Our in depth interview with the creators behind Super Mega Baseball Scott Drader and Christian Zuger. They took time out of their busy schedules to talk with us about Super Mega Baseball Extra Innings and the humble beginnings of Metalhead Software.
The Natural: … The two co-founders here, Scott Drader and Christian Zuger, they’re going to tell us about super mega baseball, and they have extra innings coming out for the Xbox. We’re super excited for this game, so we’re going to have them chat with us. Welcome, guys.
Scott & Christian: Thanks for having us!
The Natural: Can you tell us a little about your backgrounds, like, your positions at MetalHead?
Scott Drader: Sure, the two of us actually met about ten years ago now working together at a software company in town here, and the town here is Victoria BC out in the West Coast, Pacific Northwest. But, we met working there together for a little while and I left after a little period of time, but we stayed in touch a lot and continued to get together for beers now and then, and we kind of randomly one night at a pub decided to start a company together, above all things. We didn’t even know, at the time, that it was going to be a video game company, so it was a pretty random set of circumstances, I think, that led to us, you know, ultimately meeting and forming the company, and ultimately deciding to make a baseball game, of all things.
UberYoutuber: So, what made you guys decided to make an indie game company, basically? What made you decide to go into that specific category?
Scott Drader: Well, I mean, we bumped around a few different ideas of things to do, but I think we just kind of, when we were sitting there talking together, it was like ‘okay, what can we do?’ And we went through a list of ideas and I think just when we started talking about games, it became pretty clear that was something that we had a lot of mutual interest in.
Christian Zuger: Yeah, I mean, we both kind of had a strong tech background, we both started from engineering, computer science, we both loved video games, both big-time into baseball, so all of those things kind of came together, and we decided to try and make a baseball game.
UberYoutuber: Very cool. That’s the thing, I was wondering, now what made you guys decide to take on the beast that is a non-licensed, indie sports game, you know, and the market that it is these days, that is not an easy task. I mean, obviously you guys pulled it off, but I mean, in the very early phases of this, I mean, that’s a very daunting task, seemingly.
Christian Zuger: I think part of it is that we put ourselves into it, we weren’t quite aware of how massive of a task it was really going to be. Yeah, that was definitely helping us get into it the first place, just not being entirely sure of what we’re facing.
Scott Drader: Yeah, it was definitely, you know, a little bit of an tough going on there, we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into, and I think that was, in some ways, a blessing in disguise. We also, you know, ended up taking way longer doing what we wanted to do than we ever thought was possible, but I mean, I think we needed to not necessarily know all of the- it was good that we didn’t necessarily understand everything that was involved, because it would’ve been really hard to have the motivation to take it on in the first place. At the time too, we were already sort of seeing, you know, you guys remember the days when there was way more sports games, obviously, but even then when we were floating the idea around and doing it, it had already started to be the case where there were a handful of titles in each sport, and a lot of the arcade titles sort of fell of the map and staff. So, we were like ‘okay, well, you know, there are so many different games and different genres, why is there so few sports games, can’t we have something a little different?’ You know, something a little more accessible in sports face too and we just thought there was room there for something new.
Christian Zuger: I’m just going to expand on that and say that I’m a pretty big fan of twitch games, I think it’s pretty evident of what we ended up making too in the sense that it’s just a little more boiled down, a little twitchier than other things are.
Scott Drader: Yeah, fast-paced and is right down to, you know, getting in there and really having massive controls, and you know, there’s definitely sort of a twitch, like heavy skill levels involved.
Christian Zuger: There just wasn’t really anything out there that, you know, we could go and sit with all of our friends on the couch and play a baseball game, so we decided to make this thing.
UberYoutuber: Right, and this is where- super mega baseball really excels at that, I mean, the fun I’ve had playing this game with my friends just here locally on the couch, I mean, it’s hard to duplicate that kind of fun. It kind of leads me to the next question; how much time did you guys spend in development, and what were some of the most important features the game had to have? Like, what were the most important things that you guys were really focused on, that you guys wanted to get into the game?
Scott Drader: Okay, well the first question, like how much time we spent working on it, I mean, the idea was conceived as far back as 2009, so we were, you know, different people back then when you think of how much younger we were and so on. But, we didn’t work on it full-time at all in those first few years, I mean, we were a startup company and we were paying the bills by doing contract work with, you know, up to half of our time at least. So, it moved pretty slowly for the first little while, but you know, there was a point where we eventually had something that was like ‘okay, we can sort of see a path to finishing this thing,’ and that’s when we had to really borrow some money and stuff to get it done. But, I mean, four years of work for sure. And, you know, lots of mishaps on the way too, it was our first time doing it and we- there was a lot of, you know, one step back, two steps forward going on in development process for sure. And then you asked about pillars, things that we knew we had to do right from the beginning.
Christian Zuger: Part of it for me was the ego system, it would test difficulty, that was pretty much we caught on with from day one, like ‘hey, let’s have something where we have adjustable difficulty that’s going to impact the whole game, so that everyone can tweak exactly what their skill level is for it to be competitive.’ So, that’s what we had wanted from the very beginning, that’s something that we have built on from day one, basically, so we’re very happy with how that’s turned out.
Scott Drader: And it was never called the ‘ego system’ either, all we knew at that time was ‘okay, the way the difficulty is going to work, there will never be a point as it’s adding up where the mechanic changes, it’s going to smoothly get harder in sort of a natural way.’ So, you never have a step-up from medium to hard where the game fundamentally changes and just, you know, a particular aid goes away, there is nothing like that. It’s just that- it’s the same game on easy as it is on hard, and it blends smoothly from easy to hard.
The Natural: Yeah, that’s definitely one thing that I wanted to talk about, we definitely love that ego difficulty control that you give the players in the settings, and you know, doesn’t follow a traditional mode of easy, medium and hard. Do you feel that’s something that other games could do a little bit better, they could implement something like that, and get away with that traditional sort of way of doing it? Scott Drader: Christian Zuger:
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.
Scott: Yeah, when it’s that few people, taking that feedback in the community and sort of making an informed decision about we’re reading the forms ourselves, so we know how much people want it, but it’s the same people seeing and reading that feedback and making decision about what to do next as the people that understand how much work it’s going to take to do it, so I think having that tight loop is going to be really useful for making good decisions about what to put in there.
Christian: I was just going to say, you know, we really, really care about our users, we are trying so hard to put the best thing out there that we can, so you know, we really are trying to make the best game that we can by listening to our users, which is a key thing for us. We take their feedback incredibly seriously, and to heart, like there are so few of us, you know, so anything that they say directly goes to one of us, that’s what we’ve worked on for God knows how long. It’s very personal for us, you know, what everyone says and what we can give back to the community.
The Natural: Right, that’s your baby. So, how is the development for the next gen systems been, because I know we’ve heard some groans about development and making that move and the expense of moving to a new platform?
Christian: We’ve actually been lucky on that front, well we eventually went with the technology platform that made it not too bad for us, kind of from the get-go so whenever it was back in 2009 we made the decision, like ‘hey we’re going to try and make this crazy thing, we’re going to make a multi-platform console game,’ we knew right from the get go that these are the kind of issues that we’re going to face, so everything that we’ve done right from the get go and we’re always asking ‘how do we make this thing so that we can easily bring it to many platforms?’ So, the technology has been chosen along the way, the things that we’ve done have always been in mind, and so it’s worked out well for us, so all things are considered. So it’s still a lot of work, like it took us, you know, it took us the better part of this year to bring expense one, but it hasn’t been as bad as it could’ve been, just because we planned ahead for it.
Scott: Yeah, and not that too, it’s probably different for us that a lot of the other big companies too, because I can just imagine what it’s like once you got a, you know, a 15-year code base built up and you know, some of it is new and some of it is old. I can definitely see over time things getting more complicated in terms of technology and, you know, what you do need to do in a port and sort of take the fidelity of a project up, I’m sure that could suffer over time, it’s sort of our first thing, so I’m sure we’ll learn, you know, if we make it to the next general, we’ll see what that’s like.
Uber: Right, I was thinking, you know, because I pretty much play all all-sports games across the board. So, with the release on Steam and Microcell gaming consoles coming up here, I think you guys are- I can’t think of many other sports games that are virtually on all platforms, I mean, you guys are pretty much everywhere now. Next gen and PC, you know, and that’s pretty impressive and pretty cool.
You’ve got to get some great baseball features in.
Scott: That would be fun, we actually joked that if you look at super mega baseball, the characters are actually, you know, they’ve got some not necessarily normal proportions, and we were joking about that. What it might be to be at bat in one of those ballparks, because you know in VR, there’s that true sense of sales, so you’d be sitting beside this guy whose head looks like, literally, the size of a boulder. So, you know, we almost have to do a quick prototype on VR, just to have some class, we’ll see.
The Natural: I’d definitely be the first person to sign up for that testing.
Scott: Alright, good, good.
Uber: So, tell us one more time, where can we find super mega baseball and extra innings, where can we find it, how can we connect with you guys, how can people reach out to you guys?
Scott: Super mega baseball extra innings is coming this Friday, August 14th to Xbox one, and a week later on Steam. The best place to come and talk to us is on our forums, supermegabaseball.com, and of course twitter and Facebook @supmegbaseball on twitter and Supermegabaseball on Facebook.
Uber: That’s awesome. You know what, I have one more question; PS4, I’m a PS4 guy, are extra innings coming to the PS4?
Scott: So, basically, effectively yes, in the sense that the new console is going to come to the PS4 via a patch and a free VLC in September. So, it won’t be called extra innings, but you know, all that content is going to make it to the existing players on PS4.
Christian: And because some people have asked, it’s coming to PS3 as well.
The Natural: Great, awesome, very cool. Well, we really appreciate you guys being with us, taking out time in your busy schedules and we’re really excited about the game, it’s a great game, and you know, really can’t wait to get our hands on it. Make sure you guys get out there and pick up the game, get on the forums and everything, and we’re going to get our community super excited about super mega baseball. I just played it before we talked here, it’s still on my screen as we look at it. Looking at the yoga classes, it’s a modifier right now. Which, by the way, it’s really cool, the unlockable, the modifiers here, they’re pretty funny too. You guys made it fairly humorous as well, so you know, it’s not just completely analytics and numbers and, you know, saber metrics crunch, you guys made it fun and humorous, which I love.
Scott: We had a lot of fun making it, for sure.
Uber: Very cool. Well, thanks for taking the time out, really appreciate that, Scotty and Christian. Thanks guys.
Scott and Christian: Yeah, thank you very much.
Scott: I really appreciate it, hope everything on the site goes well and it looks good, and we’ll keep our eyes on you there.
The Natural: Absolutely, we’ll stay in touch. Thanks guys!