Q&A: Arcanity

We recently talked with Brick House Trading Company's Jason Jacobitz about the developer's upcoming online role-playing game, Arcanity. Jacobitz shared some information with us, including some of the studio's history, what inspired the fantasy gameworld featured in Arcanity, and what the game will do differently from other online role-playing games.

GameSpot: First, about the company: Brick House began as a day-trading firm, right? What made you switch to game development? Have you noticed any parallels between the world of day trading and the world of game development?

Brick House Trading: The day-trading firm thing is actually sort of a joke. Rich and I and two other "fellas" did indeed try day trading a couple of summers back. We never truly called ourselves a firm, and we never really could have justified doing so, but we used to joke around about being "Brick House Trading Co." (We were big fans of a particular sound of music at the time that included "Pick up the Pieces," "I Believe in Miracles," "Brick House," etc., and we thought "Brick House" made the best name). The fact is, we didn't do too well, and we decided to put it down for a while. We'll probably rethink what we did and try it again some day if we have the chance; I think we all feel that way. So anyway, Rich made the initial Web page draft for Brick House, and it had something like "a day trading firm turned game developer," and we thought it was funny, so we left it.

GS: How long has Arcanity been in development, and how many people are currently on the Arcanity team?

BHT: We've been in development for a little over a year now. Development was slow at first; we had never done a project of this size before, and we only had limited experience with 3D. We also started off with only three people, and none of us was anything of an artist. There are seven of us now, and we're moving at a fairly good rate.

GS: What will make Arcanity different from other online role-playing games?

BHT: Well, lots of things I hope. Our priority is to create a world that encourages role-playing more than the others we've seen. We're doing a few things very differently from other games, hopefully not overly naively. For one, Arcanity is completely free of artificial restrictions as far as PVP [player-vs.-player], but there are lots of reasons not to PVP. Most of the upcoming games have limits on PVP, and in some you simply can't PVP at all. We're of the mindset that you should be able to do whatever you want and that our job is to provide consequences that should make you think twice.

We're trying to avoid artificial rules like "play nice" policies. If we need to implement rules of any sort, they'll be very minimal, and they won't be done by GMs, they'll be done by godly decree because that's how you role-play. If the GMs don't role-play, after all, who will?

We're also aiming to make GM "events" more like a regular part of the flow of the game rather than a special "event." GMs (called CMs in Arcanity) will really help shape the world and determine how things progress, and it will all be evident in game.

GS: Where did you find inspiration for the background story in Arcanity?

BHT: Well, Rich and I are both huge Dragonlance fans. The Elven Nations Trilogy is my personal favorite, and who didn't love the Chronicles. We've played a lot of role-playing games in the past including TSR's Dungeons & Dragons on pen and paper and everything from Dragon Warrior and early Might and Magic all the way to the later Final Fantasy installments.

GS: Are there any games--or parts of games--that you are trying to mimic? Are there any specific mistakes in other games that you are being careful to avoid?

BHT: If it can be called mimicking, we're trying to re-create the D&D feeling of adventure--the feeling that you're actually in the game and that it's a place you'd rather be than real life for the time being. Just as important as that, we want to tell a story more so than most of the other MMORPGs seem to want to. The story in RPGs is what separates them from Quake III. Quake III is a great game and has one of the most talented team of programmers in the world I think, but it's not D&D. Playing Quake III is like watching the Three Stooges; you have tons of fun for a while, but you don't think about it too much after it's over. It gets your mind off of things. RPGs are supposed to be more involved.

There are a ton of things we're trying to avoid. I don't even have to say anything here. Everyone knows the big pitfalls of other games--static spawns lead to camping; zones make for less realism and frustrating load times (LOADING, PLEASE WAIT...); separate servers (or shards as some call them) ensure that you only are really able to interact with a small percentage of the game world population with any given character. Those are just some of the overall ones. The list goes on and on and right into the more specific areas of gameplay.

GS: Tell us a little bit about the gameworld. What kind of different environments will players encounter?

BHT: We're attempting to create a world of our own that differs from the typical fantasy world and yet retains most of the races, monsters, and other elements that players are already used to. We're making the typical medieval fantasy world, but with some twists of our own, including some new races, new monsters, and lots of other new ideas that we hope will create a lasting impression on most everyone.

Our beta world is one of the smaller continents in the world of Novus called Tanzia. Tanzia is home to conservative, suspicious humans to the North that live in a genre-typical city, resting high in the mountains, while the South boasts a makeup of almost entirely new elements to the genre including the tribal Akazi and their quaint village resting in the middle of the thick southern jungles.

GS: How will the combat system work? Will there be player-vs.-player combat?

BHT: It's complicated, and it's not fully worked out yet. I'm afraid that without writing an essay, I really don't think I could shed much light on that subject right now.

I will say that PVP combat is unrestricted. I think I mentioned that above too. There are lots of reasons not to PVP though. There will be arenas and duels and other ways to PVP (like wars) without consequence (other than the possibility of death) just like there should be realistically. But you wouldn't generally just run around looking for people to slaughter, and if you do, people will come looking for you.

GS: What kinds of different character classes are featured in the game? How will character advancement work?

BHT: www.brickhousetrading.com is the place to find that answer. There's a lot to that question. We're using a "classless" system; Arcanity is skill based. You don't pick a class when you start. You pick a race, balance your stats, and enter the game. In game you choose which skills you'd like to learn. You can learn almost any skills you want to, but it's hard to be good at swordplay if you're smart and weak, and it's hard to master the Arcane arts if you're big and dumb.

GS: When we last talked in October, the development team was finalizing the character animation system and working on the landscaping techniques. What kind of progress has been made since then in those areas?

BHT: Character animation came out as well as we hoped it would. It hasn't been properly tested with several characters logged in over the Internet, but the Internet shouldn't be a factor. Animation is as smooth as Quake III Arena and nearly as fast, but with only very minimal memory usage. Landscape is looking good, but it's a little more typical than the animation method we used, which was very custom. The landscape looks good though, and there are some great shots of the in-game landscape on the official site.

GS: What are the biggest hurdles you have to face before you begin beta testing this spring?

BHT: The biggest hurdle by far has been organization, and I suspect it will continue to be so. With a project this size and with so many different aspects involved (art, modeling, design, the 3D engine, simple AI, networking, music and 3D sound, etc.), organization and planning take up a huge percentage of our time. If the whole thing was laid out for us in terms of what exactly each person should do next, we'd have been done by now.

Probably one of the biggest things on our "to do" list is optimizing the dungeon-making process. Right now, making a dungeon is very much a manual process, and it needs to be automated before we can create the very large dungeonscapes that we want to create.

There are also a lot of optimizations we want to make, but that will probably happen during beta.

GS: Will you be looking for a publisher, or do you plan to publish the game in-house?

BHT: Chances are we'll be publishing Arcanity ourselves over the Internet. We very much want to keep full control over the gameworld, and working with a publisher would likely compromise that.

GS: Thanks, Jason.