Iron Tower Studio Interview
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CSH: You mentioned your team had never worked in the gaming industry prior to AoD. Did you find your hobbies or previous work had any influence on your games?
Vince: I love reading, history in particular. History provides all the reference material you need and then some. Whatever you’re writing about, there is a good chance it happened quite a few times in the past and it’s simply a question of knowing where to look. Then you can trace the events, compare different scenarios, see how they unfolded, similarities and differences, etc.
For example, one of the factions in TNW is the Brotherhood of Liberty. They rebelled against the Ship Authority and established their own dominion. Naturally the reference materials are the French and the Russian revolutions. What’s remarkable is that even though they were more than 100 years apart, they followed the same template, including the reign of terror and the subsequent authoritarian regimes.As for my previous job, I worked in a place where scheming, backstabbing, and ever-shifting alliances were commonplace. Some of the characters in AoD were based on people I worked with and knew well.
CSH: Let’s talk more about your upcoming game, The New World. Without spoiling too much, what can you tell us about it?
Vince: It’s a generation ship game. What’s a generation ship, you ask? Wiki to the rescue:
“It’s a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels at sub-light speed. Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue traveling.”
Basically it’s a perfect ant-farm where different societies are forced to coexist within a limited space, influencing and affecting each other’s development while fighting for that limited space, which adds “the end justifies the means” pressure.
Your character is one of the Freemen who make a living scavenging and selling various junk. One day you stumble upon something that’s clearly worth a lot of money. The problem is, you don’t know what it is…
