Interview with Robert Murray, Kynan Woodman and Ronald Haupt

Interview from Yug - Tuesday, 08 April 2008 @ 8:44pm

Anna and I managed to get a sit down interview with Robert Murray - Founder and CEO, Kynan Woodman - Development Director, and Ronald Haupt - Senior Producer. It was a great casual sit down with these guys, talking about where they've been, their achievements, and where they expect the company to go in the future, and as always we're very thankful for their time.

Yug: Alright, umm, first of all do you just want to go around and tell me who you are and what you do here at Firemint?

Rob: My name is Robert Murray. I founded the company and I’m the CEO so I handle sales, finances and high level management. I worked my way up through programming, production and design, moving up to this position as the company kept expanding.

Kynan: I’m Kynan Woodman, I’m Development Director. I started with Firemint when the office was in an apartment next door to Rob’s place, as a programmer. Now I manage internal development, and put out fires…

Yug: Hehe, manage internal development, that’s pretty vague.

Ronald: Ah, Ronald Haupt, I am a Senior Producer here and have been with the guys for just over a couple of years now. I produce a lot of our long standing repeat titles. The producer's role includes the day to day stuff like scheduling, client liaison, and also putting out fires. Anything I don’t want to handle becomes Kynan’s problem – that’s what he does! That’s the other part of what he does.

Yug: Well, did you want to just tell us a bit about how Firemint sort of came about, how it started and how it’s grown to become what it is today?

Rob: Well, it started as n-Dimensional Software. Sounds really...

Kynan: …And then you blinked.

Rob: ...lame as a name. I was a programmer, prior to starting my own company I had a high level technical role at Torus and when I left I was going to provide some programming services and -

Yug: Sound corporate, Professional.

Rob: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was supposed to sound like hardcore, hard maths, hard sums sort of physics programming. We changed the name to ndWare and finally Firemint came about when I decided that we would be a game company. I had done a GBA title at that point and I realised that I could start a dev studio here and we rebranded in 2003 to Firemint.

Yug: Why Firemint?

Rob: Uh, we thought for ages about all the names – I wanted a name with a free dot com that I could also trademark, and keep it under two syllables. It had some sort of an evocative relationship with where I wanted to go.

Yug: And sounded cool!

Rob: Yeah, sounded cool enough. And I didn’t want it to clash with the name space. It was a totally original name at the time. Anyway, 2003 was really the year we started growing because we got out of my house and into a real studio. We had six people and then 12 the next year and then 18-

Yug: How many people here now?

Rob: Ahh 33 or 34 currently, full timers, a few contractors at the moment in here as well, we outsource a bit more for some of our artwork and music, so yeah, that’s quite significant. Last year we were probably 25 or so and the year before 15 to 18. So it’s just….

Yug: Progressed…

Rob: Yeah, steadily growing, as soon as we can find the right people.

Yug: Non stop.

Ronald: Every month on average! I swear, every time I look up there’s someone new.

Rob: Yeah, although we don’t really have any ambition to keep doubling.

Yug: But it keeps going that way.

Rob: Yeah. You get a new project and you want to make the most of it. They keep offering us really interesting brands for mobile and you get into this premium position. Need for Speed Most Wanted was a big sort of leg up project and then Madden and from there it’s sort of grown into other high profile titles and now we get offered these interesting games... and it’s hard to turn them away.

Kynan: When we went to E3 for the first time we had a little Moto GP demo, I think it was the only demo we had…

Rob: We’d done it way back.

Kynan: Yeah, which you’d done with your mate, in your front bedroom or something.

Rob: Yeah, yeah.

Kynan: We took that along and we were walking up cold to people...

Yug: Saying 'Here, have a look, look!'

Kynan: At E3 in 2004 we walked up to this huge EA rotunda thing, I don’t know if you were at E3...

Yug: No I wasn’t at E3

Kynan: …and there were these enormous screens all around you. We walk past EA and go, we’ll see what they've got to say for themselves, so we say to them “Anyone here do mobile?” and they’re "Oh yeah that guy over there". He says “Oh yeah car racing we‘ve got something next month” and suddenly we're making Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Wow.

Yug: So make a tech demo and randomly walk around at gaming expos!

Rob: Yeah, although you couldn’t do that now.

Kynan: EA Mobile had really just started back then. They saw us with what looked like the best 3D racer on a device.

Rob: We’d developed a bunch of Jumbuck titles and also some work for THQ and others but there weren’t many 3D developers so we had probably the most outstanding tech at the time. We sort of did the same to get Madden in 2005, it was a bit convoluted how we ended up with Madden but it was based on our soccer tech with 22 fully skinned animations running on a standard phone in 3D.

Yug: So you didn’t just sort of get that contract because you did Need For Speed?

Rob: It sort of happened around the same time, but it wasn’t because of ...

Kynan: It was a different company that was…

Rob: Yeah, Electronic Arts and Jamdat. We were doing Jamdat NFL and then EA bought them in December 2005. Though we had previously been invited to pitch on Madden… but we were already doing Jamdat NFL so we had to say no when EA wanted to talk to us about Madden.

Kynan: We said we can’t, but we couldn't say why we can’t. And they were like, you don't want to do Madden. What is wrong with you people?

Ronald: They had to rebrand it. It was for us. They wanted us! We had to claim it!

Yug: Take it, take it!

Ronald: So they could get our team and put out the best ever bloody football game to reach the consumer.

Yug: Let’s go with that.

Kynan: Once EA bought Jamdat they picked up our work so suddenly we were doing Madden after all. It all worked out well, if we had pitched on Madden while doing Jamdat NFL it wouldn’t have worked out so well when they merged.

Yug: Yeah, that could’ve been…

Ronald: Would’ve seen us as bad people.

Kynan: Need For Speed was done a bit earlier than Madden, and once both of them were out that set us on the path to doing more of the high end 3D stuff for big publishers.

Yug: Just curious, how many assets do you guys get? You know, Need for Speed or Madden they’re the sort of game that come out on every platform and all this kind of thing?

Ronald: LOTS.

Kynan: The story I liked to tell about Need for Speed when I was programming that, was they said “We’ll send you out some assets from Need For Speed: Most Wanted, some console stuff". So they send through these cars – the BMW hood ornament had more triangles in it than our entire game.

Rob: So it was kind of not very helpful.

Ronald: We have the same problem on Madden, as you know Madden goes on nearly everything, over all the years they’ve been doing it they literally have hundreds of hours of motion capture, team jerseys, logos, symbols, signs that go up everywhere, front end, masses of things that they always give us to sort through for something. It’s great reference – stadiums, we’re talking about 9GB files they send us from a title that I want to produce into about 300k for a phone. They send us a lot but because of the area we’re working in, everything’s redone. We can never leech anything. Getting to these phones (points to N95), it might not be too long before we may be able to use some of their lower end stuff…

Kynan: The DS is similar.

Ronald: We’re getting very close to the DS. Although sometimes we can’t use something because the publisher wants a format different to what we use.

Kynan: But they’re very similar now so you kind of go “Yeah, maybe”.

Ronald: First of all, it works out easier because they share it out with us and what the guys get for the console and stuff. It’s pretty good. There’s the licensing issues, they already have the rights to use certain voice clips but then they have the right to lend it to us for the phone too. So it’s the same voice clips you’ll probably hear on the console plus about thirty million others. And we have some of them on the phone too from proper licensing, licensing is always a big issue when it comes to Madden, for example. So it’s through that kind of relationship that we get things that (I know I’m generalising a bit here) you probably won’t find on any other game. Very few people have the same kind of power that EA do with licensing and the additional assets they can bring to the table. Some publishers are really good like that. Do you know how much time it cuts out when you don’t have to do the assets yourself? And some of them could be delivered like voice-overs that can be reformatted to a slightly lower quality, bring the size down.

Kynan: We’d never be able to have that otherwise.

Ronald: It’d blow up the price to be huge, I think.

Yug: But the rest of the assets and things like that are just too big to use by the sounds of it.

Kynan: Yeah, we just regenerate it. But the console stuff is nice to look at.

Ronald: We make our own stadiums. We use their mo-cap quite a bit although we had to rework it a little, but that’s why you commented when you saw it - “Those animations look really good” - they’re all from original motion capture stuff done in a studio with a man in a suit. But our character uses far less polys than any normal person would be mapped on to. I think ours have less points throughout the whole body than they capture from the fingers. Ours don't have fingers. We just worked through that.

Yug: Took what you needed sort of thing

Ronald: Yeah, and again, that’s a great help. It makes the animation really stand out. We couldn't do that without EA supplying that kind of stuff.

Yug: Ok fair enough. You guys have got a really fantastic reputation for mobile phone games in the industry. Are you going to keep building on that or are you looking to try and get into other systems, other consoles or things like that. What are your plans for the future, without giving much away?

Rob: Strategy-wise we’re definitely going to maintain leadership in mobiles. It’d be crazy not to do that. Vision-wise we don’t see ourselves as a platform based studio, we see ourselves as a games studio. Possibly as there is more and more accessible entertainment suitable for mobiles, suitable for PC, Wii, DS, whatever. Ultimately we’re focussing on how we design games, that’s the direction we’re moving in. But yeah, definitely maintain leadership in mobiles. You get such awesome brands and things we get to work with, as well as premium titles. We’re also doing DS at the moment, we’re doing PC obviously with Project Joystick as well. We're interested in PC and mobile crossovers, especially in the casual space. So yeah, the direction’s kind of fluid but we will definitely maintain leadership in mobile.

Yug: What about a game like Mega Monster? That’s your own IP, what’s it like working on that compared to the other licensed titles that you’re working on? Is there much of a difference?

Ronald: Yeah, because there’s no precedence.

Rob: It’s much harder.

Ronald: Most designers jump up going "Yeah! Let’s work on something without all these limits". But it’s a challenging thing. You can get pulled into a scope so big that it keeps people busy for four years developing a project. But it’s great, we want to do more of it going forward. It’s a whole other set of challenges. When you’re dealing with a license you’re very limited to what’s being leased out on that license. What you can use, what you can’t use. With the Mega Monster approach, we could be open to anything, anything that we can imagine, if the tech can handle it.

Kynan: When you compare it to work for hire and car racing games for example, it’s much more challenging. Like when you’re given Need for Speed, you’ve got a scope. Maybe they want it more interesting or whatever and they want to add some features but you know where you stand. With Mega Monster we’ve been pretty ambitious. It’s kind of a new navigation technique designed for the type of mobile phones with 3D. We set the bar pretty high for what we want to deliver. So yeah, just fulfilling that promise, it’s challenging.

Yug: You’ve got no one to answer to except yourselves…

Rob: There’s a few titles like that that require a lot of creativity, and when I say creativity I really mean failing a lot of times and then succeeding. You just have to try so many things out to see what will work. You might have to backtrack. It’s a bit harder on the teams when they have to discard work.

Ronald: Yeah, an idea that didn’t pan out, it’s tough on the person who had that idea

Yug: Have to drop it, have to ditch it sort of thing.

Ronald: I think just about every studio, if they can, should do this kind of thing. It’s a real challenge compared to the other stuff. It really does expand the way you think and tackle things. Like I said, at first the idea of that blank canvas seems really great but then when you’re actually staring at it and you’ve got nothing to begin with – it’s challenging for some people. I think most of ours like it, it gets the juices flowing. We encourage that with our Game Dev Days and things like that. You need those kinds of projects, I think a work environment would go stale if we only ever had “refab” stuff all the time. Sometimes we have people vying “Oh, I really want to be on that project” but obviously we can’t put everyone on one project.

Kynan: They say that before they’re on it but then they realise…

Ronald: ...and then they sort of go “Help!”

Yug: But also at the end of a project like that, there’s a great sense of accomplishment sort of thing. It’s all–

Ronald: Come back and ask me after!

Yug: Oh, ok, fair enough!

Ronald: We’re jumping the gun.

Kynan: Even just working on a demo of the prototype for something like this, once you get going you get a real boost. Something like Mega Monster, as an original it’s a huge game for mobile, it’s beyond the scope of so many.

Ronald: We’re trying not to think of it as a mobile game, we just want to think of it as a game on a small screen.

Kynan: It’s bigger than a DS game, I suppose, isn’t it?

Ronald: The scope is huge. The mindshare around the IP can lend itself to so much that everybody who looks at it has ten bright new ideas on what we could do and I mean, that’s nice but at some point you have to draw a line and get a game out of this.

Yug: There’s something you mentioned which is what you see as a game where it doesn’t really matter what platform sort of thing but as, I mean, in my personal experience with mobile phones, I’d imagine that the input limitations make it really difficult, actually to be honest most Australian gamers that I know have very limited experience with good games on mobile phones.

Ronald: Can’t say I agree with you.

Yug: Yes, well, the ones that I’ve played have had limitations. I remember, I used to play games and you can’t play up and right at the same time.

Rob: Key based input is a big issue.

Yug: Ok, well, things like that. How do you get around that?

Ronald: You don’t, the device limits it, that’s your limitation.

Kynan: You just can’t do certain things. In game design, you’ve got to think about that .For example with the Fast and the Furious, we thought about what we can do, more than what we can't. The game’s about steering your car so you tap forward to accelerate and then you don’t accelerate ever again.

Rob: You don’t have to hold forward for instance.

Kynan: So you don’t have to push forward to accelerate, you just steer. So, with the input and user interface, if that’s what you’ve got, that’s all you can use. It’s a very casualised version of that game because of the input device, but that’s the thing that limits mobile the most – the input. And a lot of time is spent on a lot of games where it’s all about input, right? Right now we’re reworking an old idea and it’s about how do we make it so that the user can just move with minimum input. I mean, you’ve seen the casual space, it’s all mouse and click, and it’s not a lot of click and not much mouse, it's all very turn-based – not a lot of twitch. So you’ve got to do all these kind of ideas of casual gaming and go, "let’s really refine it to what the game is", and make it a simple interface.

Rob: You almost take a hardcore title and make it look like the hardcore title but it’s a totally new game, different design on the actual controls but it’s got the same flavour.

Yug: Well, it sounds like you’ve got it – a design specifically for the mobile controls.

Ronald: Well, this is exactly why you’ve always got to consider the platform that you’re working on for that design.

Kynan: Yeah, some games work better because of the expectations from the user. If they expect to go in hardcore, they’re going to suffer. Look at Japan, they tend to just port the game straight on to mobile … with lots of buttons and that …

Ronald: Yeah, they love it.

Yug: Really?

Kynan: They’re playing it like a console. Their phones have a more similar form factor and they think about games a lot more there. There’s also a dexterity and an acceptance thing.

Yug: Do you think the controls on phones will change to accommodate games for the future or not really a big push for it?

Rob: Manufacturers are thinking about it. They’re doing what they can to accommodate it a little but they won’t change their design unless the user really demands it.

Kynan: In my opinion– (you’ve said something similar to me before), WASD and mouse was pushed onto what we have as keyboard and mouse. Now everyone says it’s better than console, but it wasn’t designed for that. These consoles are designed specifically for games. So they’re not as good as the thing that was pushed on to PC so I don’t know … I think we may at some point find the thing on mobile better.

Rob: The hot platform.

Kynan: The thing that works with the keypad, and the way to do it properly – I don’t think we’ve hit that pinnacle. The first Wolfenstein just had the arrows, and then Doom didn’t have mouse but you could hack it on. And then you had Quake and it did it and everyone went ‘Oh my God! What the hell were we doing before?’. So I’m waiting for the ‘What the hell were we doing before?’ point on mobiles. I mean, do you bring out a different keyboard for your gaming, different joysticks – for most people it doesn’t happen.

Rob: What’ll happen is as they improve the UI, as a consequence we’ll have more to play with. They’ve got accelerometers in the Nokia N95, for example. So you can play a game where you bounce the ball and it just zooms in and out of the screen as it’s bouncing and yeah, it’s kind of cool. They’ve got their touch screens with iPhones having the multi touch where it’s really useable with the thumb. Awesome stuff. So as they try and improve the UI, games will work better

Yug: More potential.

Rob: Yeah, that’s what the mouse was as well. The mouse came out to improve non-game UI, and games found a way that used that.

Kynan: Some of them have a little wheel up and down here, like the BlackBerrys.

Rob: We tried that for steering.

Kynan: Yeah. You can steer the game with that. Using the thing up and down will be cool. So I think it’ll be as you said, the "mouse" will be added or something. It’ll help business users and all that kind of thing. Then we’ll steal that and use it for games.

Rob: I liked your idea too, of using the camera – I don’t know if that would work…

Kynan: But you know, you could have the camera filming your hand and just move your hand like a joystick…

Yug: There was something I wanted to… well, I went to ACMI this morning and they gave me a whole bunch of brochures and one of them was mobile phone game development with cameras sort of thing, where you actually move the mobile phone and then your camera and it moves the stuff in the game or something like that.

Kynan: That sort of thing with swatting mozzies where you move around and it knows where you’re moving so the mozzie screen is still and you’re just looking at a perspective.

Yug: Just quickly, with the different phones – when you make a game, how much do you have to scale that to different models?

Ronald: Uh, yeah, across the handsets we have different screen sizes, things like that. Obviously, they essentially have the same kind of buttons so the user input’s not really changing across many devices. It’s just that a lot of the visuals change, because of what you can have on the screen size-wise and what they can push with the number of polys.

Yug: Because of the different sizes and resolutions – that sort of thing.

Kynan: (Points to Nokia N95) That’s 240 by 320 there. So something like the old consoles. And that goes down to 176 by 208 and then all the way to the bottom with 128 by 128.

Ronald: Yes, so it’s quite a spectrum to support.

Yug: So do you make your game as big as you can and then just scale that back down?

Kynan: Yeah, with a couple of tiers in that.

Ronald: In the case of that one you’ll be comparing it to “this’ll be a 3D and that one’s a 2D” so it’s sprites. Little sprites – it’s entirely different.

Kynan: You’ve got an entire strata of games. The top end starts with 3D, then you drop off a few of the graphics so the field’s 2D and the players are 3D, and then you’re in 2D land.

Ronald: Sometimes you even cut the features because the feature takes up so much space – like you have a head bob up saying “This is the player you should choose” as an example, you wouldn’t have that on the lower end, it’s just too much. So you drop that one out completely. It helps bring your size down for the phones.

Kynan: You get 3D and the features drop out as you go down, and then you go to 2D and the features drop out again as you go down. And then sometimes there’s the really, really low end game that’s just got a bad menu and maybe some game, we try not to do those.

Ronald: Almost like on PCs when you get games with all these scaling factors that you can drop – the shadows and aliasing and all that kind of stuff. It’s much the same kind of thing. You have to take that into consideration. We create all these reference builds as we call them, they use them for porting .

Yug: Look, just a quick question as well, you guys have won heaps of rewards, which one are you most proud of?

Rob: Probably the one I'm most proud of is our Commendation in the Governor of Victoria Export Awards ICT category – because you’re up against every industry, not just games. Beyond that it would have to be the International Mobile Gaming Awards. That was Mega Monster – Excellence in 3D in 2006, and WRC won the IMGA People's Choice in 2007. Also, runner up in the GDC Innovation Hunt for Mega Monster because that was so bloody hard. It was everyone in a room with loads of beer for the audience, you had five minutes to present the game, and there was a gong and everything. Yeah, that was a tough one.

Yug: And last of all, I know you can’t talk much about it but I just wanted to touch on Project Joystick stuff and if you can’t say anything about it, that’s fine. First of all, how did you guys get involved with that, how did you pick up that project?

Rob: Well, they put it out to tender amongst a group of developers – at least ten or so. They asked for the usual RFP and we responded with our proposal and won the right to do it.

Yug: Do you have any contact with the guy who came up with the idea? Is he involved with the project at all?

Ronald: It’s a girl.

Yug: Guy, girl. It was a girl? Ok. Is it pretty much like you got the spec and you’re running with that or do you have a constant communication there.

Rob: We started with Sherele's original brief concept and designed a full game from there. I can't really say much about Project Jostick, it's still all secret for now.

Yug: Ok, cool. Well, that’s pretty much it, I’m out of questions but look, thank you for your time.


If you wish to find out more about firemint, visit their website at www.firemint.com