NEWS| ALPHA
wanted that core combination of physics and simple control to remain. We knew that on top of that there were numerous things we wanted do, such as taking it into multiplayer and fully utilising all the opportunities that online allows, and enabling UGC. The challenge then was in seeing if it was possible, and it was. We managed to provide a physics-based world and a physics-based toolset for end users that would allow them not only create Trials tracks, but also almost any type of game. So there were plenty of challenges along
the way, and we set ourselves many difficult tasks, but in the end our team has been hugely happy to have been able to make the game we wanted, even if it took a bit more time and a bit more effort.
And you’ve given the consumer access to some of your own tools? That’s bold. It actually goes deeper than that. We gave them a very developed tool, because we have been developing our own tools for years. When we first started to create Trials HD
what we decided was that we wanted to share the same physics based tools with our users, and we knew that making that tool a good user experience for our customers meant making our entire game with the exact same editor. So when we started on Evolution, we made the game using the same editors that we are now providing to gamers.
Do you not worry that giving so much power to the consumer will make it harder for the next game in the Trials series to make an impact? Giving so much to the consumer is highly motivating for RedLynx as a studio. It’s been part of our philosophy that we need to push the boundaries always. Now we have an editor that means people
can create Trials tracks and other physics based games without us – tracks they want to play. Our thinking is that we’d have no idea what they’d create. We hope that it will be a
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huge inspiration for us, and offer us a huge challenge for our next big project.
Would you consider introducing a microtransaction model to Trials Evolution? The game seems perfect for it. For Trials Evolutionwe simply don’t have those plans at the moment. It is available to buy on Xbox Live Arcade for now. Of course, we have been studying the other markets and models very closely, and we can definitely see on the iOS side for certain games microtransactions have been very successful. And it’s happening on other platforms too, and it seems that definitely those models are here to stay.
I would be quite confident in saying
that Trials Evolution is one of the most ambitious digital console
games ever made. Tero Virtala, RedLynx
And we have done it ourselves. If you look at our latest iOS game MotoHeroz, it has microtransactions as part of the business model, but we’ve have tried to be very careful with how we introduce those. Our background is that we are gamers, and our philosophy has been that the development teams have a lot of freedom. The people that make our games have a lot to say on what they are designing, and we are trying to make the games that those developers would like to play. There’s a lot of things that we have learned about how microtransactions should be utilised. But at RedLynx we try to design games that do not force people to use them. For certain platforms microtransactions are
certainly the future. For Trialswe can’t say anything yet because we haven’t even started thinking about it.
At GDC you said the independence of being in indie can be something of an ‘illusion’. What did you mean by that? I of course can’t speak on behalf of every studio that’s been acquired, but for us clearly Ubisoft has been an extremely good family to join. In many ways we are more independent now than we have ever been. There is definitely a truth to the fact that
there is an illusion to the idea that being an indie – in that you are independent from a bigger organisation – gives you so much freedom and is so great. The fact is that most of those small indie studios are in a position where if they don’t have enough money they are constantly having to search for publishers, producers and so on, and they have to work out the likes of contract details. That can make them far away from being
really independent where they can make their own decisions about the types of games they make and where and how they publish their games. There is the possibility, of course, for things
like venture capital financing. We had gone through that route, and we had a good venture capital investor, but some investors have a lot of power over decisions. From the outside it might seem like a
company is very independent, but the reality may be that it is not necessarily the founders or the games developers that are really driving the company forward. Of course, there are independent games
developers out there that really are independent, but what I’m saying is that the only really independent studios are those that are fully owned by their employees, who have plenty of cash so they can really decide what they want to do and how they want to do it, and really make all of the decisions about their games themselves. Other independents have to make
compromises all of the time, whether it is due to the fact existing contracts dominate what they are doing, or whether it is because they just don’t have enough money.
MAY 2012 | 07
Trials Evolution has taken the core mechanics of its forebearer and thrust them into expansive new worlds (above). RedLynx CEO Tero Virtala (left)
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