Towers, guns and 50s sci-fi

The first thing you’ll notice when you see Fortified is its wonderful art style, taking that b-movie 50s sci-fi feel and blending it with a colour, caricature visual appearance. But what you should pay more attention to is the gameplay, which blends third-person shooting with strategic tower placing as you fend of an alien invasion.

It’s certainly an interesting concept, so we got in touch with the game’s Toronto-based developer Clapfoot and spoke with Matthew Rigg, the game designer and a 3D artist for Fortified, to find out more about what to expect from the game.

---

GameWatcher: The tower defence genre is a particular crowded genre - how have you been designing a game with that in mind?

Matthew Rigg: One of the big things that we wanted to do was play the balance between what you’re doing while you’re shooting and what you’re doing while you’re building structures. One of the important points was that we didn’t want it to be one-sided either way, so we don’t want you to be able to shoot your way out of a situation and we don’t want you to just to be able to stand back and let the structures do all the work. So it’s really like, what are you bringing? What upgrades are you bringing? The types of weapons that you’re using are really important, the tactical game is really high, so it’s not just that you can overpower your enemies with brute force, that usually won’t work in Fortified. And so our effort was to make it about really, really tactical decisions from the outset. And I think that’s what makes the game the most fun, and at its peak is when you’re failing over and over again and you make these really dynamic tactically choices and you’re like ‘oh shit, that totally works - great. Now I can move forward.’

GameWatcher: Are you finding that by having these two very distinct core parts of the gameplay it’s a difficult message to get across?

Matthew Rigg: It’s funny that you mention that because I was just saying the other day that with the trailers and stuff it’s really hard in a minute and a half to get that point across, because otherwise we’re looking just like a tower defence game. I think… well, we’re doing these spotlight videos and I think they do a better job of getting the message across. And some other people have streamed the game at this point and seeing them play seems to get the chat understanding the game a little bit better. I think messaging has actually been a little bit harder than we expected but for the most part as soon as people start playing it they’re like ‘oh, okay, I see what’s going on’.

GameWatcher: How did you settle on the b-movie sci-fi setting for the game?

Matthew Rigg: Well originally it was actually super different. I’m the lead game designer on the game and when I originally pitched the game it was actually ‘Ghostbusters in Space’. It was like these four Firefly dudes going from planet to planet exterminating aliens, and then from there it ended up getting kind of dark. It was the last kind of civilization of humans trapped on the ship and aliens infesting the ship and you were trying to protect them. It got really dark and it was cool and it was fun and it was a good story, but the game we were making was not serious. It ended up being kind of goofy, and so we were like ‘this isn’t working at all’. There was this dichotomy that wasn’t quite playing together and so one of my bosses was watching Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow and he was like ‘man, this would be really, really funny if we tried to do something along those lines’. And as we went deeper down that rabbit hole we found a bunch of comics from the 50s and one of them was Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 AD and on the cover there was this guy, in a skirt, karate chopping a robot. As soon as we saw that we were like, ‘okay, now we know what we really want to do with this game’. We didn’t want to full silly, but as a result it looks kind of silly if that makes sense.

GameWatcher: When you changed the style, did that affect the way that Fortifield played at all?

Matthew Rigg: Yeah, it started to inform design for sure because a lot of the early stuff was about building mazes and stuff like that to try to keep aliens at bay. We started to reach into the silly stuff, the really physics-based stuff, because we thought that was really funny and so a lot of the structures in the game are really physics based stuff. Or elemental as well, like fire and ice - freeze rays and flamethrowers and stuff like that. Just the aesthetics started to give us more ideas of how we can integrate that into the gameplay.

GameWatcher: As for the art style itself - and we talked a little bit about getting noticed in the genre earlier - but do you think that’s helped to stand out because of its own, unique style?

Matthew Rigg: Thank you, yeah. I think so, I hope so. I’m on the art team as well as the game design side. With the art we tried very hard to make it our own thing, and I think by taking modern technology - we’re building it on Unreal Engine 4 - and using modern techniques, but also making it feel retro. Those were our two goals: make it feel new, and make it feel old. How do you do that? I think we got there…

GameWatcher: How do you balance a game like this, especially since you said you wanted each of the two gameplay types to be equal to one another?

Matthew Rigg: A lot of playtesting! So I would manage lots and lots of spreadsheets just looking at lots of rare numbers and you start there and you start looking at how it feels and what’s actually happening in the game. Because sometimes your plan doesn’t work out and only by playing it and experiencing it will you understand. And one of our QA testers was just unbelievably good at this game and so we had to test the hardest difficulties with him because he was the only one that could really get through it. Basically there was a time period where there was a bit of a downtime and the programmers were kind of wrapping up features and polishing stuff up and there wasn’t as much QA stuff to do, so what I did with him was I sat down with him and we spent two months testing and would tell me if something felt wrong. We would sit down and play it day in, day out and I would go back and I would make changes, we’d do 10-20 builds a day and just balancing everything to make it feel as good as possible. I think we struck a good balance between the two, but it was a challenge for sure.

GameWatcher: I always find with these types of games it’s an element of variety that is most important to keeping players interested. How are you tackling this with Fortified?

Matthew Rigg: We erred on the side of keeping things on the brief side and to not overextended. Because I agree 100% and I really didn’t want anything to get stale over time and as a team when something got boring we all called it out. We all don’t want it to overextend its welcome either way. We’re only seven people so our resources are kind of limited, right? We were like, ‘what can we do?’ So for the first two-thirds of the game every level has a new enemy introduced, you’re unlocking stuff constantly, right? Plus the four different classes, it’s a four-player co-op game as well, and it isn’t a stat-based game it’s a completely mechanics based game. We didn’t want to make the game too long and so it should feel fresh the whole way through, at least I feel that way. And people who really dig it will maybe go into the harder difficulties, which is a completely different game because it changes the way the waves play out, you don’t deal as much damage, you don’t get as much money, it’s a lot harder. So people who are really into will have that extra, different experience.

GameWatcher: Was co-op always an integral feature to the game?

Matthew Rigg: Yeah, that was number one. It was that and it was the fact that it’s a cross between third-person shooting and strategy. The co-op was number one, in fact it was originally six players and we brought it down to four.

GameWatcher: Did that have an impact on the way you were designing the game?

Matthew Rigg: Absolutely. Each character doesn’t have access to everything in the game, so each of the characters bring something to the table. The spaceman, for instance, is all about crowd control. If you were just like running in with the rocket scientist who doesn’t really have that much crowd control you’re probably going to have a really different experience because she can do a lot of damage and blow things up and throw things around a little bit but the spaceman can completely stop everybody which is unbelievably vital if you’re talking about a base defence game. So when things are going bad he can stop everything, but the rocket scientist on the whole hand is similarly useful because she can get across the map really fast but she will probably take a lot more damage or other things that you won’t think about. I think balancing the four characters became really important, especially when you talk about their abilities and their unique weapons and structures that they have.

GameWatcher: So this is your first PC and console game after having previously worked on mobile, why did you decide to make the switch?

Matthew Rigg: Mainly we wanted to make fun games. I think there’s a market for making really fantastic games on tablet, but that just hasn’t really been tapped into because of how the market has gone. That was a goal for us for a while - to make these really fantastic tablet games - but we found that in order to be competitive you really have to do free-to-play stuff and in-app purchases. The games that are not free-to-play that are really successful - like Monument Valley or something - I almost think they spread through word of mouth and they do really well because of the way they are marketed. They are going to be shown off and it spreads like wildfire, but I think it’s really hard to get any traction as a paid app. So by doing free-to-play stuff we could get a lot of traction that way - I mean, we did, we had a million people playing our mobile games - but the thing is though is that sacrificed the quality of the game. We could never make it add to the quality of the game. And also, we’re not analysts, we don’t want to spend all of our time looking at numbers. We want to make games, and that was the real motivation - to make fun games, so that’s why we switched.

GameWatcher: Have you found it’s easier to get noticed on PC than it is on the mobile market? I mean the indie scene is booming these days, and many are saying it’s difficult to get recognised as a result.

Matthew Rigg: So far it’s been tough. We seem to have a niche pocket of people following us and that’s really cool, everyone liked it at PAX and they’ll jump on. It’s a little bit harder obviously but we’re actually making a new game and no one really knows who we are - yet. That doesn’t help as well, right? It’s growing though, every update we did, every PAX we did - we were really visible going to shows and making regular updates and keeping people aware of us, but the key thing for us is that we’re trying to make a game without compromises. So that is the most important thing. We’re proud of it, so that makes it even better. It has been difficult to get traction but I think we’re getting traction the more and more time the game has had in being out in public. Which is all we could really ask for.

GameWatcher: Will you be maintaining it after release with updates and DLC?

Matthew Rigg: We’re not sure yet, I don’t have anything specific to say. But I will say that we’re not totally opposed to the idea, I think we’re going to wait to see what the reception is and how everything goes from that. We definitely talked about it but we’re not able to commit to anything just yet.

GameWatcher: Do you think that’s expected of developers these days, to ensure there will be future updates and content?

Matthew Rigg: I definitely think in the triple-A market that seems to be the case. But I can only really speak from my own personal experience and especially going to things like PAX, people always seem to ask that question every time. People are like ‘can I buy skins for characters?’ and stuff and we’re like ‘well, that’s almost like reaching into the mobile stuff again’ and so we don’t know if we’re going to do that. People are like, ‘well, if you do I’ll totally buy the DLC’. So we’d love to do that, so maybe, but in my experience people do want that - especially if they really dig what you’re doing. I don’t know if it affected development of our particular game, maybe it does with other indies - but it does with the triple-A market because those games are so expensive.

---

If that’s got you interested in Fortified then you’ll be pleased to learn that you don’t have to wait long to play it. This unique blend of third-person shooter and tower defence strategy is released on 3rd February, 2016.