Posted 2/14/2008 at 11:28 AM By GamingShogun
We recently had the chance to interview Cliff Harris, founder of Positech Games. Positech recently released Democracy 2, sequel to the popular political strategy game, Democracy. Positech also developed the life simulator game, Kudos as well as Starship Tycoon.
GS) Tell us a bit about your background in the gaming industry or gaming in general, if you will, that led to the formation of Positech.
CH) I have been making games as an amateur since 1981, but only took it seriously with Starship Tycoon. I went from that game to working at Elixir (Of infinite-polygon engine fame), and from Elixir to Lionhead to do AI work on The Movies. I already had Positech sat there from before I’d worked at Elixir, and by the time I quit Lionhead to do a short contract for Maxis, Positech was doing well enough for me to work on indie games full time. That was about 2 years ago.
GS) How long did it take to develop Democracy 2 and what were some of the challenges faced along the way?
CH) I think it took about a year, but that was part-time. The biggest problems were the mechanics of the neural network that powered the game, and also the user interface. Democracy was the first game I designed where there was literally no blueprint for a game to emulate or be influenced by. All other government and strategy games have a 3D world or a 2D map, but this game would have none of those, so coming up with a design that worked, and allowed so much information to be onscreen at once, was pretty tricky.
GS) Democracy 2 is a very complex game of strategy. What kind of research was put into the game’s policy decision-making system as well as realistically capturing the effects caused by those choices?
CH) Not as much as people assume! I am a bit of a politics obsessive, and I know a lot about the issues, and think a lot about the repercussions of political decisions, so it didn’t involve much in the way of text book analysis and number crunching. The problem is that Democracy is, despite its complexity, a vast simplification of all the effects. How much does immigration affect racial tension? There are no concrete figures for that, and anyone you ask will introduce extra new variables into the answer, so it all has to be just an educated approximation. I listen a lot to feedback from players, who says things like “state health care should have a more positive effect on this group of people”, and there have been hundreds of minor policy effect changes in updates to the game since its release.
GS) In Democracy 2, the player chooses to play as fictional analogs to modern, real-world countries. What prompted this change from the original Democracy in which you played as real-world nations?
CH) Partly because I had already tried to do real countries, so wanted to be different, but mainly because I never really felt that the real countries actually felt like the ones they were meant to represent. The thing is, the model is a generic model, and it doesn’t have the flexibility to represent different cultures. For example, in the UK, people would take it as fact that if we relaxed our gun laws, we would get more gun crime, but in the US, a lot of people think the exact opposite (and because of cultural differences, both can be correct). That makes it horribly difficult to represent both countries without having entirely different data for every one of them, which is a huge task. But people miss the real countries, and they have already been modded back into D2.
GS) One thing about the democracy games people have always appreciated has been the 2d artwork. Who was your 2d artist(s) on Democracy 2?
CH) Narcissistic Studios did the character artwork, and the Democracy 2 logo was done by Sprite Attack. The actual user interface GUI bits are my fault. I just don’t have a big enough art budget
GS) Are there plans to expand Democracy 2 officially? I say, officially as you have created a vastly moddable game for users to expand on.
CH) As you mention, the users have added a lot of mods, which I totally support and think is great. The game was patched many times to include changes and features for the modders so they could do stuff they wanted to do. I would love to take another few months and add some new features to the game at some point, but as a small company, you always have to keep an eye on the sales figures to see if you can justify the time. Right now I’m not sure if that’s doable or not, but the games only been out for 2 and a half months, so maybe. I would also love to do Democracy 3 one day, with a totally different approach to the interface, and maybe with some decent online integration. You never know…
GS) Has the response to Democracy 2 been what you expected it to be?
CH) It’s been very good, but it takes ages to really see how much of it filters through to commercial success. D2 cost me more than any game I’ve ever made, it had specially written music composed for it, proper artwork for the characters etc, and this all costs money. The original game sold well for years and years, so my fingers are crossed hoping that the new one does the same. Democracy has a pretty fanatical bunch of people who really love the game and enjoy modding it and tweaking it, which is great. I’m sure a lot of the modders on Democracy have never modded a game before, but this one is so easy to change, because anyone can use a text editor, and people have really embraced that which is excellent.
GS) Are there any upcoming projects being worked on right now at Positech that you can tell us about?
CH) I’m fiddling around with a sort of sequel to Kudos right now. That game had a lot of potential, and did quite well, but it looked pretty bad, and really needed some polish, so right now, I’m stripping that game back and redoing it so it will be the game I’d always wanted to make. That will take quite a while. There are 2 other game ideas I’m very keen to make, but they are design nightmares. They may come next.
GS) Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
CH) If you like indie games, please buy them! All indie developers have free demos available, and they always really appreciate the people who go direct to the developer’s website and buy the games direct. We don’t have any big publishers sat ‘RIAA style’ between us and our customers, so you can always directly support the game developers whose work you like.
Thank you so much for taking the time for us to interview you, Cliff, we appreciate it! You can find Positech’s website here.
Screenshots from Positech's titles can be found after the break.
Bookmark & Share:
