A cutting edge alternative reality game spawned in the wintry streets of Winnipeg?
Stranger things have happened.
ZenFri, a 10-person multidisciplinary studio based in the heart of The Peg, is releasing its first game – Clandestine: Anomaly – later this month for iOS devices.
Headed up by 29-year-old studio co-founder and chief executive artist Corey King, the project aims to put players in the role of a human involved in an intergalactic conflict who uses a suped-up phone to see things other people can’t.
King’s idea for an alternative reality adventure took root more than four years ago, mere hours after he purchased his first iOS device. But it took a while for his concept to take shape.
Experienced in film, writing, and art, King didn’t know any coders, so he needed to gather people to help build his game and realize his vision. He also hooked up with Joshua Ortega, an established novelist, comic book writer, and lead writer for the blockbuster console game Gears of War 2, who assisted with the story.
Along the way he managed to secure an investment from the Canada Media Fund, and even pick up a design award from at the GamAR 2013 Metaio Developer Competition based on an early prototype of the game.
Now Clandestine: Anomaly is just days from release. Post Arcade chatted with King to learn more about the game, the role that alternative reality plays (it turns out to be optional), and whether we ought to expect to see paranoid looking people on the street staring at the world through the screens of their phones anytime in the near future.
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Post Arcade: It’s safe to say some people are flummoxed by the whole geolocation AR thing. Can you explain what it’s all about, and, more specifically, how it works in your game?
Corey King: Geolocative AR is about using technology already in your pocket to transform your environment. Using your smart device’s camera, compass, GPS, and gyroscope, we try to create the illusion that digital characters and objectives have been placed in the real world.
It’s kind of like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, only the live action elements are the real world, as seen through your mobile device.
Weirdly, the closest I’ve come to experiencing a geolocation AR game was inside another game: Watch Dogs. It has AR mini-games in which the protagonist blasts aliens only he can see (via his phone) in public spaces. Is that vaguely the same as Clandestine: Anomaly, or am I totally out to lunch?
It’s similar in that they are both about a hidden conflict you can only see with a phone, and that the deaths of aliens are involved, but that’s where the similarities end. We are inspired by ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), and trying to sell the fiction of the game as “real” as opposed to arcade-y or cartoony. This informed a lot of design choices.
Looking at the Watch Dogs mini-game, and how your character runs around in public, they look foolish even within the context of the game world. A lot of AR games try to do this, and it’s a massive barrier to enjoying the game. No one wants to be embarrassed as they play. We actually put a lot of effort into building the mechanics around not looking foolish in public, and playing safe.
For starters, the entire game can be played without AR. AR allows powerful location-based abilities when you walk to the real-world location of a battle, but you can always stick to commanding units remotely from the comfort of home.
Should you choose to use AR it’s a special power-up with a limited duration. We aimed to make it so that you’re in AR for bursts no longer than the time it would take to snap a few photos, this is so that you are never obligated to hold your phone up in the air too long, and so that the whole experience is less socially awkward. We built this around the idea that your primitive human phone needs a “boost” to see the covert events around you, and that boost has to be within signal range of your units and can only last a short time.
We also don’t use the phone like a gun, which is the bane of so many AR games. In Clandestine: Anomaly, your phone is still just a phone, only it’s been supercharged with alien technology. You can command and control units, as well as call in airstrikes, but your phone itself doesn’t shoot, it’s a communication device. Like any normal mobile device it receives text and video messages from characters, as well as directs other in-game assets.
The whole idea that your phone is just a phone impacts even the tower tactics side of the game, as you need to build signal towers, which we call Pulsars, in order to help reveal the enemy’s location and see them.
Our game is designed to be played in your own neighbourhood. This locality provides an intimacy that is lost in the Watch Dogs example, as well as in location based games like Ingress. Clandestine: Anomaly is about you, your phone, and your neighbourhood.
ZenFri
You sort of answered my next question, which is whether people will feel weird playing alone in public.
James Bond works alone. He has contacts, gets intel, and gadgets from Q and so on, but at the end of the day it’s just one man who gets his hands dirty. The covert nature of the story and where this game takes place in the larger story timeline dictates that you’re a single anomalous entity in a much, much larger context.
We do have ambitions to make future multiplayer games using GPS and AR and within the same IP, but Clandestine: Anomaly is about you.
By making this a single player game and setting Clandestine: Anomaly just within your neighbourhood we have the benefit of allowing users to access GPS and AR features without using any data after the initial setup. Once you download the app, and go through the initial setup phase, you have a feature-complete game, no other data required. I’m not sure there is another GPS game like that.
The story was co-penned by Gears of War 2 scribe Joshua Ortega. How did he become involved, and what has the presence of an experienced, award-winning game writer added to Clandestine: Anomaly?
As the other writer on the project, I got to work directly with Joshua. I’m still surprised by the whole thing, and have no idea what attracted him to the project.
He became involved through someone who I’d now consider a mutual friend named David Greene. David was a friend of Joshua, whom I had just met at Augmented World Expo in Silicon Valley. David saw my talk at that conference and thought I should meet Joshua knowing Joshua was interested in becoming involved with an AR project. It’s all kind of strangely inexplicable really, I met the right person at the right time, he liked what I was up to, and knew Joshua would, too.
Joshua took what I had written and improved it in a million tiny ways. There is no single instance that I can pin down and say, “Josh did that!” The Clandestine universe and plot were all pretty well laid out, but Joshua brought it all up to the next level, and helped develop the narrative to flow more quickly and effortlessly.
Beyond being an absolute professional, he brought a sense of confidence. I began truly believing that we may be onto something special, not just in this single game, but in the grand Clandestine universe, and story arcs that I’d created.
ZenFri
The trailer makes the experience look pretty futuristic. Did you have to develop or modify any technology to realize your vision, or are you simply employing existing AR and geolocation systems?
Thanks. I’m glad you find it to be impressive!
In the teaser where we meet the player’s companion, Nuncio, is actually the least sophisticated use of AR that you’ll find in the game. In the late game missions, if you walk to the mission locations and use AR, you’ll literally feel surrounded by the battle, with colossal machines of war firing on enemies that are attacking all around you.
A small taste of that is in our new gameplay trailer. But even that is an example of AR in an early mission.
We’re using a bunch of established technologies like Unity 3D, Open Street Maps, and Metaio (an AR SDK very recently purchased by Apple), but there is a lot of custom code working between all these systems to get it all working together nicely. The heaviest custom code was used to get the AR, GPS, and Maps to work together nicely, and to eliminate the “jitter” and other stability issues you normally get with GPS based AR.
Winnipeg is better known for Neil Young and Winnie-the-Pooh than innovative game studios. What’s it like working on games there? Is there a network of indie developers who know and rely on each other?
We have a very supportive community that’s small enough to work together, but large enough to have a few of us thrive. ZenFri is neither the largest, nor the oldest studio in the city.
My own creative temperament is to work pretty isolated from other companies, but still collaborate on community-wide issues and events.”
ZenFri
What’s your core demographic? Who do you expect to see wandering the streets of Winnipeg and other cities, phone in hand, rescuing humanity along with the broader galaxy?
Our core demographic is male, mid-core mobile gamers, although we hope it will expand far beyond that.
We believe that video games are for everyone, and that the exciting technologies used in conjunction with the optional active nature of Clandestine: Anomaly will intrigue those who do not typically consider themselves gamers. For us it’s about an overall experience, and we hope it’s a novel enough experience to reach further than it otherwise would.
We are aware that there is resistance with some hard-core gamers towards mobile games, and even to AR. We feel their pain; there isn’t a lot out there for them on mobile and in the case of AR most games are worthy of the ridicule.
Our goal has always been to try to sway those people into incorporating mobile games to their day. We believe that by leveraging cutting edge technology in order to create a large immersive experience on a small device, Clandestine: Anomaly will entice those who most often game on PC or consoles. The phone is merely the keyhole into what we feel is a very big experience.
Of course we’re getting close to finding out if we’ve succeeded or not.
As to seeing people out and about playing the game, we’re as curious as anyone to see what the uptake is on the outdoor features of the game. Of course, I also realize that a good covert agent who has been entrusted to fight an intergalactic war might be hard to detect even if they’re right in front of you.
Ideally, they’ll be everywhere and barely be noticed.
The preceding interview was lightly edited for length and flow.
