Welcome to an interview with the hardworking developer veterans Andrew & Cory Trese (
Trese Brothers Games). These brothers are no slouches when it comes to game crafting, with many classic releases behind them. I have not played them all myself, but from the titles I have played,
Templar Battleforce struck a chord with me. They are currently working on the upcoming turn-based tactical game
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint. It’s in Early Access currently but is already showing great promise for the future, if you enjoy
X-com type of games. Let’s get into it, it’s a fairly large interview!
Who are the Trese brothers?
Andrew and Cory Trese. We’re running a players-first game studio, making deep, highly-replayable RPGs & strategy games.
What games inspired you to join the industry?
Tabletop games way before video games. Our first real board game love affair was with
Hero’s Quest. Andrew and I saw a flyer or advertisement for it at KMart and I begged our mother to buy it for me for my birthday. It was probably all we talked about for weeks, I’m sure it drove my parents insane.
It was an expensive board game, a much bigger purchase than was normal for a birthday gift and I really didn’t think I would get it. Well, my parents decided it was worth it to make Andrew and I stop talking about it. I remember getting in very clearly; we went berserk.
And the game didn’t disappoint — it was everything we hoped it was going to be. We made up dozens of scenarios, forced my dad and sister to play. We never got Mom to play, although we tried very hard to tell her how amazing the Dwarf was.
From there we found D&D and other roleplaying games. We never had all of the books for any one game — we had like the Gamma World Rules and the D&D Monster Manual and a RIFTS book on Jungle Planets. Random stuff so we kinda made it up as we went along. That was the start of creating our own homebrew systems.
How come both of the Trese brothers started to create games? Did you start the business together?
Back when the Android app marketplace was very new and way before it was called Google Play, Cory started experimenting with app development. We lived on different coasts at the time and missed working on projects together.
Star Traders RPG started as just a hobby project, something fun, based off tabletop RPGs we had created and played and heavily
Firefly and
Dune inspired. It immediately got a good response on the market, and players were telling us we should create a paid version. We did, and players bought it. That was the point we started wondering if we could make a business out of it.
Do you share gaming genre interest or does it differentiate in any way?
[Cory] I think we’re pretty split on our favorites. Andrew loves fantasy RPGs the most and I’ve always been a hard-sci fi guy. Clearly, looking at our games, I’ve dragged Andrew through the hard-sci romp for the last 13 years and only let him make one fantasy RPG with
Heroes of Steel.
[Andrew] I’ve loved it. I never got into game mastering sci-fi RPGs because I felt out of my depth with the settings, rules and tech. But years of making games and writing stories in these worlds has really brought me around to it. Fantasy, gritty, medieval is still where my heart truly lies, but I’ve let this cyberpunk and space opera stuff into the inner sanctum over the years
Who does what in the studio?
I’m sure you’ve heard the adage before – in small studios, everyone does everything. Over 13 years, we’ve had time to deeply establish our own roles, things we do that no one else does. Cory is deep tech – automation, builds, databases, performance optimizations. While we share the lore and world development, I write the stories and the dialog trees and the implementation of the ideas.
Luckily over the years as we have grown, we’ve been able to share segments of the work that really
need a specialist out to… well, specialists. It isn’t great for me to do animation! So, we’ve had help now in different ways with animation, video production, 3D art, UX design, music composition, SFX, and we have amazing help from our marketing director and community manager in those realms as well. For a long time, we did all these things, and admittedly did some of them pretty badly.
What do you think about outsourcing work? Does it work well, any problems?
We work remotely to begin with, so outsourcing has worked very naturally for us. The most important thing is to be selective about who you work with; we do a lot of work in the search process to find someone who can really be a partner to us, someone who understands what we’re doing and delivers at a level that makes us want to go back to them again and again, like our composer.
For
Cyber Knights, we contracted N-iX Games to illustrate the concept art, help with all the 3D assets and animations, create more mission maps, and work with us on the UI. They love the game and have consistently gone above and beyond.
What none of us could have planned for was that Russia would invade N-iX’s country, Ukraine. For over two years now Putin has continued to send troops to assault Ukrainian towns, launch missiles into civilian areas, and worse. The Ukrainian people have continued to persevere through all of it, and N-iX have continued to be great partners to us through some incredibly challenging times. We’re really proud to work with them.
How do you work from concept idea to production? Do you have ideas ready and pick them out of a hat, or is it more involved?
For the game design and system, we have too many cool sounding ideas haha. Every week someone has a new idea, “want to hear about this crazy game we will never make?” We are a very core strategy and tactics RPG studio, so we make very deep, very replayable games that are strongly situated in a genre, usually. So we have a lot of wild ideas but stick to what we know and have done really well in the past.
For the lore and story, as our inspirations have all come directly from tabletop RPGs we game mastered at some point, we sort of kick around our coolest ideas and see which one sticks for both Cory and I. It’s always important we’re both excited about any given idea. We had a lot of ideas that didn’t stick with both of us and got shelved for maybe another day.
After we had made 5 games, each their own thing, we realized we wanted to “fold back in” on the IP we were sharing through our games. This started kind of organically because
Star Traders is the same world as
Templar Battleforce – the Templars are a Zendu military order in the
Star Traders universe. Then we made a 4X game,
Star Traders Empires, in the same universe. And then we’ve just doubled down on the worlds, lore and canon that have really resonated with our community.
Each time we make a game we are excited to push the game world forward, run the lore timeline a bit and deliver something different.
Cyber Knights classic was in 2217 and
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is 2231 and a lot of interesting things and big world events have happened including the destruction of some factions and megacorporate mergers that brought others together to create new events. So for those who played the original title, it’s the world you remember and love, but evolved.
I see you have made Android games too beyond titles for PC, and android version of games for the PC. What has been the most lucrative, and what system is the most fun to make games for?
When we first started, we only made games for Android phones, so those games, that platform and that community will always hold a pretty special place in our hearts. But the mobile gaming space is a really hard place to be. It is a place with high bar of competition, jammed packed full of “free” games and predatory monetization strategies: gacha, ads, coins, consumable IAPs.
When we started publishing our mobile games to PC in 2013, we had a rough ride with the first games –
Heroes of Steel and
Star Traders 4X Empires. The games and the engine weren’t technically ready for prime time, but still – players found them and loved their deep gameplay, for those who looked past weak keyboard, mouse and fullscreen support.
We’ve fixed all that since then, and now our process is always desktop first,
then mobile ports. And hopefully, soon, consoles.
Without a question, making games for the desktop is more fun because you can just dream bigger. For us, mobile has always been a struggle of squeezing our ambitious games down onto a small screen and interface size. We don’t compromise on gameplay or content – mobile players get 100% the same game, just with a different UI and some graphical adjustments.
For the paychecks, also desktop. Desktop gamers have no complaints about buying games at fair prices especially if they don’t have DLCs and you get free updates for years. A lot of mobile players aren’t interested in higher price tag premium games anymore, it is just not what is going on mobile anymore. It is harder for us to grow there now, but we already have so many fans on those platforms so we’re still excited to be able to give them a big game on small devices!
Most of your games seem to be sci-fi inspired, is that the primary influence for your work?
I would say tabletop RPGs are really the primary influence for our work. We were making homebrew TTRPG systems long before we started making video games. That freedom and interwoven storytelling is always what we’re trying to capture the feeling of in our games.
What general work of arts have inspired your games? Any specific authors or films and novels?
Too many to count.
Firefly and
Dune were definitely big influences on
Star Traders, but also Ursula K. Le Guin and Isaac Asimov,
Battlestar Galactica and
Star Wars, Traveller RPG and even Icelandic sagas.
Cyber Knights draws from a ton of cyberpunk classics like
Neuromancer,
Blade Runner,
Johnny Mnemonic, Mike Pondsmith,
Shadowrun, but we’ve tried to avoid a lot of the old 80s tropes that people keep rehashing and create our own more far-future vision of cyberpunk instead. We’re inspired by real-world advances in quantum computing and nanotech as much as we are by science fiction. We love that classic near-contemporary cyberpunk setting but wanted to something farther afield in the future to give us more freedom to create something different.
One of the big things that marks your development style is that you hold a high tempo for patching and updates. How do you hold such a pace without getting burnt out?
Great question. I guess it comes down to loving and playing our own games and talking to our community every day. We’re very proud of the games we’ve created and one of the reasons is that we truly enjoy playing them. We’ve crafted experiences for others to enjoy but we’ve made sure that we can find the fun in them and play them for hours. So when we hear a community member with a good idea or constructive criticism, it makes us want to jump up and make the game better. Sometimes because they are just right and we didn’t see it. Sometimes because we’re players too, and we love the change they suggested.
And who wants to wait for that? We like to improve rapidly because it keeps our tempo up. It’s a motivation game – you go fast because you’re moving fast. Slow down, and things start to plod.
Your games also have an “ethical” approach (no monetary exploitation), how come this is important to you? Is it a business thing, to make you stand out from others, or is there more to it?
Is it cheesy to say it’s a “feel good” thing? It feels simple and right and is something of which we can be proud. It is our pricing structure, so it absolutely has to work from a business standpoint, but we’ve found the formula that works for us in simple, one-time premium pricing with hundreds of updates. We’ve learned how it makes us stand out from our competition and now it’s something people know they can expect for us, so that is a lovely feather in our cap. It wasn’t always that way but gaming and pricing have come a long way since we made the decision to do it this way. We’re glad we’ve stuck to it.
You also seem very involved in your community, why do you consider this important? Has it led to any improvement in the games that you have released, or maybe development in general?
I don’t think there is anything else that is more truly the essence of our studio – it’s the Trese Brothers community and how close we are to them.
Has our community improved our games? LOL …yes! Yes a thousand times over. All the input, engagement, gameplay stories, feedback, criticism, support, daily chatting is the fuel to our fire, and a huge part of what makes our games good.
Players’ encouragement and excitement is the reason we started selling Star Traders classic in the first place and it has only grown as a critical part of how we operate, stay motivated and make our games since.
Beyond the occasional soundtrack DLC release, there are no gameplay/content DLC releases for your games on Steam. How come, is this part of ethical game development?
We always come back to this – we play games too. We have all had experiences where DLC have felt unfair – there are so many, they are small, they feel like they were carved out of the main game’s content, they are included at release with the game. We’d never want to create a DLC like that.
It’s been so much better for our games and our business model to just build a great game for a fixed price, and for at least as long as it’s viable to do so, continue to add content for free. That’s worked really well overall, but we do continue to discuss what fair DLC might be appropriate for us in some situations.
For example, after 6 years and more than 350 updates, we’re going to release a $5 Supporters Badge DLC for
Star Traders: Frontiers. It’ll be completely optional, no content locked behind it, but for players who have loved the game and appreciated the near endless stream of updates, it’ll give them a way to support all the work our studio puts into our games, and get a shiny badge on their ship status screen to identify themselves as a supporter.
What do you think about the gaming industry in general, from big AAA productions to indie games?
We’re usually very heads down working on our own stuff. The upside of being independent and completely self-funded is that we don’t have to try and read the tea leaves of if the funding environment is getting hot or going cold, or try to figure out what trends investors want us to be chasing. It’s just challenging to grow when you’re going up against games with much larger marketing budgets; we know players love what we do, we just really depend on them telling others about it.
Graphic-wise, you seem to have gone from 2D sprites to now full 3D, how come? Is it a natural evolution type of thing?
We love 2D games, we grew up playing 2D games, we still love to play them and we made 8 games that were fully 2D. We wanted something new and we are always trying to push up to the next level, so 3D felt like it could be a natural evolution at this point especially as we upgraded to the Unity game engine. The evolution was pretty intentional for
Cyber Knights.
Our vision for the way combat, stealth, explosions and abilities would work in
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint convinced us that we needed to abandon not only 2D, but the entire concept of a grid. Using 3D graphics has been really exciting but we actually feel like the gameplay is the star here.
I assume making 3D models and graphics are much more expensive and harder, is that correct? And if so, why did you take this step?
Way more expensive! As we’ve just kept growing and pushing to level up with each new game, we carefully waited and bided our time before making the leap to 3D. We’ve long wanted to try it out and see what we could do with it. But we always worried about trying to jump to 3D and ending up with a sub-par result from running out of budget before we’d even finished iterating on the basics. So we waited a long time, and finally
Cyber Knight: Flashpoint was the one to be ready for it.
We are super excited with what we’ve been able to do with our first outing into 3D; more budget could always make this better of course, but the current level serves our gameplay very well and creates some really cool-looking environments and player screenshots.
One of the things that stand out with your games is that they are all pretty deep mechanically, with a lot of different options and play-styles. With so many alternatives in gameplay, how do you avoid bloat, and how do you balance gameplay with so many options?
It’s very important to have an overall vision and a set of clearly defined rules to guide the design. We design them to be very deep mechanically, but we also stay flexible and respond to what is working and what is not.
A big part of avoiding bloat is making sure that every system is connected to other systems; they need to function well independently but also contribute to the larger picture.
In terms of balance, we play a lot of hours ourselves seeing how it all feels, but in the end we talk to the community and watch what they come up with. Players love finding their own strategies. And unless it’s exploiting something that’s really a mistake, we try hard not to nerf them. Because so much of the fun of so many options is that the player community can develop these emergent strategies and discover new ones as they play. Who are we to take away their toys?
Are you happy in your current position as a company, or are you looking to the future? What do you want to become as a studio?
We started Trese Brothers as two solo devs who did everything – mixing music, drawing the art, writing the code, supporting all the platforms, managing the community. We’ve always wanted to grow and bring more talented people into the mix, do more, make more games. We love what we are doing, we just want to do more, faster. Our Kickstarters for
Star Traders: Frontiers and
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint have been a big help in allowing us to fund more specialists joining our team, either on specific parts of a project (animator, composer) or on a more permanent basis (community manager).
We’ve always created and published a single game at a time. That’s how it works for small studios – a single hand at the poker table, everything resting on the results of that play. A dream of ours is to get to a point where we aren’t single threaded, where we can work on 2 projects at once.
Now, let’s talk about your upcoming turn-based tactical game, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint. What prompted you to make this game?
What we now call “Cyber Knights classic” was our second game, a little Android-only RPG that we made to test out a new approach to map design and the RPG system we wanted to use for
Heroes of Steel. It really grabbed a lot of players; players still love it, players are still playing it. You can emulate it today on BlueStacks on your PC. It was kind of our cult-classic game for a while because we went on to make
Templar Assault,
Age of Pirates and (finally!! See question #4)
Heroes of Steel. It turned out it wasn’t a tech test so much as a passion project and 300 some updates later, an enduring hit with our community.
We love cyberpunk and all the tabletop RPGs we run in these worlds, so we wanted to come back to it after making
Star Traders: Frontiers, a spiritual successor of our first game. And one of us had probably watched
Heat again recently haha. And it just clicked.
What’s the inspiration for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint?
A lot of the cyberpunk tabletop RPGs campaigns we ran and played are the main inspiration. We built out a lot of the setting for
Cyber Knights over about ten years of running campaigns for friends and family (including one brother running something and the other brother playing). And those campaigns were built on inspirations from the classics of cyberpunk literature and movies – most notably, Gibson’s
Neuromancer and
Johnny Mnemonic which were huge for us when we were young. And so much of tabletop RPG in cyberpunk is doing runs or hits — really just heisting in some form or another — and so heist movies mix into that big time.
While the game has cool combat, it’s not exactly encouraged, seeing as the game becomes harder (although exciting) fighting your way out of missions. Why the focus on stealth?
Well, that’s actually not correct. It would really be much harder to complete most missions going full ninja than it is to complete them going full Rambo. Stealth is available, and a really smart way to get an advantage, but you’re both welcome to go guns blazing from the start and fully expected that at
some point during any mission you’re going to want or need to go loud with your squad. As you said, that’s what cranks up the excitement and gives it that feeling of a thrilling heist.
We designed the game to support a full spectrum of playstyles from guns-blazing to ghost in the machine. Most players will use a mix, taking advantage of silencers or quiet weapons to pick off perimeter guards and get close to their objective before unleashing their firepower. But you can pop off with loud weapons on turn one and still succeed; you just need to know what you’re doing, have a squad that’s equipped for a pure-combat style, and not get bogged down — you have objectives to complete.
The same independent enemy unit AI and awareness that enables sneaking past enemies also enables diversionary tactics, flanking, and ambushes. The game’s stealth options are about providing smarter, more realistic tactics, instead of enemies across the map dogpiling toward you the second one becomes aware of your squad.
How do you make sure AI behavior feels authentic, and does it have different states?
The situation in a
Cyber Knight’s heist is really fluid – you can come in and out of stealth and combat, clean up a mess you started, get things quiet again, or the guns can just start roaring. It is very unlike the black and white, one-way transitions you often get in games from stealth phase to combat phase and every enemy on the map wakes up and suddenly knows your position.
To achieve this, we’ve built every individual enemy on the field to have their own awareness, with only limited knowledge of what is going on across the map. But, at the end of each Turn, all of the enemy agents “report” up to the global security AI — which then sends orders back down to the agents to help them coordinate their response. This means you might have a short gunfight and then hide the body before another enemy comes looking for the missing guard. Or because every one of your characters also has their own individual stealth state – your Soldier starts throwing grenades to draw attention to himself while your Vanguard sneaks past the guards who rush to the distraction.
It makes for a really unique stealth and combat simulation unlike anything other games in the genre have tried and players are loving it.
How is the combat balanced to make it hard, yet fun?
If it’s done right, the difficulty should be part of why combat
is fun! You have a set of tools and the enemy has a set of tools. If you just run at each other firing wildly, you’ll both get wrecked — combat in a turn-based tactics game needs to be difficult enough that it demands you use your brains, not just your bullets.
That’s where the fun is: making smart choices that let you overcome the odds. You get that amazing satisfaction when you execute a perfect ambush, counterfire from the perfect position to take out their rooftop sniper, or toss a shock mine right on the staircase the enemy VIP is about to use as they flee.
So we’ve created a solid and exciting core for
Cyber Knights by making sure you have lots of really different and powerful tools at your disposal. In a cyberpunk world with cybernetics, nano-tech and more there are so many cool and crazy things you can do. We’ve worked hard to make sure every class has an exciting and varied set of abilities that can be very effective, different and used in smart, tactical ways.
Throughout Early Access, we’re expanding the enemy variety to be just as exciting and continue to be challenging. Heavy enemy troops are about to get Full Auto attacks, allowing them to AOE fire on your crew. And as the enemy variety continues to grow, individual factions you’re fighting take their own shape. Syndicates and Brave Star milsec already really stand apart and we’re excited to see how far we can push this variety.
And finally, part of what makes combat fun is there being stakes beyond just did you succeed or not. Combat should have both short and long term consequences depending on what happens in it. Systems like stress, injuries, and story tie-ins lets you balance risk vs reward and increases your connection to your squad members.
The more you’ve invested in your characters, the more you care what happens to them. The more hardship they’ve been through, the more meaningful their successes. Challenge, variety, and stakes that create stories: that’s what makes our combat fun.
How does XP gain work for agents under your command? Is killing worth the same as a “hack”?
XP gain is driven by going on successful heists, not by a single kill or hack. In order to keep the widest range of possible play, we’ve kept XP at a pretty high level – if you go on a successful heist, you get the heist’s XP reward. This lets players defeat the mission in any way they see fit and still get the benefits. Then, based on the mission and the interest of the contact who offered it, there are secondary objectives – such as completing it fast, killing a certain number of enemies, or keeping the security level below a certain threshold – that can grant bonus XP.
From the few hours I have played (waiting for 1.0 release), it seems very X-com inspired in its approach to missions and base building. How does the base building work? Is it for bonuses for your men, or something more?
Base building in our game is about making the most of the space in your safehouse to expand your crew’s capabilities and manipulate missions. Building a room like the Field Ops Center opens up new leverage advantages for missions and lets you use tradecraft to delay mission deadlines when timing is critical. Building an Underworld Hub connects gives you more ways to work your network, recruiting more squad members (up to the limit of how upgraded your Barracks is), finding new contacts offering the services you need, or trading for materials to use in your Nano-Fab crafting workshop.
As the number of room options continues to grow, how you prioritize and build out your safehouse will become very personal to your playstyle. A player that loves hacking will want a Hacking Station as early as possible to help them maximize their effectiveness in the Matrix and highly-upgraded Cold Storage to earn more from stolen files. While a combat-focused crew will want a Triage Clinic to buff their wound resistance, and a Counter-Intel pod to reduce their Heat and throw Head Hunters off their trail.
Is Cyber Knights: Flashpoint a game for someone that likes to collect loot and equip your men? What kind of interesting loot can you find, and is loot restricted to classes, or can the items be equipped by anyone?
Yes, that’s a lot of the fun of our crafting system. As you complete heists you’ll often find blueprints that you can craft in your safehouse to create weapons, armor, weapon mods, and gear. Some of those are quite powerful on their own, and crafting can save you a lot of creds instead of purchasing it. But the real power is in breaking down and combining blueprints, to be able to stack modifiers and create powerful custom weapons and armor. The exact combinations that you come up with, the crafting supplies you use to roll for additional bonuses, all lead to a really exciting loot experience. If you find an armor blueprint, maybe you don’t like some of its stats but some of its other bonuses could be combined with another blueprint you’ve been sitting on.
Is loot randomized?
Yes, with some structure around it. Loot tables are dependent on the faction you’re going up against and the power level of the mission. Within a mission, not all loot-containing security lockers are created equal. Harder-to-reach lockers often contain more or more valuable loot.
Does Cyber Knights: Flashpoint have permanent death for agents?
Yes, that is an option in each game’s difficulty settings. In addition to some standard preset difficulties, we have
detailed individual settings you can use to create custom difficulties.
If you get your squad wiped on a mission, is that a game over, or can you still continue the campaign?
On most difficulty settings it will depend on if the squad included your Knight or not. You can lose a whole squad of your other mercs and still continue, laying low in the safehouse while you recruit new mercs to fill in the gaps. There may be consequences if friends or family of some of the lost mercs come looking for them, but you can deal with those as and if they come. If your Cyber Knight dies though, it’s game over.
Can agents be captured, like in Jagged Alliance 2 and Xcom 2, and later be busted out of prison?
Not currently, but we do have the appropriate status tags set up in the backend to support it.
Does the game have a mode for “ironman”? Do you like to play tactical games in ironman mode yourself?
Yes. Our highest preset difficulty, Chrome, is an ironman difficulty, or you can customize any difficulty level to include both ironman and permadeath settings. Ironman is a brutal way to play any game, but for me it can be the gateway to some of the best highs in gaming. Those moments where you know it
really matters right now, do or die. Really die, not just “Oh dang, reload!” That’s a kind of tension and excitement that is hard to produce without real ironman.
I don’t get to play much
Cyber Knights ironman right now because my play time has to be about getting hours in on the progression and the feel, so I can’t risk losing progress part way through, but I’m loving the player stories I’ve heard so far and looking forward to when I can start my own run.
We’ve got very, very in-depth difficulty customization options so you can make even Chrome difficulty worse if you want to. Or the opposite, play at Chrome difficulty without it having to be ironman. And you can change your difficulty any time during play if you feel like you made the wrong choice.
Like everything in our games, we’ve made the difficulty system better each game, getting more feedback and incorporating it into the next. With 20+ options in custom difficulty, 6 canned difficulties, flexible difficulty, the option to make the story go faster or slower – this is our best difficulty system yet.
Beyond the missions feeling very “sandbox”, there is also a set plot to follow. Is it hard to mix these two ways of different approaches to gameplay?
Right now it might feel like there’s a set plot while there’s only a single origin story and the missions that result from it will always be the first thing you see, but as we continue to build out the available content, you’ll see the game is actually much more sandbox than not.
Origin stories offer a repeatable starting point for playthroughs. They explain and give you ways to deal with the consequences of how your Knight got his quantum computer spinal implant. But beyond that point, we use a mix of procedurally generated missions and a custom-built story engine called the Casting Director to dynamically select story missions. Your specific squad members and contacts get woven into these storylines based on how you’ve been playing, and your choices will lead to different follow-on stories or open up entirely different story eras.
Different factions seem to be an important part of the game, explain a little how the factions work?
Factions represent the major entities within the New Boston Zone; from sprawling street gangs to the globe-spanning megacorps. Power players within these factions are constantly vying for power, both within their own faction and to further their factions’ interests. That’s where you come in.
As your reputation grows, you’ll get access to contacts within more powerful factions and the risks and rewards of your heists will increase. Helping contacts raises their influence, benefiting them and you. Fail them or betray them, and their exposure will grow instead, increasing the risk they’ll be taken out by enemies or rivals as the game goes on.
As your choices in missions impact which story eras open up, different factions will rise and fall in power as a result. Take some stories far enough, and your actions might be the domino that topples some of the highest towers in the city.
Does the game have a definite ending, maybe even several endings?
Yes,
Cyber Knights features retirement storylines as a way to choose the ending to your story — if you’re ready. At the end of certain climatic story arcs, you’ll be offered a chance to retire a certain way – perhaps retire to a luxury off-world space station with a megacorporate power-player. Each retirement will have a different feel and you have the option to accept or decide you’re not done yet and head back to New Boston for “just one more heist.” And if one of those heists leads to another climactic story arc, maybe you will survive to another retirement opportunity.
What are you most proud of regarding Cyber Knights: Flashpoint so far?
That we hit the right nerve for players who love this genre. There are so many great references in our reviews from players.
XCOM,
Shadowrun,
Invisible Inc.,
Cyberpunk 2077,
Mech Warrior,
Phantom Doctrine…
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is its own thing, but making a turn-based tactical RPG that gets people comparing us to some of the best in the genre and seeing how much they love ours is a very awesome feeling.
What parts of development have been the most difficult so far?
I would say Kickstarter commitments. These are always tough but also good. When you run a Kickstarter, especially one pulling in 5,000 backers, you make a lot of promises and those promises always come with a deadline. With all our Kickstarters, we’ve been very dedicated to delivering on every promise and to update the backers every month until the project is finished. So, then
Cyber Knight’s Kickstarter ended in March, 2020 and covid happened and our deadlines slipped. And the game is big, the engine is new, it is our first full 3D game … things slipped. So there has been a lot of pushing and pulling here and there to try to not let our backers down while also trying to make the right business decisions for the game. On one hand, we owe this to the backers. On the other hand, rushing the cooks in the kitchen doesn’t make a good meal.
Thankfully, with the launch of the game to Early Access in October 2023, we have moved past this stress point.
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint isn’t finished yet, but are there any features/ideas that unfortunately had to be cut?
Nothing that we’ve cut. Mostly we just have to stay disciplined about not adding features we ruled out in our original scope, no matter how often they’re requested. Multiplayer, destructible environments, romancing options…
Has the game turned out what you had envisioned, or has it changed in unexpecting ways during development?
It is always cool when you get to this point in a game’s arc and can look at it and say “yah, we stuck the plan.” And we really have. So many old design documents can be held up to the game we built and we can say, “yep, that’s what we decided in 2020!” But at the same time, you have to squint a little because in every design document a lot has also wiggled or changed. Which is good, which is how it should be. We got the big brush strokes – the “pillars” as we’d call them – but the details have been honed and fine tuned now that the game is real and players are putting in thousands of hours of playtesting.
What engine does the game run on, and does it work well for your needs?
We are running on Unity 2021 LTS. We’re working on a big upgrade to Unity 2022 LTS. It has worked great for us and we’re happy here because we have a big C# background.
When can we expect the release of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, and why should we be hyped by it?
Development-wise, we’re on track to be able to fully launch late this year. But we do still have a few big roadmap items to complete like translation, and as those final big pieces come together we have to see if the timing is leading to what would actually be a good launch window.
If things take several weeks longer than expected, it’d be bad for us to launch in the middle of the Steam Winter Sale for instance. If something like that’s the case we might decide to just push it a couple more months into 2025 and keep adding to the game in the meantime (we continue to add to our games long after launch anyways).
As the reviews show, the game’s great already, so be hyped for our full launch because it’s only going to get better. The EA players continue to give us great ideas, and we have a lot more planned content coming, new character classes, and improvements.
If you want to check it out at launch, please
wishlist Cyber Knights on Steam.
Is there anything you want to add, about Cyber Knights: Flashpoint or game development in general?
Just a thank you to everyone who’s played, purchased, kickstarted, upvoted, reviewed, retweeted, memed, or modded our games. We are only able to make the kind of games we make through the support of the people who like them and want more of them.
What a doozy. I want to thank Andrew & Cory Trese again for answering my many questions. I did notice some repeats in my questions, but I guess that is how it turns out at times when you conduct it over email. Nonetheless, it turned out well. I’m looking forward to
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, since it seems to be specifically made to scratch that eternal
X-com itch. I hope captured agents make it in before the 1.0 release. I’m glad that they have tags for it, though, even if not implemented yet – it makes me hopeful it will become a feature. It’s a unique and cool mechanic.
