neotopia Interview - A New Home

After our usual teasers, it’s finally time for our full chat with David Dow, Director at madmunki, a British studio which is trying to revive the concept of PlayStation Home in neotopia, a PlayStation 4 title (though other platforms are being considered too, as you’ll read below) currently on a Kickstarter campaign for funding.

 

• You have worked on PlayStation Home. It was a very ambitious project, but it’s being shut down by Sony on March 31, 2015 worldwide. What went wrong with it?

We did indeed work on Home, but speaking for myself we worked on Home as madmunki, so we published our content within it and occasionally did work for Sony in Home, but we are not Sony so can only guess at why Sony would shut it down. Ultimately Sony covered all of the costs of Home and developers will have taken most of the profits, and the costs would have been much greater than such a service would be now, simply as it was built on top of a very old system (originally Home was planned to be launched on the PS2 – that was dial-up!), since Home launched cloud computing has come into its own…

 

• neotopia seems to be its natural evolution. What kind of enhancements/additions/changes are you planning to implement in order to make it more appealing than PlayStation Home?

Well, there are a lot of fairly boring sounding things which we can do better simply from having Home as an example, but things which are crucial to user experience, such as; loading times inventory management, security, functionality for dealing with anti-social behaviour etc. The neotopia that launches will just be the starting point, the plan is to develop it with the community to the greatest degree possible – we will have in-world forums and an area you can go to vote on upcoming development choices. We want to embrace all of the new technologies as they come online such as Project Morpheus. Finally the fact that we are building it in Unreal 4 means that there will be a big graphical leap over PlayStation Home.

 

• Is there any specific reason why you’ve chosen PlayStation 4 other than your previous relationship with Sony? What do you think of the platform as a developer?

It is a hugely appealing platform as a developer; easier to work with that previous iterations of the PlayStation due to its architecture and fully integrated with PSN which makes the financial transaction side of our life a lot easier than it would be on say PC. But our previous with PlayStation Home is a huge pull too and the fact that there is an audience there who were previously (and in many cases still are) using Home on PS3, so the platform is a natural fit for Virtual Worlds.

 

• Are you considering other platforms in the future, such as PC and/or Xbox One? We know that Sony is open to cross-platform play and neotopia could benefit from a bigger population, I assume.

Yes, is the simple answer. We’ll launch on PS4 then take it where we can and where the community want it to go. PC would obviously give us a bigger market and there is no reason why we can’t have companion apps, in fact there is no real reason why we shouldn’t have say an iPhone or android avatar editor that interfaces with your account so you can interact with neotopia on the go.

 

• Why did you choose the Unreal Engine 4 over other popular engines such as CryEngine or Unity? 

Partly experience, a number of us on the team have used previous versions of Unreal before and have not only a lot of knowledge of the tools but a great deal of respect for what can be done with the engine. The fact that Unreal started out as the engine behind a competitive, twitch based networked game also gives us some serious confidence in it’s capabilities for handling the network side of things.

 

• You mentioned having games/activities in neotopia, can you make some examples? Will there be leaderboards, tournaments etc.?

Yes, we will certainly have leaderboards, tournaments and regular events, although none of that will be there on day one. Like I say we intend to develop neotopia with the community, if they really want a Casino or a Race Track we’ll make it. What we would really like to do however is create simple little gameplay elements that players can use and combine as they wish – all with multiplayer at their core. For exampe imagine an ‘It Marker’ – a big arrow which bobs above the head of whoever is ‘it’, the person with the marker would have a context sensitive command to ‘tig’ anyone who is close, making them ‘it’ – now they have the marker.

Or even simple teleport pads where you can lay one at location A, another at B and use it to teleport between them. On top of this we will have regions where players can set score targets, time limits and so on. Ultimately we want to create tools that the community can use to create their own games with.

 

• Neotopia is going to be free-to-play. What can you tell us about the microtransactions system?

Players will be able to buy neobits (the neotopia currency) from the PSN Store and can then spend them in the neotopia shop as they wish.

 

• What happens if the Kickstarter is not successful? Should we expect a delay (the limited beta is currently scheduled for April 2015) ?

Well if the Kickstarter is not a success we will not have the money to make neotopia – we put together the campaign and started the project using our own money but we literally cannot afford to continue it that way. We did not realise that the PlayStation community would know so little about Kickstarter, so we’ve had to explain many times that we do not get the funds unless the target is met and that if we fail to hit the target that everyone will automatically get their money back. We have had to think a lot about ‘Plan B’ right now, and to be honest the community have suggested many good ideas, but the fact is the closer we get to the goal the more options we will have. #EmbraceTomorrow!

 

• Thank you for your time.