1. How did the whole project start? Dr. Cat: The first "seed" was planted in 1985, when I was writing up a proposal for a single player RPG called "The Cat's Lair" for Electronic Arts. In the middle of doing that, suddenly this vision of an online multiplayer version of it came into my head. As I sat there, it seemed like the instant I thought of any question about how it would work, a really cool answer to it would form in my head. After a few minutes of that, I thought "Ok, back to work, the time for that game isn't for years yet". But I kept an eye on the market and the technology ever since then, watching and waiting, determined to be right in on the first huge surge of success in the online games market, which I've always believe will be BIGGER than the solo-play games we have now. I'd gotten my first modem in 1980, so I was already well aware of what "online communities" were like and how fascinating they could be to participate in. I was lucky the university I went to had a good group of people hanging out and exchanging messages on the school mainframe. I met 'Manda when we were working together at Origin, and we worked together on the first project she did there. We always worked very well together and like each other a lot personally. Origin seemed to realize this, and always put us on the same projects without us every actually asking. Maybe it's just because we were the two most eccentric people in the company at the time. In 1991, when I left Origin, 'Manda left with me. We worked for a year for Daniel Goldman at Tangent Online, the company that was later to be renamed Total Entertainmen Network, or TEN. But it was still a little early to be starting back then. 'Manda came up with the concept art for DragonSpires in 1992 or 1993 while we were working on a variety of projects, and in 1994 I wrote up a proposal and starting pitching it to people I knew at Imagination Network (INN) and Kesmai. They were both real interested, but they were also both dragging out the discussions for months like people always do... So I decided to just start programming it, and it would both get them moving quicker and turn up other companies that would want to discuss publishing the game. I had a very simple version working in about two weeks, and it did accomplish both of those things though we never did end up getting funding. It did get written up in Wired Magazine and has had over 11,000 characters created on it to date, so I guess it's earned itself a little place in the history of the earlier graphic muds. (Far from the first, though! Habitat was a grounbreaker in 1985, and the earliest graphical multiplayer online fantasy games actually predate MUD I, having shown up on the Plato network in the mid to late 70s. These games used line drawings to display the dungeons and were the inspiration for the game Wizardry.) When the time came to try and make the rounds again with a new and improved version, we decided to switch to a setting we felt more enthusiasm for. 'Manda and I have always loved talking animal characters and art. And besides, there's about a zillion generic medeival fantasy games, I always loved the genre but after all these years it's hard to get as excited about working on yet another one of the same old thing. We also wanted to make a game that's focused on other things besides combat, because it seems EVERY computer game these days is about fighting or conquering or something. We not only want to offer people more variety by being new and different, we're also hoping the millions of people who don't play computer games at all because they don't like fighting will find this to be something that might be fun to try. 2.How do you expect Furcadia to compete with other, massively funded 3.Online RPG's such as The Realm, and UoL? Dr. Cat: First of all, I think that the concept of "competing" is a big mistake the game industry makes, and many other industries too. Even if I'm wrong about the rest of the gaming industry, the online games business is so small right now, and expected to grow so fast, many people think it's more important to have several hit games rather than just one. To have most of the major gaming services succeed rather than have one or two fail, so that the market grows to its full potential - which will mean better sales for everybody. So, how I would try to "achieve comparable success"... The first goal is to try to just get massively funded ourselves. (grin) Having a partially finished version of a product improves your chances of getting funding immensely, especially if you can show that it's popular. We really aren't looking for "massive" funding, though. Talzhemir and I have always focused on making just those parts of the game that really add to the fun, not throwing in every feature we can ever think of (like some game companies). So we can make games more economically. We also have many years of experience doing this, so we're very efficient. The budget we were seeking for DragonSpires was about one fifth what I heard Origin is spending on Ultima Online. Where I do hope to see some significant money spent is in marketing. I've learned from long experience that no matter how good a game is, it really needs first rate marketing to reach its full sales potential. So I want to make sure we team up with a company that's excited about the game and is good at letting the public know that it's available to come try. We'll probably always keep a small section of the game available for free so people can check it out and see whether they want to spend money on it. Unlike some massive CD games, too, we won't have any problems keeping the demo version small enough to download. Long term, though, I'm counting on our game to be simply be better for making friends on than any of the others. And for communicating with friends and other people. The whole game is focused on user interface design, and specifically on design that maximizes the ease and bandwidth of communications between people. And I think that's ultimately one of the things people want most in life. The biggest entertainment medium in this country isn't videogames, or TV, radio, movies, books, magazines, music, or anything like that. It's the telephone. Whatever percentages you might guess are represented by personal calls (versus business and other uses), local and long distance phone calls together add up to a $160 billion dollar a year industry. Any significant percentage of that easily dwarfs the revenues in little $10 billion entertainment industries. What humans beings want to do most is to talk to one another, and we are going to facilitate that for a lot of people who aren't even interested in computer games that are about "winning" and "losing". We intend to do a lot more in the way of supporting clubs and guilds than most games, having special interest message boards, live online helpers to introduce people to the world and answer questions, etc. Eventually we intend to support some kind of microphone based voice chat, also - chatting with keyboard and words on a screen isn't fun enough for a lot of folks, or is too much effort, or both. If they can just talk and hear people, though, then they'll come and play. 4.Where do you plan to take the game once it is complete? Dr. Cat: I guess I touched on that some in the last question. But one of the neat things about an online game is that it doesn't have to become "complete and immutable" once you "ship" a product to the public, the way boxed single player games do. Since people are connecting to our server to play, we have it programmed to check if there have been any changes since the last time you played, and automatically send new code to your computer if there have so you can enjoy the new features. Some online game developers prefer to call a game "done" at a certain point and go start the next one, but I would like to keep adding things and making improvements in Furcadia for the rest of my life, if I can. If we get enough income coming in from the game to live on, then I probably will. So while I have enough plans and ideas saved up to keep me busy for the next five or ten years just doing them, eventually I'll probably be doing things I haven't even imagined yet. Ultimately I want it to sort of be the ultimate communications tool. The message system is meant to end up being better than any I've ever seen, with some really nice features to let you have messages filtered by various criteria by the moderator of your choice. Either by quality, or by content, or both. If you don't like the opinions of one moderator you can pick another, or become a moderator yourself. Or you can just turn filtering off and read everything that's posted. I also want it to be kind of a "model society" that we can maybe learn things from about how to get along a little better in the real world. I've been playing on text-only muds for several years, and it occurred to me that in those environments, where you can describe yourself as looking any way you want, can instantly create any object you want, "pose" that you are doing abosolutely anything you want to... That essentially everyone is all powerful. And when we have an environment where we have the maximum possible power, the maximum possible freedom, what do we make out of all that limitless potential? Is dreaming up places to pretend to kill each other the best that we can do? I have no problem with that, personally, and enjoy it myself at times, but I think we should have more besides that. A place for people to share aspirations, to work towards some loftier goal. Mostly I want it to be a place where people can learn of the joy of being expressive, and to share it with others. The more ambitious can create maps, upload music or art they've created, or write stories on the message boards for people to read. But everyone can tinker a little with pasting a few stickers together in an amusing way, making a few little improvements on a map they're working on with a friend, using the "face kit" we'll make to customize their portrait a bit, or just offering suggestions and feedback to their friends who are making stuff. I want more and more of the tools for being creative to be built into the game, and for those to become easier and easier to use. We want to give discounted or free access to people who contribute the most popular work to the environment, and eventually, years from now, if the game's big enough and commercially successful enough, maybe we could even pay people royalties if their stuff was wildly popular. Kinda like what Ted Nelson envisioned for Project Xanadu back in the 1960s - but I'm afraid the poor fellow was WAY ahead of his time and probably still is! I also hope through my work to play some small part in trying to reduce the amount of killing and war in the world. It may sound kinda naive and hopelessly altruistic and daydreamy... But I am convinced that was one of the reasons behind Walt Disney's plan for having the International Pavillions in Epcot Center. They are actually staffed by people who are native to all those different countries, who come over to work at Disneyworld for a fixed period of time. So when you buy something at a gift shop or order something at a restaurant, you can actually meet and chat with people from other countries, which is something many people don't get the opportunity to do all that often. I can possibly go that one step better, and get people in regular contact with folks from all over the world on a daily basis, without even leaving their own home! We have a world map on one wall, and there is a white pin in every country that someone has connected to DragonSpires from. Some of them really surprised us, like Slovenia, a country that didn't even exist ten years ago! So what's going to happen if people make friends in other countries? Maybe, just maybe, when somebody they know makes an ethnic slur or their government leans towards going to war or whatever... They won't think "Yeah, that stupid place where they wear those ridiculous looking clothes and have weird customs"... But will think instead "Hey, that's where my friend lives. They can't really be that bad if they're like him, can they?" 5.How important is player interaction with the game itself? Dr. Cat: This is what single player games focus exclusively on, of course. And it's one of the biggest reasons why most people don't play them at all. I was always obsessed with games, even as a kitten, and I loved to find the best strategies to win with. It was an intellectual challenge. But I learned from Danielle Berry that most people play games as a form of socializing. Watch a group of people playing Monopoly, or Trivial Pursuit, or Hearts. These people don't have the same obsessions that a veteran wargamer does! Sometimes they aren't even trying very hard to win, just to enjoy playing and enjoy spending time with friends. I think the primary role of games should be as a "social catalyst". People wouldn't have as much to talk about if they didn't have that Trivial pursuit game or Monopoly board in the middle of the table making things happen. It's a "social lubricant". Trivial Pursuit is particularly brilliant at this because if keeps injecting topics into a group of people, any of which could turn into a topic for conversation for a while if people feel like they would like to chat about that. A perfect example from DragonSpires is the color changing shop. I could have easily made it so that you could change your colors all by yourself. That would have been easier - and duller. By requiring two people to do it together, the game makes them interact, cooperate, maybe even (gasp) talk to each other! People are already finding out interesting little details about Furcadia and what you can do there and sharing them with each other, which is great. A lot of this comes from people experimenting and trying to figure out interesting new things to do, even things I never anticipated. So in that sense player interaction with the game is important in that it provides a source for more things to talk about and more things to share. But we need to be focused on interactions that encourage people to do that, as opposed to those that encourage solitary activities like trying to build up a "high score". Castle Infinity actually has a high score list for who's received the most "post cards" from other players, which I think is a great idea! Interaction with other players is our primary goal, interaction with the game environment should always be secondary & focused on helping with our main goal. 6.How do testing groups such as ~Souls of Chaos~,figure into the programming adjustments? Dr. Cat: I had actually never heard of independent testing groups until several members of ~Souls of Chaos~ showed up on Furcadia and told me about their group. They're the only such group I have heard of so far, if anybody knows of any others please let me know because I think it's a really interesting idea! So far it's been nice to have SOC members in the game because they all tell each other about new games, which can help you get more new users. And with regard to modifying the program or finding bugs, they're more likely to have experience playing several different so they may have a broader perspective there. I'm also always glad to have any group of people that already know each other from somewhere else - because I figure then it'll be easy to get them to set up a meeting hall and message board for their group, they don't have to go through all the time to meet and develop a group of friends from scratch! 7.How do you as designers, feel about player interaction within the game? Dr. Cat: As I mentioned before, this is really the heart of what the game is all about. Unlike a single player game, where the developer is supposed to essentially provide the fun for people, in the multiplayer environment we feel our job is just to create the opportunities to have fun, and the tools to make fun things happen, and really step back a bit and let the players make fun for each other. In our first few weeks we've already seen people organize capture the flag games, play word games, and make giant checkerboards and play checkers with red and black pillows, so I think we're off to a good start! I've also seen a lot of people pick up on the tradition I tried to establish right at the start of welcoming new players and being helpful to people that have questions about how things work. This is very important, because I want it to feel like a friendly, helpful environment right from the beginning when people first arrive, and we could never do that all by ourselves with such a small staff! In the future I imagine we'll see a few of the more ambitious players doing things like setting up little quests, running ongoing RPG campaigns in their own specially built areas, having contests, scavenger hunts (actually already saw one of those), parties, and lots more. Basically I feel the more power we give our players to interact with each other in the ways they want, the more successful we're going to be. We just give a little "nudge" to get things started by providing the setting and artwork and maybe a few ideas here and there. That's what Talzhemir is really great at. 8.Is combat planned for the game? If not, what is going to be the draw to new players? Dr. Cat: Right now we're thinking we'll probably add combat in a year or so, in special areas that are set aside for that kind of adventuring. It's not really what the game is about, and I feel that letting people get that impression will keep away all of the millions of people who don't like any of the existing computer games, but do like to socialize. There will likely be some adventuring going on, but the absence of a built-in combat system will force people to do it more the way you would play a conventional paper and pencil RPG, like Dungeons and Dragons, White Wolf, GURPS, etc. I think this is a good thing. Even in that field of gaming, there has been a tendency on the part of some to turn it into just an endless series of battles with little or no story to connect it all together. Without a combat system I'm hoping we'll encourage people to spend more time playing out interesting situations in their adventures, acting a bit more, using their imagination. More like the MUSH style of roleplaying than the combat MUDs. 'Manda has helped found and/or run several MUSHes, so she's quite familiar with what's been learned there about what does and doesn't work in online roleplaying. As for what's the draw, that's a tricky one. It's not an easy thing to summarize what we're about in 25 words or less to give to a marketing guy that's trying to figure out how to make a flashy ad or something. We do want to offer a variety of things, for people with different tastes - some will prefer to ignore most of the game and use it just like a big graphic chat room, others will get really into designing intricate puzzles with sliding crates, levers to pull, keys to find, etc. Or solving other people's puzzles. Some people might come mostly just to read and post on the message boards, or play in a weekly RPG campaign with a bunch of friends just like you might in real life. Mostly what I'm hoping will draw people in is the setting. It's novel, and I feel it's very visually striking - actually I think it's the best art 'Manda has done in her career to date. The music by The Fat Man and Team Fat is really great too, they and 'Manda really make my work look and sound wonderful! Anyway, once the sights and sounds and interesting animal characters have hooked people in to take a look, I think we can get them to find something that'll keep them interested enough to stay, even though that may be different for everybody. To some extent I think I want people to come in not feeling like they know exactly what to expect. Because this is really such a new and different thing compared to existing games. That way they'd have an open mind and see what they might happen to like about the game, whereas if they come in with specific expectations in advance they might just think "Oh, this isn't what I came for." What really sums it up best for me is the slogan 'Manda came up with: "Furcadia - Let your imagination soar." For some people this might mean as little as pretending to be a talking animal for half an hour while you wander around exploring and talking to people. Other people will be going nuts with the map editor and the DragonSpeak scripting language and creating things we never even imagined they would. We know that this will really be just a minority of the players, same as with the features that let you upload art and music. But those few people are going to be creating most of the things that are the real draw for the majority of players, whatever those things might turn out to be. There's another benefit to having areas created by players, too. The emotional response you have to being "invited" to play some new Doom levels by the creators of that game, through a magazine or something, that's one thing. But the way it feels to have one of your friends say "Hey, want to come see the castle I just built?" is a totally different thing. Even if it might be a little less polished sometimes than what the "professionals" create, there's a certain pleasure inherent just in the fact that you're checking out something a friend of yours made. And you can talk to them about it, suggest things, maybe even work with them on parts of it. So I think that makes it every bit as much fun as seeing "professionaly" built areas, maybe even more so. Probably more so, a lot of the time. 9.The Dream's making feature of the game is unique; how will dreams affect the game? Dr. Cat: The current "dreams" (that's our term for user-uploaded levels, for readers of this interview who aren't familiar with the game) are just the beginning. Right now you can only make your levels appear temporarily in the game, through the dream gates. Later you'll be able to make them a permanent part of the game world, with an exit in a fixed spot on some particular map that never goes away. Once this happens I expect the game to start growing explosively, just like a lot of the text muds that let players build and connect their own rooms. (One of the ones I play on has over 20,000 rooms and is still growing!) We currently envision the game world being divided into three basic areas. The core will be built entirely by us, or perhaps also by a few people who we work very closely with. This will be divided into areas aimed at the major categories of players we expect to find based on our experiences with text muds, so they can group together and not end up stepping on each other's toes too much. One area will be focused on roleplaying, another mainly on socializing. There may be others for things like puzzle making & solving, or whatever else turns out to be popular. Combat will be another area when it's added. We'll also probably have some of the major guild halls in the core area. Somewhere within the core will be the entrances to the two other major areas, which represent two philosophies of building. One of them will be somewhat managed and planned out, either by us or the builders guild (known as the Mage Masons) or some combination of the two. It won't be too hard to get an area approved, but there'll be some effort to keep things organized a bit, put up signs to help people find their way around, establish areas where all the maps have a common theme, etc. The other area will be the "wilderness", and it will essentially be wide open for anyone to do anything just about anywhere. People will be able to set up an exit on their map for someone else to link to another map, or if you want you can just leave some "open" links that can be connected to by the first person to wander along and claim them. We'll start the ball rolling with a few starting areas that have a large number of open links, and just see what happens! Which of the three areas will prove to be the most popular? I make no predictions. We'll just sit back and watch what happens along with everyone else! Of course we will adjust where we focus our efforts on improving the game based on what people seem to like most, and what they ask for most. That's one of the beauties of online games compared to the "old" way of doing things. 10.Since beginning Alpha testing, what kind of feed back have you recieved? We haven't been open too long yet, but I do get a pretty steady stream of comments and suggestions. Also if there's any bug in the game, you can believe I'll hear about it before long! There have been specific a lot of specific requests for a few of the upcoming features that aren't working yet, and when it's possible I try to move up the priority of those. If people are wanting it that much I figure it's probably one of the most important things to get working. Every once in a while I do hear something I had never thought of before, and usually I'll make a note about it to considering adding it to my list of things to add. One example was the notion of making DragonSpeak so it can respond to things people type, setting off some effect or response if they say a specific word or phrase. I had never thought of that, but a lot of people want to make NPCs or bots in DragonSpeak that will reply when you talk to them. So that feature is going to be added. It will have other uses than what people asked for, of course. You could make a magic door that opens when people say a special password, for instance. A lot of people have also just said how much they like the game, which is very gratifying. We don't do this just for the money, knowing that we've made people happy is a major part of the motivation for doing this kind of work. I guess I'll never get tired of hearing that! 1. How did the whole project start? Manda: Dragonspires was written about a year before the words "In Character" and "Out Of Character" became important in online text games. It was meant to be more like ZZT or Dig Dug or Gauntlet, an arcade-ish combat and puzzle game, not a roleplaying game. Everybody was a knight, and there'd be no explanation. At some point I turned to Dr. Cat and said, flat out, "Let's make it furry." And everything just seemed to "click" into place, because we were both fans of that genre. 2.How do you expect Furcadia to compete with other, massively funded 3.Online RPG's such as The Realm, and UoL? Manda: I do think we have a better grasp on what it is people really *do* in an online environment. You can see it in what Dr. Cat chose to do first. Dr. Cat coded the map editor and released it to players from the start, with the ability to upload their personal maps. I put alot of work into the all-text game, FurcadiaMUSH, because it's a repository of source material in a form that's immediately available to any player who wants to see it, to spark the imaginations of players who want to learn the background. That MUSH will remain free; anybody with Internet access (possibly a player who's decided for whatever reason they will stop playing the for-pay game with graphics) will still have a place to meet those friends they have made. The friendships are *real*. There's players who want to be themselves; there's players who want to roleplay. And those two activities mix very poorly! That's why there's a "roleplayers" area, where it's understood that you don't mention the real world. And that roleplay, although only a small minority of players actually wants to do it, and *can* really do it, is vital, because the players who do it are the creative people who form the heart of the environment. Then there's support for finding the information that makes social interaction smoother. I invented the Qcodes, which a player voluntarily appends to their descriptions. I'm sure many things will be borrowed from the text muds, such as +finger, but Furcadia contains what I call Engineries of Thought, mechanisms that are unique and new. Everybody else is doing the kill-monsters-take-their-treasure kind of game. We're not like `everybody else'. We're going for ordinary people, people who have this unfortunate impression that computers are mostly for spreadsheets or games in which you cause explosions. So... I actually don't think of these games as competition. We even hope this is the legendary game that will draw in the female audience. You could give it to your daughter, your wife, your sister, your aunt, or your grandmother, provided they have access to the hardware that runs it. I intend to support roleplaying heavily. Only a small portion of people really like to RP, but those people are the most interesting. So they become the core of your game. 4. Where do you plan to take the game once it is complete? Manda: There really is always more room for improvement. Hard to say what "complete" is. I mean, it will grow to fill available resources. We'll have an international array of players; how about adding online dictionaries for French, Japanese, and other languages, to English? And how about adding graphics/code support for more animal races? And then, why not do character generation and graphics for more environments, for modern or futuristic milieus? It doesn't end! There's a little utopianism here, a little transhumanism, ways to play with your own psyche in a safe environment. I tend to share Felorin's idealism here. If you look at GhostMOO*, which is a game whose world I designed some years back, you'll see an ultra-violent post-holocaust world. That's how I exorcised a paralyzing terror of nuclear war with which I and my Generation-X brethren were instilled. Some of us turned to wishful thinking fantasies like Dianetics and crystal healing. My esoteric totemist leanings grew into Furcadia. *GhostMOO is accessible by telnetting to casper.bga.com 6969 Tell 'em Razorhawk sent you. As for the game world, I envision other games. How about a 3D game a la Magic Carpet, in which you ride a Scarhawk, firing crossbows at your pals? How about a paper-dolls kit, featuring Furres from all nations and periods of history? We have to make sure to balance our dreams with some down-to-earth mercenary thinking... We'll take it to somebody who sees things in roughly the same way and has money. Yeah. 5.How important is player interaction with the game itself? It's very important, because it's where the different games will compete the most. That is, what happens when there's nobody but you (just a single player) and the game, for WHATEVER reason. It has to be at LEAST as good as a standalone home "boxed" game. But *too* involving, and that would detract. Other players would get ignored in favor of interacting with the server world; that's not optimal. 7.How do you as designers, feel about player interaction within the game? Manda: I think other live players become 99% the game, and what we make is the medium for that interaction. I think that these things aren't only useful in games, but just as games were the pioneer arena of new sound cards and better memory management and fantastic chips for the PC, games will be the forefront of online interaction., esta It's a scam-- we're selling players each other, gift-wrapped in fur. I'll make a coherent world, and background, established characters, and the look of it, but then Felorin and I try to seed a kindly and generous and sensible and fair culture, which players will pass amongst one another. And that's the game's REAL purpose: To keep injecting that -feeling-. If it wasn't for that, I think people could have just as much fun in a souped-up IRC kind of thing. The game sets a common mood, gives a common context, so people always have new things to talk about. 9.The Dream's making feature of the game is unique; how will dreams affect the game? Manda: Felorin said it all. :) 10.Since beginning Alpha testing, what kind of feed back have you received? Manda: Pretty much people liked the pictures, and that's good. I still don't know how they like the in-character background stuff, yet, or the optional full-scale more detailed character generation stuff but I think that will work. Mostly, I'm impressed with how well people respond to Felorin's social ideas!