Today we sit down with Valerie Cope (Community Manager) and Kevin Heap (Lead Programmer) from NinjaBee, creators of the newly released hit, A Kingdom for Keflings (AKFK), for Xbox live arcade. So let’s dive right on into the questions after a big launch night party.
ATC 1982: So how do you think the November 18th Launch Party on the www.xbox.com forums went?
Valerie Cope: I think it went great! The forums were hopping — we couldn’t even keep up with all the questions being asked. Every time I posted an answer to a question three more questions popped up. The energy in the “room” was so fun; everyone was hyped up and super excited for the game to release. It got us all even more hyped up than we already were. J
ATC 1982: What were some of the highlights of the event before the forums went down?
VC: I think for me it was just the sheer amount of people who showed up and asked questions and were generally interested in the game. I seriously thought it’d be a few people from our company and maybe five of our die-hard fans from the NinjaBee forums and that’s it. The fact that other people came and were talking about the game and had good things to say about it — that made the night for me.
ATC 1982: Seeing some of the fans’ reaction toward this game, has anything surprised you?
Kevin Heap: The fan reaction has been quite positive, which has been great. It’s not so much surprising as reassuring that we’re not crazy – we’ve known this game to be fun and awesome for more than a year and it’s nice to know that we’re not alone in the galaxy with that line of thought.
ATC 1982: Being the first team to use Avatars that are functional, does it change how gamers approach or play the game?
KH: As far as gameplay, not really. We’ve had our own avatars all along and the Xbox Avatars are really just an extension of that – it’s just that much cooler to play with your own avatar instead of a pre-built one.
ATC 1982: When developing AKFK, what were some of your inspirations and influences, and how can we see those in the game?
KH: Well, we NinjaBees are all big fans of the simulation/strategy genre and it’s hard to draw the line between inspiration and influence. At the very least, I’d have to include SimCity, Settlers, Black and White, Caesar 3, Populous, and even games like Railroad Tycoon and Darwinia. The visibility of these games in AKFK will certainly vary but certainly they have inspired me personally and the hope is that if you like any of those games; you’ll love A Kingdom for Keflings.
ATC 1982: Will AKFK have any downloadable content in the future? If so, can you give us any hints on what to expect?
KH: There is some DLC scheduled that is focused around further customization of your city.
ATC 1982: What are some of the things that this game does that will set it apart from all others?
KH: A major difference to me is that there really isn’t conflict, and that right there feels very different than most other games out there. We had lots of arguments very early on about adding fighting, natural disasters and the like but as we played early demos it became clear that this was a fun and addictive game as is. We wanted players to walk away from playing our game feeling happier than when they started, and so we focused on creating that experience.
ATC 1982: Tell us a little bit about team NinjaBee. Who are you guys and how did you come together? How do you approach the development of your games, and what were some of the major hurdles in getting AKFK to market?
VC: For the first part of this question I’ll bring in Steve Taylor, company President. Take it away, Steve!
Steve Taylor: The owners of NinjaBee worked together at another game company for a while. When that company started having trouble, I left and started the new company with another friend, and Lane and Brent joined me soon after. In general, I run technology, Brent directs art, and Lane handles the business. We've grown over the last seven years a bit at a time, adding smart and passionate people to the team.
KH: As far as hurdles in AKFK, I’ll say we somewhat underestimated what it would take to make a sandbox-style game instead of the scenario-based ones we had done up to this point. It was much more challenging to deal with than I had anticipated. In a scenario-based world, you have a certain set of objects in the world at a time. However, A Kingdom for Keflings must be able to fit just about every asset in the game at the same time. The world is fairly large and you can have a huge number of unique, interactive objects in it. It was quite the challenge to go back and rework and optimize existing systems that had been working fine up to this point. There were other hurdles as well, including Avatar controls and multiplayer, but this one seemed to be the most time consuming overall and was the personal bane of my existence.
Thank you for your time and good luck with your future projects.
