Personal
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Do you play the game? What are your favorite heroes, combinations, gameplay features?
- TIM: Yeah I play EP and PC both daily - not superduper actively so ‘just’ all of the Titans, wars, important quests, and so on but still it takes a chunk of every day. I run with a fairly low-key set of Legendaries, still got Vivica (costumed though) in my lineup. I personally like ‘luck’ as a gameplay element so I’ve been really happy with my Rumpelstilskin - and Hel, I summoned her all the way back when she was the first Hero of the Month, yeah. I’ve got none of the top-tier meta heroes, I’ve got a pretty limited monthly summon budget - but that’s ok. And while I can’t really compete in meta, my super-wide roster of all kinds of stuff works great for Tournaments which I really, really like.
- JOEL: I’m currently taking a small break from playing EP as I have been lately super busy with development work. From my own roster, my favorite heroes include Onatel, Marjana’s costume, Sartana’s costume, Tyr and Kunchen. Onatel has one of my favorite Special Skills in the game so I was very happy to summon her. Lately, I have been enjoying Raid Tournaments a lot as I do have a large bench of rare and epic Heroes.
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I’m also generally curious about Tim and Joel as people. Who are you? Background?
- TIM: I’ve got a game artist background, and I’ve seen a lot of projects, good and bad in my 20+ years of game development. So these things kind of affected EP as well - we got the hero art set up super quickly at the start of the game development, and because I really, really dislike a failing game project (it just means everybody is super sad) I’m probably more eager than many to make hard or unpopular design calls as long as it ensures the game stays alive. Otherwise just a regular family guy who likes pizza, video games, and action movies.
- JOEL: My background is in programming. I went to a school that offered a program on game development and I was aiming to be a graphics programmer. During our game design courses, one of the teachers said to me I should do game design instead and I gave it a go and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 5 or 6 years. So I’m still in the early years of my career in games. I started working on EP at the beginning of 2018 and it’s been a great experience. In my free time, I spend time with my wife and kids, play games, and run a lot.
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What was the biggest constraint you had to deal with while developing Empires & Puzzles?
- TIM: We haven’t really had constraints as you might think - anything I’ve mentioned earlier related to prioritization and so on is always necessary and all the schedules and deadlines we have are entirely of our own making - they just help us to keep focused and keeps us from taking up more work than we can handle. We’re a small team but is that really a constraint? Nah, not really, we can still be really nimble and as said choose what to concentrate on.
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From a general staff point of view, are your feelings towards the game (and the community) different from the early days when the game was just starting to be a big success? If so, how and why?
- TIM: Well for me it’s still pretty much the same, of course, the success was an awesome surprise and a dream come true early on…but the game was from the getgo intended to be something that could be built upon for years to come and as such I’m still, personally, designing and looking at the thing from the very same perspective as I had 4 or 5 years ago; how to ensure we have something new in the game that’s good enough, soon enough, developed easily enough and so that we always have contingency plans for both good and bad occasions.
- JOEL: I don’t know if the way I feel about the game has changed during the years, I loved the game then and love it now. For me, the biggest change has been in how I think of the game. Early on it was a lot about specific elements of the gameplay and how specific heroes work. Nowadays it is more about the overall economy, overall balance, and how different systems interact with each other. Having a better understanding of what’s going on there has somewhat changed the way I look at the game.
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What season was the hardest to create and why was that particular theme chosen?
- TIM: Season themes probably are a bit easier now since we know each has to be different enough from the previous season…I mean season 2 was something where it was still a bit uncertain if we’d even really need a season 3, but now that we see that yeah, we should definitely have a season for each year it’s more of just choosing a theme and making sure we stay within the idea there, just so that it’d be nice and fun then to come up with the next one. Season 3 was really solid since the Norse mythology is so vast…but I wanted to avoid the obvious with Season 4 thus this bit more eccentric mix of Jules Verne-inspired characters. Season 5 is going to be a bit more familiar in some ways, as you’ll see later this year:)
- JOEL: For me, Season 2 was a big learning experience as it was pretty much the first thing I worked on when I started on the EP team. So in that sense, it was the hardest as I was still learning how everything works. Seasons 3 and 4 were more straightforward in the sense that I knew what I was doing. Of course, they had their own challenges, but compared to Season 2 they were easier.