060 LASER LEAGUE
Roll7’s Simon Bennett, John Ribbins, and Rachael Gregg-Smythe fire off about Laser League
Roll7’s founders discuss eSports and the challenge of doing something totally new.
Here at OPM Towers we love a bit of couchplay. Online multiplayer is always very well, but it’ll never be as sociable as gaming alongside a friend or three, pads in hand, shouting and laughing. And since we first played it last year, Laser League’s been on our radar. It looked good then, it’s looking better now, and so we sat down with Simon Bennett, John Ribbins, and Rachael Gregg-Smythe from developer Roll7 to talk about how the game came about. John Ribbins: The first version of the game was made on a train on the way back from Birmingham, with Tom [Hegarty], who’s the production director, and it was quite different. It had guns and it had little turrets that you activate that would shoot at the other player. We got stuck on this train for about three and a half hours because of delays, and over that time we were just playing this very, very, very early prototype and going, “Um, the turrets aren’t a lot of fun, let’s take those out. The guns aren’t a lot of fun, let’s take those out.” Basically, the most fun bit was turning on these big beams that covered the whole screen and rotated around and killed the other player if they hit them. We refined it down to just that, so you just went around, there wasn’t spawn patterns like there are now, it just randomly spawned a node somewhere on the screen and both would race to collect it. You ended up with this random, bizarre mess of lines on the screen
that you were trying to navigate your way through, but it was literally like each player was just a four-pixel-by-four-pixel square and the lasers were two-pixel-wide lines and you collected circles to turn them on.
The version that we built on the train was quickly replaced by a version called Cosmic Ultra Neon Tactics, which we thought would be funny because the press wouldn’t be able to abbreviate the name, and then we grew up and called it Ultra Neon Tactics. This was all built in Multimedia Fusion because it was really, really quick to prototype stuff. OPM: How many versions of the game have there been now? JR: I think there have been four versions; there’s the very early prototype, there’s quite a polished 2D version, there was an unpolished Unity version. The Unity version was basically the point at which, me and Simon were playing a lot of Rocket League at the time as well, and we’d kind of been like, that look and that idea of taking a very simple, bizarre sport that doesn’t really exist and giving it that bombastic, futuristic vibe was kind of our starting point.
Like, “What if instead of being these little pixels running around a screen, you were actual sports players? And there’s a huge crowd that’s cheering every time you score a point, and instead of just being a little dot that wins the point, at the end there’s a little man who’s like, “Yeah!”, punching the air, and there’s the big crowd behind them. That was our starting point. Simon Bennett: We’d all taken a break after Olli-Olli 2 and Hero, and John and I were on our break and we were just playing Rocket League up until two or three in the morning, chatting and just going like, “It can’t be that hard to do online multiplayer and make it a 3D game, let’s just do that!” and just making wild assumptions as to how easy achieving something like Rocket League might actually be, and we’ve spent the last two years regretting it. JR: I think the Unity prototype was the point at which we started to nail more of what Laser League, as you see it now, was going to be. Unity allowed us really rapid prototyping, and being able to chuck scripts in and stuff like that.
That was the point at which we started going, “What if you had character classes?” Initially, it was like, “What if you had a slide tackle?” and then, like, “What if this character had a bigger slide tackle, and one with a larger collision box, and what if one of them can steal lasers?” So that’s when we started bringing a class system into the game.
It was still random where the lasers appeared, so what if you had a consistent pattern that you could learn that added to the strategy a bit?
ALTHOUGH ON THE FACE OF IT IT IS A VERY SIMPLISTIC-LOOKING GAME, THERE IS A TON OF DEPTH TO IT.
That was, I think, where the more strategic element of the game started to shine. It took about four years of gradually building on this original basis.
We did a team meeting before Christmas where we went through all of the previous versions, and the tutorial in the very first game basically says: ‘pink avoids green, green avoids pink, everyone collects blue,’ because the powerups and the nodes were blue. And so, in that four years, the game has changed dramatically but it was interesting looking back at that first tutorial for the first version and the core of the game still being the same. OPM: How did the Class-based tactics get developed over time? Do you put a lot of thought into how they pair together? JR: Once we moved to Unreal, we were pretty locked on what the classes were, and I think at that point it became less about “Oh, wouldn’t it be great to have this class?” and more about these six classes and how we balance them so that you do have that team strategy.
You can drop in as any class and run around and grab lasers and revive your teammates and so on, you can really start to get into it. You can be like, “Right, you take Shock and I’ll take Blade. You shock people and knock them down, and I’ll run in and take them out afterwards.”
As a dev team, everyone’s been playing it, and it’s been really interesting to see that journey of strategy where the QAs all figure out a really good combination of classes and keep beating everyone for a week until somebody figures out a good counter to that combination of classes and then suddenly it’s less relevant, like, now Shock and Blade isn’t as deadly and doesn’t always win the match because somebody else figured out that Thief/Snipe was a good counter set-up. So, yeah, there’s been a lot of intensive testing and a lot of playtesting internally with the team. SB: We had a lot of people playing the [PC] open beta and it’s really interesting watching the discord and the comments on the Steam forums of people essentially going through a very condensed version of our last three years of coming up with the classes and playing the classes. Initially, we were like, “Ghost is massively overpowered. Oh, hang on, Snipe seems powerful, I’ll play Snipe,” or “If you’ve got a Shock and Blade, that’s impossible.” It’s really interesting seeing people being like, “Get rid of this class, this is crap!” And then someone else being like, “How long have you been playing? I’ve been playing for 20 hours, you can’t play a game without this class!” Players having these sort of arguments, watching it all happen and being like, “Don’t worry, you’ll probably all get to the same conclusion that we got to,” which is that it’s a constant evolution of strategy.
I don’t want to make a massive statement saying that the game is 100% balanced and we’re never going to change it, but I think it’s in a very good state from a balance perspective, and I think it’s very interesting to see people having to go through that process of understanding with the game.
I think that’s quite exciting because it starts to build people’s realisation that, although on the face of it it is a very simplistic-looking game, there is a ton of depth to it and we’re already starting to see some conversations on the [Steam] forums and you’re like, “Yeah, you’re all now starting to have the sort of conversations that we’ve been having recently,” and that’s quite exciting, imagining where they’ll take that competitiveness to. OPM: Obviously Rocket League is the big comparison that people are making. Is that something that you enjoy? Can you plan to have a successful eSport game? SB: I just did a talk, funnily enough, on what makes an eSports game at a conference in London, and I think the general take away from that is that you definitely cannot ‘make’ an eSport. You can create a videogame that has a community that becomes competitive around your game and wants you to start setting up tournaments and build a big enough community and player base that then that happens naturally. In order to achieve those things, you need to tick various boxes around the game: it needs to be balanced; it needs to play very well online; if it’s an online game, it needs to not be massively cheatable.
There’s a series of different things and people need to be able to inherently see that competitive nature in order for it to move into the sphere of ESLs and tournaments and stuff like that. We have always said that we will never use the word eSports when pushing this game. This game is a fun game and we try to make a videogame experience that people will really enjoy. JB: I see eSports as being the most hardcore in the way that you would approach playing a game. If you’re an eSports player, you’re seeing it in a very different to someone who’s just grabbing from PlayStation Plus or PlayStation Store or
whatever. The criticism that was levelled at OlliOlli and Not A Hero, both of those games, was that they are hard games, that they require quite a high level of skill, even at the beginning, in order to succeed.
What we realised we had, with Laser League, is a game that literally anyone can pick up. You’re like, “Yeah that stick moves, and that button does that ability,” and you can very quickly pick it up and get into it and have fun with it. That’s one of the things we didn’t want to lose. It’s awesome that people have said, “Is this the next eSport?” and “This could be an eSport!” That’s really cool, but, really, our goal was, this time around, in many ways, to make something more accessible than we’ve made before, that has a lower barrier to entry and means that more people can get into.
Obviously, as a by-product, if, at the other end of the scale, there’s enough depth and enough balance between Twitch gameplay and high-level strategy that means it could be an eSport, then that is great and that is something that we would love to grow post-launch, but our initial goal with the thing was to make something that anyone can download and jump in and quite quickly get to grips with and start having fun with. OPM: Is it a different game when you play locally, as opposed to online? SB: This was our biggest worry. When we sat down and wrote thousands of production questions in pre-production, the one that we were so worried about was: this game is really fun if I’m sat playing it with you, we know that we shout at each other, we know that it’s really exciting, and we know that people get really hyped – will we get that with people if they’re just sat at home playing it alone?
When we started playing it alone and not communicating directly, not chatting with people at the same time, it is a different experience. It’s not as visceral, necessarily. But watching people who played it on the open beta, they’d come back with some sort of general sentiment that we’ve always had about the game when we’ve been playing it, which is that it’s addictive, and that their heart-rate is going and it’s just as exciting.
I think if people are partying up, for example, on PlayStation and using the chat, like, I’ll send you some footage, there are people who Twitch-
streamed it and they’re chatting with the guys they’re playing with and they are screaming, grown men are screaming like you’ve never seen before! It’s absolutely intense. I think it is definitively possible to have a very similar experience, but there’s nothing better than being in the same room and playing it together. JR: There’s other stuff we’ve done to try and harness some of the fun of local in online as well. I’m going to bring up emojis because it is the thing I fought for… So, when you’re playing locally then there is that thing, like, if I’m a Blade character, I can instantly kill people, and I run over and I kill Simon in the middle of the match, locally on the sofa, obviously I’m like, “Ha, ha, got you!” or whatever, and then I run off. So, the emoji system that we’ve got in the game is something we really wanted to include. Obviously, we’ve structured it so that you can’t be horrible to people, necessarily, or have that toxic communication, but it gives you the opportunity to run up and blade someone and drop a cry laughing face on them or drop a little fist emoji, like, “Ha, got you!” and then run away. It gives you that banter element.
We could see that through the beta, if someone messed up at the end of a really intense point, just ran into a beam like an idiot, by accident, the next point starts and literally everybody in the game’s dropping cry laughing emojis. What’s nice about that as well is that it carries across language barriers, so it doesn’t matter if I’m playing two French people, the emoji system means the same thing to everybody, which is nice. OPM: Are you planning on doing a free access, or anything, for PlayStation? A demo or a trial version? SB: Maybe. [laughs] OPM: Are you doing any enhancements for the PlayStation Pro version? SB: Maybe. [laughs, again] At the moment we’ve got a clear plan for how that console version of the game will work. We’re not saying no to anything at this stage, but we’re not saying yes to anything. It’s very much us seeing how things progress, generally. OPM: Obviously PlayStation VR is doing quite well. Was a VR version of the game, or a VR element, ever something you considered? Even a spectator mode? SB: Funnily enough, exactly what you’ve just said there. I mean, anyone who ends up playing the game will realise that a first-person version of Laser League would be absolute chaos, and fundamentally questions how on earth these players actually know where they’re meant to move on the screen. We thought it would be really cool to have VR experience, but a lot of these things come back to: are you just putting it in there because it’s a thing, or are you putting it in there because it adds genuine value to the community and the player base? I think that would just be a bit shoehorn, ultimately. I dunno, Rachael? Rachael Gregg-Smythe? Um, well, I’m a big fan of PlayStation VR, so I would love to see a spectator mode in it, so yeah, maybe. We’ll see what the future holds!
GROWN MEN ARE SCREAMING LIKE YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE! IT’S ABSOLUTELY INTENSE.