Interviews// Flying Helmet Games' Mobile Gaming Startup

Flying Helmet games is a Canadian developer that is based in Vancouver and they are attempting what many would have regarded as a pipe-dream a mere five years ago.

That being Eon Altar, which is a merger between video game and pen and paper RPG via the use of smart phones and tablet devices. I met Edward Douglas, the creative director and co-founder of Flying Helmet Games about the game.

SPOnG: Could you give us a bit of history about how Eon Altar came to be?

Edward Douglas (ED): Eon Altar is a tabletop video game and a lot of us have been playing tabletop games for quite a while. We used to play Dungeon and Dragon games years and years ago and Scott Penner, the lead developer and I continued to work in the video game industry and made bigger and bigger games, we really wanted to make something of our own.

We looked at an old RPG system that a few of our friends had written themselves back when we used to play D&D and we took a small slice out of that system and decided to make something out of this.

It was around the time when tablets started to become pretty big and everyone had a smart phone in their pocket and most people knew someone with a tablet. So we thought let's just start trying to make a video game where you take the screen away from the players face and put it down on the table and just play a video game together around a table.

We've been in development on the software for just over five months now and it's really early days and we're showing a prototype here at PAX East. We think we have something that can be very cool.

SPOnG: So, it's safe to say you're tabletop game fans, otherwise you couldn't make Eon Altar.

ED: Very much so. We're big tabletop players, we enjoy board games and I like playing video games with my friends and I bemoan the death of the split screen gaming on the console. I just want to hang around with friends, order some pizza and beer and play a game together.

SPOnG: Eon Altar has been developed using Unity, has this been done to make it compatible with as many devices as possible?

ED: Working with Unity lets us as a very small team do a lot without having to create a core engine on our own. It is thanks to Unity that we have a prototype that has cross networking between iOS and Windows 8 tablet devices and we're up and running on Bluetooth and wireless with iPads and iPhones as well. We are also looking at Android too.

SPOnG: What are you demonstrating here at PAX East? The game appears to be running on a Windows 8 Tablet that is networked to five iPad minis.

ED: At PAX right now we have two different builds running. We have a communal game-master tablet running Windows 8 that is running with iPad minis and we also have a demo running with iPad as the game-master tablet and smart phones.

SPOnG: How long before release for Eon Altar?

ED: This is our first prototype and from this we know what makes the game fun and how we want to make the game and we can start building out the rest of our feature sets before we get a better understanding of how we bring this game to market. We're not committing to any dates yet, personally I'd love to see a soft launch this next fall, but we'll see how it goes.

SPOnG: Looking at the engine of the game itself it appears you have done away with the game-master and put that job in the hands of the communal tablet, is that right?

ED: Eon Altar is through and through a video game. You're all playing a story together and we're all D&D players and we love the idea of making your own stories. But a long time in the future, we may be able to put those creation tools in the hands of the end user. But that's a ways off from now.

SPOnG: Tell us more about the universe Eon Altar is set in.

ED: It's based on our own world and now our own IP. A few of our friends wrote their own world and story, like a lot of young gamers and D&D players they want to create something of their own. Years later when searching what sort of game we really wanted to make we delved back into our own creative history and found the universe that Eon Altar is set in. We have fleshed it out a lot and are working with a film and television writer to help us describe this little slice of the world.

SPOnG: The game does rely on people owning certain devices and here at PAX East you have a very large tablet being used as the communal screen. Most are not going to have access to such technology, with the largest tablet being an iPad. How does that work with Eon Altar?

ED: It's likely that the most common set up will be someone with a tablet, whether that be a iPad or an Android device and everyone else has a smart phone. Granted the bigger the better for the communal screen, but we do have Eon Altar running on all sorts of scales.

SPOnG: How does the game experience translate when you have the smaller screen on the smart phones and communal game master screen?

ED: The resolution of the iPad 3 and above is actually fantastic, so it can look better than larger screens.

SPOnG: Can we assume it runs on iPads 2 and above?

ED: It runs on 2 and 3 and iPad minis, but we've never tried to run it on an iPad 1. After PAX East we're going to see what devices are out there and what people are using. From that we'll make a decision as to which ones to support.

SPOnG: Can it be run on a PC?

ED: The game can be controlled with a mouse, but it's better with a touch pad. We can't stop people from playing it with a mouse and it absolutely works that way and you can play it online with friends that are far away. But it's like D&D, where you can play over Skype, but that's not the best way to play that game. Similarly with Eon Altar as it is designed for communal play.

SPOnG: How is the game being tested at present?

ED: We're doing some focus testing in a small group right now and this is the first public showing of the game, which is in prototype. We'll be going back and start to flesh out a lot more of the game and sometime well before the game is out we will be dong soft launches and beta type launches.

SPOnG: How are the characters created in the game? Do you start from scratch?

ED: We have a small set of characters as the story is told from their point of view. They have been built as the ideal versions of certain classes, such as mages and warriors. The character building system is flexible enough that the player can push their character's class to be whatever they want.

If say you want to take Markus the tank and push him to be a stealth assassin, you can do that. He will be an interesting stealth tank. but he won't be as stealthy as the initial assassin, probably not.

We're creating characters and letting the player evolve those characters into the play styles they want to play. You have to understand that I'm a story teller. I used to work with Ubisoft and I also worked on the Mass Effect story for a while and that's why I want to make characters, to tell a story.

SPOnG: Was one of the drivers behind making Eon Altar the need to get rid of all of the paraphernalia that comes with playing Dungeons and Dragons?

ED: In my gaming group I'd only be able to jump in and play once in every 3-4 sessions. So I would jump in I'd have a character that I could play I'd have a good time and then I'd have to jump out and then a few sessions later I would come in.

There's also board games that I love to play but they take ages to set up and you have to learn all of the rules, so we want to make something that quick to get in and start playing as it takes minutes to get going yet provides the same experience. But you don't need to spend the hours to teach the rules to play Eon Altar and it is just as deep as pen and paper RPGs.

It's like a video game where you can take the screen away from your face and put it down on the table. Eon Altar really plays like a video game, it just happens to be around a table.

SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time!