Spymaster: Interrogating PlayRaven

Finnish development studio PlayRaven's new game, Spymaster, is an incoming iOS title that has caught our attention thanks to what looks like an appetising blend espionage and strategy. We caught up with company co-founders Lasse Seppänen (CEO), Tiago Rocha (lead game designer) and Teemu Haila (product manager) to find out more about their intriguing game, what influenced them, and where they are in development.

First of all, can you give us a brief overview of Spymaster?

Tiago Rocha: It's not usually what you would think about strategy games on the iPad, it's got a bit more depth than a lot of strategy games on the iPad have. It's a turn-based game. It's more like a manager, but in this case you're managing a team of spies during the Second World War. You're taking them to basically occupy Europe, and to deal as much damage as you can to the war machine of the time.

What kind of missions are you sending the spies on?

Tiago Rocha: You have a meta-game where you can hire new spies on a higher level, or you can get the spies to train in what you want them to do. And you decide that you would like to go and do a certain type of operation, you're given different operations you can choose from. When you go to an operation, an operation takes something like 10-15 minutes, and then you'll go around moving in a really deep map of Europe, you can go to many important cities.

There's no direct combat here. It's mostly about trying to cause damage to the Axis before they actually notice you. The way they go about doing that... we research a lot about history here, in this company we have a lot of history buffs, and we noticed that back then the main risk is not physical, there's no bullets flying, they had to lead this different life the whole day, the whole time. You had to have a different accent and you had to fake and fake with friends, and so a lot of the agents they actually went crazy, many of them in real life. So we thought that having to manage their stress, and how far you're willing to push them, it's a core, central thing in our operations.

So you basically move them around the map. There are more difficult places like Paris, or especially Berlin. Cities like that are very dangerous... which will cause them to get stressed much faster. But to counterbalance that you can create spy rings in different cities. You go around building spy rings and connecting them. When the spy rings get connected, they produce intel; one of the most important resources we have. To make the intel actually useful you have to get it back to London, and to transmit it then you have to have a specialist spy that can actually deal with radios and transmit this stuff back to London. But while you're doing all this they're getting stressed and the Axis is noticing what you're doing more and more - they used to have this radio thing which would go around trying to pinpoint where radio transmissions are coming from.

We also have this thing when you're going around you're also finding these targets of opportunity, like factories and training depots and Gestapo headquarters, and you can do raids on these things. The raids is a really important part of our game. There's this interesting mission planning screen where you decide which spies you want to take here and really want to put at risk. You can use intel to improve the plan and then send them on a mission. When you see the mission going on it's pretty cool, you can see things happening to them. It's seldom random, there's a lot of dependencies. Depending what skills they have they do different things, and then different things happen to them. The result of what happened they tell you later.

How will it play out for the player? How will we interact with the game?

Tiago Rocha: It's very much an iPad game, and from the start we tried to make it so that it's very tactile. We believe that for an iPad game to be successful you have to open it at any time and you need to have all the information you need to make your decisions right away, without having to go through many screens, which is a problem with many strategy games on PC. When you open up Civilization, or when you open up a Paradox game, you have to go through many screens to actually remember at which point in the game you actually were. We're trying to make sure that all the information you need is on the map right in front of you and all the actions you can take are done through your spies. A ring by itself cannot do anything. Spies do everything. So you don't have... like in Civilization you have a bunch of cities and you're managing all of them. In our case we tried to keep this down and the scale of the number of actions you have by limiting that you can only do actions through your spies. You press ‘end turn' and you can move your spies - you can just drag and drop them anywhere. You can pick them up, they're in London, and you want to take them using an airplane, just take your finger, put in on Paris and you hit ‘end turn' and then you see them flying there. When it arrives there it's going to ask you for new orders, and that's how it goes.

Are the spies going to have different tolerances to pressure, are we going to be working with different personalities?

Tiago Rocha: Yes, that's actually a very important aspect of our game. Maybe I've concentrated too much on mechanics because that's what I'm working on right now. But when we start from the very beginning we thought that there was not too many spy games on the market, and we thought that to actually have people there would be a big attraction to our game, and we've been noticing that, we've been doing tests with people we don't even know playing the game, and we do notice that they get very attached to certain spies and they don't want those spies to get injured. If you put them into too much stress they might get injured, they might get captured, so people get attached to some of their spies. And we still haven't even added that much differentiation, we're always trying to add more gameplay differentiation between the spies, but right now we don't even have that much. Just because we have a nice picture of the guy, you tell them what kind of behaviour this guy does, what kind of skills this person has, so you get really attached to it. Of course it has a name, it has a real life name and an agent name.

Can we expect to see double agents and things like that?

Tiago Rocha: This is one of the features that I want to add the most. We don't have it yet, but everybody asks and we're definitely going to have it very soon. It's just that it's tricky. It's not easy because you might get very frustrated that you couldn't do anything about it. Just suddenly your guy is doing something for the other team. But it's a very interesting concept and I'll definitely be thinking about it very soon.

What about your influences? What brought you to spies and espionage?

Lasse Seppänen: I have been thinking about this for a couple of years. World War II is so used and so much seen in games that there's no point in making another game where you're running with a rifle and killing the bad guys. At the same time I definitely think there are big areas that are under-utilised, and spying is one of those ideas, and that's sort of the initial spark for it. Also we were thinking about how these things are cool, novels and so on, Spying is a big deal in pop culture, there are very cool movies and books and so on, and World War II is also a very special time in history where the bad guys are really bad, you know it's very clear who is bad and who is not. That was part of the attraction. When you're trying to make a new game you want to find both an entertainment and a cool factor. I think the spying brings a lot into it. A very strong, almost polarised, good guy/bad guy setting. They were the things that this provided.

We wanted to go far away from other games. That's our strategy. We only build games that are really very different from the rest of the market. I mean, life is short, we'd rather make new games for people than recycle the old ideas. So we were also listing a lot of ideas that would create something fresh and this was what ended up at the top of the list.

Tiago Rocha: From a gameplay perspective I found some of the other ideas more interesting to play. Because I love tactics, for instance, more combat orientated games, Civilization or Crusader Kings. But when Lasse mentioned this idea about doing something about the Resistance in France I thought that there was so few games that deal with spies, and spies is such a cool thing in other mediums, that it'd be a really big challenge to design gameplay for this because there isn't much on the market. So because of the theme we got pushed into doing something that is quite different. We have had lots of inspirations - from a gameplay perspective - from Civilization and Crusader Kings and Football Manager and the interesting strategy games that we've played, but since the theme kept pushing us around into places that we haven't been before, I think we've got to something quite unique, and I don't say this to... I mean everybody is going to say their game is different, but ours is different and that has problems with it as well. We're having to redesign the tutorial now, we want to make sure people understand and we're trying all the time to make it more and more simple so people understand our mechanics since they are not based on many of the other games that are around. So people are used to saying: "here are my units, where are the enemy units that I have to go and destroy?" But we don't have that, so it's going to be quite tough for us. But as Lasse said, life is short and it's kind of nice to try and do something different.

Why tablets, what attracted you to iOS?

Lasse Seppänen: The business opportunity is one thing, but we sort of see it as what PC was a long time ago. This is the new computer that everybody has. It has the performance for fantastic games and they're everywhere. I mean there's hundreds of millions of these devices. It's not just a cold-hearted business decision, it's also that we seriously think that this platform is cool. Within the next years it's going to become very, very cool when the performance goes up and the screens get better. So it's a cool thing for creative game developers.

Tiago Rocha: I think it also had to do with us having tablets, and our friends having tablets, and them not necessarily having anything to play right now on it, you know, things that they find really interesting.

Lasse Seppänen: The App Store offers a lot of awesome games, but they're also very, very similar to each other, at least the toplist titles. You know, we felt that we were having a hard time finding something that would be specifically for me to get really hooked on, and I was encountering - all of us were encountering - many friends and colleagues who were complaining that there were all these technically awesome games, but on the other hand it's not really intriguing me, or keep me there. So we felt that there must be some sort of audience there, that are not getting their games. That was one reason.

What about other platforms, where might Spymaster goes in the future if it was a success on iPad?

Lasse Seppänen: Of course Android is very obvious after iOS. Steam is of course an option, and any other platform. We work in Unity, so the technical porting of these games is not that hard, and our game is not based on... like a car game would be taking all the last performance and squeezing it out of the device, so in that sense also porting is pretty easy. It's going to be a demand decision. If gamers like this on iOS, then the next stop will be Android, then we'll look if there's people demanding it on something else.

The game will be free-to-play, why did you feel like this was the best way to monetise the game?

Teemu Haila: In our game you can get everything for free. So it's about having a fun experience. And that's also important, because our game - as Thiago was explaining - it's about your spies, your spy ring, and how it evolves with you. It's a longterm game that you play for a long time and keep coming back to. So as a free-to-play game it just makes sense, it feels right. Instead of, for example, paying 30 dollars upfront for something.

What's the roadmap ahead, and when are you planning on releasing Spymaster?

Teemu Haila: What matters the most about releasing the game is that it's good. No-one cares if the game is bad when you release it, so in that sense we're going to release it when it's done. Right now our current state of the game is late alpha. For us that means that we're pretty confident that we've found the pieces that make the game really, really fun. We've tackled the core mechanics. And then once we go beta, that for us is the polishing stage. But now with the game we're building more content on top of it, so you've got that 20-30 etc hours experience there. So when we work that up at some point we'll essentially decide: "now it's good enough, now it's done, now we'll ship it." If that's going to be two months, three months, fourth months, I couldn't tell you yet, but we do want to get into beta sometime within the next month or so. So that would put it at the end of February... Then hopefully we could show it off to more people and get some great feedback, and depending what people say, then as long is it takes. Hopefully only a couple of months.