titleThose who have been to one of our LAN parties know that our location is central to many larger cities, Fort Wayne being one. We’ve attended a few LAN events in that area, including one hosted by member Reaper from Fort Wayne Gamers. It was exciting enough to hear that John had volunteered his coding expertise for an indie game studio just on the heels of releasing their first game, but we were even more so when we learned the studio was local, operating out of Fort Wayne. We quickly made contact, and were invited to sit in during one of their weekly meetings.

Written by: Adam

Pictures by: Wes

Rapture Game Studios

The Sunday meeting was marked as mandatory, which meant we were going to have the opportunity to meet a majority of Rapture Game Studios. We walked into an apartment converted to studio, packed with members of the team, some working on full tower computers and others collaborating on couches with laptops open, typing away. Zach Steinke, CEO and co-founder, met us at the door and ran through a brief introduction. There was a natural organization to the room: concept artists on one couch, sound artists on another, modelers face-to-face sharing workspace and bouncing ideas back and forth, with Zach in somewhat of the center, bouncing to and from each station.

All around the apartment there are white boards with various notes scribbled including a timeline, the most bold of which stands out as “Possibly make profit”. Rapture Game Studios shares the same story of many Indie developers. They are a group of dedicated and talented individuals with full time jobs and responsibilities devoting any free time to something they believe in.

Zach: “You know the meaning of Rapture as a Christian stand point. There are multiple religions here, non-religions; it doesn’t have anything to do with religion really. When you go into the definition of it, you have another meaning of changing one’s life due to a certain event, and we put that into gaming terms: changing the player’s gaming experience.

A lot of us went to school together, in the same class. We all applied to studios and were like, you know what, we’re sick and tired of being declined, we’ll just start up our own. It was basically just word of mouth, then we got Youtube up and Facebook, then all of the sudden people started coming in. I’ve had resumes come in week after week after week, and I’m like, I can’t hire you people. I had a resume come in from 38 Studios that just went under, which was the lead character artist, the 3D modeler. And I’m like, if I could have you on the team; it would be a life saver. I’ve had guys from Infinity Ward actually email us; Robert Bowling has tweeted to us and talked to us, from Ouya. David Sanchez with GameZone, we talk a lot over Twitter and Skype. Then I’ve got a guy over in England, and he really just pushes us over there. I guess we’re really popular in England. And I’m kinda like, where are all the sales at if we’re so popular, you know?

From day one, I’ve always told all these guys that I’m not about money, I don’t care. I’m here to do this as a passion. It's just a dream to do games, I’ve wanted to build games since I was what, three? Playing Zelda, playing Mario, beating it and at that age just knowing this is what I want to do. And we’ve just kept pushing and pushing.

We were talking about publishing for one of our projects right before you guys came, and I would love to do a hard copy of this game, but I want to maintain ownership of the company. I want to maintain control, full control, I don’t want them breathing down the back of my neck saying ‘hey when are you getting this thing done’, or ‘when are you making Call of Duty? Modern Warfare 7?’ (Laughs).

 Yeah, I don’t want that. If someone were to offers us 80 million dollars I think Josh and I would turn around and say yeah, let’s take the money, they can have the name of this studio; we’ll just start up another studio. Screw ‘em, you know? They can have the name.”

Though Rapture Game Studios is an indie developer, it’s obviously a team effort. The apartment is packed with individuals work, talking, chatting, at least ten people at any time and some coming and going, taking phone calls, coming or going from rest or work.

Zach: “We’ve got one animator right now, most of the guys can model though, so two animators really. Josh is redoing our website fully, that’s all on him, kinda sucks for him because he’s VP, he’s been with me since day one since we revamped. We started in 2010 and we were working on game that was so unorganized, no documentation or anything, and it fell out. We lost a couple guys; we had started with a five man crew. Josh jumped back onboard and was like, alright, if we’re going to do this we gotta do this shit right this time. So we started getting more people involved, ended up with 21 guys.“

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He goes on, introducing everyone in the room in a round-table manner. We started talking about Gunblitz, which had just released on September 4th. Shawn and Debbie passed around concept art cells for a companion comic to explore the narrative behind the game. Though it’s still a work in progress, they are planning to have it ready and digitalized for the debut of Gunblitz on the Ouya system.

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Zach: “When we launched Gunblitz in September that was actually our first organized game with a design document, deadlines and everything. It had a story, and we were going to launch it with a comic in between levels. Well, the deadline ended up creeping up on us too fast and we’re like let’s just launch it as beta, first levels one through eight, and we’ll release an update.”

Eric: “You’re a group of people who are involved in basically what was a civil war between Earth and Mars, and you’re part of a separatist faction. You get transported to an alien galaxy to save this race from evil that are taking over, and they have enlisted you to help them, and the only way to get back to Earth is to help. They are too cowardly to fight for themselves but have the weapons, so they give you ‘Gunblitz’, which is the ship.”

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Gunblitz did officially release on September 4th as planned. We asked Zach what that night was like, his eyes widened as though reliving the stress as he set the scene for us.

Zach: “I’m probably going to go insane we have a big game with a dead line. It’s going to drive me up the wall.”

John: “We had a lot of things we were working on until the eleventh hour, for sure. I was almost pulling my hair out.”

Zach: “That night, when we launched on September 3rd , September 4th, he (John) was there at like 11:00PM, he ended up leaving, he said ‘I’m going home, whenever you guys get this thing rolling call me’.“

John: “I’m going home; I’m getting my triple monitors ready so I can iron this thing out when it’s ready. I’m doing set-up, you know, I’m doing DRM, I’m doing all that stuff so I need to have the final thing before I can process it, make the package, and then put it on the website.”

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Zach: “So a half hour passes, its eleven thirty, and Keith is like zooming in code and everything. 11:59, we release. Okay? We did release at 11:59. But here’s the problem: Keith had missed one line of code from the first level, the one that would take you to the second level. So when you bought the game, it would’ve just played the first level, and when you beat it, it would go right back to the first level. And it would just continuously loop. We’re like, ‘really?! You tested it right before!’ Yeah, it worked!’ “

John: (laughing) “And here I was, worried that my DRM had somehow goofed it, because what I’m doing, is really, really nasty.”

Zach: “So when he changed that line of code, it screwed something up in level four, way down the line, because, I don’t know, Game Maker is wonky on code and developing games, we probably won’t use it again. So he goes to test it to level five, and level four crashes the whole game. This is like 12:30, okay? He’s sitting there like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on’, he’s got headache, he doesn’t feel good, and it was awful. I’m outside smoking up a storm and on the phone with John and I’m like ‘I’m about ready to kill this dude’ ( laughs).

It’s now like 2:30 in the morning and Keith is yelling at the computer. Keith didn’t even leave until around four, and I had to work at eight in the morning. After Keith had it ready to go, levels one through eight, I bought it to make sure it worked.”

John: “I was glad I was home because I just passed out after.”

Zach: “I wanted to run through a wall. It’s going to be a nightmare when bigger games come out.”

John: “I think what really hurt us is that we didn’t have a true QA cycle. We really didn’t, and I think that as long as we work that in, with future games, we’ve got a lot of things that we learned, the hard way. Now, once we get a proper QA cycle that’s going to alleviate a lot of that."

Zach: “And I think every indie studio starts off hard.”

John: “You put a date out there and you say, people, we’re going to have this out by this date, and then you got to do it.”

Gunblitz is now public, but the work is far from done. Rapture still struggles getting the game in front of the eyes of consumers.

Zach: “Wild Game Studios is another one we’re working with, they are starting up their own digital distribution like Steam and Dsura. We’re actually one of the first indie studios jumping on board with them, so we’ll see.

Then Ouya, in March, we were the first Indie studio to publicly announce working with them. It’s great because Julie Uhrman emails us personally and we talk to her. It’s nice to see these guys focus more on the indie based market because no one cares about indie developers, especially like the big publishers, EA, Activision.

Joystiq jumped on that, we said we were coming out for the PC and for Ouya, and the next day there was an article. I didn’t even know they had written an article. One of our friends was like, ‘hey good job getting on Joystiq’, tweets this to me, and I’m ‘Joystiq? Like, really? Send me the link!’”

Eric: “We were mentioned in an article with Final Fantasy III? Because they’re releasing on the Ouya as well, and that was like, Final Fantasy? We’re in the same article!”

Zach: “Being in a headline of ‘Ouya gets Final Fantasy III and Gunblitz’, that is just awesome. And we’ve had articles written with ‘major developers: Robert Boling from Robotaki, Rapture Game Studios, and Square Enix’…wait a second, does that say major developers right at the top? Yes. We win.”

We started discussing future projects, looking at the project names time-lined on white boards. Zach explained that the development team splits in another fashion, into small groups each working on a different title for future release.

Zach: “We’re working on, what, four or five projects right now? We did a timeline one night, we were just sitting here drinking and eating Taco Bell, and we were writing on the board, and what did we get out to, 2029, 2030?” (Laughing) “Just all these projects were laid out, these ideas, and every idea that we’ve had is a written down synopsis or fully written out.

We haven’t started a Kickstarter, but we’ve considered it, for future projects. We haven’t announced any other games aside from Gunblitz. I think we are going to announce the next game in Decemeber, to launch for either April or March.

Every single game we are working on now is fully 3D. One game is highly detailed, actually two of the games, the other is more of a cell shade type of game, but it is three dimensional.”

Eric: “Genre wise, it spans RPG, first person, third person; we’re already developing the functionality of something else.”

Zach: “We are working on a game that will be LAN based initially, and then we are going to do a multiplayer set up where you are going to hook up to servers or some sort of servers when we get it working. I think every single game we’re working on has some sort of idea with LAN and multiplayer.”

Eric: “Personally I’d like to do something you don’t have to be connected to the Internet to play the game with other people. That’s a pain in the ass. I remember playing back in the day StarCraft, Halo, games like that where everyone had to have a copy of the game but you didn’t have to connect to the Internet.”

Gunblitz is available from the Rapture Game Studios website, and is also at the time of publication a candidate for Steam’s Greenlight program, which allows Steam users to vote for the games they want to see available on the digital distributor.

Zach: “Greenlight, we’re at like 25% upvote.”

Eric: “We’re actually in danger of being booted off, aren’t we? We’ve stagnated I believe.”

Zach: “We started off at a ten dollar buy, we had a couple of sales on it, we dropped it down to seven, and we’re talking about dropping it to five, just because we want people to buy it. That’s what our main focus is right now, is getting it out there, and getting our name out there.”

steam Copy

Wes and I talked for a while there after, checking out concept art, chatting with writers and designers about their plans for future projects. Hearing people talk so passionately about video games made us feel right at home. Each of the 21 team members has lives outside of the studio: jobs, commitments. But they share a common passion for game design, and a dream to someday see fellow gamers enjoying their work.

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Zach: “You know who Naughty Dog is? When you talk Uncharted or you talk about their games, it’s more or less a Naughty Dog production. I want to get to that point where it is a Rapture Game Studios production. I don’t want to be known for the game, like Call of Duty for instance. Who the hell makes call of Duty? I mean, I know who it is, Activision or Treyarch, or who is it now? Hammerhead? You don’t know who these studios are but you know the game. I don’t want that. I want to be known for the studio and the quality of work.”

 

Author Bio
Lersar
Author: Lersar
Contributing Editor / Event Staff
Adam is a big proponent of LAN parties, esports and speed-running, and helps organize our semi-annual LAN events. He has covered hardware and software reviews of a wide variety, but most content these days come from event coverage, such as other LAN parties.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #28348 02 Nov 2012 17:29
A look inside a local indie studio.

Also here is a link to their game on Steams Greenlight if you would like to support them.

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetai...02189583&searchtext=
Arxon's Avatar
Arxon replied the topic: #28349 02 Nov 2012 18:22
Amazing read. These are the people who push the games to new levels and are not all about pushing 20 games out that suck. Instead they push one with less bugs and more fun. I am going to buy their game just to support them.
Lersar's Avatar
Lersar replied the topic: #28350 02 Nov 2012 19:36
This was such a great experience. We're looking forward to working with Rapture in the future, too, they shared some info on their upcoming games that we can't talk about, but we're really excited for it. It's no understatement to say they are going to keep busy, especially with Ouya on top of everything.
Reaper's Avatar
Reaper replied the topic: #28358 04 Nov 2012 03:26
Geeze am I really going that bald?!?! Ok, perhaps that's a bit rhetorical...

Thanks for coming to check us out, guys! Anyone wanting to know anything else (within reason) feel free to ask. I'm a programmer on the team, and I'm really one of the "new" guys but maybe if someone asks a question I can't answer I can convince the right person to sign up on here & answer.
Arxon's Avatar
Arxon replied the topic: #28360 04 Nov 2012 11:18
What type of game is your next release?
Reaper's Avatar
Reaper replied the topic: #28364 05 Nov 2012 19:11
What types of games would be a more accurate question, because we do have multiple projects on the burner. Unfortunately I don't have the authority to disclose any information about upcoming/unannounced titles, though as mentioned in the article we have projects in the works that "spans RPG, first person, third person; we’re already developing the functionality of something else." (from the interview).

The real reason is even if I did tell you today what we envision for some of our projects, the release may not even be close to what we have in our design docs & source control today. We're not trying to feature creep, and we're definitely NOT shooting everything with the nerf cannon, but we are constantly evaluating what is fun to us and every week making sure something is as fun as we can make it.

I can say that one of our major initiatives is to take Gunblitz and port it to iOS & Android ASAP. There's talk of getting on the major consoles, as well but don't hold me to that one. I'm not involved much on that project, but am told it is underway. If you look around for us a bit, you'll see that Gunblitz is also announced to be a launch day title for Ouya, which we're pretty excited (and nervous) about. So, once we get the dev kit for Ouya, it's going to be all hands on deck doing whatever we need to do to make sure the release on Ouya is as smooth as possible.

Anyways, good question, sorry I couldn't really give you exactly what you were looking for on an answer, though!
Arxon's Avatar
Arxon replied the topic: #28365 05 Nov 2012 19:22
I understand, can't blame a guy for trying =D
Reaper's Avatar
Reaper replied the topic: #28366 05 Nov 2012 19:33

Arxon wrote: I understand, can't blame a guy for trying =D

Not at all man. Trust me I'd love to tell you guys everything I'm working on!
Arxon's Avatar
Arxon replied the topic: #28367 05 Nov 2012 19:47
If you need a beta/alpha Tester let me know. I do a lot of them for all different types of games.
Lersar's Avatar
Lersar replied the topic: #28370 06 Nov 2012 06:49
John, one of the things you mentioned was being worried about the DRM, with even AAA-budget studios miss-stepping on their releases, its a very understandable concern. It sounds like much of that responsibility for Gunblitz was yours, what was that like?
Reaper's Avatar
Reaper replied the topic: #28380 06 Nov 2012 11:17

Lersar wrote: John, one of the things you mentioned was being worried about the DRM, with even AAA-budget studios miss-stepping on their releases, its a very understandable concern. It sounds like much of that responsibility for Gunblitz was yours, what was that like?

First off, let me say DRM in any form is never fun for anyone! Its only purpose in my opinion is to help keep honest people honest. The DRM for Gunblitz (and likely for future Rapture games) was totally on me, and I had 2 weeks to get it done, having never done anything quite similar before. Some might think that is stressful, the thing is, I like challenges, and there were certainly plenty with this. First off, coming up with a system that wouldn't put the majority of people off. Our system does require an online activation during your first play, but it doesn't do any type of phoning home or "double checking" after that. If you copy the game to another computer, or certain aspects of your hardware change (the parts that would generally mean basically a new computer) then you're going to get the activation prompt again, and our web side will run some logic to decide whether or not to allow that activation.

This thought was in my head the whole time, knowing Gunblitz was going to be around a $5-$10 product: Anything can be hacked & any security can be bypassed given motivation & time. If there ever was a model against this, it would be MMO's, and yet look at all the private servers there are for games like WoW. So, my goal was to try to make it complex enough that there was really just not much reward for anyone wanting to do that. And, really, if we saw a cracked Gunblitz on a torrent site, is that really so bad? Obviously our name is getting out there at that point.

Going back to the challenges I mentioned... Obviously there was the time constraint of having to design a program that would protect, activate, and launch the game within 2 weeks. Along the way I had to battle with:
  • The fact that 2 machines running the same OS may not give consistent results based upon minute differences in their setup
  • Windows APIs (functions that Microsoft provides so you can interact with Windows) can behave very differently between WinXP -> Win7, or 32 vs 64 bit
  • The engine Gunblitz was programmed in had a builtin lightweight DRM that my DRM would trigger from time-to-time
  • The DRM was tripping up antivirus programs due to "unusual runtime compression" for a while

May not seem like a lot, but certainly was enough for 2 weeks. I probably have no less than 75 builds from my initial version to what is in use today, based upon team testing and my own internal testing against ~10 VM's running everything from WinXP to Win 2k8 R2 server.
garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #28411 12 Nov 2012 08:07
thanks for all of the answers
Reaper's Avatar
Reaper replied the topic: #28419 13 Nov 2012 09:17

garfi3ld wrote: thanks for all of the answers

My pleasure!
Lersar's Avatar
Lersar replied the topic: #28421 13 Nov 2012 18:12
Is Greenlight going looking any better?
Reaper's Avatar
Reaper replied the topic: #28422 13 Nov 2012 18:29

Lersar wrote: Is Greenlight going looking any better?

From what I heard it's still hovering somewhere pretty low. I think we are having the same blues in the same regard as this guy was: www.joystiq.com/2012/10/09/not-getting-n...-incredipedes-story/ . I expect it will take a few more games out there from us to make a huge difference, either that or a huge marketing campaign. Since I have never been a marketer myself (how many of my LAN parties had any bit of sponsorship?) don't look to me to solve that particular problem ;-).

We're in the middle of launching on Desura as well, which is a smaller community but seems to be really focused on indie game projects. Their review process is much like Steam's old one - submit a game, have someone review it, and then pass/fail launch. We've already got approval through the first step and are in their reviewer queue for the final phase.

We also had unfortunate timing with the release of our game - after September many people are thinking of those huge AAA titles and saving every penny for whatever game(s) they can afford and interest them the most (guilty as charged, here!) . I think Ouya's planned release in April 2013 is super smart because that's when a large enough percentage of gamers will be ready to spend more money on games.
Lersar's Avatar
Lersar replied the topic: #36269 15 Feb 2015 00:50
Wanted to give this a bump as Rapture Game Studios announced today that Gunblitz has been greenlit! If you haven't already, give them a follow on Facebook and show them some support, stay tuned for information on when the game is available. Congratulations guys!

www.facebook.com/RaptureGameStudios
garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #36271 15 Feb 2015 04:24
awesome news!

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