Worlds of Magic Interview

Welcome back once again for my next interview on RPGWatch. This time I had the chance to talk with Leszek Lisowski of Wastelands Interactive who agreed to answer a few of my questions. But first, here is a refresher for everyone, new and old.

Worlds of Magic is a 4X turn-based strategy game. Players can explore and conquer an almost limitless number of procedurally generated universes, using military and magical power to overcome their foes. Found cities, raise armies, research and cast spells, hire powerful heroes, and create powerful magical artifacts. All will help you in your bid to become the supreme Sorcerer Lord.

The developer also has a few game-play videos on the game's YouTube channel. So with that out of the way lets continue with the interview. and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Couchpotato:  Thank you for agreeing to answer a few of my questions for RPGWatch, and to get started, can give a brief introduction of yourself?

Leszek Lisowski: Thank you very much for the invitation. This is a real pleasure for me. My name is Leszek Lisowski and I’m a founder and CEO at Wastelands Interactive. I started the company in 2009 but started to develop games in 2006. For couple of years earlier I have been a modder of Paradox games (ie. HoI2 Fallout mod) and of course I have been playing video games since I was seven, and that is an achievement for somebody born behind the Iron Curtain. Now I’m focused on running a 20 people development studio and acting as a producer for our games, from time to time I’m also giving a hand as a designer.

Couchpotato: Just in-case anyone reading the interview doesn't know who Wastelands Interactive is, can you tell us a little about your company and your previous games?

Leszek Lisowski: As mentioned above, Wastelands Interactive has been officially founded in 2009 as a “garage” company, made of love and passion for computer games. Without any other funding than savings and a complete lack of skills as a programmer or artist, I’ve focused on creating complex, but still accessible strategy games. The most common name for the subgenre is “wargames” and more or less all those titles have been focused on war.

Between 2009 and 2013 we have released 5 wargames covering Pacific and European theater of war. At the moment, except Worlds of Magic, we are also working on a completely new engine that will allow us to release wargames also on mobile devices and consoles with a much better user interface. If anyone would like to try what those games are, it is best to start with Strategic War in Europe.
Currently we are a team of 20 skilled and dedicated people making the most awesome strategy games on the planet.

Couchpotato:. What is your daily job like at Wastelands Interactive?

Leszek Lisowski:  Generally my working day starts at 7AM and ends around 2AM, with some breaks to get to and from the office and to spend some time at the evening with my Wife and kids.

I think I can divide my duties into two major parts, where one is taking care of business and other one is development. Currently I have reached the point where I spend more than 80% of my time running the company. This includes contacts with publishers, distributors, subcontractors, doing paper work, budgeting and dealing with the usual things to run the office. I’m trying to provide my team with best possible work conditions and to make sure there is a friendly atmosphere. I should not forget about planning and scheduling of milestones, as I have found this is more business than development part of my job.

The bright side of the job is when I can help with the game design part. There is still less time for me to do this, but having a quite good and long experience as a designer (I’ve been working as a ERP dev before founding Wastelands Interactive) I’m still taking part of that field. 

Couchpotato: Which games do you play in your spare time, and what are your top five RPG games?

Leszek Lisowski:  Having two kids and a house in the countryside, you don’t have too much spare time. I’m slowly moving towards tablets, as it is much easier to pick up a game that way than spend time on the computer. iPad is much friendlier for people with not much free time. Now I’m playing a lot of Worlds of Tanks Blitz, which is a simplified version of Worlds of Tanks (which personally I’m not a big fan). There are less tanks on smaller maps with shorter matches. Perfect if you know that you might have only five minutes to play.

I can easily divide the games I play into two groups. One of them are the games I’m playing for fun, and other are those I’m playing because of my job. I don’t have any specific type of games that I prefer to play. Of course most of them are strategy games, but just due to the fact that you can have the game running in the background and do something else. Among recent tiles that I’ve been playing are: Shadow of Mordor, Ridge Racer Unbounded, Civilization V, Valkyria Chronicles, JUJU, The Walking Dead 2, Dying Light. Generally I’m buying much more games than I’m able to play, so there are some titles that I play just to see them.

The question about top five RPG is very hard, mostly because my definition of RPG is quite wide, but let’s try to do this.

Number One: Mass Effect series, mostly due to the nice story and good pacing, which means for every action part there was some kind of storytelling. I had a lot of fun playing every part and I’m really hoping there will be some more games from the same universe.

Number Two: Dungeon Master, I have spent hundreds of hours playing the pirated version of this game on Amiga, without the manual and any source of knowledge about the mechanics. I haven’t been able to complete the game back then and I did complete it like two or three years ago.

Number Three: Diablo, even if I know that some people don’t agree that this is an RPG. That was completely new quality, something never seen before. The graphic, animations, possibilities and those procedurally generated dungeons and items. That was a lot of fun, both on PC and PSX.

Number Four: Planescape: Tornment, I was playing this game back in the times when I had plenty of time to read all the dialogs, and extra text in books, and talk with every NPC on my way. One of the greatest stories served very nicely. However I’ve been trying to go back to the game some time ago with hi-res textures, but the amount of text just scared me off.

Number Five: Wizardry 8, was a game I haven't finished, but I think it was one of the most intriguing designs. Very nice combination of fantasy and sci-fi. I think I need to give it another try.

Couchpotato: I'm always curious about what developers think of the current state of the games industry, and crowd-funding in particular. So could share your opinion on the topics?

Leszek Lisowski:  There are cons and pros in the gamedev industry. But I’m sure these are everywhere. So let me start with crowdfunding first. Personally I think this is a great thing for both developers and customers, this was something what allowed us to create Worlds of Magic, and games like Pillars of Eternity or Wasteland 2 and many others. I’m finding this is a great deal for both sides, so support those folks with vision if you only think they will be able to deliver the final promise.

If I had to say about the industry as whole, then I would say it is better than ever before. However, I think that despite the whole digital revolution there are hard times coming for small developers without any portfolio. When the so-called indie games started to pop out a couple of years ago, everybody thought this is the final look of the industry, this is where the industry leads to.

Unthinkable success of Minecraft makes people think that THEIR unique idea is so awesome that they will become the new Notch. That hasn't happened. Of course we have got a lot of games from small studios that are becoming huge successes and their creators become rich, but for every such game there is more than a hundred that makes their creator broke.

But here we are coming to a point where all those aspiring stars of gamedev can verify their ideas by launching crowdfunding campaigns. It is much better to get negative feedback when you have created just a prototype, rather than selling one or two hundreds copies of your game.


Couchpotato:. What do you consider to be the most important, and least important game mechanics in the fantasy 4X genre?

Leszek Lisowski: From my perspective the most important factor is so-called “one more turn syndrome”. If you were planning to play for a while, and ended up at four in the morning, then you know the game is good. I think that to get that feeling, we need to give the player an achievable goal mixed with some challenge. The game can not be too easy, because it will become too boring, on the other side a too hard game might create two reactions: make you angry or make you more dogged. At least, that's how it is for me. Generally the 4X games such as Worlds of Magic need to have good mixture of all four X, so if you forgot and miss something, then the game becomes “unfinished”.

Couchpotato: Your kickstarter game, Worlds of Magic, was funded over two years ago. Can you share any lessons you have learned during the campaign?

Leszek Lisowski:  Two years are like eternity for Kickstarter, but what I have learned is that if you are not extremely lucky, there is a very, very hard work to be done and it is better for you to have some good friends among press members. Of course on one side we have got projects like exploding kittens or star citizen and on the other some fake scam of low quality. But regular projects fit just between those. General hints I can recommend are:

Be professional – there is nothing worse like making a feeling that you don’t really care about the project and that you have got no idea if you are able to complete it or how to do it.

Be transparent – tell directly about your own and your teammates skills. Don’t try to hide your cons, if you feel that you need extra money in your budget, just for case of something, tell this.

Be devoted – make sure you really want to spend your whole time just to finalize the project. People will feel this.

Make good videos and provide good descriptions – this is something what makes the first impression when people finally land on your page. Now you just need to grab them and persuade them to trust you.

Be honest – think about the project and ask yourself about the project before launching it. It is sometimes better to show it to 10 people and eventually improve or change the design, rather than wasting a month with an unsuccessful campaign.

Be realistic – calculate the needed funds wisely. Check how much you need to spend for various things, including payment fees, taxes, etc.

Couchpotato: I remember reading your game, Worlds of Magic, is inspired by Master of Magic. Can you describe how your game is similar, and how it will be different?

Leszek Lisowski:  The main similarities are within the gameplay concept. The player is taking a role of powerful sorcerer, which with the use of one of the races is trying to eliminate enemies by building cities, creating armies and casting powerful spells.

The greatest difference is the spell system which has been designed from scratch and also the battle/unit management system, which now has been based on D20 OGL system, so well known to millions of players.

So far we have received a lot of feedback from players telling us that we have made a true successor to the Master of Magic. There is nothing better than hearing that this is the game they have been waiting for.

Couchpotato: Will modding be available and supported in Worlds of Magic, and if it is, how will players be able to modify the game?

Leszek Lisowski:  Yes, we have done a lot of work to deliver the game with as many modding options as possible. At the very beginning players will be able to modify XML files to change various statistics in the game and to implement new spells, sorcerer lords, units etc. With time we are planning to equip them with some tools allowing them to easily modify specific parts of the game. Generally giving modding possibilities was one of our major design points during the development.

Couchpotato:   Worlds of Magic has been on Steam Early Access for a few months, so can you share any feedback you have received from early players and talk about some of the changes you have made?

Leszek Lisowski:  We have received a lot of great feedback and already built up a great community at STEAM forum (next to our company forum). Just after the initial release we got more bug reports than we have expected, but I assume this usually happens for games of such scope.
The most important voice from the community is that most people love what they see. An already playable 4X game with a lot of potential. Of course there are still some bugs and glitches we need to take care of, but a policy of weekly updates gave us another good point among the community.
Worlds of Magic has been released at Early Access very late in development, so changing anything fundamental was not an option, although we do listen players and constantly add new features and options that we find reasonable to be made. This is of course in terms of playability and effort needed to complete the task.

Couchpotato:  This month you announced that Worlds of Magic was ready for release on March 19th. Do you foresee any delays happening to change the released date?

Leszek Lisowski:  Setting the release date is not an easy task, especially when creating such a huge game as Worlds of Magic. We have talked many options and after writing down all pros and cons we have found out that the 19th of March will be best reasonable and achievable date. So far we are developing the game according to the schedule. From my experience I know that always there will be something worthy to add. New features, new improvements, some changes in balance, a new VERY IMPORTANT spell,  etc.

However, we need to draw a line somewhere, and say it is enough and release the game as version 1.0. This is also not a secret that we are planning to improve the game after the release for a long time.

Couchpotato: After Worlds of Magic is released, do you have plans to add more content in the form of DLC or game expansions?

Leszek Lisowski:  Yes, this is exactly what we are planning. There is plenty room to expand the game. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about DLC are new races. Our community already suggested what next races they would like to see released, so I’m sure this is the best way to start. There are also such things like new heroes, Sorcerer Lords, spells, planes, etc. Some of those things will be added in patches for free and some of them as paid DLC, for a reasonable price. It is too early, however, to talk about some large expansions. We need to take a breath after the release and wait for feedback. We do have some loose ideas of what might be added, but at this moment that would be only speculation. One thing is sure in that matter. We are going to listen to our fans.

Couchpotato:  So after the game is done and time has passed, do you plan to use crowd-funding to make any new games?

Leszek Lisowski:  Crowd funding is awesome and I love Kickstarter, but at this moment I just don’t know. Most probably we will consider this very much at the moment when we find out that our next project seems to be very risky. That would be very helpful to see if there is any need for such title at all and if there is enough audience.

Couchpotato:  That's all for now. Before we finish do you have anything you would like add?

Leszek Lisowski:  I would like to thank you for giving me opportunity to talk about myself, my company and our games. If anybody who reads this interview would like to talk about our games, please feel free to jump into our forums or just email us. I wish you all a lot of great games this year.

That concludes the interview, and be sure to check out the game at the following links.

1. Steam - http://store.steampowered.com/app/265970/
2. Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wastelands/worlds-of-magic
3. Games Webpage - http://myworldsofmagic.com/

Don't forget to check out our news coverage also over the last year.