Interview With Anthony Keeton Of JetCat Games, Developers Of Heliborne

I recently had the chance to sit down with JetCat Games' Community and Media Relations Manager Anthony Keeton to talk about their game Heliborne. We talked about the current flight model, the Open Alpha, the wars and eras the game covers, and more.

Me: How long has Heliborne been in development?

Keeton: Actively, I’d say about two years and most of the development work has been done by two or three people. We’re considering ourselves a little bit more actively-in-development now that we’re on Steam and we’re coming out of our Alpha phase and into Beta.

Is it important to the development of the game that Early Access sales go well?

Very. It’s very important to us as a team. We’re hoping that we’re producing a product that people are happy with, that they’re enjoying, and that they’re having a good time with. Obviously, there are lots of different stigmas in regards to Early Access titles, but we’re hoping that we’re trying to do something a little bit different and give the gamers something that they really want, that’s unique, that they enjoy, and that they think is worth their money.

Well, when I do say “very,” I should clarify and quantify that we have been working on the game without any real substantial income. It’s public information on our website that we’ve received investments. The company is actually headquartered out of Vilnius, Lithuania. I’m the only American on the team.

What’s happened there is there’s a venture capitalist investment firm in Lithuania that’s assisted five companies in starting up. We’re one of those companies. So that’s what’s been sort of paying the bills outside of us being on some sort of live digital distribution platform.

How has the Open Alpha coinciding with the Early Access launch fared?

It’s been good. We were more Closed Alpha for the last six months or so to a year. We had a few very dedicated players that were playing the game pretty much by themselves and testing and giving us feedback. The Open Alpha decision that was made has seen a lot more people come on, a lot more people play, a lot more feedback—good and bad. Obviously, there are people who have chosen to support us outside of the Open Alpha and we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from those guys, as well.

So the Open Alpha’s been a really good decision. We’re hoping that, with the Alpha while the game is on Steam for purchase, people can apply to the Alpha, get accepted almost immediately—it does take time to parse and send out the invites, but they’ll get accepted almost immediately—and then they can play the game for free and decide if they really want to spend that $10 on us or not and support us or not.

We’re hoping that it’s been received well and it seems to have been. It will be closing eventually, though.

How long do you think it will take before the Open Alpha closes?

Right now we’re keeping it open until the next major update adds the first pass at the new feature and system into the game, which is deck building. Which allows you to build squadrons of helicopters to take into a match. Once the first pass of that feature is in the game, which should be sometime in the next three-to-four days, then we will shut the Alpha version down and you will have to purchase the Early Access version to get back in.

We’ll keep it open as long as we need to to make sure that people can play before we shut it down and we move entirely onto Steam.

What is “deck building?”

The closest thing I can think of is Wargame: European Escalation. Right now, you go into a match and you play whatever helicopters are available for that particular tier. Our tiers are based off of historical periods of helicopter and rotary wing aviation. When you die, you respawn and that’s pretty much the end of it.

The new feature will actually allow us to start working on the progression system and allow players to have a little bit of progression. When you go into a match, you can actually go in with a squadron of helicopters. You sort of build that squadron by treating each helicopter as a card in a deck. The helicopters have point costs based on weapons loadouts and depending on how powerful they are in perspective to other helicopters, which represents how many times you can take them out.

A lot of this, I should say, is subject to change, but it’s what we’re hoping to get out within the next week. When you’re actually in the game and playing now, you’ll still be limited to, say, Vietnam era helicopters on the Vietnam map but you’ll have your squadron. If your helicopter’s damaged you can fly back to base, land, leave that helicopter with the mechanics, so to speak—it will have a repair timer—and then fly out on another helicopter in your squadron. Once all of your helicopters have been shot down you’re out of the game.

We’re trying to do the best of both worlds: MMO and single-player-y kind of things, and not do the typical free-to-play progression.

The game is going to continue to be buy-to-play after release, correct?

Well, you purchase once like Guild Wars, basically. One time purchase and then you can play the game as much as you want after that. We are going to support Steam Workshop and mods, believe it or not. That’s being talked about—how we go about doing that.

We’re not talking about DLC or anything in Early Access. We’re not going to do that to you. We are focused on the core game for at least the next year or two, regardless. After that, if we get a chance to go live, fully out of Early Access and into a full release, then the discussion of maps and packs of DLC like large groups of helicopters is something that we will start talking about then.

So it’s still up in the air whether the game will have DLC or not?

Yes, it’s still up in the air that we’re going to do it at all. That’s kind of how the industry is going. So we have to really decide a year or two down the road if it’s worth it to our customers and our players to say “okay, we didn’t get a chance to do this but now we would like to and here it is as DLC.” We have to figure out what’s worth it. How much do we charge? How much content are we putting in these DLCs?

Again, this is stuff that might not happen at all. If it does, our players will be involved in the discussion as soon as we start thinking about it. One of the big things is that we’re open and we’re transparent. We want to talk to everybody, get all of our feedback, and ask our playerbase “what is value to you?”

We’ll talk to our playerbase then, but again, it could not happen at all. We could just stay focused on the game outside of any DLC, continuing free updates.

How involved is the community going to be in Heliborne’s Early Access phase? I noticed that you may even consider adding another flight model based on feedback.

We have already made a lot of changes in just the last few days based on community feedback. When we say it, we mean it. If you check the Steam Community, the forums, our Twitter, and Facebook, you can see me and the other members of the team very actively in discussions on Steam, for example, and the forums. I, myself, am in the game alongside our lead designer and lead programmer to get active feedback and actually play with our community. We’re hoping to build a relationship with our playerbase—a very close one. We want to know what they want, we want to know how much they want it, and if they want it enough and we can do it, then we’re going to.

If people want a realistic flight model enough then we’ll look at the resources and the time required and we’ll be able to give the community a realistic answer of “okay, we can do this, but don’t expect it for six months.” We’ve only got one programmer, one artist, a biz dev, myself, and one other person right now. We’re a very, very small team and we have to judge our time. All of us can get our hands into the project and do things, but as far as dedicated developers there’s Diana Leer, who has done all of the helicopters, texturing, and map design. There’s Ilja Toldayev, who’s done all of the programming. Then there’s Raman Ulasau, who’s our biz dev and lead designer. There’s myself, Community and Media Relations Manager. Then there’s another gentleman, Illia Lahunou, who is focusing on the Russian and non-English speaking side of the community.

Currently, you have scenarios set in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and one other. What other eras and regions are you hoping to include?

Just the three. Pretty much from the 50s and 60s to 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s. From the beginning of helicopter aviation to where it really got its kick-off in Vietnam—Korean conflict in Vietnam—moving up into more recent events. We’re planning to stay between about 1960 and the year 2000. If a helicopter flew before or after that, it probably won’t be in the game. So you could say Afghanistan and Gulf War as far as modern helicopters and then Korean, Vietnam era conflict and we’re sticking to about that area.

So there will be more maps based on the same wars and timeframes, rather than different timeframes?

Yes. You can probably expect, for example, more Vietnam-era maps, more maps out of places like the Middle East for the modern helicopters, then you could expect a completely different conflict zone.

Could you explain the flight model in a bit more detail?

I can tell you that each helicopter in flight is modeling engine power, thrust, weight, degrees per second radians in terms of how fast it can turn, it can yaw, ascent and descent speeds, nose up and nose down degrees per second—all kinds of flight attributes and flight dynamics. Everything that you can possibly think of and we’re doing this even in an arcade environment. Obviously, there are a lot of things to worry about in balancing these helicopters. Everything from straight line speed to how quickly can it climb to how quickly can it descend to how quickly can it pitch, roll, and yaw, do everything that it needs to do.

We’re moving forward on modeling the differences and the performance of the helicopters based on troop loads and whether it’s actually empty or full. A lot of that stuff’s in the game right now and, without boring people to death, just assume that we’re modeling everything from engine power to rotor disk diameter to how quickly the rotor turns the aircraft one way or the other—things like that. There are about 80 different flight attributes now. There are actually more flight attributes now than when I wrote the information on the Steam store page.

So everything is being modeled, but it’s being distilled into an arcade environment?

Yes. I guess you could use the old term “we’ve got a simulation environment that we’ve nerfed.” We’re kind of forcing it into an arcade environment and I can tell you that helicopters are exorbitantly difficult to model. They don’t act like any other vehicle out there in the vehicle combat genre so it’s very, very, very difficult to do this correctly.

A lot of this stuff is relatively easy to do in a full 3D environment when we’re talking about “how fast can the model go up, down, left right, turn left, turn right? How fast can you pull the nose up, pull the nose down?” Stuff like that is relatively easy to do in an arcade environment. Then, with the updates to the flight model, where we’re modeling engine power and everything else and how much thrust and how much it weighs and how that’s affecting the momentum of the helicopter and how big they are. Their flight profiles, all of that stuff, have been put into the engine and we’re kind of just pushing it down into a more arcade flight model, which actually makes it a little easier for us to do the more simulator-focused stuff later if people want it, but when I say easy, I don’t mean that we can just flip a switch and do it tomorrow.

And you would be supporting joysticks with the addition of a more simulator-focused setting?

Oh yes. TrackIR, VR, pedals, joysticks, throttles; if we went that direction. If that’s really what the community wanted to see. Let me preface this with “we have to see a large portion of the community want this.” To put it straight, if ten guys out of ten thousand want this, it’s probably not going to happen.

We’d have to pull aside to really make sure that the peripherals connect correctly and that they control the vehicles correctly. We don’t have cockpit models yet. We don’t have a spare 3D designer that could work on cockpit models. That’s something else that we’d want to do if we add a simulator mode. We’d obviously want to give you guys the ability to fly in cockpit.

So the simulator model has to be understood that it really needs to be wanted and, if it is, and it changes our design focus and our development focus, then hopefully, people are a little bit more patient with us and understanding with us that, if they really want this, we’re going to have to take a left turn to make it happen.

Do you have any details about how the tech tree and progression system will change the current system?

None that I can give you concrete. Basically, the goal is that you’ll start with one helicopter from every era for all three eras so that you can play everything right off the bat. Then, we’re probably shooting for 40-60 hours of gameplay before you unlock everything.

In comparison to the other World of-type games, if you take into consideration World of Tanks Tier 1 to Tier 10, it’s more than 100 hours, if not more for just one line of tanks. We’re hoping to push that down because we’re not a free-to-play business model, so we can’t incentivize things with a membership bonus and an experience bonus and things like that. We’re really not looking to be looked at like a World of Helicopters. That’s kind of not what we’re going for, but obviously, it’s a valid comparison.

We’re going to try and do it differently where you can get in, play, and experience some progression and then get to the point where you can just enjoy the game period without having to worry about “my friend’s at Tier 10 and I’m down here at Tier 1 and it’s going to take me 6 months to get to Tier 10.” That’s what I’m hoping for.

Is Frontline going to be added to the other maps?

No. Those maps are specific to the base capture point game mode. We are probably going to change those maps, though, to where it will be 5v5 instead of 8v8. Eight versus eight is a little too crowded for maps of those sizes. Those maps are what you can expect for the standard base capture mechanics.

The Frontline mode that is on Operation Nguyen Hue—which is the much, much larger map with the bases and convoys and everything else like that—we’ll continue developing more maps of that size specifically for that mode.

Going forward, will maps be specific to each game mode?

We’ll have to wait and see. Right now, the maps are being specifically built to the game mode. If we see a desire and people are asking for it, it’s relatively easy to build a map and then say that it can operate on any game mode.

For example, when you start a match, you’re actually on a helipad at a base. The large map on Nguyen Hue is an 8v8 and there are only 8 landing pads.

When we build a map every point is an actual, physical location. Gulf of Tonkin, for example, the points where you land, drop off troops, and they get into patrol boats and go off. Those have been specifically built into the map for that.

People are probably used to shooters where it doesn’t matter what type of game mode you’re doing, the map changes. We don’t really have the resources to do that yet. We can do it. It’s just a matter of time and development resources put aside where we say “okay, we have two versions of Nguyen Hue—one for Frontline and one for capture the flag. Whichever one loads up is the one that you play on.”

Right now, since we’re so early in development, we’re very much focused on trying this game mode on this map this way and seeing what players think and moving from there.

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Heliborne is available now on Steam Early Access.