The Swedish Game Awards are moving along and as it’s almost time for the Workshop! Alongside we also bring you a new spotlight, and this time it’s Bloodline Champions. The Frostfire development team is taking the stage to talk and what seems to be one of the most well polished games in the competition.
Could you give us a short introduction to Bloodline Champions?
Bloodline Champions is a tactical multiplayer action game for up to 10 players. We aim for the E-Sport market and therefore use no random elements. We combine effective controls with a tactical top-down view. Bloodline Champions is for those who like a fast-paced game with continuous action and teamwork, where skill is the determining factor. We aim for the game to be easy to learn yet difficult to master.
The player picks a character representing a bloodline. Our diverse bloodline champions represent the best fighters of their people. They have been chosen to fight in the ancient battlegrounds controlled by an ancient powerful race that has the power to restore life.
You already have a ton of screenshots and trailer of beta gameplay online. How long has the game been in production?
Our production began at the end of summer 2008 during a game development course at the University of Skövde. The course ended in January, but we have continued to polish the game during our thesis projects, preparing the game for SGA. So 20 weeks + all free time we manage to get until SGA :D
You are focusing on making Bloodline Champions an e-sport game. Why did you make this choice and what was your inspiration for it?
We were initially discussing a single player game, however we realized that we wanted to make a multiplayer game, and finally we decided that going multiplayer would give us the most complete game possible given the time we had. We felt that there was a lack of games that focused on E-sport, in other words games that promote both interesting gameplay and no random elements.
We felt there were several factors that could be improved in games such as DoTA and WoW Arena. We started by eliminating all random factors. For instance, there is no chance to gain critical strikes. We also wanted to make a game that would be easier to spectate compared to today’s E-sport games, while still keeping a deep gameplay. This is where the top-down view comes from.
Our artists are doing an excellent work with colors and silhouettes, so that each character feels and looks unique in the most intense battle. To identify which team a character belongs to, most games just change an overlay color on the characters mantle or tabard. We decided to instead change the whole color scheme of the character. This makes it even easier to separate teammates from enemies, and it also increases the visual experience of the game.
We also wanted all effects to be visual, so that you would always see where an attack comes from and who it comes from. All effects are therefore colored according to the color scheme of their casters team.
Another thing we focus on is to eliminate downtimes, which in our opinion only make the game less fun. Players should always be able to use their abilities. Thus, we do not use the concept of mana, which many other games rely on. Another thing we have decided is that no ability should have a long cooldown. At the moment no ability has a longer cooldown than 15 seconds. .
In terms of mechanics and gameplay, Bloodline Champions seems similar to DotA. Is there any connection between your game and the by now pretty famous WC3 mod?
We were indeed inspired by DotA, especially as an E-sport game. However our gameplay is far from DotA. Some similarities are that you pick a class, you have abilities, and you constantly get those “OMG! Did you see that! Ha-ha! Cool!”-moments, and that you kill people for fun. Except from that, I think you’ll just have to wait and see :D
You have a pretty big development team with 15 people, what does your development process look like?
So far we have used a quite simple development process that we based on agile development. We prioritized all work according to how much fun it brings to the game. Then we work! We don’t believe that it was our process that was the thing that has made us come this far though.
Simply put: Communication, commitment and cooperation.
What tools are you using, and how have they been working out for you?
We are using XNA, which is working out fine. We have been working with XNA for the last two years so we have some previous experience. We have put quite some time into developing our own tools, because we believe that in the end these tools would save us more time than it took to develop them. We have developed tools such as a content viewer, a map editor, a particle editor, an in game profiler and a debugging tool.
Among these tools we have chosen to explain and show our content viewer in more detail. Compiling content to XNAs content format was a serious time consuming process for us in our early XNA projects, and it took lots of time for our programmers to add content and compile it whenever an artist had created anything new. What’s worse is that we sometimes had to recompile all content in our early games, due to an error in the programmers’ projects.
The problem is now solved thanks to our new content viewer. When artists open and view their content in the content viewer, the content viewer also compiles all the game’s content. Our programmers don’t need to compile or import any content nowadays, which saves us a lot of time.
The content viewer is not only used to view models, animations and textures. We also have a feature that makes it possible for us to attach things, such as items and armor. We might use this in the future to introduce character customization options.
An e-sport game usually requires a lot of balance testing. How are you balancing Bloodline Champions?
We do a lot of testing and by that I mean A LOT OF TESTING. Roughly half the team spends 1-2 hours each day playing Bloodline Champions. We obviously play to find bugs and fix balance issues, but most of the time we play simply because it is fun!
Recently we implemented a database that saves statistics from all the games we play. With this statistics we can see if a class has an advantage, or disadvantage. We also record all abilities used so we can see which abilities that are superior and which ones that might be too weak.
The balancing of Bloodline Champions goes great, we continuously tweak and improve, and we will never stop, because we believe that we can always make it better!
Do you have any tips or tricks for other SGA developers?
Absolutely, here is the recipe for game development in a bottle:
- Make a game that you and your team thinks is fun. Second, play your game. Is it fun? Can it be made even more fun? Make it more fun. Play it again. Rinse and repeat.
- Never say to yourself that “it is going to be fun when it is done”. If it is not fun now, then something is wrong, find out what it is and fix it ASAP!
Some other tips we have are:
- Prioritize everything! Time management is all about prioritizing the features of your game.
- Keep the team spirit up! Games are fun and game development is supposed to be fun as well (and a lot of hard work of course ).
Also, it’s always good to use the last part of the project to polish. Improve the graphics, tweak the gameplay, iron out as many bugs as possible, and play!
What are your 3 favorite games, and your most hated game?
Tough question, as a team we obviously have different preferences when it comes to games. There are many good games out there, but in short we can say that most of us are big fans of all of Blizzard’s games, Puzzle Bobble and NHL09. Most hated games are even tougher. Even the worst of games come with valuable lessons to be learnt.
Any last words or shoutouts?
We would like to thank everyone that has shown interest in our game so far. We also want to thank SGA for their continuous support of the growing game development community in Sweden. SGA is a great way to reach out to the world to and get a first touch with reality. Take the chance!
If anyone has any questions about Bloodline Champions, do not hesitate to post them on the SGA site (the Bloodline Champions entry) or on our forum – www.frostfiregames.com.
Keep your eyes and ears open, because when summer comes, maybe, just maybe, you can get hold of a sacred Beta Key to Bloodline Champions! No promises though.
That’s it for this time! Big thanks to Frostfire for taking a break from playing Bloodline Champions and answering our our questions. Make sure you check out their Alpha Trailer on Youtube. Until next time, I wish you all luck in your development. I hope to see some of you at the workshop!
