Conducted By – Adam Ames
Cyril Guichard and Rich Myles offer an extensive and detailed look at their upcoming top-down science fiction shooter, The Lost Outpost.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with the development of Lost Outpost.
Cyril> I’m Cyril ‘luxregina’ Guichard, the artist behind Lost Outpost. I worked on pretty much everything “visual” in the game, the sprites, levels, UI, intro animations, etc. I also collaborated with Richard on level design and general game design.
Rich > And I’m Rich “Squize” Myles, the coder on the game plus handling the sound effects / story writing / balance and design duties.
How did you get started in developing PC games?
Cyril> I’ve been a gamer since a little kid, in the mid-seventies, when my dad brought home a ZX81. Since then, I played on all type of machines: Commodore 64, various Amstrad machines, Amiga and then my first PC.
I’m kind of the curious type, so quite quickly, I wanted to make games, since I enjoyed playing them so much (and it was part of a deal with my father: I could spend some time playing if I was learning how to program in the meantime). I did some stuff on the Amstrad in the mid 80′s, but I really started developing games in the early 2000′s, particularly with Flash. As a designer/artist, the coding side of it was still intelligible, and as an engine, it was powerful enough to bring many of my ideas to life. That’s when I met Richard, and a whole bunch of other Indies that were already making remarkable games, pushing the Flash technology farther than even Macromedia would have guessed.
Fast forward 10 years, and a couple projects with Richard, I decided to drop my full time job as a Creative Director in a mid-size Ad agency to try to focus exclusively on our Indie activity.
Rich > Similar story from me really. ZX81 > Spectrum > C64 > Amiga route ( Just to show my age ).
My interest died along with the Amiga and I had a couple of years doing anything but touching a computer. I then discovered Javascript and after 68010 assembly coding thought it looked straight forward enough to do cool stuff with. Luckily before going too far down the path of Javascript I stumbled across Flash, just before Flash 5 was due out, and that was me drawn back in again.
The thing I loved about Flash was that anyone in the world could technically make the best Flash game ever, it was such a level playing field, and way back in those days there was a real spirit of friendly competition as we all tried to replicate the engines / effects we grew up, where open sourcing was more a challenge for someone to beat you that a truly altruistic thing to do.
Where did the idea for Lost Outpost come from?
Cyril> Originally, Lost Outpost was a prototype Richard had made, that was channeling Alien Breed, a game that we both love very much. I got very excited to take it over, visually, and give it its own personality and style.
I’m a big Sci-fi fan, and the references for Lost Outpost are pretty obvious: Alien, Aliens, Starship Troopers definitely infused the DNA of the game. Funnily enough, a lot of players have mentioned Dead Space as something Lost Outpost could relate to, but we really only played the game after reading those comments. It’s perfectly accurate though, as the type of Sci-fi Dead Space harkens back to is the same that inspired Lost Outpost visually (and in the game play)
Rich > As a child of 8/16bit games there are so many games that I love, Paradroid, Uridium, Dropzone, Speedball II and Alien Breed ( Funnily enough ) as just a starting point. For me one of the biggest joys of coding is that I can go back to these games I loved and do my own take on them. Lost Outpost, and Outpost:Haven before it, are my love letter to the games ( And movies ) that ate up so much of my youth. Also shooting aliens, what’s not to be inspired in that.
What are some of the successes and failures you learned from in developing Lost Outpost?
Cyril> In terms of success, I’d say that we have a product we are pretty proud of: I think it looks good, it plays well and it’s a fun game. I’m very proud of the fact that our game as equal part action/exploration, which is something I really look for in games. I think we have a very polished, and deep product, specially for a 2 persons team.
For the failures, it’s a bit early to say: it will all depends on the reception the demo gets, and whether or not we can distribute the final product on big networks. In this regard, our Greenlight campaign will be instrumental. I dropped a pretty good job and salary to be able to finish the game in a timely fashion. It’s a pretty big bet, and a pretty big risk: there’s a lot at stake.
Rich > This is a tricky one to answer, as you don’t usually look at a game introspectively like this until it’s been out a couple of months. It’s all too raw now to be truly subjective I think.
Success wise it’s a game we’re both proud of, there are very few “Let’s just ignore that, no one will notice it” aspects to the game, it’s been given a lot of love.
Failures, hmm. It could always have more polish given to it, and ideally it would have been finished 6 months ago. Oh, and we really made life hard with the level design, that was hellish in places, so a key learning point I think we’ll take away from this is never design a level like we did in this again.
In its current form, how close is Lost Outpost to your initial vision?
Cyril> I’d say pretty close; since we developed the game on our own funds, there was really no one to interfere with the process, or the choices we made. I’d say the only things that could bring it closer to our original visions were things we dropped from scope, in order to finish the game in a timely fashion. And these are the things we are trying to bring back in the Director’s cut.
Rich > As Cyril said, it was mainly a case of reduced scope. We had so many ideas for level types ( That we can hopefully go back to for the DC ), but in terms of hitting the original story beats we had planned out we hit them all and didn’t compromise too much on the way.
Cyril Guichard
Some devs admitted their games were too hard upon release because they became experts as they developed the game. Talk about setting the difficulty levels for Lost Outpost and if you faced a similar challenge.
Cyril> I can see balance being a problem when you know the game too well in some cases. For us, it’s been a bit different though because we’ve put our game in the hands of players pretty early: we have other Indies that played the game, and some of our Facebook fans got access to various beta versions pretty early, so we had ample time to tweak and gather feedback. I’m more concerned about “features” that help tailor the game to one’s play style being under-used by players (like the armor/equipment can significantly impact the gameplay or how hard/easy the game becomes).
This said, our previous versions of Lost Outpost, “Outpost: Haven” and Outpost: Swarm” gathered more than 10 million players, and a lot of them left very insightful comments on various site: we had a huge database of players impressions to build upon.
Rich > Continuing on from Cyril’s reply, compiling a spreadsheet of feedback is an exercise in self torture, but likewise ignoring feedback would be insane, and very wrong to all the players who took the time to comment.
There’s always some noise in there which you can filter out quite easily and you’re then left with the common complaints. The job of a sequel is to round those rough edges off, to remove the barriers players found originally and then to give players something they weren’t expecting. That’s the case with the armor in the game, it throws a wild card in there in terms of testing the difficulty, which makes getting the balance right all the more trickier. We’ve been very lucky to have some great beta testers, some of whom have been with us all the way from the start and others who have jumped on board as development progressed, so we have a nice spread of experience.
As a general rule of thumb, if half the players find it too easy and the other half too hard that’s about as good as we’re going to get it.
Were there any challenges you faced in ensuring Lost Outpost would run on the various PC system configurations?
Cyril> I’m sure Richard will have more than me to say on that 
– I’d say that optimization has been on top of our mind, and that we did have to drop a few things to make sure that the game would run smoothly, even on small configs.
Rich > The single most costly part of the game in terms of cpu usage is the specular lighting, so we’ve defaulted to that being off and with a handful of other options players will be able to set the game up to suit their machines. It’s only atmospheric effects which are hurt via the options, and we’d rather lose a couple of mist particle effects than have lag.
The beauty of using Flash as a lead platform for it is that it just works. Yeah it has its quirks and it’s never powerful enough, but it’ll work the same on your PC as it does mine ( Unless you’re using Chrome, but that’s a whole different world of hurt ) and that’s vital.
In terms of the code, it’s fairly well optimized, but there’s always scope for more passes on it before we’re done. It’s a balancing act, the game needs a certain level of power behind it, but we don’t want to be elitist so only players with the latest gaming rigs can play it, that defeats the object. So a five year old cheap laptop may struggle with it, but that’s the line we drew in the sand, and a lot of my work from now on is trying to eek that little bit more performance out of it. If that opens up the game to just 1% more players then it’s worth it.
Please talk about developing the art style, level design and music for Lost Outpost.
Cyril> One of the perks of creating games by ourselves is that there is no client, or publishers to push us in a corner. So it really all started with a vision: when I saw the prototype, I knew what I wanted the game to look like – I created several photoshop mock-ups, as a proof of concept, and shared them with Richard, and other devs we knew: people reacted quite well to them, so I went back to photoshop and really started generating usable assets, tiles and UI breakdowns. I’d say that defining the look and feel of the game went quite fast, what took a lot of time was to actually do all the production work: the levels are a mix of tile-based approach, and art-based renders, and they are INSANELY complex to set-up. In average, one level took us around 10 working days, from conception to completion. That’s already 100 days just in level design…
I think that one thing that helped, particularly for the UI elements, is that I sketch everything – so it allowed me to cement where I wanted to go even before opening my software, and share that vision with Richard.
Rich > Yeah the level design was just hellish. Everything has to have a reason, a point for being there, Haven has to feel like a real lived in place, not just a maze with space station tiles.
Also the level design allows us to tell the story, we can have areas where there’s been an obvious conflict, areas where something terrible has obviously happened to the crew, and so on. Bioshock set the bar for the environment being part of the story and we’re not exactly standing on the shoulders of giants, but we’ve taken a leaf out of their book.
As Cyril mentioned above we only played Dead Space after the first game was released, and I’m glad we did as the similarities are scary. The one big thing I took from it though was the sound design, it’s just stunning, so that really made us ramp up the time we spent with the sound effects. There’s a lot more ambient sound in the game now to try and increase the tension.
In terms of the music, I think we’ve got around five tracks in there, and they were done by our friend Matt, who did us proud.
Outside of creating the game itself, what is the toughest aspect of being an indie developer?
Cyril> Exposure, exposure, and exposure!…and also distribution! Oh, and revenue, too We don’t have a “name”, we are not well known, so it’s been very difficult for us to get coverage for our game (Thanks for the interview! ). And we all know that without coverage, our Greenlight campaign will dwindle and without Steam distribution, and good press coverage, people will not really get to play our game, even less to buy it – and by then, we will have ran out of money for our next projects.
Rich > I don’t think there’s much more I can add to that. It’s always a battle between scope and your bank account, so you have to manage your own expectations as best you can from the very start. Given enough time a lot of people could make good games, the trick is trying to make a good game before you starve.
Richard Myles
How did you go about funding Lost Outpost and did you receive financial or emotional support from friends and family?
Cyril> We were self-funded. I saved money from my previous job, and Richard did a lot of client work to prepare for a 6 months period when we would be working on the game with no income at all.
We considered (well, I did) Kickstarter to help us fund the project, but we ultimately decided that it was too much of a risk: Neither of us believed in coming to Kickstarter with just a project, so we developed most of the game first, then put it on Greenlight to try to secure distribution. Running a kickstarter after that would be stretching us too thin: if we are getting press coverage, it’s better to direct it at our Greenlight campaign, and if we don’t get enough coverage, our kickstarter campaign would die anyway…
Family support is capital for the type of risk we took: my wife had to be completely on board with this before I would even consider it. She knows it’s something I had to try, and that a lot of things were coming together to make this precise moment the “perfect storm”: we had money aside, we had a promising product based on a player-popular franchise, and I was in a point in my career where taking that type of risk would be rewarding on the resume, no matter the outcome.
Friends support is also essential: it’s been our base network to spread the news, have feedback on our product, and just general uplifting support – I don’t think we would be where we are now without the encouragements of the people we love.
I would also like to tip my hat to Ruan Rothmann, from the Broforce team – I casually reached out to him after reading a very interesting blog post he made, and he provided us with very comprehensive advice and help! It was definitely nice to get the help and attention from a successful Indie team that went through the same issues we are going through.
Rich > Having a good support network of family and friends is vital. Also having two good kidneys so one can go on eBay helps.
Tell us about the process of submitting Lost Outpost to the various digital distribution platforms and if you encountered resistance in doing so.
Cyril> It’s still a bit early to say – at this point, we’ve had Lost Outpost on Greenlight for 13 days, and from what I can read elsewhere we are doing OK – just barely OK, this means that without more coverage, more “buzz” I don’t think we’ll make it. The great thing with the Greenlight process is that there is no resistance at all, but you have to do all the promotion side of things yourself: the organic traffic of steam alone isn’t enough to sustain the campaign on its own length.
We’ve also approached some other platforms, such as GOG and a few others we intend to contact, but we are still in the “review” process. I think that the digital distribution system is the main reason why we could give this a shot: 10/15 years ago, it would have been too much of a bet to please a publisher while keeping complete control of our scope, hence budget. So we are thankful for the relative accessibility to these platforms. This said, it’s also true that it’s not because you have a game that you are proud of that they will necessarily distribute it.
Did you research similar titles when trying to come up with the launch price?
Cyril>Yes and no: we are aware of the price of similar products, but we also know that the digital distribution partners will have some advice and input on how much we price our game. We want to stay competitive, so we are aiming at the lower end of the spectrum, while still having the ability to down-price the game for promotions and bundle sales.
Can you tell us why you chose to release a demo for Lost Outpost?
Cyril> Well, first of all, it’s important to put the game in as many hands as we can. It’s also a business decision: we decided to make our demo in Flash, and get a gaming portal to sponsor it, in order to recoup our investment a bit and fund the additional work that will go in the Steam version. This is still being negotiated as we speak, so we’ll see if it was the right decision.
Rich > A game needs to be played basically, it needs to be in players hands, and every day it’s not just really pains me. For us having an online version was never an issue.
How important is it to get instant feedback about Lost Outpost from users through online message boards and other social networking sites?
Cyril > It’s capital: we setup a Facebook devlog last year, when we started on the project, and communicated with other devs through various boards. It helped us nudge our design in what’s hopefully the right direction, and make sure we would offer features the players really wanted. It’s also been great “moral” support: it’s exciting to see your fans enthusiastic about the upcoming product when you are still buried, head deep, in development.
Rich > I’ve already touched on this in one of my previous replies, but feedback is gold dust. Lost Outpost has been a great learning process and the one thing I’m going to take from it is that we need to reach out to the players even more often and sooner in future, as doing so really does reap rewards.
How much value do you place on the opinions of those who review Lost Outpost professionally?
Cyril> Pretty highly: they are “expert” gamers, and not long-time fans: they’ve seen a lot of that stuff, they will come to the game completely neutral, so it’s important that they like our product – to me it’s a good insight whether players are going to embrace what we did or not.
Rich > You expect a pilot not to crash; a doctor not to amputate the wrong leg and a game reviewer to make sure you’re not wasting your money on a game. There’s that level of trust there with a good reviewer, so their views are vital.
How do you feel about the various indie bundle promotions and the “Pay What You Want” pricing methodology? Would you be interested in contributing to a project like that in the future?
Cyril> I like the bundle promotions a lot: it’s a good way to package what I would call “whale games”, games that got a lot of attention and praise, with lesser known games, and give them a shot at being discovered. I think it’s very much in the Indie spirit. I kind of reminds me a bit the music industry a while ago, where lesser known groups would intro bigger artists The “pay what you want” model is also very much in the Indie Spirit, but can be scary as well: as an industry, we do have costs, and profitability needs, and this model makes forecasting pretty difficult. But there again, that’s part of the system that makes Indie gaming so accessible, it’s not something we can pick and choose, so we’ll embrace the whole package
Rich > The indie scene has become the indie industry, and luckily enough it’s still in a position where experimentation in all aspects of it are viable. Longer term I’m not so sure, I don’t think anyone wants to breed a culture where a player will see a new game and think “Cool, I’ll grab that in the next bundle”. In saying that we as game developers have to ensure that players are panting to play a game on day one. Hmm, my thoughts are a bit of a jumble on this subject so maybe I should have left it alone.
What are your thoughts on how the PC gaming industry as a whole are dealing with the problem of intrusive DRM and piracy?
Cyril> It’s a little bit the same problematic as above: I understand why bigger studios want to quell the Piracy (you know, profitability and costs…) but in the meantime, we all know it’s a fight that is lost as soon as your game goes to market – every security always had a counter-hack. And that DRM stuff is an expensive investment, it’s all money that doesn’t really go into the game.
It’s less of an issue for Indie, IMO, maybe because they just can’t afford it, but more importantly, because it’s less part of the “system” – things are more fluid, and we rely on people’s good faith a lot more (which takes us back to the “pay what you want” concept). As far as we are concerned, it’s not something we are going to focus on and we will hope that our players want to support us.
How do you feel about individuals posting videos and receiving monetization of Lost Outpost?
Cyril> Not a problem at all! Every person that make a video on our game is helping us with its promotion: if they get money out of it, it’s even better! I’m really for that consumer/advocate stuff, and I think it’s great that advertising revenue can help incentivize this behavior.
Rich > We embrace it. I think any developer gets a buzz from seeing someone going to the effort of uploading a video of their game. Now if that’s because they really like the game and want to share it, or because they want to earn a couple of quid ad revenue, or a bit of both, there’s no way that has a negative impact on us.
It’s a form of creativity based on your own work, and that’s what it’s all about.
How do you feel about DLC and its current implementation in the PC gaming industry?
Cyril> It really depends on how it’s done. On the positive side, I’d say it’s great to get more content from a game you liked and finished – it’s like getting fresh news from an old friend. This said, there are a lot of games out there that trim content away from the original package to try to milk a bit more money, and I don’t think it’s really respectful of the players. And then, you have the content that was planned to be episodic from the get-go, and I’d say, particularly for smaller studios, it’s a great way to ventilate scope and costs, and minimize the risk. I think it all boils down on how up-front studios are with that stuff.
Rich > Day 1 DLC is just the height of naughty isn’t it. Actually no, on disc DLC is the worst.
It bugs me slightly seeing press releases for DLC before the game is launched, even if you know it’s going to happen ( COD / Battlefield ). We all get the economics behind it but there’s something slightly jarring about it. Let me enjoy eating this cake before showing me the next slice.
How do you feel about the online modding community in general and specifically if mods were created for Lost Outpost?
Cyril> I love mods – I always have plenty installed on the games I love – I think it’s a great way to harness players creativity and expertise, and it’s certainly a great boost to a product’s notoriety and replayability.
Unfortunately, the current version of Outpost isn’t exactly “mod friendly” but depending on our success, and some of the refinements we could make on our level editor, I’d love ultimately to provide tools for players to create their own scenario! We would love to play our game, tweaked by someone else!
What advice would you give up-and-coming indie PC developers who are trying to break into the business?
Cyril> Several:
- Don’t take unnecessary risks, plan everything: I expected several months without income, and planned for a year, and so far, I’m glad I did.
- Everything is going to take twice as long as you thought it would, plan in consequence.
- Be ready for a lot of rejection: gathering interest, and building momentum around your product is twice as hard as you though it would be.
- Partner with someone you know, love and respect: Small teams are fragile by nature – there will be many occasions to disagree on many things, there will be moments when someone in the team will be down. You don’t want a complete stranger by your side at these moments: your professional friendship will be tested a lot, you want someone you can trust, and someone that will be able to convince you when you need to be, and that will listen to you when you need to vent
Rich > There’s something which has stuck with me for years. I watched an interview with someone on TV who described himself as an “Unpublished playwright” and I remember thinking, but technically I’m an unpublished playwright too. If you want to be an indie game developer, just make games. It really is as simple as that. I’ve seen so many people getting bogged down with making great engines and a million other things, but never actually finish a game.
Enter a 48 hour game jam, that way you’re pretty much putting a gun to your head to finish a game. Aim small, think more Tetris than GTAV. Accept that your first handful of games are going to be pretty bad, it doesn’t matter, everyone’s were. Your 100th game is going to rock, so spend every day you have trying to get there, that Snake clone you do may be too bad to even share, but it’s a stepping stone towards the good stuff.
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Headquarters – Savannah, Georgia
Release Date – Q1 2014
Available PC Platforms – Windows, Mac
Team Members – 2
Publisher – None