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feature :: a visit to auran

A visit to Auran

Yug and Matt take a visit to the offices of local Brisbane based game developer Auran, to generally harass them but also find out more about their upcoming MMO game: Fury

PAGE 1 (Welcome to Auran) : PAGE 2 (FURY)?

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A visit to Auran

News from Matt - June 13th @ 12:00am

Brisbane has long had a strong contingent of local video game developers and one of the most prominent is Auran.

Best known for the 1990's hit RTS "Dark Reign", Auran have been concentrating on smaller projects for the last few years.

Now they're back to mainstream, and ready to show us what they've been quietly working on for the last few years.

We went to Auran's studio in Newstead in Brisbane to take a look at their latest game - Fury.

We first heard about Fury several months ago, listed as an MMO RPG. The words "WoW Killer" were heard in hushed whispers, and our own thoughts were concerned. Taking on Blizzard in this field would be a massive undertaking.

One of the highlights of Supanova 06 was our chance to finally see Auran's Fury running. We wanted to get an idea of its scope, it's graphics, and specifically how it was going to differ from and improve on the world Blizzard has created and refined. And the genre it has largely captured.

The first thing we saw was that Fury is not a WoW killer. That's not to say it's not capable. It's just not even the same genre.

Fury is a combat game, set in a Fantasy Universe. There are role playing aspects and elements, but in the end this is a third person combat game, with all the trimmings.

The first look we got at Fury was honestly not that impressive. It was a relatively short video, not particularly high resolution. The map was quite small, and the movement looked stilted, with jerky and vague combat. Some of the spell effects, etc, looked really good, however.

Well, E3 has come and gone, and Fury (and Auran in general) took up about half of the Australian presence there. By all reports the game was well received, winning the MMORPG.com Most suprising game of show, and on Auran's return we caught them while they were still tired and persuaded them to give us some time to come in and poke their game.


The trip to Auran's place of busy-ness was short and uneventful from our little house in Fortitude Valley. Most of Brisbane's Game companies are concentrated around the inner city area, and Auran have their offices in the suburb nearby, Newstead.

The Auran office itself was slightly difficult to find, as it's based in a huge building thats deceptively marked with the title 'Newstead Estate' on the outside.

We rocked up to the service entrance and were shown in and were greeted by Ashwin Segkar, Marketing Officer for Auran. Ashwin showed us briefly around the 'factory floor' and then took us to visit Ann-Marie Huston, the Director of Human Resources. Ann-Marie gave us the official tour (Ashwin came along too, he said there were still sections of the place he hadn't seen before!), and spent quite a lot of time walking us around and talking to us, and really gave the impression that Auran is a great place to work, and that they look after their staff very well. Possibly that's her job, fooling us while they hide the bodies.

Anyway, the first thing we noticed about Auran's office, other than the fact that it's a drab unassuming building from the outside, was that it was MASSIVE inside.

It's easily big enough for various indoor sporting activities, possibly up to and including soccer. Ann-Marie told us that early in the company's history, before they had so many staff inconsiderately taking up space, the boys used to play cricket inside. In fact, there were foam arrows from Nerf guns lying in impossible to reach sections in the roof.


I say 'boys' quite deliberately. With the exclusion of Ann-Marie and one other lady Auran's staff, from programmers to designers, sound engineers to administration are all male. This isn't by any means a reflection of their hiring policy, but an indication of the wider industry. Despite the fact that approximately 30% of gamers are female, only about 2% of games industry workers are female, and those are mostly in PR and marketing. With these skewed numbers it's not hard to see why games are tending to appeal more to a male market than female.

In any case, back to Auran! Their open warehouse-like offices are split up into the different development sections, so the people working on Fury are in one section, while the Trainz people are in another. Although most of the guys there seemed really focused on their work (or maybe they just didn't want to make eye contact with us), you could sense there was a casual atmosphere about the place. From the replica Dr Who tardis in the middle of the room, to the flags hung up around the office to represent all the nationalities, as far as Yug was concerned, all the place needed was a skate ramp it would be perfect.

Of note were little side stories we were told while Ann-Marie was showing us around, such as some of the guys getting into a bit of after hours wrestling and knocking holes in the walls, the fact that maybe possibly perhaps Kylie Minogue had come in once to the recording studio, and my personal favourite fact is that all the staff get their lunch for free!

As we were being showed around Auran's fine indoor cricket pitch we were introduced to Tony Hilliam, the CEO of Auran. Tony is a dynamic and energetic guy, who we were really looking forward to talking to. Unfortunately we ran out of time on our little trip, and missed our chance to talk to Tony in depth. Never fear! We're going back to Auran within the next month or so, and we'll have a lot to talk to Tony about then.

One of the most impressive things Auran had to show us was actually their sound equipment. It's one of the best studios in the Southern Hemisphere, and though we don't really know all that much about such things they sure had a lot of knobs and levers happening. The Auran studios can be neatly divided into two sections. One section, as well as the studio contains QA PCs, set up to beta test games. It even has its own separate kitchen area. This means that povo game testers (such as ourselves) never have to disturb the all important worker bees.


After a good long look around and a play in their studio (including an insincere promise to record a single there), we invaded the office of Adam Carpenter, Fury's Lead Designer.

Then we got to sit and ask some questions about Fury itself.



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