After releasing two acclained indie games (Uplink and Darwinia), UK based game developer Introversion is preparing yet another unusual title for release later this year and it's looking like it will generate quite a lot of attention. The multiplayer oriented title Defcon deals with full thermonuclear war that is openly inspired by the classic hacker-geek movie Wargames. FiringSquad got a chance to ask Introversion questions about their plans for Defcon and got some answers from co-founder Chris Delay:

FiringSquad: First, Darwinia has gotten a lot of praise and is now being sold via Steam. Are you happy with the response the game has received?

Chris Delay: The review scores were incredible, and that certainly felt very good but unfortunately it didn’t at first translate into the sales we’d hoped for. It’s obviously an uphill struggle if your concept is difficult to summarise and this was perhaps our biggest problem; Darwinia was a very, very difficult game to describe and therefore market, something that perhaps made Darwinia appear inaccessible. We did our best to change all that with new demo, which did a much better job of explaining and introducing the game to new players.

However, things really picked up for us when we joined with Valve and the subsequent media coverage certainly helped with getting Darwinia more recognised. Darwinia winning IGF was also a really big thing for us – our first ever award ceremony and the first industry awards we've ever received. It was a massive boost for us to do so well at the IGF - it made it all seem worthwhile and it also gave us a chance to have an awesome biz trip/holiday to America and visit some of the people that have helped us along the way - like Valve for example.

FiringSquad: How did the idea for Defcon come about?

Chris Delay: The inspiration for Defcon was primarily the 1983 film, Wargames, firstly because it’s a great movie – one of those movies I loved when I was a child. The hacking elements became one of the big inspirations for Uplink. In fact two of my favorite childhood movies were Wargames and Tron, which probably explains quite a lot.

Watching the movie it dawned on me that there was a really cool game idea in that movie, and that nobody had really attempted it. There are some games which successfully simulate warfare across the world but they tend to be too heavily strategic (e.g. turn based and stat heavy). I wanted to see a game that looked like the movie, with vector-lined soviet subs closing in on your coastline. Most of all I wanted to recreate that tension and paranoia.

FiringSquad: While nuclear weapons have been used a lot in strategy games, this is the first game in a long time that deals directly with the real possibility of thermonuclear war. Do you think some people might be sensitive to the game's theme?

Chris Delay: To be honest we make the games we want to make and we don't really pay a lot of attention to external input. However I believe that the nuclear war is portrayed in such an abstract manner that it’s unlikely to upset anyone.

FiringSquad: Defcon is being created primarily as a multiplayer game but will there be any single player modes as well?

Chris Delay: We're providing a Defcon computer player - effectively a bot. You can include as many of them as you like in the games you are setting up. So you could play a normal game of Defcon against (say) 2 enemy computer players.

The single player also contains a tutorial for learning the game, with computer players as the enemy. But Defcon is pretty easy to learn to play - just very hard to win.

FiringSquad: How does the player control his or her units on the world map?

Chris Delay: Its a pretty simple point and click interface. You click units to select them and can then click on enemy targets to initiate combat action, or you can right click anywhere to set movement targets.

FiringSquad: Can the player just fire their nuclear weapons against their opponent at the start of the game or does there need to be a build up before nuclear weapons are used?

Chris Delay: The game takes place in stages. During the early phases it’s sort of a cat and mouse game, with each side trying to position their subs and carriers ready for a massive nuclear strike, while also trying to find the enemy subs and carriers and destroy them. At some point nuclear conflict will erupt, and the game gets very violent for a short while. There is then a final phase where the last surviving units try to search each other out and get that final killer strike on the enemy capital.

FiringSquad: What can you tell us about the multiplayer modes and how many players can play the game?

Chris Delay: We're building a fairly complex Alliances system. If 6 players fight each other it tends to end up a shambles, so we're permitting players to form alliances and play (say) 3 versus 3. Each individual player is still playing to win - their score is independent of their alliances progress, and players can betray their alliances and switch to the opponents teams if they chose to and are able to convince the enemy to permit it. (This is determined by a vote of all the players in the destination alliance). We're predicting its going to get quite ugly, with players attempting to line up the perfect attack on a teammate before betraying them and striking at a key moment. There's going to be a lot of paranoia in alliance games. We've got in-game irc between players (public and private) and we've noticed lots of "wheeling and dealing" in the games we've played, with players desperately trying to secure their alliances. We've seen alliance members shooting overhead friendly planes down because they believed the planes were scouting the area for targets in preparation for a strike. This results in arguments in the chat channels, followed by skirmishes at sea, followed by retaliation, before finally the whole alliance collapses and everyone starts nuking the hell out of each other. It's awesome.

It's worth mentioning that alliances and betrayals are all options that can be disabled when the game is starting up, if you fancy a slightly more friendly game of global nuclear war.

FiringSquad: What other gameplay elements do you think are important?

Chris Delay: We're very excited by Office Mode. The basic idea is that a group of work-mates can start the game up in the morning in Office Mode, playing over their local area network. The game takes place entirely in real-time (you can quite easily end the world with nuclear conflict in 8 hours) and each player controls one territory, e.g. North America or Russia. You can hit the Panic key (press escape twice) which immediately removes the game from the screen and places a discreet icon in your system tray. That icon changes when important things happen - for example if you detect some nuclear launches the icon will flash as a Nuke for a few seconds. Because everything is taking place in real-time you've got at least 30 minutes before those nukes land, so you've got plenty of time to respond without interfering with your real work too much.

FiringSquad: The graphics in the screenshots look very minimal for Defcon. Was that intentional?

Chris Delay: Defcon has been a considerably shorter project to build than Darwinia - around 9 months so far compared to 3 years with Darwinia. It's a simpler and purer game in almost every sense. After Darwinia I think we all wanted a more controlled game design method and had learnt more specifically that content is bad if you’re a small team.

Even with Darwinia's retro look and feel it took months to make all the custom content - almost every level had something special on it that wasn't on any other level. The second demo level we made took us over four months – all for just one level with about an hour’s gameplay!

Defcon is a wonderful project because its almost entirely "content free". The world map continent data is publicly available, the world's major cities are all well known, the icons are simple, there’s no custom level designs or cut-scenes or dialog or anything - its just a pure game. The only serious content we are producing is the wonderful, ambient music (written by Alistair Lindsay and Michael Maidment - the same guys that did the awesome Darwinia audio).

FiringSquad: Will Introversion use Steam again to distribute the game?

Chris Delay: Yes. In addition, we’re considering a number of opportunities on a variety of platforms.

FiringSquad: What is the current status of the game's progress and when will it be released?

Chris Delay: We are currently at the beta-testing stage and are looking to release Defcon towards the end of September 2006.

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