Interview

How to follow The Room: Barry Meade on why developers shouldn't be embarrassed about chasing a 'gaming classic'

Fireproof man on the problem with short-termism

How to follow The Room: Barry Meade on why developers shouldn't be embarrassed about chasing a 'gaming classic'

When Fireproof announced it was working on The Room 2, the stories almost wrote themselves.

A follow-up to a critical and commercial success was always guaranteed to attract the eyes of the press – something Fireproof's Barry Meade is only happy to admit to.

More tricky, however, is developing that game in the first place. So beloved was The Room that there's undoubtedly a risk that any successor will either be seen as 'more of the same' or, conversely, will be criticised for messing with the formula.

As Meade explains, however, that pressure has had very little impact on how the studio approached the development of the game. With The Room, Fireproof isolated itself from the wave of trends sweeping the mobile market and, instead, made the game it wanted to make.

According to Meade, that's exactly what it's done with The Room 2, as well:

Pocket Gamer: Given the success The Room achieved both critically and commercially, was there ever any chance you wouldn't work on a sequel?

Barry Meade: Not really no and for a few reasons.

Firstly, when we started making The Room we hoped as a for-hire studio that our first game would get us some notice in the industry but we expected nothing else - no Apple 'Game of the Year', no sales, none of that, we naturally assumed the game would sink off the charts like so many of devs have experienced.

So, from the start we planned to raise enough money - either through work for hire or, hope beyond hope, through some sales - to make three versions of the game. We thought that by game three we would have learned enough to make a really good game that finally would connect with the public.

The Room was only supposed to be the first step. When it took off on release it truly shocked us - all our plans for global insignificance were ruined.

Secondarily, there was the game itself. Because our resources were so small, we purposely made a simple and short game in order to ensure we could polish all its parts 100 percent and do right by the audience. So when we finished, we felt we had a lot left to give to the concept - much left unsaid as it were.

Thirdly, I would say that all of us at Fireproof saw the flaws in the first game and are quite determined to make the best possible version of the game in our heads.

We had spent years earning the right to make our own ideas and now that we are able, making a few more is not a chore but a joy - I can't overestimate what it means to us to have the freedom to do that.

And finally, there's the fact that we went from a studio barely turning profit to one that made more money in four days than we had in the previous four years - that would peel back anyone's ears.

So, all these points considered, I think frankly it would have taken a localised nuclear explosion to stop us making another Room game.

That success must add a fair weight of pressure to The Room 2, no? There are a lot of people watching what you're doing now...

Some, yeah, but at least nothing that gives us too much pause.

As a studio we're coming from a place where we had very little - no traction in the industry, no publisher attention, nothing to say we had any special prospects. We had no expectations, no right to expect success at all with our release. So everything that has happened since release is one giant bonus to us.

It would feel strange now to start worrying unduly about what we are doing when everything is going so well - doing so would suggest we have a right to expect success, and we bloody don't.

Our rights are earned by making great software and that's all. While there is always luck involved in success we're not believers in luck as the decider - we would only ever blame ourselves if we failed so if the game sinks, we made a bad game and we'll deserve what we get.

As long as we are honestly trying to make the best game we can, there is nothing else to worry about or concentrate on in our book.

As it stands now, every one of us in Fireproof is living our own dream making games we want to make. To start worrying or moaning now would be tantamount to rejecting our blinding good fortune. We'd find that a bit obnoxious to be honest.

With any follow up to a successful game, there's always the fear that, if you keep things exactly the same people will complain about a lack of progression, but if you change things too much they'll be equally dissatisfied. How do you approach a sequel to a game that, for many, ticked all the right boxes?

Well, the ideal is a balance of course, but we're not hugely worried about it. Remember for every aspect of the game our players liked, we liked it too and before they did, so our players are somewhat in sympathy with our tastes by default.

But really, I'd refer back to what I was saying earlier - The Room was a short game, very focused and in its own way was a basic version of what the game's concept could be. When we finished making it we felt we had barely gotten started - there was no question that we had way more to investigate with the concept yet.

All the areas that the game touches - Victorian Horror, Lovecraftian atmosphere, 19th Century cults, beautiful and strange furniture, the touch interface and mechanics - any one of these influences is a goldmine of ideas and we feel we've just skimmed the surface of each.

As far as players having expectations well that's natural but last time we won them over by surprising them and if we want them to have the same sense of delight with The Room 2 we would be insane to start pandering to those expectations now.

The idea that creative entertainment is about giving people what they want is a mostly bogus ideology driven by execs often out of touch with gamers and who are not in it to please their audience, whereas we see our entire future wrapped up in that single idea.

We're just delighted to get another crack at it, being able to add to what we brought before has no down side to us.

Was there anything about the original game that didn't quite work for you? And, if so, have you taken steps to correct it here?

Sure. Our players have confirmed to us a few of the things we knew we wanted to make better when we released the game.

Firstly it was short - everybody says that. What they might not know is that we made it short because of lack of money and resources. With only a limited time to complete it we could add more to the game to make it feel longer, or cut the fat from the game to ensure that we can polish what's left to 100 percent, and we chose the latter course.

It was tough doing that. We knew some people would hammer us for it and they did, certainly in the reviews but we knew it was making a better game. After it sold well and we had the money to do it, the first thing we did was spend months making a new chapter that grew the game size by 25 percent and gave it away for free to our users.

But, frankly, the original decision to go for polish over content was far and away the best decision we made during development and it really helped the game become better.

If you look at our user reviews, probably 50 or 60 percent of them say the game is too short. But 90 percent who say that give the game 5 stars. That means we not only got our calculations right, we got it bullseye.

We learned something big from that: quality is what players want above all else, though they may complain otherwise when they compare your features to other games.

There are other areas we wanted to improve too. We have a better ending, we have a shade more story, we upped the production values across the board but a lot of extra work has gone into the environments and the puzzles - that's where we hope people will really notice the difference in effort.

It's just as important to expand what people liked as it is to fix what they didn't.

Presumably, much of the promotion takes care of itself with The Room 2 – as soon as people see the name, they're going to be interested. How do you think you'll approach things when you launch a new IP?

You're correct. We're lucky that people now know the game as opposed to last year.

So far we've been blessed enough not to have to do marketing campaigns or hire PR agencies and all that stuff and rely on word of mouth.

But from this point its quite hard to say what a launch of new IP would look like, the market changes so fast it might be that we have to consider using those tools when that time comes, which we hope to do in 2014.

But from where we are now, with the success we've had we're still far from needing that. Now we're not dogmatic about it - we want to survive and keep making our games and will do what is necessary. But on the other hand, it's both invigorating and terrifying to stand or fall purely on the strength of your software. All the greatest games makers did that, and that's who we're really inspired by.

We come at our work as game fans first and foremost, and id Software didn't create the FPS because of market research. Nor Bullfrog Populous, nor Miyamoto Mario, nor Notch Minecraft and these are the people we want to emulate - make something new from nothing, seduce your way onto peoples hardware by making something new they can't ignore.

If most of the industry is unembarrassed to say they are strategically pandering to the market, we ought to be unembarrassed to say we want to make gaming classics.

We may not get there and I understand that's why the industry thinks our position is the less noble, more naive one of the two, but our players tell us all the time that they like our game because it's different to what most mobile games are like.

If we ever do become a famous developer known for its work, marketing cant hold a candle to that kind of buzz. And meanwhile if we continue to do right by gamers, our name will gain respect and make future launches easier not harder.

On that subject, how do you think things stand now as far as indies and games promotion? Every indicator we have seems to suggest it's only getting harder, but is more being made of that than is necessary?

I honestly can't say. With this stuff I can only speak from our experience, but it's obviously true it's getting harder and harder. There are many reasons feeding into that though - it's not as simple as 'too many games'.

For example, the confusing app stores are not well tailored to the curious gamer looking for entertainment. I wish the grossing charts could be tucked away as its clearly guiding new users to games that merely monetise well and hides the unbelievable amount of refreshing and joyful content out there.

And the vast ad spending by the big publishers for casual free-to-play games has a great spoiler effect. All of these things affect games that otherwise could do well in a marketplace built for gamers.

But mobile devs are at fault too - they have a problem when it comes to expectations. Anyone with £500 can make a game now without being experienced enough to know what it takes to turn that into a success. Start up developers have virtually no barriers to entry, but the barriers to success have always been big and have grown ever bigger.

It's gone from a yawning gap to an abyss and these developers now find themselves adrift in a tiny row boat with an ocean of vast waves looming over them.

Further, making a great game that comes over well with an audience always was and remains terribly difficult on any platform.

I think Fireproof is lucky to have come out of the console industry with its focus on great gameplay and player experience - it gave us an anchor to plan around. We thought mobile was too crazy to take for granted and perhaps our expectations were reduced to a useful realism by it. We simply didn't plan to win big, ever.

As a studio we had a very limited hand to play money-wise and so we were tremendously risk averse - we stuck to making what we knew, we didn't bloat our team to chase extra cash, we bet the only money we could afford, and we ignored areas of the mobile we knew or cared nothing about.

A lot of the failure when it comes to mobile studios is the market painfully correcting itself of the devs who bravely jumped in but without knowing their own end game.

And finally there's just a lack of dynamism in the market. For all its openness and simplicity of access, mobile gaming contains more group-think and creative me-too-ism than any entertainment industry has a right to expect.

Everything is short-termism, a gold rush - either copy the leaders or go home, that's the message.

While it's definitely tough out there for developers to get noticed, there's also armies of experts telling everyone to do one thing: copy what works.

In our view If you want to get noticed, it helps to be noticeable, be different. Stop playing 'the market' like it's a system and go back to what you know works and works honestly - start giving delight to gamers and a reason for them to turn to you.

That's what we can do as developers. But I would also like to see the platform holders start making moves with their stores.

Sony did something admirable when it was speccing out the PS4 - it went to the developers and said "what will help?" That's the kind of wisdom I'd like to see Apple and Google and Amazon start displaying - to look to the future and wonder if a world with only three publishers left is really what they want.

Thanks to Barry for his time.


With a fine eye for detail, Keith Andrew is fuelled by strong coffee, Kylie Minogue and the shapely curve of a san serif font.