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From Kojima to Kickstarter: Ryan Payton explains the long journey of Republique

'It's really hard to come up with ideas that haven't appeared in Metal Gear'

From Kojima to Kickstarter: Ryan Payton explains the long journey of Republique
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iOS
| Republique

Ryan Payton is best known as the Metal Gear super-fan who infiltrated Kojima Productions and climbed his way up until he was working right alongside Hideo Kojima as assistant producer.

You would be forgiven, then, for thinking that sneaky iOS adventure Republique - his first game for indie outfit Camouflaj - was inspired by the games he made in his previous role.

But Republique didn't actually start out as a stealth game. In the beginning, Payton says, players were "calling different characters in a secret facility through their webcams and looking through survellience cameras".

"Once we started prototyping in Unity, we looked through the surveillance camera view and the game immediately started to look like Resident Evil."

Survival of the fittest

The game then drifted towards survival-horror territory, but "we didn't want Hope to be shooting people and slitting their throats so the game quickly evolved into a stealth-action game".

Even then, Payton tried hard to differentiate his game from those made by Kojima Productions. That wasn't easy, though.

"It's really hard to come up with ideas for places where a character can hide that haven't appeared in Metal Gear or Splinter Cell. Trash cans are out of the question, cardboard boxes are definitely out."

Hope can hide in a locker like Snake, though: "We tried to find ideas that weren't in Metal Gear, so we have bushes in which players can hide and we have statues behind which Hope can hide."

Republique

Making a stealth game on iOS presented its own challenges. Primarily regarding control.

"I believe very strongly that a game should be designed specifically for the device on which you're releasing it," Payton says. "I always consider that using a virtual joystick on an iPhone screen is one of the worst sins you could commit as a designer."

In the end, the Camouflaj team opted to employ a one-touch control scheme. But that presented its own issues, like "having the proper AI driving the system to know that when you tap on a box, Hope knows which side to go to".

"It's by far the most challenging thing I've ever worked on in my life. It took about two years to get right, and we just solved that problem, I'm serious, about three weeks ago."

Republique

Like with censorship saga Blackbar, the release of dystopian adventure Republique feels especially timely considering its oh-so-relevant themes of privacy, security, and government control.

"It's something that's a passion for me," Payton explains. "When I sat down and started thinking about what Camouflaj's first game was going to be about, there was really no question in my mind that it was going to be about surveillance and privacy and some of the issues that we're facing today."

"Obviously, older books like 1984, Brave New World, and We are all inspirational for our team, especially our writer Brendan Murphy."

The team also wanted to tell a story about a woman.

"Not because it was a marketing decision or we're trying to say something about gender or social inequality or anything like that - it's just something we're interested in as a team."

Republique

Republique was one of the armfuls of games from developers who were seeking crowdfunding assistance during the Kickstarter boom period of 2012.

The crodwfunding platform was especially useful for Camouflaj, who wanted to do a big console-style mobile game where "we still owned the IP, had full creative control over the project, would be publishing ourselves, and needed lot of funds for it".

Industry pals told Payton and partner Jeff Matthews that no publisher would go for that.

Soon after, "Jeff and I went to a coffee shop and we were just kind of moping around and wondering what the hell we should do and I checked my phone and I saw what was happening with Double Fine and its Kickstarter."

Double down

Double Fine, remember, raised over $3 million to fund a new point-and-click adventure (the upcoming Broken Age). This kickstarted a Kickstarter gold rush, and Camouflaj was one of the first game makers to jump on this new bandwagon.

The studio met its funding goal of $500,000. "At the time, though, it was definitely perceived, for the vast majority of the campaign, as an epic failure." The promise of a Mac and PC version, and a last-minute rush of donations, pushed Camouflaj over its goal line.

Unlike most Kickstarter project creators, Camouflaj shut itself off to fan ideas and contributions. "It's not that we're not interested in what the community has to say."

"It's more that we were charting undiscovered territory for so long that I didn't want to put it on the shoulders of our backers to figure out how we do our one-touch control system and how to drive the AI for Hope or the AI that powers our camera system."

Republique

Camouflaj is also one of those rare Kickstarter project creators to have mostly kept the promises made in the original pitch.

"The only difference I could really point out would be we pitched the game with the whole idea that we would be doing pre-rendered backgrounds just like the original Resident Evil games, but we had to abandon them the moment that the Retina display iOS devices started coming out."

"Once we moved from iPad 2 to iPad 3, we found that the size of each of those scenes was increasing by a factor of four, so we were loading between 20 to 30MB files for each camera and that was just destroying our memory budget."

Payton also says that releasing this game feels different from finishing games at big firms like Konami and Sony. "You're doing this on such a personal level. People would email us talking about how they want to up their pledge but they have to wait for their next paycheck."

"It's definitely true that the pressure of wanting to please your fans on Kickstarter is far greater than wanting to please a traditional publisher."

Republique

While Payton is trying hard to make Republique feel different from the games he helped make at Kojima Productions, there are some things he took from the Japanese studio.

"The #1 thing I took away is not just Hideo's but the whole Metal Gear team's commitment to quality. It was absolutely relentless."

"It didn't matter if it was a Tokyo Game Show pamphlet or a soundtrack or a scene in the game, there was no compromise. Everything was just done to perfection. I've been trying to instil that philosophy in Camouflaj."

The first episode of Republique will be available on iPhone and iPad tomorrow. Future iOS episodes and a version for PC and Mac will surface in 2014.
Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer