Interview With Ofir Maimon, Developer Of Barons Of The Galaxy

I recently had the chance to sit down with Ofir “DrDread” Maimon, the lead developer of the upcoming browser MMORTS Barons of the Galaxy. We talked about in-game politics, release schedule, typical browser MMORTS conventions, and more.

Me: How long has Barons of the Galaxy been in development?

Maimon: I probably said “start new website” maybe three years ago, but I didn’t work much on it. I just kind of toyed with it. It was very slow. I’m working full-time. Recently, in the last six months, it picked up a lot of momentum. I started working on it all the time. And then it started getting somewhere. So I started throwing money at it and all of the sudden, I got a lot done very quickly.

Now I’m down to this point where I think I can launch it in two or three months. If that’s the case, I need the artwork. The money from Kickstarter’s going to take a month. The artwork is going to take another month. I need to test it. Three months from now, hopefully everything will be in place, looking good.

What is the game’s initial tick time going to be?

There is no tick time. The turns flip every 10 minutes. Right now, there is nothing that automatically sets the turns. Right now, I’m doing it manually. It’s pretty easy to make the turns flip, but I’ll do that towards the end. But it will flip automatically every 10 minutes.

I saw in the Kickstarter that you don’t like a lot of the MMORTSes that are out right now. Are you going to have excessive production times of a day or more at any point?

No. To be honest, I don’t make that limitation. The whole game is basically a trading game, but it’s not guaranteed progression. You’re competing with everybody else to make money. If you can’t do it right, if you can’t sell high and buy low—you don’t really buy low so much as you produce—if you can’t work your corporation correctly, you will probably fail.

It’s not an automatic progression game. It’s also not one of those games where you’re playing by yourself and there just happen to be other people around. It’s more like you’re playing with other people who are all doing the same thing.

Is there a limit to how many players can be in a city?

No. Here’s something that’s a little different than other 4X-type games: you don’t own the city. You don’t own the planet. You’re just a corporation in the city and that’s just where your corporate HQ is. You can build anywhere.

Maimon begins talking about giving orders to vehicles.

The transports. You don’t just click here and click there. The transports have a queue of orders. You can can queue up a transport, or any unit, to say, “I want you to go here then pick up this then fly over there and then sell something over here then go attack something for five rounds then come back to this main city and then loop all those orders.” You can queue orders like that on units. So it’s usually not a very simple “click here, go there” thing like it is in an RTS game.

Other than the turn flip and the art, and possibly reorganizing a few things on lists, what is left to do between now and release?

The major component that’s left is the event system, which is the big one. And also the chat system. The chat system, I’m not sure how long it will take because I already saw one that might work. You’d have a chat room and a way to message. I don’t think that will take too long because I’ve already seen one that I might be using.

The event system was the major one at the end and that’s pretty much the last piece, mechanic, that needs to go in. The event system will probably take a little bit of time because I have to get everything else in place first before I can even attempt it.

Once that’s in place, all the mechanics are in place, I can kind of alpha the game. What you’re doing so far pretty much works. If I had 100 players doing the same thing, it’s functional. I’d have to do another pass at it. It’s obviously not perfectly clean. A couple of small details. But it’s pretty much the event system and the chat room, then I’m probably going to clean up the system for a couple of weeks, then I’m going to try doing an alpha and find if there are bugs.

All going well, how long do you think that will take?

I was telling people on the Kickstarter that, after the Kickstarter, probably a couple of months.

A couple of months to Alpha?

I’m thinking that three months from now, I can probably launch it, but that might be optimistic. I was trying to get an Alpha by the end of Kickstarter. I actually wanted to say by the end of Kickstarter, before it ends, that there’s an Alpha running with the 100-200 people I’ve got signed up on the site and they’re actually playing it, but I’m not sure if the event system is really 100% in place.

I have to have like 100 people playing it to see if any problems are arising. I can’t easily test what 100 players are going to do. I was considering pushing back the event system just for now to make sure I can get it in, but I really need the event system in there to get voting and stuff in there.

The first thing I need to do is set up the Sol system, a couple little tweaks like, because it’s the starter town, I have to make sure that the demand for all prices pretty much stays within a certain range. It could shift, but it rubberbands itself back because it’s the starter zone. It never gets too high, it never gets too low. The Terran Federation units, the guards essentially, have to be in town so that, if you get attacked, you’re being defended by these bigger units. A couple little things in the Sol system and you can actually have people sit in the Sol system and play it. And then put the turn flip. And then an Alpha from there. I can actually do it without an event system, but I really want to try getting the event system in.

So the Sol system is the starter zone. Does everyone start on Earth?

You can. If you are a free account, you have to put your corporate HQ in the Sol system, but you can build anywhere you want. Also, if you want to be elected to govern a city, the only people who are eligible are the people who have their corporate HQs in that city. So if it’s you and 10 other people inside Sydney, you’re the only people who can get elected to Sydney government. But in the Sol system, there are no government elections. It’s run by the Terran Federation. Because you can’t move your corporate HQ out, that means you can never be in a government position.

That’s pretty much the only limitation of the free account. I can never get my corporate HQ out of the Sol system so I can never be leader of a city.

So that’s how you limited it. It’s not a hard limitation saying you can’t enter government because you’re a free player. It’s because you’re based in the Sol system.

Yeah, that was actually a very easy mechanic. I used to have a lot of complexity to the free account vs paid account thing and people were right in saying “this is too crazy what you’re doing.” But in the end, what I thought of was doing this. It’s very easy to control programmatically that “if you have a free account, your corporate HQ can’t get out of the system.”

Just so you know, you can move your corporate HQ whenever you want. It will take a turn and it will take a small amount of money. Your structures don’t go with it, but they can all be salvaged for half and I had this idea of being able to liquidate your entire corporation’s net worth or a percentage of it. If you don’t like what’s going on on Mars and something went bad, you can say “you know what, I just feel like going to another planet. I’m tired of everything.” You can probably liquidate everything to cash, at least, and go somewhere else and set it up over there.

The same is true when you go from free account to paid account. I imagine that if you’re playing free for a while, and you like it and you want to go move your HQ to another planet because there aren’t that many people there and the resources are a little higher outside of the Sol system, you might want to liquidate your entire corporation and you can. It’s just a way to pick up and go somewhere else.

If you don’t like something, you can just leave. If you’re being harassed by powerful players, they can’t really leave as easily because the bigger you are in an area, if you have this big empire with 26 structures, you can’t just up and leave. It would cost a fortune. But if you’re smaller, it would be much, much easier.

How does the voting process work?

If a spot has enough industry and there’s not a city it will all of the sudden become a city with a starting population. All of the demand will show up. Once the city’s there, one of the first things that will happen is an event that says there’s an election for this city. Whoever has an HQ in this spot can be the ruler of this city. It will be voted on by the people who are there.

Let’s say there’s four or five other guys with you. They all vote on who becomes the leader of the city. Their voting power is based on how much industry they’ve got in that city. If you’re producing 1000 of something and someone else is producing 100 of something, his vote is worth one-tenth of what yours.

How often will re-elections occur?

I was thinking like once a week. It would be the same process.

Do the elections go up to the system level?

Yeah. What I was thinking of doing is setting it up so that there’s the planet level and the system level. When there are three-to-five cities that show up and there are leaders, then a vote happens at the planet level for the planetary emperor. The people who vote for that guy are the five city leaders. It’s almost like a republic. They’ll vote and their voting power isn’t based on production, it’s based on the population of the cities that they’re ruling.

So if there’s five cities on this planet—I’m still playing with the number: three, five, or maybe even ten—that are founded, then suddenly there’s a vote on the planetary level. Those five guys will be the ones voting. One of those five guys is going to get elected into the planetary level. All of the sudden, his city gets opened up for another person to take over if he gets put up to the planetary level.

It works the same way. The city rulers are getting money based on the population of their city they’re controlling as a bonus. Everything else is pretty much the same, but they’re getting this big chunk of cash now that’s coming in from their city. The planet’s the same thing. They’ll get a lot more money from the population of the entire planet.

The same thing will happen on the system level, but it will be three-to-five planetary leaders. When there are three-to-five planetary emperors, then they’ll be voting on a system-wide guy.

If everyone can vote for themselves, what’s keeping everyone from voting for themselves and elections ending up with the highest output becoming the leader?

Not much, but I had some ideas on that. I was thinking of letting other people also have voting power, but a smaller amount.

I wasn’t sure how that was going to play out exactly. Usually, the biggest guy will get voted in, but maybe he doesn’t want to. Or somebody else votes for you. I’m not sure if every single person wants to be the ruler of a city.

Let me give you a different situation. There are three corporate HQs in the city, but there are ten guys producing there. Only three guys can be elected. The other seven have to vote for somebody and it’s not going to be them.

And the other players in the city can vote. Whatever your industry is there, you can vote, but you cannot be elected. The only people that can be elected are the people that have their corporate HQ there. There could be 20 people producing something here in this town, but there are only three corporate HQs.

What can rulers do other than tax people?

I’m not sure that they will have anything special other than tax people, but I’m thinking of a couple of features that I might do. Besides collecting money, there might be a way to do a city-based fleet that they have control of or that they pay less on. If they lose the election, they can hand over this fleet to the next person that gets elected. That and they might have voting power, or more voting power, in other places. In a city, it wouldn’t make much difference, but if you were a planetary guy, you might be able to influence votes on the city level.

You also might have more influence in voting when it comes to events, depending on the events. The events are a very dynamic thing. Most events will just have things that happen, but they will be voting on almost everything that happens. I can make it where city leaders have more power or planetary leaders have more power in the vote. Or maybe all the power in the vote, depending on the event. You might have situations where you are the voting power. It’s your city and this particular event is all on you. Which way do you want to do it? That might be how some events play out.

What kind of events are planned other than city raids and market crashes?

I actually had a big list of different kinds of mechanics for events that I was working on. There are going to be the simple ones that you’re mentioning—city raids, terrorists, stuff like that—but almost all the events, I’m probably going to add some kind of voting or election on it.

It could be almost anything. It could be a kaiju monster attack shows up and it is going to go rampage across the planet and stomp a city along the way. It sounds like a combat mission—and it kind of is—where can you just attack it, but there will also be some industry product, like electronics or something weird, that you can attack this monster with. So all of the sudden, people who are in this industry can actually get involved in the stopping of this thing.

Then when it gets to town, depending on how it’s going, the event gets to a multi-stage where the city wants to drop a bomb on it but it’s going to wipe out half the city, but it will do a lot of damage. Then there’s a vote between the corporations about whether they want to go this way or that way. Kind of like a choose your own adventure-style thing, but on a more massive scale.

Since most of the money is going towards art, what happens if the Kickstarter fails?

I will probably still launch the game eventually. Or I’ll improvise on the graphics. Or I’ll have him do less. Right now, I need about three or four grand to pay the artist to make about 25 units. All the military units, the structures, and a couple of other things is about that much. If I couldn’t get the money, it becomes “well, I’ll get the ships from this guy and then I’ll try and find another place to get the other graphics or slightly improvise.” I’ll find some people to do it cheaper and it won’t be consistent. It won’t look quite as good. But I’ll be able to launch the game because it’s not like anything is stopping me financially. It’s just the artwork. So it might take a little bit longer but I’ll get it out eventually.

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Barons of the Galaxy is currently on Kickstarter. At the time of writing, it has raised $1726 of its $6000 goal. You can find more information on the official website.