The New York-based developers behind Guns of Icarus Online had a rough start. Between a terrible contract with a game publisher and launching their game when Hurricane Sandy hit the City, Muse Games Team Lead Howard Tsao has earned the right to brag about his team’s accomplishments.
iDigitalTimes visited Muse Games’ office to chat with Tsao about Guns of Icarus Online, a steampunk-inspired, team-based multiplayer online airship combat game available on Steam. Players can take on the role of a pilot, a gunner or engineer and each team has a captain - usually the pilot - who determines what guns to bring, what tactics [to use] in the fight, hopefully with input from their crew.
In combat, the captain/pilot flies the ship, the gunner handles the turret guns and the engineer runs around repairing the ship, but everybody on the team can do a little bit of each role. For example, a gunner can make a repair on his guns if the engineer is busy handling another issue.
“The specialization comes in with the skills you get to bring in per your class. So the gunner will have three gunning skills per one engineer skill, whereas the engineer will have three engineering skills per one gunning skill,” Tsao said.
Players cannot change their roles during the matches, but are not confined to any role. The length of each match last anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes depending on the mode you choose. There are three modes: 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 ships.
Tsao began development for Guns of Icarus Online in 2011. Muse Games partnered with an Asian publisher, which Tsao didn’t name during the interview. He explained the publisher rakes in “a few hundred million dollars a year.”
“They squeeze the crap out of indie developers,” Tsao said. “They’ll have exclusive rights to publish a game. Long story short, we were really screwed. They don’t pay, they try to squeeze a lot of features in the game that were intended for later development, and we were still prototyping. They wanted us to polish the game so they would look good for their marketing team…All kinds of crazy stuff. We were crunching [to meet deadlines] for almost six months.”
It wasn’t that Guns of Icarus Online wasn’t ready for release, but the team’s main concern was to get out of the prototyping phase and make sure the game mechanics weren’t broken, Tsao said. The publisher Tsao’s team partnered with paid them very little at first with the promise of giving them more money later on. Tsao said the company would withhold payment and try to jam in features that weren’t past their alpha or beta-testing phase.
“Finally we had enough. [The publisher] literally threatened to copy the game if we tried to leave and do this on our own. Basically some really shady stuff,” he said. “In games if they want to copy a mechanic, you totally can. You can copy 90 percent of a game and there’s nothing a developer can do.”
Game developers can’t legally protect their code. Tsao said if the publisher decided to name their knock-off Guns of Icarus Online then it’s a violation of copyright. If the publisher decided to create a steampunk airship game with a highly competitive multiplayer like Guns of Icarus Online, there was nothing they could do.
After six months of crunch time with 12-14 hour days, they backed away from the contract. It cost them of a lot of money, and Tsao said the team was “pretty broke” and needed help from family to continue making Guns of Icarus.
“You kind of brought back a flashback of painful memories,” Tsao joked. “Now it’s like ‘Okay, haha. It’s an experience that you went through.’ We still learned a lot but a lot of work just went down the drain.”
It’s one milestone at a time for Tsao’s team. Eventually they made it onto Steam, but that didn’t come without drama as well. Most developers fear players complaining about bugs they didn’t anticipate prior to launch; Muse Games had a natural disaster heading their way on the night Guns of Icarus Online debuted on Steam.
Enter Hurricane Sandy, Oct. 22, 2012.
“The moment we launched the game was when Hurricane Sandy hit New York. It was that night, which was bad,” Tsao said. “That was terrible. We were all at home and everywhere around [our office] was flooded. There’s no power, no electricity. Our online servers didn’t work because we used a hosting company and their power is knocked out.
“People got the game and most couldn’t play it. When we finally got Internet we just saw a sea of player complaints on Steam forums and we can’t reply to it because we don’t have a steady connection. It was probably the worst launch ever. In the beginning we were just getting hammered. Not only was the game not playing, but there were some bugs we never anticipated.”
Tsao’s team had to sneak into their office located in Lower Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy passed to grab their build machine to fix the game's issues. Once the team was able to get the word out that they were based in New York City, Steam users backed off and gave their support to the developers, telling them to take their time with getting the game up and running.
With two traumatizing events behind them, Muse Games is currently working on core mechanics and its goal is to bring an expansion to Guns of Icarus Online in 2015. The team is working on the game’s artificial intelligence. The goal is to develop a computer that sees how well your team is doing in the match and throws more challenges for a more satisfying win. Muse Games also wants to introduce a story mode to Guns of Icarus Online.
“Right now it’s all PvP. It’s about players coming online and forming teams and they battle against each other,” Tsao said. “We’re working on an expansion right now. The gameplay will be not just PvP, but will also be PvE, which is teams of player ships versus computer. So there are a number of new game modes we’re working on. In addition to that, we’re also introducing factions in more of the sense of the world.
“Players will be signed up to different factions, with each occupying a different geographic territory or region on the map. Factions have different ships, technology, weapons and skills.”
Another goal for the Guns of Icarus Online expansion is to add what Tsao called “seasons” to create more “meaning” in the game. The story and lore is something Muse Games will add on top of the gameplay they have out now.
“Say there’s a season,” he said. “Every season is two months. During the season you can play PvE matches and accumulate resources and stats for your own faction. At the end of the season the world will be in conflict and people will be contesting different geographic territories. The resources that you gain will be more significant.”
Tsao offered one piece of advice for anyone who wants to create their own game: “Fail Fast.” The sooner developers can get past their beta testing stage, the better. You can download Guns of Icarus Online on Steam here. Keep up-to-date on Guns of Icarus Online on their official website here.
