Scott: Sure, I have to admit that I haven’t sunk my teeth into, you know, other games as much as I used to recently, because we’ve been so busy working on our own. But, you know, I know they have a lot of cool sliders and that thing, they allow you to kind of set up the game to what you want it to be, but as far as difficulty goes, I think a sliding difficulty scale is something that would definitely work in another game.
The Natural: Can you tell us a little bit about the AI development in the game? Was that one of the tougher things and something that you really had to focus on, because it seems like that’s one of the biggest complaints people have, that games don’t have really great AI, that’s not really a problem for you guys, so that’s really something that you really had to focus on?
Scott: Yeah. What really helped there, when I was growing up playing ball, my dad actually coached all the way along and I used to go along with him to coaching things, and he was pretty hardcore into it and I used to go along with him to symposiums and so on, you know, for Little League coaches and that kind of thing. So, I kind of developed, you know, an abnormal amount of knowledge for a kid about high level baseball strategy and positional play and all these kinds of things, so that really helped when it came down to ‘okay, let’s design it,’ even if it’s quite simplified AI, you know, from real baseball. It was still built with the understanding of the fundamentals of the sport, like here’s where a player’s supposed to go on a caught ball, you know, ball in the corner, ball in the gap, here’s where the cut-off man goes, here’s who’s supposed to cover this base and that base, and so on, and you know, we didn’t necessarily do every aspect of that, like in real baseball, but it was all built with sort of that type of staff in mind and from my dad, and my dad- when we were sitting and working through the game the last six months, he was actually among who play tested the game the most. He sure did a lot, he would jump in and be like ‘no, here’s a video on that play, the throw should’ve gone to second base there, that runner shouldn’t have advanced, he should’ve just stayed at third,’ and so it was just a great process by having people there to support. Well, one of the old archaic games, you know, that didn’t necessarily have good AI, but definitely is something that we wanted to do, it’s not perfect super realistic, we’d be really solid.
Christian: And I think what made it and why it worked out well, like I said before, because of the tech background, it’s the same guy here that has all the baseball knowledge, and with computers running in the background, so he actually did all of the programming for this as well, so there was kind of no in-between person. Like, he’s very knowledgeable about baseball and is directly into the game, there’s nobody in-between, so that really worked in our favor.
Scott: I think something that worked in our favor was time, and we decided through huge ideas, and I really hope that somewhere down the line we get to get to some of those ideas that we didn’t get to in the first program.
The Natural: Oh, are you going to let go any future features that we might see later on?
Scott: You know, we haven’t yet decided how we’re going to, you know, what we’re going to do after this set, like what type of new game we’ll be doing. We’re just going to sort of sit back and see how this does, and you know, frankly we have to look at how it sells and how we’re doing, you know, how we’re sitting a month from now once we’ve got a couple of launches under our belt and we’ve shifted onto three platforms at least, and just see where we’re sitting from there and decided. But, you know, we’re not trying to make our decision yet until we sort of have the data that we need to have.
Christian: I was just going to say, and you know, we’ve got a really good community built for us, so you get a lot of good feedback on our forums, on Twitter and things like this, and we listen to them, and I mean, the things that people request and that everyone wants to see in the game is not really a mystery, I think that we have a pretty good idea of what the community wants us to put in the game, and you know, we definitely listen to them. I’d like to think that we’ve listened from what we’ve added since the very original release, and you know, refining and continuing to do so is the same.
Scott: We have our little road map, a little list of ideas in our head or even in our system at work here, our top ten or fifteen things, but it’s really to choose which ones of them to do, you know, when your users are basically calling out the exact things on your list, it’s like ‘okay, we know what our priority should be on these things now,’ it’s pretty easy when all of you guys are asking for this the most and this one and so on.
Uber: That’s definitely taking advantage of not being a super mega video game company that, you know, that doesn’t have that connection with their community. Yeah, it’s actually refreshing, because often times you see people just crying for certain things in games, and it seems to go on deaf ears, so that’s really cool to hear that you guys are into the community, but the people that actually play the game and are willing to spend the time to give you guys feedback, and you guys are there to listen, I mean I can’t say enough about that because it does seem to go on deaf ears often times with other companies.
Scott: Cool, yeah, thanks. And I think it helps to see when, you know, when you’re an operation that’s as small as we are, I mean hopefully we’re not this small going forward.
The Natural: How many people do you have currently employed?
Scott: We have five full-time right now, and then a few other independents that spend a lot of time helping us out, even if they do for other companies. But, there are about eight or nine people actively contributing right now, so we’re really small.
The Natural: Wow, that’s really impressive that you guys can make a game of this quality with that amount of people, wow. Yeah, that’s impressive.