Qixter Interview Transcript
Raxa: Hi everyone and welcome to the audio broadcast. This is Raxa, I am a site mod with Gaia right now, and I have through the power of the internet here Qixter, the senior Producer and Director of the online Game zOMG! Which I am sure many of you are fans of. And since I am not going to give a long introduction well get straight into introductions. You want to say some things Qixter what you do as senior producer and Director?
Qix: Oh, that’s a big question. The producer side of making a computer game is basically the business side. Handling the organization of the team and figuring out the ways to help with marketing, and trying to find ways to make money out of the project. The creative director side of the business is making the stuff up basically. Creating division, working with the team to hone in, brainstorming with the team and figuring out which features will make the cut and which ones won’t. And I have always done both sides of the business through my 20 plus years of working in the industry. I’ve worked both sides o f the fence, which isn’t typical. Usually that’s two different people. It’s worked out really well with my projects and my teams so I keep doing.
Raxa:So have you ever had a conflict where there’s some feature you really, really want to add in but marketing wise it never really becomes viable?
Qix: Well its always a question of bang for the buck. We have a small team so we can only do a certain amount of features so we have to constantly weigh the priorities of the company and the project and the fun factor against each other and figure out what is the most important at the time and then making sure we are always doing whatever our major goals are. Right now we are focusing on fun factor, and of course we would like the game to start making some money so the game can pay for it’s own costs. That would be cool So we will be focusing on both of those, mostly the fun factor, but also add some revenue side to the game in the next 6 months.
Raxa: Ok, so do you have more staff than just the staff who appear in the bar room in barton town? Or are there other support staff? Or how many members are on your team?
Qix: There’s only 15 of us. It’s about uh, actually its less than 15 now. We have myself and Bronstahd who are basically the designers, there are 7 programmers, and we have 4 and a half artists.
Raxa:So do you do any of the coding yourself?
Qix: No I don’t code. Well, sorta code, I do a lot of the scripting. Scripting is uh, we use a language called Groovy which is java light. It’s a scripting language for Java. It’s a lot like programming, I have computer science degree, and Bronstahd has done a lot of scripting on another game. We do a lot of serious game logic but we are not programmers. The programmers are the ones who work in java and flash, making the servers, and the database stuff. I said we have 7 programmers but we have 8. But uh, yeah that’s where we sit. I cant claim to be a coder, but if you read the script I think you would think it looks a lot like code.
Raxa: So as director do you direct? Similar to a movie where you direct the story direction and the general direction and the feel of the game? Try to put yourself in, I don’t know, the users shoes?
Qix: On the surface it is, you’re the creative visionary of the project. It has to go through one person to make sure it’s a tight vision, so Im that person. So lots of people are creating on the team, but I essentially guide the process, and of course a lot of the plot direction Bronstahd and I make up. But um, yeah it’s a lot like a movie director but when you get down to the nitty gritty of it its very, very different.
Raxa: Ah ok, so my first question with zOMG! is, was the idea of the game, I know Gaia has been planning battle system for years and years and years, I Joined back in 2006 and they were still telling us “yeah its coming! It’s coming!” and how long has it actually been in the works? How long have you been working on it?
Qix: I got hired in April of 2007. At that time there were about 3 people working on the project. They hadn’t done much yet. They were just basically playing, well I shouldn’t say playing they had just started a flash engine, so you could move an avatar around inside a limited area. There was a little bit of art. But there really wasn’t much game design and there really wasn’t much direction for the game to go. I was hired to essentially create a virtual community, virtual world in as little time as possible. So um, uh we initially started out making what you might call a stock MMO with a very Gaia flavor. So now that we have the core going we can start building what we really want to build, which is a very unique and different kind of game and you will see that start to develop over the next half of the year.
Raxa: So how did it change back from the video we saw at one of the Cons a few years ago where it mostly looked like a towns base system? Did you have to re-write the entire engine?
Qix: I don’t think they ever showed anything that was real before I got hired. There was a mock up which I think you can still find on youtube. That was really just a mock up. It wasn’t serious, it didn’t work, there was no logic behind it. It was just a proto-type of what the game could look like, but they didn’t know what they wanted it to look like.
Raxa: So the battle system prior to about 2007 was an “eventually coming” thing?
Qix: Yeah, it didn’t exist. For all intents and purposes it didn’t exist.
Raxa: So when they hired you did you bring on the developers to code? Did you use people you had worked with before? Or did you have to entirely new people to do the system?
Qix: Well, Flajeau, Swarf, and JK were all here when I got hired and a couple of the artists that worked with us all the way through open beta launch like Pepper-tea and reapersun. Those artists were there already but we hired most of the programs that we have now we’ve hired since I came on board and Bronstahd was a direct hire after I’ve started so yeah, I’d say the vast bulk of the team was hired since then.
Raxa: My other question is, is it similar to how the mock up changed, will zOMG change a lot between now and then final release version. I know we’re still in a beta and its still fun as heck even though it’s a beta but will we see large strides in it between now and then?
Qix: Yeah, the next, well I mean don’t want to get a time frame or hint at a release date and I hate release dates because I’m almost always wrong. Lets just say that, yes, its going to change significantly. I think that, well my opinion is that its going to change significantly for the better, some of those changes will happen right away. We’re going to announce some of the changes at Fanime, tomorrow actually, but the biggest changes will be still a few months away.
Raxa: I’m going to pull up a community question, I think it’s a good time, if I could find it here…crap I cant get it…sorry I’ve got these all arranged in a big word document. I probably could have had a better way to arrange these, I forgot who the user was but one of them was asking “Can we expect to see any new Mini Games with in the system?”
Qix: Yes but, not in the fashion that you know of right now. We’re going to be making a bunch of, well some of this stuff I’ll be talking about at Fanime tomorrow but just as a teaser, we’re going to create a lot of the things that are happening in the world that are community oriented so that people can corporate together that even with out being in crews together to achieve big goals so that you can be fighting alongside people and not have to be necessarily have to be crewed with them to accomplish the goals. Those will come in a lot of different flavors they won’t just be straight up combat, there will be a lot of them that are non combat, so yes there will be a lot of new ways to play the game.
Raxa:And the user was Kaihou if I butcher your name I’m sorry, I just wanted to put it out there who’s question it was. My next question was with the current system how many of your new implements actually come from the community. I know a big addition just recently that everyone loved was the “Kill Counter” so that they could work on their grinding towards badges. Do you read a lot of the threads in the zOMG forum and see what the user base is looking for?
Qix: Sure yeah, we read the zOMG forum all the time. If you look back on the history of the game a lot of the stuff that has come into the game has come in as users suggestions. I can’t really make a list right now but a lot of the stuff you’ll notice got talked about in the community and we went ahead and did it. Now we can only do this on an ad-hoc basis if the feature is small enough for us to squeeze in. We have a much more robust version of the kill counter page for later on in our schedule, but Kaia9 was able to real quick make up that version that is on the webpage now and we all thought that was really cool and he did it in his spare time and it basically shaved about 3 months off of when we were able to get it to you, so that’s why we released it right away but there is still more to come on that feature.
Raxa: I have another community question here from Kats Kokeshi Doll, “Will the upcoming chapters of zOMG, will the past come back to haunt us? Will events that have occurred so far in chapter one somehow have an effect on future story line in the game?”
Qix: Yes.
Raxa: Can’t go into any more details? That’s fine, I’m sure she’ll be happy with that answer.
Qix: One of the things that got unveiled in chapter one was that unfortunately as you use the rings you may have realized that are part of the problem, that’s going to be a focus on the background story going forward.
Raxa: So was the Gaia plot and the manga over the last couple of years leading up to zOMG or was it kind of hinting at it or have you had to adapt the story so far to Gaia’s plot?
Qix: It was the latter, what I did was when I first came on board I read, and reread the existing manga and everything that had gone on the site before, I interviewed Josh, sorry L0ck and [JK] and a bunch of the people that had been here back when and pulled a bunch of information out of their heads. And then I took that all and created a big long story line of everything that had happened in Gaia and how it interrelated and then we developed a plot line that could work alongside that, for those who haven’t gotten to the end of the game I don’t want to spoil it but that’s where the endboss stuff came from. And that’s where a lot of the things that we did kind of branched from and then the whole life force story basically spun up because I’ve always been a big anime fan and one of the predominant themes that gets done a lot quite often has something to do with life force, the meaning of life, where it comes from and what the bigger issues are and we have a lot of that stuff planned for later.
Raxa: My next question is I noticed in your profile that you did table top gaming creation for a while has that influenced zOMG! and its system?
Qix: Well maybe, I guess I’ve always been a fan of “sand box games”, and by sand box games I mean you don’t get stuck in a particular role, you can fine tune your own character and we got pretty close to where we wanted to go with the ring system but some of the changes that are going to be coming in the future will make the ring system much more flexible so that its easier to change rings back and forth and experiment a little bit more. Right now its far too laborious in my opinion for if you want to try out a new ring and you’re a pretty high level and it takes too much time to try out something you just found, and that’s not really what we had intended so we’re going to make some changes to make that easier. But yeah, my original games Mecha and Sprit Warrior Empire were giant robot combat games—
Raxa: The best kind.
Qix: Yeah, it gives you an excuse to watch a lot of anime didn’t it? We designed that whole system to be like an open ended tool box like a lot of the miniature strategy games are and I would have to say yes, that influenced me a lot. Most of the games I’ve been involved in either had mechs , or ways to spec out your characters or your vehicles, or whatever it was so yeah I really enjoyed those games so yes zOMG! was influenced by that.
Raxa: I was wondering on that same note where you got the ideas for zOMG! and where you got the plot line from, are you trying to strike a balance with your game between storytelling and actually just letting people play?
Qix: Well, I haven’t been accepted to speak at Austin GDC yet but I did create a presentation for that show if they chose to select it and one of the big focuses of that presentation is the fact that most MMOs today are pretty much the same game with a different set of graphics and a different story. And I’ve played most of the MMOs that are out there, some of the extensively many of them for like a year or more and quite honestly I’m tired of the same damned game and story line doesn’t change the game so looking back at zOMG with hindsight in 2020 I think that the amount of storyline and dialoged that we put into the game was kind of an error. Because one of the things I think that players really want, and this is a “no-duh” kind of statement but players don’t want to read a book or watch a movie they come to play a game. So our future focus on the game is going to be adding lots of variety, lots of different kinds of ways to play and increasing the fun factor so when you’re in there for 10 or 15, 20, 30 minutes whatever you’re playing the game for you’re just going to have a lot of fun you’re not going to feel grindy and you’re not going to feel like you have to remember all this story and all this other stuff. We’ll keep telling stories, we’ll defiantly do that but at the same time we’re really going to shake it up and try to turn the game into not just a 3 ring circus but a 16 or 20 ring circus.
Raxa: I have a related question from the The Original Shurtugal his question was “Will Gaia’s plot come into play? Will the updated mangas keep being used in zOMG or will you see more zOMG reflected in the manga there, in what story line will appear in the future?
Qix: In future chapters yes probably we’ll keep the future chapters up to date and I have a feeling that the previous chapters like this chapter one that we’re in right now will be kind of be a fly in amber and as we move forward in the game you will get updated history as we go. But we can’t continuously back fill the content, our team is too small for that kind of thing so what we’ll do is we’ll concentrate on just making sure that the game really, really fun and we’ll keep growing the story line as the main site grows. I mean the we’re not going to necessarily base the game on what the main site does with their plot lines because we have different purposes. You know the main site is doing its thing and we’re doing our thing and we talk and we’re really tightly integrated we talk back and forth all the time, we sit at each others meetings and brainstorm together but at the same time when someone wants to do something really goofy with promagedon or something that doesn’t necessarily mean it will show up in zOMG unless its appropriate for zOMG.
Raxa: My other question is the April Fools day joke I know was a very, very popular joke and mild plot line thing, will we ever see anything like that return or can you even tell us? Because I know that Cresento is still a fan favorite character, that appeared shortly and everyone was like “wow.”
Qix: Well I don’t want to spoil Fanime tomorrow but I will say that there was a character in that, that will return.
Raxa: Okay, next set of questions that I have I’m moving more towards the ring system which you mentioned slightly earlier considering its so unique to this game in particular, because I know in a lot of MMOs that I play, I’m a mild MMO player I’ve played a couple over the years that I’ve been doing, I think I started out with Diablo 2 back in 1999, which even if you can consider that as an MMO.
Qix: Its close.
Raxa: You had 7 man rooms yeah, that’s about as close as you could get on dial up. My question was, will the ring system since its incredibly versatile, in the future will we see more interactions between ring use because right now I know with potential for four rings on each side its very, very limited and even with the set system a lot of people chose not to do it because you can get more ability out of individual strengths and the rings seem to act more like a group of individuals rather than a team.
Qix: Yeah I agree with you that the crews tend to just be a mob of just individuals and that’s not really what we were shooting at. So we are going to be making changes to the way that the rings are set up and the way that rings are used in the future so that people will be able to identify themselves as specific roles so that its easier to draft people in for certain roles. We’re not going to lock people into classes necessarily because we want to retain the flexibility of the rings but we will make identifying characteristics for players so other players know what they can do.
Raxa: My other question is with the current CL system I can see issues with it coming up such as the learning curve, in a particular MMO that I play right now the issue is to keep people interested they have to keep raising the level cap but by raising the level cap you’re increasingly isolating your new users who may have to play, in this particular one I played for 6 months to be able just to get into good parties. Will you be implementing systems in the future to prevent users like in chapter one there are people who have over 100k total charge levels will there be any type of system to mitigate that in anyway?
Qix: By mitigate that what do you mean?
Raxa: To keep it interesting for new users so that they can hop in and since its suppose to be a light MMO keep it within reason that they have to play for a while so that they can play with some of these higher levels without having to grind endlessly.
Qix: I think that’s one of the goals that I mentioned with the 16 ring circus, the idea is to make every area have unique game play so that even when you level up to a CL 20 area in chapter two or chapter three or whatever it is, there will still be reasons to go back into other areas because the games are different from area to area and a lot of the events you’ll see starting to come out will only be available in certain areas so if you want to play that particular game you’ll need to keep going back and forth across the world so that we don’t end up with veterans only inhabiting the last 10% of the game. I think that’s the real trap that a lot of the other MMOs, I should say most of the MMOs fall into, they end up spending 90% of their time trying to feed the 10% that are end the game and that’s not good for anybody, that’s not even good for the 10%. They’re so focused in on trying to make great rate content or really high end futures and so on and so forth that they forget that if the game is successful theres always new people coming in but if those new people are never seeing anything new and they always feel they’re always in a back-water why would they play? Why would they stick around and enjoy the community? How would they make friends? We don’t want that, we want to make a game where people are just having fun all the time and making friends on a regular basis so that our community grows so that Gaia keeps getting better. The zOMG is not a stand alone, its not intended to be a standalone product its intended to be for lack of a better metaphor its intended to be flypaper for the site you know it’s a cool game that people can say “Oh wow I want to check that out, its free and theres no download I’ll just click on this and see what its like” and they stick around on zOMG long enough to find out Gaia its self is a very, very cool place to be. It just lets them stick around long enough to find out about that and hopefully the community keeps growing.
Raxa: I know I’ve seen some of your advertisements on, I believe Google ads across the sites, one I frequent a lot is New Grounds I’ve seen it on, it’s a big flash site and I figured that’s why it was there.
My next question regarding the ring system is I know that they’ve become soulbound in the recent past and I personally like that because I know I bought a couple of my higher end rings for that particular reason to hit higher levels faster, will there be any system where you can gain benefit out of redundancy of rings?
Qix: We don’t have anything currently designed for that so I guess the current answer is no, but that doesn’t mean we wont come up with something clever along that line some day. Its not a bad idea, we’ve tended to lean on the salvage mechanism for if you don’t need the ring go ahead and just salvage it, you know its like free orbs. But something like that, or ways for rings to combine powers there’s been a lot of discussion for combo effects but we don’t have anything planned on either of those fronts right now.
Raxa: Where did the actual ring idea come from? When did that pop up and say “hey” because I know one thing I really like about rings is that in other MMOs your higher level characters especially all look alike due to just the same equipment they tend to be using, aesthetically everyone looks the same because they’re all trying to reach the best statistics that they can have and it tends to make them use the same gear and that’s what I like about zOMG is I can still have my avatar.
Qix: That’s exactly why they made the ring system. Our cardinal rule at the beginning of the game when we were first putting the design together which is started to bend a little bit with the new features we have coming up, but our cardinal rule originally was “Thou shall not change the avatar.” Well because you know we get like 20, 30 thousand different ways to equip bits of clothing you know, I don’t know what the possible combinations are but you know never see two avatars that look the same on our site and we didn’t want people to feel like we were forced to have to use the +10 sword of doom or whatever it was because then everybody would have it and then they would end up looking alike. Now if down the line if Gaia created a “closet” or “add an outfit” feature so that you could easily swap back and forth between outfits we might bend that rule then. Because then you could have your zOMG outfit and your regular Gaia outfit and you could change back and forth between the push of a button and that would be really cool and we might do some other things with it. But yeah for now we wanted to make sure the rings were not visible specifically for the reason that your avatar did not change because your avatar is you, it is your personality, it what you chose to display as you and we don’t want to mess with that.
Raxa: Is that why you don’t like the community dressing you up in pink so much?
Qix: No I just like to dress up my own character, the “Pinkster” thing was a joke, when was that? Oh that was Easter and yeah I just did it because a bunch of people were daring me to do it and I said “Well what the hell,” it was 20 to 30 minutes of wearing it and that will never happen again.
Raxa: Yeah, I’ve seen some of the images spawned by it and its like “ewoah” my other question is from Valheita on the forums is there any plans to develop the weight system because as she described as is right now that stat that stops knockback?
Qix: You mean to develop it as something more than knock back?
Raxa: More useful yes.
Qix: Well yes there is one feature that will come into play.
Raxa: I know the other problem is my density ring that for the most part some users will argue is pretty useless.
Qix: Well we have a balance pass that’s coming up where there are a few things in our ring system right which are quite honestly inadequate, one of them is our armor system. It has way too coarse gradations in it you probably know yourself that couple of points of armor is really, really useful when you’re fighting against just regular ol’ grunt monsters but its almost worthless when you’re fighting up against demi bosses. So we’re going to change the armor system around and we haven’t done that design yet but its definitely slated to change and when that happens its going to affect the balance of a lot of different rings and we’ll be re-examining a lot of things. So I wouldn’t expect my density or the weight system to make any changes real soon but when we get to that point and do the rebalance well a lot of things are going to shift around we’ll sell.
Raxa: Moving more towards the general creation of the game I have a question from Citrine Topaz asking if any of the NPCs or items or any of the particular animated were modeled after anybody. Because I saw your picture in your profile and looking at that for a while it seemed increasingly to look like the Null Fluff. That’s an arguable point that, that face looks like Qixter.
Qix: (laughter) That’s hysterical, no I don’t think they intentionally made it look like me and no I don’t think any of the other stuff is modeled directly after anybody and if you go into the bar and look at Full Time Failure that particular avatar looks just like the real guy they modeled it after him, it looks just like Justin but other than that no, most of the stuff is just made up just out of ol’ cloth.
Raxa: My next question is the current glitch with the anchor bugs, I had this question from scullylam they’re jumbo sized was that intentional?
Qix: Nope, there was a screw up. We’ve been optimizing the monsters and we did a lot of optimizations and I guess we just kind of accidentally stuck that one through QA and we didn’t notice they were too big until after it was live so we’ll be changing that back after the next update.
Raxa: In addition to her question, since they were so giant is the heart tattoo on them, what exactly does that say?
Qix: On the anchor bugs?
Raxa: Yeah, because before it was too small to really make out.
Qix: I don’t remember, I think it says mother but I’m not sure, I think it’s a sailor tattoo but its been a long time since I’ve looked at the art but I’ll have to look at it again.
Raxa: My other question was I don’t know where they got this from but Anima Elysium the Landshark isn’t an animated, where did he come from? Or will that be explained in later chapters since he seems like such a popular character
.
Qix: Yep. Yeah a lot of times we make up rationalizations, like everything is rationalized believe it or not no matter how wacky our world is we almost always rationalize how its that way or why its that way and in particular Landshark’s background never got explained but basically it’s a shark that lived near the Gambino event crater and because it lived near that crater it ended up eating a lot of animated and eventually the over abundance of life force turned it from being a regular ol’ shark into what we call Landshark now. So yeah, a lot of this stuff is rationalized but sometimes its just not important enough for us to spend time making you read dialog about, so it just never comes out.
Raxa: I have a question from Chem-Kun will we eventually see all of Gaia’s towns in play, and even with that I know its probably a long way off before we see every town used but will we see the Gaia world and universe potentially expanded to meet your needs?
Qix: That’s absolutely the intention we actually have artwork for Gambino Island already and we have some concept work done on Durem as well as the Durem reclamation facility has a whole bunch of adventure areas loosely speced out for it. And I know totally what I want to do with I Aekea but you’re right it’s a ways off still.
Raxa: Well with your history I’m looking forward to some very, very nice super fighting robots.
Qix: Well yeah, I mean look at my game history. I’ve done 4 or 5 different robot combat games and Aekea has AI robots in it, okay I’m not going to commit us to this plot line but just think about it there are a lot of AI robots over there that have personalities but you also have to assume that there are a lot of robots that don’t have AI that are just dumb bots. Well what if the dumb bots became animated and you had AI verses animated bots.
Raxa: Similar to the predator pups verses the tiny terrors at the aqueduct?
Qix: Tiny Terrors vs. Preda pups?
Raxa: Yeah.
Qix: Yeah that sort of situation could easily happen over in Aekea and of course we all want to make the terminator jokes and all the different things but whether that happens exactly the way I just mentioned it or not I don’t know, its so far away and we have so many brainstorms to do but there is a lot of potential is all I’m really saying. Every single one of these cities we have more ideas than we could possibly get done. We’re looking forward to it and yes we have plans to expand to those eventually.
Raxa: I have a question, any chance that community created content, would there be a contest or some other way for that type of thing for that to enter the game or is that just not plausible with your current limited resources?
Qix: Its not that its not plausible its just that its really hard. MMOs, you may have noticed that there are not a lot of MMOs that have user created content with the exception of City of Heroes did some stuff recently where they allowed people to make up adventures and that’s a cool thing that they did but honestly they didn’t really add game play they just let people write dialog and mission structure, the game play wasn’t as strong as it was.
Raxa: I know that games such as Team Fortress 2 a lot of user created levels are eventually put into their official patches.
Qix: Right, and I’ve done games that had mod communities like Tribes 2 and the Med games but MMOs are tough because you’ve got this game server structure and most of the tools you’re creating are intended for in house and when they’re intended for in house they’re defiantly not user proofed, there are a lot of ways to screw up using those tools so for us to turn it out so that other players can actually create content and hook it up to an MMO lets put it this way, if we did it we’d be the first kids out there to do it. Its something we discuss a lot and its on our brains storming list but there is no way we’d get to it in sooner than a year lets put it that way, if we were able to get to it, it wouldn’t be near term. But let me answer it a little bit further we do have a lot of ways for users to convey their own fun but that’s not the same as creating a mission and hooking it into the game
Raxa: My other question was you worked on Mech Warrior 2, this is a personal question for me I was a huge fan Mech Warrior 3, I never played 2 did you happen to work any more on that series? Or was that like a one time gig?
Qix: No I worked at activation when they owned Mech when Fausta had given activation the license, when they yanked the licenses away from activation and gave it to Microsoft we “retaliated” by making the Heavy Gear licenses come to life which didn’t work, well Heavy Gear one was a decent attempt to make the paper game come to life and then heavy gear two which was the one I was involved in, was more of a game where instead of like in Mech it was like giant tanks with legs that were 40 feet tall, ours were more like the traditional Japanese anime where its like a 15 foot tall amor suit that was more agile and more human like.
Raxa: More like power-armor out of Fall Out?
Qix: I suppose so, yeah there was a bunch of anime at the time that was doing that sort of thing, Maddox and Metal Skin Panic and a couple of other things that we were really looking at for the flavor that we wanted for the game and we decided to try to spin it that way and we were a little ahead of the technology at that point, some of the stuff that we could do now we just couldn’t do then.
Raxa: More of a game before its time?
Qix: Yeah a little bit, its really easy to accidentally design ahead of what can get done. Part of the trick of good design is working with in the fences of reality.
Raxa: The company that created Metal Arms they disbanded for 10 years to wait for technology to catch up, they made their game and promptly got bought out.
Qix: yeah, I’ve had a game idea that I’ve been sitting on for close to 15 years because the technology just wasn’t there and after zOMG! is all done and everything is taken care of I might start a company to finally do that game because I think its time has finally come but until now there was just no way that it would work so there are a lot of ideas like that.
Raxa: Well that’s it for questions about the game to keep this within the reasonable time I don’t know how long we can actually keep peoples attention so I have a couple of general questions more towards you than anything in particular. Pook Plz asks “Whats your best score in goof?”
Qix: To my recollection I think I shot a 27.
Raxa: Wow that’s I think 4 or 5 times better than I did.
Qix: Well when you’re making a game you get to play it a lot. One of the things that gets asked of me all the time or when I tell people what I do for a living they’re like “Oh cool you get to play games for a living?” and my answer is “Well sort of, I play the same game for two years at a time and for about a year and three quarters its broken.” So the fun part is usually in my head, and part of the trick of working on a game like this is always knowing what its going to be like eventually, and always keeping your eye on the ball and not worrying about what it is right now but shaping it to what it should be.
Raxa: Is it some of the benefit of having a beta once you actually have a semi working version is you can get the community help you test rather than have a group of people go out there and trying to screw things up?
Qix: Oh yeah, watching you guys play and listening to your comments on the forums is night and day. When you take your game and put it into reality and watch what people really like and what people really don’t like yeah, that’s where the fun is. That’s where you can really tweek it so it becomes really good. Now if we had a team that was 3 or 4 times bigger as big as the one we have now we’d be even faster with the changes because we know exactly what we need to do to change this game into something great its just going to take us a while because there’s not very many of us.
Raxa: Your name is actually pronounced “Kick-ster” like I mentioned earlier but we weren’t recording? Its from SakuraMinamino.
Qix: Yep, “Kick-ster” and my last name is just like “Son of George” George-Son, just two syllables.
Raxa: Okay, unless you have anything in particular you’d like to shout out to the community I’m about out of questions here Qixter.
Qix: Yeah I hope to see some people over at Fanime tomorrow and what we announce at Fanime is going to get broadcasted over webcast so if you can see that great, and if you can’t whatever I say at Fanime will get posted with more detail early next week and we’ll get all the information out there and then after we really cement in on the plans for what we’re doing we’ll start teasing you with information on whats coming up and what you can look forward to because a lot of this stuff is really cool and I want you guys to know about it because I can image that some of you, like the I guess its about 6000 of you that are at the end of the game are probably wondering “Whats coming up next,” “whats the cool thing that’s coming,” “why should I stay interested in the game?” We don’t want you to quit, so we’re going to be telling you all that information soon.
Raxa: One more personal question, will you becoming to Gen-con? For us out here in the mid-west.
Qix: I’d love to come to Gen-con, I used to go to Gen-con all the time back with 7 Streets Games but its going to depend on whether or not there is any press or anything there. I have to be really jealous with my time, if I have to take you know 3 or 4 days to go to the convention it needs to be worth that 3 or 4 days not doing something else. Its that whole bang for the buck thing, its like you know last year I went to New York Comic-Con which was really cool I loved it, I mean its Comic-con right? And it was a in a new city and you get to see Stan Lee and all those people and I’m as big a geek as everybody else but quite honestly I went there to do, you know I flew over there, sat in the hotel for a day, did a 2 hour panel and then spent a day and a half coming all the way back and that time was affectively lost from production and I would rather make the game and make stuff that’s really fun for millions of people than spend two hours somewhere. I’d love come to come to Gen –con I’d love to play games and everything but we’ll have to see whether or not its going to fit the schedule.
Raxa: Ok well I think that’s about it I have question wise, thank you very much Qixter for this interview I’m sure the community will love listening to it. My guest today was Qixter who is the senior producer and director of zOMG Gaia’s MMO which I’m sure most of you have played and I am Site Moderator Raxa and we are signing off.
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