[GameCareerGuide contributor Cassandra Khaw talks to Coffee Stain Studios, the indie team behind the shooter and tower defense hybrid Sanctum, delving in to the trials and lessons learned during development.]
Rock, Paper, Shotgun likened Coffee Stain Studios' sophomore project to certain parts of the male anatomy -- "The harder it gets, the more interesting it becomes." Their forums are filled with zealous fans recounting sessions that last for hours; one spoke about a 10-hour marathon.
An ambitious medley of first-person shooter elements and the tower defense genre, Sanctum has generally been well-received both by the public and the press; Metacritic accorded it an overall score of 70. With its polished visuals and intense gameplay, Sanctum has come a long way from its initial shape. Formerly an Unreal 3 mod, Sanctum has since been reworked multiple times and has even seen a full overhaul of its code base.
Given the team's commitment and professional outlook, it can be easy to forget that the people behind Coffee Stain Studios are, in fact, like-minded students as opposed to veterans of the industry. Where many have opted for the most cost-effective method of working at home, Coffee Stain Studios has established themselves in an office in Skovde with the assistance of a local company incubator. Recently, GameCareerGuide had the opportunity to interview the leads of each division and question them both about their game, their methodology as well as their company.
Tell us about the original team and the development process utilized in creating the first iteration of Sanctum? Being students, what was the main obstacle that you faced? Do you have your own offices? Or is Coffee Stain Studios just you and your friends at one of your places once in a while, working on this game?
Mikael: The first big obstacle was that we had no programmers in the beginning, and of course that we had to study at the same time. Everything became easier when we finally got hold of our epic programmers. About a month later we took the opportunity and moved everybody to an office.
Oscar: The original team was actually 11 students during our second game project at school (we all studied game development in Skövde, Sweden). When we started we were actually only designers and graphics artists, something that isn't really optimal. As we didn't have any programmers on the team we felt the best course of action was to make a UT3 mod. The first we focused on doing was the things that were critical for gameplay, followed by several iterations for polish, performance and game flow.
One thing in particular that I found challenging was, since I'm not a programmer, writing the path-finding for the enemies. The difficulty came both from inexperience and the limited documentation of UT3. To find out how something worked you had to comb through several hundred script files with thousands lines of code. Sanctum right now is the third version with the UT3 mod being the first and the UDK tech demo being the second.
We decided to start a company as soon as we got the chance. At first we had to sit and work at the University, as offices are both expensive and hard to get. But we talked to a local company incubator that helped us start up. So now we've got our own offices and do this full-time.
Markus: I wasn't in the team from the start; I joined when in the creation of the UDK-version of the game. It was quite crazy then, we snatched a room of computers in the University. The problem there was that there was no UDK installed, so we had to sit there with our own laptops, leeching internet from Anton's phone. After a few weeks, we got hold of two small offices (about 25square meters?) and added 11 people in there. The Internet connection problem was solved, but air became a valuable resource.
Doing this at the same time as trying to write a bachelor's thesis made us work quite a lot during this time. This tight deadline of three months made us use the good old: "Panic development process", we added a few bulletins on a wiki, and then someone took a task and marked it in another color to say it was work in progress. We often looked at the mod version to just check how the game should play and tried to reproduce this.
Gustaf: The original team consisted of 11 people. We were all students at the University of Skövde and in one of our classes we were to create a small game over a period of 10 weeks. At that time there was a ridiculously low amount of programmers available to us so we decided to make a mod in UT3 without the use of programmers. Being without programmers was without a doubt the greatest obstacle at the time. We managed to create a prototype of Sanctum only using the UT3editor and decided that we wanted to continue to develop the game.
Later we managed to attract some programmers to the project. Then things really started to get interesting.
