It’s been almost four years since Tilted Mill released Children of the Nile, a challenging departure from the historical city builders that many of the designers themselves had developed while at Impression Studios. Since then, the Boston based company made Caesar IV, firmly in the Sierra/Impressions tradition, and SimCity: Societies, an only partly successful attempt to take EA’s prize city building franchise in a new direction.
Now, freed from working on somebody else’s game, Tilted Mill returns with an improved version of Children of the Nile, promises of new content for fans of that game and, now, a completely new game with a smaller scale that fits their more focused ambitions. Chris Beatrice and Jeff Fiske sat down with me for a long conversation about the history of Tilted Mill, the perils and potentials of independent development and one of the first in-depth discussions of their new game, Hinterland.
Your last two games were successors to a couple of very big franchises and you worked with some very large publishers. Now you are striking out completely on your own. What brought this about?
Chris Beatrice: I was at Impressions I think eight years and this is a very similar situation actually. We were a wholly owned subsidiary out here on the East Coast, basically working independently. We started as an independent publisher and got acquired. We ended up working on some pretty good sized titles in terms of budget and yet not really owning the process or anything. So being a true independent as we’ve been for the past eight years has been better than Impressions in that we can just walk away from deals. We have contracts that hold the publishers accountable for some things, but still after doing that for eight years…we made a good amount of money but still one more step was required in order to truly be independent, to make our own decisions about what the games are going to be.
A lot of things changed in the past year. The first thing is, there are these huge PC franchises, like Blizzard’s stuff, and there are tons of these budget/casual/independent titles and it seems that the worst place to be is making these four million dollar games that are only going to sell 300,000 copies. That’s kind of the middle. As the retail space dried up and online distribution came up and tools fell into place like the Torque engine. Suddenly it’s really dumb to spend six million dollars doing a 3D engine from scratch to make a game unless it’s going to be a huge seller. With PC games, only a certain number can do that, so there is now this opportunity where, hey, we can make our own games now and distribute them ourselves. The types of games we’ve specialized in are not where I see the future. I wouldn’t be saying this if we were Blizzard, but the types of games we’ve made, I don’t see…well, we’ve developed city builders for all the big franchises for all the big publishers and there aren’t any of those left. And the classic PC RTS is not where I think the future of the PC game is either, so we look at this as an evolution.
A lot of the things we complained about internally at Impressions, we’ve complained about at Tilted Mill. Not owning anything at the end of the day, not controlling the process…certain categories are just viable for the big publishers any more, so this move is a natural one for us.
What motivated you to reacquire Children of the Nile as your first move?
Children of the Nile is a really unique opportunity. We started putting together this business plan to make games that are much more modest in scope, where we aren’t dumping millions of dollars into a graphics engine. We’re focusing on fun gameplay and good quality graphics and a good presentation and real innovation, which means rather than taking three years to make one game, you make three or four games in a year. A lot of the games that are successful in this space, like Sins of a Solar Empire or Galactic Civilizations, are actually very much like the games we all started out making in this industry. At the time, those were at the top of the pile and now they are closer to the middle or even bottom. My premise is that this is what PC gaming is - lots of diversity, lots of innovation, strong gameplay and the developer being close to the consumer.
We have no shortage of ideas for games like that we can do or want to do. Looking at a certain budget and a certain sales forecast, etc. By reacquiring Children of the Nile and reinvesting in it the amount of money we would invest in making a new game, and hopefully getting the number of sales we would by developing a new, smaller game. It fits our model, and even better, is an AA or low AAA game that can work in that space and we got it back very inexpensively.
On top of that, we certainly wouldn’t have done it if we thought Children had tapped out all of its sales. We started making Children of the Nile right after doing Pharaoh, which sold 1.3 million and Caesar III was 1.2 million, Zeus was like 800,000…you know we looked at the history of the city building franchise at the time and we estimated something like 1 or 2 million unique users. Now I’m not saying that that market still exists, but when you look at the sales of Children and the known distribution problems and the fact that it was, mostly through our fault, largely dressed as Pharaoh and therefore misunderstood, I think that there are a lot of people who didn’t get a chance to play it. I don’t think that’s a million people by any stretch, but it could be a lot.
From a pure business perspective, this was a unique opportunity and almost a no-brainer to get it back and make it the flagship for Tilted Mill. It was our first game, and the one that defined us. The two that we made after that we pretty much driven by what the publishers wanted them to be. We caught a lot of flak for decisions that weren’t ours and so on. And then there’s the subjective aspect of that, of course. We just wanted it back. It’s ours.
Children of the Nile
You said that not reaching the sales figures you had hoped for Children of the Nile was partially your fault. What were the missteps there? And how will you correct them this time around?
It’s kind of a threefold thing there. When we started the company, we had to decide what our first product was going to be, and for a conservative person like me that means a project that you really want to do and something you can convince other people you do well so that they pay you to do it. So our history was definitely in city builders, and Egypt specifically, so we said let’s do an Egyptian city builder game. We had seen other new developers switch from, say, doing racing games to RPGs or something and no one will give them the time of day because people don’t think they have any competency in that area. So we started off with that decision and then we did a whole lot of innovation in that context.
I’ll put it simply: We totally underestimated the extent to which someone would just look at this game and think it would play just like Pharaoh or the other Impressions city builders when the whole point of it in some ways was to turn that paradigm on its head. We completely missed that. Even though, from our perspective, we tried to hit the player over the head with the differences in the tutorial, it still wasn’t enough. And we’ve also learned from SimCity: Societies that even if people understand that, it still gets them mad. Gamers just have an intuitive way of approaching or playing a game and then it doesn’t do what they expect, and they get really upset especially if they end up losing. I’m using my usual bag of tricks and I’m getting my ass kicked.
The original Pharaoh
So you’re fighting this paradigm the gamer already has in their head.
Right. So the things that I can admit we did wrong were, one, we underestimated how much users would need to understand that this game was actually easier and more forgiving with no arcane rules about keeping chains linked together. We did not make that clear.
The second thing is that in the actual gameplay itself, it demanded a unique type of feedback and there were a lot of holes in it. We look back and we are almost shocked. For example, you are trying to build a pyramid and you select it, but it hardly tells you anything about what’s going on. It says if you’ve got thirty of the fifty blocks you need, but it doesn’t tell that you don’t have an overseer activating it, that you don’t have any source of that stone, that you have the stone, but it’s on the other side of the river and you can’t get it because you need barges. That level of feedback in certain critical areas is just missing. And that ultimately stems from our misjudging, the mistake that a lot of developers make because we’re playing it and we understand what’s happening.
