This Means Warp just docked with UK publisher Jagex today. With the news that this bold new future for space treks everywhere is ready to speed into early access this march, we got some time to take our station and try to keep things together long enough to make it off the lower decks and find out more about this rougelike spaceship simulator. Once Outlier Game’s Paul Froggatt and Matt Rathbun connected on subspace, Gamespace got down to asking the two to describe what exactly This Means Warp is.
Paul
This Means Warp is a multi-player spaceship management roguelike game. The best way to describe it may be the blending of two genres. It’s part frantic online multiplayer co-op combined with a more strategic roguelike where you’re building out a ship full of custom equipment and trying to survive as long as you can.
However, to catch the eye of Jagex and survive more than a few parsecs on Steam, This Means Warp needs to stand out from the crowd. Set in the cold dark reaches of the cosmos, with a bright aesthetic, and roguelike mechanics, we asked if this new adventure could stand out from the crowd and other games like Space Crew.
Paul
It’s a really good question because these (Space Crew and FTL) are awesome games that we love. So the fun of being a game developer is, in the name of research, you can play games that are similar in the course of creating your game. Space Crew was announced after we started developing, although the prequel to it, Bomber Crew, is an excellent game.
In terms of making This Means Warp different, one thing that I think we really found when it gained traction, is that people were investing a huge amount of time into the game. This allowed us to get the balance, the ebb and flow of that frenetic action-packed combat that gets the adrenaline up. Then, in between, we have a little bit of downtime where you can strategize for the long-form game. So similar to the Space Crew or FTL or a number of these. This means the game can spin off into anywhere between half an hour, to an hour and a half, rather than other alternatives that very short game times.
Really, I think what we felt was bringing people together is the combination of the frenetic action and the strategic moments afterward, where you continue to build and develop that strategy with friends. That’s what a lot of the roguelike side doesn’t have. There’s a huge element of fun that we can bring in your friends and develop that strategy together.
Gamespace: Was Online Multiplayer Something you set out to develop from the outset?
Matt
We set out right from the beginning knowing that we wanted to do online play. I think when you’re developing a game, it’s kind of this looming cloud in the future where you know the net code is coming. While it introduced a number of new problems and challenges to overcome, we’ve now benefited massively from the community feedback and getting people’s opinions on how it plays.
Part of that was that we knew we wanted to collect that community feedback and the best way to get communities interested and engaged is to allow for allow community play. So yeah, we’ve known right from day one, that we would get this online and functional in some form when we ran our first alpha.
Since then we’ve gone from remote play together to fully online and have benefited massively, especially between Paul and I. Since he’s in Ireland and I’m over in Canada, it allows us to play and test and kind of do our development work. It’s been really great to just be able to play online and be able to join in with the community too. We had a run this weekend, even with one guy in Germany, somebody in the States, me in Canada, and Paul in Ireland. So just that global connection has been fantastic.
Online and co-op games are not new to MMO developer Jagex, who used their live service experience to help Flying Wild Hog kick Space Punks out into early access, so we asked if this was something that played into the development of This Means Warp’s multiplayer chaos?
Matt
At the moment, networking has not changed much from what we’ve had built out previously. We’ve certainly been discussing with Jagex and there is the benefit of getting their oversight and finesse to help troubleshoot you and kind of oversee the quality of the product is there. But so far it’s a very new relationship. So we haven’t gone and done a massive rework overhaul of any online functionality or anything along those lines.
Gamespace: How did you and Jagex happen?
Paul
We actually met at Jagex at EGX Expo, a show in the UK, and just found that we got on with them really well. We’ve been having lots of chats with them since, but one of the core elements that really we shared with Jagex is the focus on community in building the game. So what’s been super important to us as we’ve been developing the game is involving players really early, like much earlier than most games do, and taking that feedback, those ideas, and building the game in the roadmap based on player feedback. And that’s absolutely something that we’re speaking to.
The other element is just the scale of the player base and the experience that they can bring to raise the quality of the game. And also, you know, the commitment from both of us to continue developing the title. We’ve got lots of plans. And that was a great selling point for us.
Matt
Yeah, like the folks at Jagex have been just fantastic. We’ve met with a bunch of different, different publishing options and opportunities and really Jagex has stood out among the crowd in many ways. They really have just been fantastic and just seeing them be passionate and interested and driven, and even seeing how much they’ve been playing the game since they’ve gotten some early keys has just been wonderful. They really are our fans as well as partners on this one.
Gamespace: With This Means Warp being a community-focused game for friends and enemies, what sort of feedback did you get from your community early on?
Paul
I think it’s it’s always a bit of surprise because the point of it involving the community is to think of things that you didn’t know, right? So that’s the huge value in getting all those diverse opinions feeding into the game.
What is most surprising from my side is how much value you get from feedback that isn’t specifically an idea. We got a lot of ideas from our players and then they were like, “Yes, that’s a great idea.” Whether it’s a mission, a different item, or just some sort of kind of quality improvement.
There’s a huge amount of value in that. For example, feedback that players felt they might not have agency over the individual items on a ship. This was the one thing that came up right in the first alpha that we did. As an example, we originally had kind of flat-out upgrades that you apply to the guns or the systems on the ship, and it would just make it more powerful. But you wouldn’t really see the power. It wouldn’t really be a choice. So we changed that to a stats based system where you can improve the health, improve the damage, improve the capacity like whatever it might be. That was like a really like light bulb moment that was triggered by the community feedback. And then in the beta, people were like, “OK. Yes, this is a huge step because you get that strategic element. The element of choice that wasn’t there in the alpha.” It’s hugely important.
Gamespace: Communities can be just as toxic as they can be cooperative in online gaming. Is this something you’ve had to address?
Paul
We’ve been pretty lucky on that front so far. The community has been really, really great and very heartfelt and warm. I think compared to many more toxic communities. I think obviously as your community grows and expands, which is our hope, you’re going to see some of that toxicity come forth. Luckily for us, I think like Paul and I have had a lifetime of gaming under our belts. I know specifically, I’ve played a massive amount of competitive games where people say pretty mean things to you when you lose and blame your teammates, and there’s that toxic nature is pretty common.
It also means that we’ve had a bit of that experience. So hopefully, we’ve put in enough protections or safeguards already to cover for a lot of those instances. We’ve been designing lobbies and different systems of the game. There’s always a way to exploit whatever we put together, and we know players will find that, and we’ll have to patch and fix it later. But we’ve tried to cover what we can to make sure that the gameplay experience is fun and enjoyable.
Realistically, it’s not a directly competitive game and you’re playing cooperatively. So if somebody really decides to ruin a run or something, we’ve given people the opportunity to have some shenanigans but you don’t have to play with that player. It’s completely up to you. You can create private lobbies, you can make a group with just your friends. You can find a group on discord that fits your needs and suits what you’re looking for. So really, we try to be as accommodating as possible for everyone.
Even if you and your friends do like a bit of light trolling each other, that’s also kind of an option. There are a few elements in the game where you can shoot things on your own ships. You can blow the wall down sucking people into space, which is a pretty funny moment, and some teams want to do that kind of stuff. Other teams want to be very focused and serious and play on hard mode. it’s very open for everybody.
Gamespace: Is that something that is important, building that community as much as getting the game systems right?
Paul
Well, I guess the real advantage of involving the community so early is you get a lot of people that love playing games and they also love the behind-the-scenes development side of things. What we found is people have been incredibly constructive because of that. That’s their interest and their passion. That is going to lead to a much more welcoming community overall now and later. Hopefully, we can just continue and carry that forward because we’ve got that established base now of players who’ve been in the various stages of testing.
Gamespace: There’s a lot of humor and nods to other sci-fi icons in the game. How many are there?
Matt
Oh, I think we’ve done all of them. I think it’s impossible to miss at this point. Yeah, no, we’ve had an absolute blast just taking references from every sci-fi thing that we’ve enjoyed, even some non sci-fi things that, you know, just kind of fit that sort of sci-fi nerdy culture a little bit. I will avoid actually dropping game spoilers in this discussion. Realistically, like, you know, the minute the game opens up, you’ll start seeing some nods. In particular, there’s a lot of stuff that I found when we were doing the game or during the game live. We took it to PAX, for example, and at PAX, we had all these people playing and you’d always have groups of four continuously playing all day long. Usually, I’d say one out of the four go and pick up a little nod or reference. So it was pretty fun to see.
Gamespace: Before we warp up (pun intended), I just want to ask what your hopes and plans are going forward?
Paul
We try and keep our road map relatively flexible because we can fit in as much of the player feedback into that as possible. But really, where we want to take the early access is from. Hopefully, we’re launching it a good state where you can experience the entire game, start to finish and without big chunks missing in terms of the core systems. However, we’ve got a huge amount of value that we can add in terms of replayability and variation. So we’ve got loads of ideas for whether it be different missions or different items you can have on the ship. Different players, ship layouts like all of these kinds of things that we can build out over and access alongside some of the community planned features as well, where players will specifically request things that we haven’t thought about or might look to build out a certain area of the game.
Matt
As for march, our hopes are that everybody enjoys the game as much as we do, for starters, and from the reception we’ve seen so far, it’s been really positive. So we can just continue to kind of grow and expand that. It’s going to be really exciting for us to just be able to say the game is out and you can go play it right now and get to interact with everybody.
If you are ready to get up to speed with this Means Warp then you can catch the free demo over on the Steam Store page or the This Means Warp website before it goes full thrust into early access in March.
