Released in November 2013, Doctor Who: Legacy has won rave reviews from fans and the gaming press alike. Widely acknowledged as the best and most popular Doctor Who game ever released, DWW speaks to the game’s creators Susan and Lee Cummings of Tiny rebel Games:
Doctor Who: Legacy has won high praise from Doctor Who fans and games players alike, how did the original concept for Legacy come about? How difficult was it to separate Legacy from the wealth of games such as Bejeweled that have flooded the app market in recent years?
Lee – the game started in very early 2013, Susan (Executive Producer) and I were discussing what we should do next, and we quickly came to the conclusion that, since we had never made a true mobile game (vs Nintendo DS, PSP, etc) it would be a great challenge. We also decided early on that we would take everything we had learned from publishing console games over the years and try to publish this soon-to-be-designed game ourselves.
As we started to discuss what this game would be it became clear that trying to design, produce and publish the game would be a tough task for two of us, so to take some risk off the table we decided that the game would be based on an existing universe (vs trying to design our own world, characters) which would also let us focus almost entirely on the core gameplay.
Susan and I are huge gem game fans, but very specific types of gem games – those with an RPG backbone and story (such as the incredible Puzzle Quest), as opposed to the more arcade focused puzzle games such as Bejeweled. We’ve been involved shipping many games which supported a solid core gameplay with RPG systems (Grand Theft Auto, Borderlands, Bioshock, for example), and we’re pretty hardcore RPG gamers in our spare time, so this part all fell into place quite easily. Susan and I had designed / produced a puzzle game a few years ago (Puzzle Kingdoms), and we had been itching to take another swing at the genre.
The final part was finding a universe we loved, full of characters we wanted to play with, and we were exceptionally lucky that we were in the right place at the right time and the BBC said yes when we approached them. Looking at a single screenshot of any gem game makes it very hard to differentiate it against another gem game, however when users play Legacy, and see the scale, scope, mechanics of the game, it’s pretty obvious that it’s very, very different from an arcade gem game like Bejewelled.
Was the process from the initial conception to final product a straight one or where many ideas discarded along the way?
Susan - After we reached a point where we knew we wanted to make an RPG backed gem game in the Doctor Who universe, the process was fairly straight forward. In fact, the game we shipped is remarkably faithful to the original concept we pitched the BBC on. The big decisions that really had to be made along the way were regarding which episodes to include, what abilities made sense for various enemies and allies. And there was a lot of great iterative design that came up as we went along — for example, the weeping angels granite gems. We knew we had an extra gem type sitting around in the database that we hadn’t used, that was ‘blank’. And after a late night viewing of Flesh and Stone, where the Weeping Angel has infected Amy’s eye and she’s rubbing granite out of them, we came up with the granite gems. This was the sort of stuff that we felt really emphasized the puzzle side of this game, that brought “puzzle” potentially to the next level in an RPG gem game. From there, it wasn’t a big leap to come up with Cybermen locking gems and so forth – and all of these things eventually evolved into gems being swiped from you, mixed around on you, and of course the ‘blind’ mechanic. From the very beginning, we wanted this to feel like a dungeon crawler. Where things are happening around you, where enemies react to you, where you have to react back. More like a traditional RPG than has been done before in a puzzle game.
Lee Cummings
Doctor Who is a global brand and the centrepiece of BBC marketing around the world. Given the rabid fan base and quite poor reception to previous games from other companies (not to mention tie-in games in general), did you feel any pressure to “get it right” first time?
Lee – Luckily we walked in not having played any of the other Doctor Who games and having no idea of how prior games were received. In the original pitch to the BBC we told them that we wanted to “make the best Doctor Who game ever”, but we had nothing to compare against at that point, all we knew was that we wanted to build a platform more than just a game – a platform where you could take any Doctor, any ally, any situation in Doctor Who canon and abstract it away to a challenging puzzle mechanic. We decided that being able to fill a game with decades of characters in situations taken directly from the show HAD to be the most epic, “best” Doctor Who game ever. So we never really had the pressure you described where we looked at another game and said “we want to be better than that”, rather we had this epic idea of what we wanted to build, we had very tight grasp on the gameplay we wanted to build, and we knew that we, as gamers, would love to play the game we had in mind. The pressure came from inside us – we were desperate to play this crazy Doctor Who puzzle game we had down on paper, we knew we would likely only have one chance to make a Doctor Who game, and we didn’t think we could live with ourselves unless we tried to do something unique, something which spoke to our inner Whovian.
How is your relationship with the BBC? How much of the content additions and designs are influenced by the BBC?
Susan – You honestly couldn’t ask for a more supportive partner. From the beginning, BBC has trusted our gameplay vision and has never in any way detrimentally interfered with game design. On Doctor Who canon, they’ve of course had to push back now and then on ideas that strayed too far, but that’s one of the things we need them for. As much as we know and love about Doctor Who, they know far more and the feedback or constraints have always been well founded. Most of the people we work with at the BBC, including our producer, are gamers. They play the game as much as anyone else. So they try to keep fun factor in mind just as much as we do.
The game as a very unique and much praised look. What influenced the design of the game and the decision to take a fusion of East and West?
Lee – one of the original pillars of the design of Legacy was that it has to be enjoyable to Doctor Who fans wherever they were in the world. Mobile, free to play, worldwide release and so on were major parts of that, but alongside those we had to make sure that the game was visually engaging to users wherever they were on the globe. From the very start we decided that we had to have an “east meets west” visual design for the characters, and the BBC (as with everything else in the game) were awesome, backed us up, and gave incredibly input (nobody knows the brand on a worldwide scale better than those guys) to help us to get to the art style we ended up with. It was of course very helpful that we were lucky enough to have a development partner, Seed Studio, who are based in Taiwan but who already knew and loved Doctor Who as well.
We started with a much more anime look and slowly scaled that back until we felt that the style looked “western” enough to be accessible to casual users in the west, but still retained an anime edge which would similarly appeal to fans in the east. We were thrilled when users and reviewers fell in love with the look of the game.
Susan Cummings
Both Lee and Susan have worked on some of the biggest games on the past decade while at Rockstar and 2KGames, notably the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Bioshock, X-Com and Borderlands. What influenced the decision to form your own company Tiny Rebel Games? what values and experience did you take from Rockstar and 2kGames into the new company?
Susan – One of the problems with console development is that budgets, teams, scope, have gotten MASSIVE. There are console games where you have multiple producers who each deal with just one aspect of the game. From a holistic standpoint, it is just impossible, on a team of hundreds, to really feel like you have your arms entirely around what you are developing. We wanted the opposite experience. We wanted our hands in every aspect of this game from development through to publishing and marketing and tech support. Everything. People email support and they hear back from the executive producer, the creative director, or from the technical producer in Taiwan. That’s really cool in my mind. And we’ve never had this sort of direct dialogue with our fans. Where on a moment to moment basis we can throw out a question on Facebook regarding what ability a new ally should have and within an hour over a thousand people have given us their opinion. And an hour later, the game has been updated.
But the values our past employers taught us – Rockstar in particular – was a fierce protectiveness of game design. That what is best for gameplay is always what is best for the game. That obsessive attention to little details matter and get noticed by the player.
The game has offered regular updates much to the delight of fans, the fan community being massively supported from day one. How long do you envision continuing the releases and how important is it to engage with fans with the game?
Lee – It’s absolutely vital to engage with fans of the game to decide what gets added to the game. Up until launch we were making the game we wanted to play, but after the game was released it immediately became someone else’s game – it belongs to the community – and our roles changed to gatekeepers trying to balance what the community would like to see next and where the game is heading. Before launch we had a small design team making choices, now it feels like I have thousands of co-designers and every day it’s incredibly important we keep remembering that. If we keep building the game in a way which excites and engages the community then hopefully they will continue to financially support it, allowing us to keep expanding the game – it’s a wonderful cycle which will hopefully lead one day to the statement we used to pitch the game to the BBC so long ago: “we want to start with the latest episode of the show and go all the way back to An Unearthly Child”.
Would you rather keep updating the original game or will there come a point it will be necessary to release a full sequel?
Lee – I don’t see us ever doing a traditional sequel, the game is built as a platform we can keep adding to over time. We can add new gameplay, new enemy and ally abilities, levels, perks and lots more instantly using our live patching system. The game was designed to expand for years and be “the ultimate Doctor Who gem game”, so it was sort of built in that a sequel would actually be unnecessary, although we would love to take Doctor Who to another genre, perhaps do some sort of spinoff
The hunt for Greayhound One is on!
Will Series 8 and Peter Capaldi be making a debut with the game in the future?
Lee – Sadly we can’t comment on the new season yet, although we’re close. There is a good chance that by the time this interview goes live we would have formally announced our plans =)
And finally, what content can fans expect to be added over the coming months?
Susan – Hunt For Greyhound One is coming in August. We haven’t announced our plans yet for the upcoming new season of Doctor Who but hope to share that soon. And of course we’ll be continuing to add content from both the modern and the classic episodes of Doctor Who.
DWW should like to thank Lee and Susan Cummings for their time and the Hunt for Greyhound One is available now in the game.
Doctor Who Legacy is available now on Facebook, the Amazon Appstore, Google Play and the Apple Appstore.
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