INTERVIEW // ANDREW GOWER | ALPHA
specifically targeting. We will make sure it will have real-time performance characteristics so that you won’t get those little stalls; the ones that normally wouldn’t matter to an application, but in a game jars the experience. We’re trying to make sure that it is also very
good for writing network code, as games these days are increasingly online. Almost every game today caters to online play of some kind. We’re really trying to design it so that it will solve a lot of problems in that area that are not easy to express in other languages. Specifically, if you’re writing a server for
your game in C++ you can give yourself a massive headache in terms of ensuring if it is secure or not, or if someone is going to hack your server.
Is this going to be for all platforms? We are aiming to target, if not all platforms, then certainly the key ones. But initially we are targeting Windows, Mac and iOS, and we would hope to expand from that. We’re designing it in such a way that it wouldn’t require any specific hardware or any specific capabilities, so it should be possible make it run on anything.
And you’re making a games engine at the same time. Is that the same thing as the programming language? What we’re making is sort of halfway between a programming language and a game engine. I wouldn’t say it was a game engine in the way that Unreal or Unity is, and I wouldn’t also say it is just totally a programming language. It’s some way in-between the two. I think to be successful there are four
things you’ve got to have. One of them is the language itself, which must be something new and must actually be worth using. You’ve also got to have a really good tool chain; a good development environment, with
DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
decent syntax highlighting and refracting and all those sort of things. You’ve also got to have good documentation, and then you’ve got to have good examples of it actually being used. No one’s going to want to use a language that hasn’t been proven. Most studios or indie developers don’t think ‘I’m going to put all this massive budget on to this program that no one has ever used and might not actually work’. It has to have a proof of concept, and the easiest way to do that is make some games ourselves to prove that it really can work. Making games with it ourselves is also very helpful in terms of ironing out any wrinkles
I wanted to create a new programming
language that’s specifically designed from the ground up for creating
games. Andrew Gower, Fen Research
with the language. A few of the things we found out when making a game, and we realised ‘Oh, actually that bit didn’t work quite as well as we thought.’ The language has evolved rapidly over the
last few months. It’s a good thing we are the only ones using it. Really. If there was anyone else using it whilst it’s in this stage of evolution they’d go mad at us for changing so much so often. In terms of the games we’re making, we’re
looking to make little test games that we can start with to prove it works. One is a turn-based strategy game, but very casual. Turn-based strategy can be a scary term, but what we’re doing is very lightweight and casual.
It’s just a simple game that’s stat based; a quick game you can play on your lunch break, and is designed not to take a lot of time to play and you can have a bit of fun with the tactics you can use. It’s got sort of quite casual balance between skill versus luck. On one hand, if you play it you will get better, but on the other hand if you go in, you won’t get annihilated if you go against someone who’s been playing it for the last six months. And then we’ve got another game which
we’ve not really got very far with yet, a sort of designer with lots of user generated content, with people being able to create their own environments.
Is that the bigger game Fen Research has mentioned before? Yes, that’s a bigger game. At the end of the day I like making games,
and I’m not just making this programming language purely as an academic thing. I’m making it because I want to be able to make games more myself. Obviously the intention is more about sharing the language and letting other people use our tools and middleware. I – and other people – want to make games and not get bogged down by the things I’ve got bogged down by over the last ten years.
Is that why you felt the need to leave Jagex and start this up. Could you not have started it there? I could have done, but it would have almost have been a distraction. It was very different from what Jagex was doing, which was focusing on MMOs. The danger of me doing it there would have been that it would have been on the sidelines and an annoying little distraction; ‘Andrew’s pet project’ so to speak, as opposed to being a serious thing in its own right.
JULY 2012 | 07
Andrew Gower (second from right; left image) and his Fen Research team, and art from one of their first, as yet unnamed in-house games
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