stands out recently is bellatro but there you go yeah there you go all right yeah i do like the way that you know some gate yeah again he's he's taken a convention which is kind of a bit relatable which is this card

based poker style hierarchy but made something completely innovative out of it and it's a good example kind of i guess of what i'm saying in a way yeah there is a relatable thing but there's something which is really different and interesting going on there as well yeah and he's managed he's definitely managed to uh crack through to an interested audience we could say absolutely yes you could say that you could say that indeed well um julian i absolutely wish the same for you with Chip and Claws versus the Brainióids.

For anyone who's listening now, the demo is actually available on Steam as literally at the time of recording.

I'm looking at it. You can download it.

So go ahead and try out the demo.

And Julian, thank you so much for chatting with me tonight and filling us all in on your story.

It's such an honor to be able to chat to you considering the legacy that you've contributed to games and just hearing these incredible stories stories about how games that we played you know through our past and stuff have have come together through your lens well thank you very much it's been a pleasure thank you for joining us for the Game Maker's notebook for more information on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences our podcasts and our other initiatives please visit www .interactive .org Transcription by ESO.

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[The Evolution of Game Design: A Conversation with XCOM Creator Julian Gollop]-[XCOM Creator Julian Gollop Shares Game Design Tips, Dev Stories and More]

📋 Summary

The Architect of Strategy: Julian Gollop’s Journey in Game Design

The Roots of Innovation: From Board Games to Code

The Creation of a Seminal Classic: XCOM

Navigating the Industry: Ubisoft and the Kickstarter Era

Design Philosophy: Constraints and Conventions

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript