INTERVIEW: Muskedunder Interactive

CG: What appetite do you think exists for 3D flash games?

Magnus Alm: We work primarily with advergames, and we see a great demand in that space. Advertisement agencies are obviously looking to position their clients as edgy trendsetters. Working with new technology makes sense to them as they want to stand out from the crowd. With that said, I don’t think 3D web games will be the flavour of the month. I rather think that we’ll see a diversification in the crowded web games space.

We have the classic 2D flash games, such as Bloons and Fancy Pants. We also have the hugely popular strategy and management games, such as Travian and Powerchallenge. 3D flash games is a new segment, which require more focused development and experienced teams. It’s a niche of quality within a genre that’s flooded with quantity. It’s now possible to offer the equivalence to triple-A content on the web, without any additional installation of plug-ins to the browser, and there is always a demand for quality content.
 
CG: As 3D processing is more strenuous on a PC, do 3D flash games alienate users of older machines?

Johan Peitz: Yes and no. It depends very much on the game and what kind of assets it uses. Since rendering is strenuous, it is very important to optimize this process as much as possible. Not only programming-wise, but the entire pipeline must be set up to produce assets that don't eat up resources. 3D artists must be very skilled using low poly models, animators must be good at animating at low frame rates, level designers must be able to make rich levels using few resources, etc.

It must also be possible to dynamically remove and add graphical elements to the experience depending on the performance. It really pushes the whole team to a new level of resourcefulness. Developers who fail to recognize this, will have a hard time reaching a large audience.
 
CG: What sort of interest have you had in your technology, and what sort of clients are you working with?

Magnus Alm: We’ve seen a great interest from both our advergame clients but also the casual game space. We’ve developed a browser based casual MMO prototype in full 3D which has yielded a lot of positive response and we are currently in dialogue with a potential partner for that project. Furthermore we have showed some 3D material, including our newly released Pepsi-game, to large media houses, toy manufacturers and large IP owners. We have many exiting parallel dialogues at the moment.
 
CG: Do you think there’s a danger that the casual gaming audience might find 3D titles more alienating than 2D games?

Johan Peitz: Potentially yes, but this again depends on the developers. Developing, or should I say designing, interaction for 3D games is harder as the possible interactions aren't as familiar as in regular mouse only 2D games. The challenge here is to make 3D games as accessible as possible, without making the 3D graphics just a gimmick.
 
CG: What sort of potential do you think the technology offers, and how much further can you push it?

Johan Peitz: I see three main advantages. First is the possibility to take 3D gameplay into the browser and offer something new to the casual audience. Second, it's a way to widen the audience that today plays browsed based games and also include the more traditional hardcore gamer by offering titles that are usually seen on game dedicated PCs. Last but not least, it allows developers to speed up their production pipeline by separating the asset creation from the Flash IDE.
 
As for how much we can push it, it's hard to say. Flash Player 10 has just been released and it really improves performance. If you look at the flash community, people are doing some crazy things but it will take some time before those high end effects can be placed into a full-scale game. As mentioned earlier, it's a team effort. But with a talented team, I think we can push it really far.
 
CG: What do you predict the next big advances in browser-based gaming will be?
 
Johan Peitz: User generated content. There's a lot of creative people playing games, and if they like what they're playing they want to contribute. I think we will see a lot of games going the same direction as Little Big Planet, making creation a big part of the gameplay.
 
Magnus Alm: In general we’ll see a huge rise of web games, it will affect traditional game publishing the same way as web music services has affected traditional music publishing. There is much to say on this topic, but to keep it short – the games market will diversify, what we perceive as games and are willing to pay for will diversify, and in some years we’ll start to see a lot of consolidation in this space.