Interview with V2Leagues, Developers of Realm Adventure League

I recently had a chance to sit down with Drew Jones and Larry Hummel of V²Leagues to talk about their current Kickstarter project, Realm Adventure League. They gave me a tour of the game and I asked questions as we went. Topics covered include the amount of characters, mashup leagues, the world model, and much more. Considering that the tour would have extended this interview from 10 pages to closer to 30, I summed up how they explained the game as a preface to the interview.

If you imagine a self-contained fantasy world—one like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV—where guilds go on weekly raids, taking their ten best players to fight against raid bosses and their henchmen, and you place a game of fantasy football over it, you will have a basic understanding of how Realm Adventure League works. Realm Adventure League differs from fantasy football in that the characters do not have real life counterparts. You are not drafting a team of real players, but of fictional fantasy heroes and monsters.

Instead, the game has a world that operates on its own. Every week, each guild's AI director leads their guild into battle. Every week, the raid lineup is chosen. Every week, both guilds and clans—the "bad guys"—generate points that determine the score of the team that they were drafted into. These fights occur independently of everything that is occurring in the league. To the league, all that matters is the score that the character generates.

However, there is a world under there. Characters can be knocked out, fatigued, retired, or even killed. Major events are written about in in-game newspapers. There is a live feed of all events that occur in the realm that each player has access to at all times. Players will have to keep track of the characters and what is happening in their lives, swapping them out as necessary in order to do well.

Furthermore, characters can be "influenced." Players can give each character healing or damage buff potions. Characters can be blessed or cursed. Each of these will subtly affect the character's ability to fight.

With all of this in mind, here is the interview:

Me: So teams and shields are going to be on a per league basis?

Jones: Per league basis, yes. So you can be in different leagues with different team names, shields, and all that. Every single league you join, you’re going to create your own guild and shield and everything else.

Is there a maximum of ten teams per league?

Yeah, right now we have upwards of ten teams maximum. That’s due to the number of characters that have to be created and available to be able to play the game. We’re right around 800 total characters that are going to be available. That’s split between two sides, Clans and Guilds.

The reason why there’s a 10-team limitation is that you have to have "X" amount of people available for each role and there’s only so many active on each AI battle so not all of the characters are active each time.

This was interesting in testing. We found out that we had a limitation and we had to actually up the number of characters. So right now, a 10-team league is the max.

Is it 10 teams per side or 5 teams per side?

Right now, leagues can recruit from the Guild side only and it’s all going to be created from the Guild side. When you create a league, everybody’s going to be picking from the Guild side.

Later on, when we get to that point, we’ll open up the Clan league. If everything works itself out we’ll be able to do a mashup league where you can pick characters from everywhere.

So right now, it’s not possible for one team to recruit from the Clan side and another team to recruit from the Guild side?

No. We won’t launch with that, but it’s in the roadmap.

Essentially, what it is is on the Guild side is we have roles called Tank, Healer, and DPS. The Clan side has Bosses, Minibosses, and Minions. It’s kind of equal on each side. What we’re going to do is have the ability to pick from the Guild side first, quickly launch the Clan so that you can create a Clan league, and then we’re going to work on the mashup league where you can recruit whatever. You know, you can do a tank if you want or a boss if you want.

The long term vision is to have it so that if you want to do a Guild-only league, a Clan-only league, or a mashup league, you can.

How exactly is the mashup league going to work? The way it sounds is that the bosses are the opposite of the Guild.

This is the hard part, right? This is why the mashup league is last. You’re going to have to have a balance between the roles, right? If one role is weighted over any of the other roles, if one side is weighted so that those are the best characters, then everyone is going to try and recruit them right?

So you’ve got to have some level of balance between roles. And the way we kind of look at it is that the tank on the Guild side has got to be balanced against the boss on the Clan side; the healer against the minibosses; the DPS against the minions.

It’s really more about the point value than it is about the roles. But it’s about balancing those so that you don’t have it weighted so that you only recruit Clan characters.

How is the game going to make sense of putting bosses on the same team as tanks in the mashup league?

Understand that the characters actually queue and fight in the background. That happens in the entire realm. The realm fights and these guilds and clans clash right? So it’s no different than when you play fantasy football. You don’t just have to pick from the NFC. You can pick from the AFC as well.

So the characters generate points and that’s really the only thing that matters. It’s not going to matter if you have a tank and a boss and a miniboss and three DPS because it’s going to be based on the roles you’re picking and the values of the points.

So theoretically your team could actually be fighting each other in the world, but as long as they generate enough points those details don’t actually matter?

Right. Say you have Peyton Manning from the Denver Broncos and you have the Green Bay defense and they’re playing Green Bay. Well, you want the Green Bay defense to beat the heck out of Manning and intercept him 20 times, but do you really?

You’ve got that in fantasy football where you’ve got multiple people fighting against each other. It’s very similar to that concept. When you get to the mashup league concept you really could have them against each other.

At the end of the day they’re fighting separate from the leagues. The whole battle system happens for the entire realm outside of the league system. And you’re just trying to see the result and what happens there.

There are a lot of zeroes on the battle results board.

Hummel: For this particular instance, this character did not battle that week. So they were on a bench from a Guild perspective.

Jones: So what that means is you have to spend a little bit of time understanding what happens within the guilds. The guilds are AI-driven The Guild AI actually decides, from their roster of 20 people, who’s actually going to get to raid that.

Because they start to decide things like, “well, you know, I’ve got this really good tank, he’s really healthy, he’s my starter.” But then a couple weeks in, he gets really tired, and they’re like “you know what, we’ve got to give this guy some rest or we’re going to keep getting beat up.” So I’m going to bench him this week and I’m going to put in the rookie tank. The Guild AI actually does this on a daily basis throughout the week. It really decides what they’re doing.

Now, that Guild AI isn’t the same for every guild. Larry and the team are building where the different AI have different mentalities. If you look at our guilds and you go back and look at our pledges on Kickstarter you can actually help us design a guild if you want. When you design the guild, you can say “I want it to be an aggressive guild. I’ll play my starters until they’re just about done Fatigue-wise,” and we’ll build that into the system.

The way you’ll tell that is you’ll be able to read the guild story, watch what’s what’s happening with the guild, and kind of learn how the teams are. Not different than you see going on in the football realm. How the different coaches manage the teams.

The reason why there are zeroes here is that if you’re not paying attention and seeing what’s going on with the characters, you end up going, “oh, they didn’t battle this week because I didn’t replace them with someone else.” Very similar to if you don’t pay attention in fantasy football and there’s a bye week you end up with zero points. So this is showing what would happen in that scenario.

Is Influence persistent? If they don’t happen to use a potion within a certain league match will it carry over to the next one?

Yes. Certain things will be consumables and if they use them they’ll go away, but if they don’t, they’ll stay. Certain things like enchantments will only last a certain time. So there will be levels of enchantments. The way we explain it is that the more powerful the influence is the more people will have to be involved in doing it.

What we call an “individual influence item” would be something like a small potion. A huge, more persistent enchantment would require more citizens—players of a league—to contribute to giving him that enchantment. Anything that’s more powerful, or bigger, would require more people to be involved and do a group influence versus an individual influence.

But yes, total persistence will be there for certain things. Certain things will go away after each week. We’ll kind of have a balance of each of those things.

One of the biggest possible group influences that exists—which we think is kind of funny—is, let’s say Nader is the top, leading tank in the entire realm and has been for the past two or three seasons. So he’s going to be a pretty popular guy. People are going to be recruiting the guy, they’re going to have him on their team.

Let’s say he gets beat up pretty bad and he dies—because they can die. There’s going to be a huge news story in the realm. There’s going to be news coming out about how he died and this other stuff.

Well, the citizens will be able to go to the temple and donate to resurrect him. That’s going to be one of those big group influence things that’s going to take a bunch of people getting together and saying, “we need this guy back.” They’ll be able to resurrect him and bring him back from the dead.

So that’s one of the bigger picture type things. Actually being able to bring him back to life. It will require multiple citizens and a lot more influence from across the realm to actually have that happen.

What happens if half of your characters die at one time?

So the AI is pretty organized in terms of what can die and when it can die, meaning that we only have a certain percentage of death and we won’t disclose it. We know what percentage of deaths are happening and what percentage of knockouts are happening. It could happen where one week, you have multiple things happen. I don’t know if you’d ever get half of your team at the same time doing that. But it could happen on a rare occasion.

But what you’ll be able to do if that happens—in a week where multiple things died or something, you still have the ability to go out and recruit characters that aren’t in other teams either. So there are still characters left over after everybody recruits.

What happens if half the entire set of characters die and you’re short on characters?

When they battle, the guild itself and the clan on the other side have built-in intelligence. They will not fight to the death. They’re not like when we were in Warcraft and all that other stuff where we were like “we’re doing it” and everybody stayed until they were dead and they’d just go pop and resurrect. They will literally break off the battle if things aren’t going the way they want.

Hummel: That will be part of their guild AI. Each guild will be slightly different on what their exit strategy is, but every guild will have an exit strategy where they will make sure not everyone will get maimed before they get out of there.

Jones: Half a guild will not die in a single shot. There’s no way.

Hummel: And then additionally there’s basically what we call a free agent pool. There’s a pool of characters just sitting there ready to go. So if a character does die the guild immediately goes and finds a free agent and adds them to their list.

Jones: So it’s kind of like, the tank who’s trained but no one wanted him yet. The next guy to come up from the minors. They’re sitting there waiting and you’ll be able to see those guys as well.

So there are fail-safes.

Yes. So we look at it this way. When we talked about the quantity of characters that exist, there is "X" percentage of death that is going to happen. We know, obviously, that citizens are not going to resurrect characters all the time. So there has to be a constant flux of characters available and coming in.

And it’s not some huge number. It’s something I want to point out because people were asking about this. So when we’re on that Kickstarter, we’re getting questions like, “well, if I don’t get a character now, what happens later? Can I get a character?” And the answer is, the chance is very slim to none that you will be able to do that. What we’re doing right now is opening up the ability to buy the characters because we have to populate the world and the realm. There’s only going to be so much turnover happening in the realm. There are only going to be so many people that die or retire—they can just retire, too—and there’s only going to be so many spots of that happening.

So when they retire, you’re going to open up the ability to sponsor new characters that you bring in?

That’s on the docket, yes.

The AI runs in the background and it’s persistent throughout leagues. If you have two different leagues with two different teams with the same character in both teams, will that character generate the same amount of points for both leagues?

Yes. The character battle and all the stuff done by that is persistent across all leagues. It’s the same relation that Peyton Manning is Peyton Manning. It’s the same premise. It’s a single type of character. If he generated 129, it’s the same character that generates the same 129 for all leagues.

And this is on a per week basis?

Yeah, the guilds and clans fight every single week so they’ll generate points every single week. We can translate it to football because that’s easy. Except for bye weeks, two teams battle in football every week. So points are generated every week.

And you’ve heard us talk about seasons. The seasons are really 13 weeks long for what’s happening in the realm. You get guilds and clans fighting. It’s a 13 week scenario. You can think of it in terms of the actual seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall. So they’re going to be doing that every single week and they fight for 13 weeks straight.

Football’s interesting, but it’s only 16 weeks long and then it’s over with. You have to wait until next year to do it. We wanted to make sure that the realm itself battled every week, all 52 weeks out of the year, and things are generated.

But we also had to organize it from a season perspective because the history of the Realm Adventure League—the backstory to the lore—was that the realms are fighting over these mystical locations. These two retired adventurers were in a tavern one day and they listened to these citizens all argue about which clan was better than what guild, which tank could take more damage, and so on. So what these two adventurers did was basically create the Realm Adventure League. They said, “why don’t we gather all the statistics from all the battles and just post it in all the recesses across the realm and let the citizens create their own virtual guilds and settle the score?” That’s why you see it as the citizens in the realm playing that game. All the battles are happening with the characters and everything else.

I see that you guys already have a second game planned. Are you planning to expand this into a network if it’s successful?

Yeah, what we have there is Virtual Squared Leagues has a patent on the system that’s in the background. The first game is Realm Adventure League. The patent is how the league system works and how the characters have fate and they interact.

The goal of the architecture that we’re making is that we’ve separated those kinds of things from the league system so that we have the ability to expand to other genres. Now the other genres when we go to do them—here’s an example for the one you see, which is Zurvival League—won’t be exactly the same. It won’t be two sides fighting against each other every week. The zombie side, the plan is that it will be survivors who are going out into the zombie apocalypse. They’re going out, trying to survive every week. It’ll be based on “did they find equipment? Did they find food? Did they join a group of survivors?” So it might act a little differently, but the league side of it will be very similar. Characters will generate points based on some kind of metric and then the actual game is about that league system.

So we have that core kernel of code managing that and the goal is to expand it if it’s successful.

How long has this been in development, this whole AI system?

So the concept around this is actually a couple of years old. The actual, full development started late last year around September. So we didn’t start the company until this year but we started working on it last year.

And you’re planning to have it done by November 2016, according to the Kickstarter?

Yeah, and really what we’ve explained there is that we’re trying to accelerate it as fast as we can. When we put the Kickstarter out, we wanted to make sure that we were able to deliver. So I really call that November 2016 the actual launch. Everything we said we were going to do is going to be there, but we think we’ll get there really quickly. As you see in that roadmap, we expect alpha to hit next quarter, first of the year. Get alpha going as fast as we can, get the feedback we need, let the players adjust us, and then we move into closed beta sometime in Q2 and we try to get it wrapped up and finalized in time for launch.

I want to make sure that we’re delivering what the gamer wants, what they think needs to happen, and what we really want to make sure happens is balance—it’s the key for us. Not only the characters, but when we introduce the gold and the ability to influence characters, we want to make sure that we have enough feedback coming from the players to understand that it’s balanced and everything else. We have a real balanced game.

We were pretty conservative with saying, “look, we want to deliver on time. We don’t want to cause issues with the Kickstarter, fans, and those that pledge.” So that’s what we picked and said that we know we can comfortably deliver it by that time. That’s full launch.

How many people are working on the game?

We have a set of employees and contractors. There’s probably about ten total, but some of those are just contractors who are doing artwork and things like that.

You mentioned earlier about investors. Is the Kickstarter secondary funding?

So the investors invested the initial seed money to get the company going. So that’s what we worked on to get going. The Kickstarter is more of an acceleration model. We want to get things done a little faster. That money will be used to accelerate that time frame. And the more successful the Kickstarter campaign is, the faster we can get moving and get more resources.

The success of the Kickstarter campaign is really key to what we need to do, but we do have investments so what we’re trying to make sure everybody understands is that this game is going to happen. Regardless of the Kickstarter, this game is going to happen.

There are investors. The game is going to be built. We’re committed to building the game and getting it out into the market and actually having people play it. Based on the industry, and what we’ve seen, and all the stuff happening with fantasy football—we’ve seen all that stuff and how big it can get. There’s a crossover and I think the market is ready for this kind of game.

The time investment can be whatever you want it to be but it doesn’t have to be huge. You don’t have to invest hours a night. You can go in there and check the characters today or every other day and just kind of manage and be able to play with your friends.

I think the best thing about fantasy football is not just the game but the interaction with my friends, the razzing, the who beat who kind of thing without having to spend hours and hours every week. I think that’s a really positive thing about the game.

Are you planning to expand on the Healer/Tank/DPS dynamic at all? It says in the Kickstarter that you are planning to possibly have a visual battlefield at some point. Are you planning to play off of that and deepen the dynamic so that there are, for example, both ranged and melee DPS characters?

I think what we’re going to want to do is keep it pretty simple. There’s enough going on with the characters that I don’t know much interaction people are going to get with the holy trinity models kind of thing or the boss models kind of stuff.

There definitely will be—and already is in the battles—the healer paying attention to the tank, and the DPS trying to determine what it’s trying to do. I don’t know how much deeper it’s going to get or how many more roles we’re going to do. It starts to get a lot more complicated and we started off with the model saying you could have two different types of tank, main tank and off tank, based on playing MMOs for a number of years. And we settled back to “okay, let’s make this a bit simpler so it’s accessible to all the players. Not really just players that understand how the mechanics work.

When can influence take place?

Influence can take place as long as the player hasn’t gone yet. There’s a time window where the player goes to battle and becomes locked. To the end player it’s going to be like they can always influence. But it’s the timing of when he actually has to battle that will matter.

Hummel: Yeah, if he just happens to be in battle at the time you drop a potion in there, the obviously, he can’t take advantage of that potion at that time.

So, for example, it can pretty much happen six out of seven days, including after the character has been drafted?

Jones: Yes.

That’s kind of a mixed thing for me because it makes me think “what if I draft this guy, and he’s doing really great, and 100 people place curses on him that week?”

There’s limitations. One thing you’ll see—and I’ll give a curse example—is that you’re not going to have it where you’re going to have stackable things like that happen. The curse design, for example, is a cursing and a bless. Right now, in the current design, the thought process is that if you go here and you take a curse and you curse this character then boom, Nader’s cursed.

If the next guy comes along and wants to curse him he’s not going to curse him again. Someone else can come through and go “dammit, he’s cursed. I’m using my bless.” The curse will change into a bless. There’s going to be limitations of how much influence can be done by everyone in the realm to one given character. And that’s again to control the statistics and stuff like that. You won’t be able to stack stuff, and there will be limitations so that we can control that.

Because that’s what we’re worried about, too. In that example, we don’t want him to come in and be like “he’s cursed 100 times and all the sudden, he’s going to produce 10 points instead of 120.” The curse is going to affect it a little bit—and the other things will be there—and that will affect his stats. We don’t think that the influence model will take someone who generates 100 points and make him generate 20. We don’t think that’s how effective that’s going to be. It’s going to change the statistics and make him perform just a little bit less.

Now, their performance isn’t just based on influence. It’s also based on that fate system and how they’re doing week to week and in their career. So that goes up and down as well. And no one will see that. You won’t see that besides their trend and what they’re doing every week. But that’s not public. They won’t be able to see what’s happening.

So it’s going to be more of a back and forth thing?

Right. Each type of influence is slightly different in how that works. What the yin and yang version of that is hasn’t entirely been decided and I don’t know that everything will have a yin and yang either. We haven’t come up with exactly what that’s going to be yet. But you can guarantee that you won’t be able to overpower one side or the other. And you’ll always have that concept.

So that’s where I think you’ll get some cross-league stuff going on and people talking about different characters. That’s what we kind of expect.

You have this inventory of around 12 slots. You have potentially thousands of players. What if every slot is taken up every week because people are giving that player so many items?

You have services and other things that exist for stealing potions and things like that.

But there is the potential that a character will have a full inventory?

Yeah, there is the potential that every single week, you’ll have maxed out characters. The more popular characters are going to be more maxed out or be targeted more for negative services. Stealing potions, curses, those sorts of things. We think that’s that interaction of the community.

But there are limitations. There are limitations of slots and all that. We wanted to make sure that was very controlled because otherwise, that could get out of hand. One side gangs up and takes over and then it’s all done. So we’re going to try and make sure that’s balanced so that that doesn’t happen.

I see that there are two sets of teams that have the same shield. Will that be prevented in the future?

We’re going to have 50-100 shields that are pre-designed. The shields that are available now will be available in all different designs and colors. We have in the roadmap—and it’s actually part of the stretch goals, but we’ll eventually do it even if we don’t hit the stretch goals—is picking an icon, picking a color scheme, picking a pattern, instead of having these created for you.

We’re not going to prevent them from picking the same exact shield within the same league because you might like that and that’s fine. But eventually we’ll have it so that you can create your own shield.

In fantasy football, one thing I hated and the reason we wanted to do this, usually you only have a couple of icons you can pick and that’s it. It’s just colors of football helmets and that’s it. It’s kind of boring. I really liked naming my team and fantasy football. I think a lot of people do. So we wanted to take that to the next level. Name your team, pick a shield color scheme, and get real creative.

We plan on having a lot of variation in shields. Something that hasn’t been published yet, and you see some indication of it on the Kickstarter stuff with the stretch goals. We call these the basic team shields that you have here, and they’re very flat graphic-based. They’re just an icon with some colors. The stretch goals we’re going to get into and the Citizen goals that are based on social media refer to unique shields that you’re going to get. Those shields will be, as the Kickstarter becomes successful and we hit those goals, more elaborately-designed 3D-type shields that are going to be exclusive to the Kickstarter community. Those shields won’t be available to everybody else.

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Those interested in pledging can do so here. The Kickstarter is currently sitting at $8,560 out of a $20,000 goal with 37 days left and looks like it will make it. As noted in the interview, you can sponsor characters and even entire guilds at some of the higher tiers.