Review Fix Exclusive: Adam Sawkins Talks ‘FortressCraft Evolved’

Review Fix chats with Adam Sawkins, founder at ProjectorGames, who breaks down the improvements in “FortressCraft Evolved,” which is all set for an early access release on Steam. Easily one of the most appreciated games on the Xbox Live Arcade, Sawkins has refused to rest on his laurels and has pushed the series forward with a host of gameplay changes and updates.

Review Fix:  You’ve recreated the game from the ground up. What was the process like and how is the game better because of it?

 Adam Sawkins: As it was our second game in this genre, we had learned a lot. We made a great many mistakes when developing and shipping FortressCraft (most of which we rectified), and this time we’ve been able to avoid these mistakes. We also managed to build in a lot of things that were simply not possible with the original engine design, the most radical of which has got to be our world size. Minecraft’s world is about as big as Neptune, and 256 meters deep. By comparison, FortressCraft’s world is half the size of the Milky Way, and 1,000 light years deep! My favorite way of putting it; if you took every single Minecraft map, created since the beginning of Minecraft’s inception, it would fit into one tiny corner of a single FortressCraft map.

Review Fix:  What have you and your team learned during the process?

Sawkins: I think our mostly costly thing that we learned is ‘Unity is atrocious at dealing with multi-threaded games’! We’ve had to work around this particular, er, shortcoming, and we’re going to continue to scale the game up to utilize as much of your PCs hardware as we can get our grubby hands on.

Review Fix: Was there a pivotal moment during the development cycle?

Sawkins: I think that would be when we finally got 64-bit mode working, and I went ‘I’m just gonna crank up the draw distance until my PC melts’ – it turns out that we’re on track for a draw distance of about 2.5km in the full game. That’s literally 10 times as much as Minecraft manages. I think the other one was where I won an argument with the other programmer, and implemented he full Unity lighting system within FortressCraft. Unity might be a bit poor at multithreading, but *wow* is it good at lighting.

Review Fix:  What are some of the new features you’re excited about?

Sawkins: Lighting, draw distance. A lot of it is really about the fact that we haven’t had to put in such harsh limits. We can support 16000+ user textures in mod packs, and we can support 16000+ high-resolution detail blocks. Sure, these *are* limits, but they are limits that users just aren’t going to run into!  On top of that, we’ve put loads of time into helping users automate the boring part of building, and let them focus on the exciting parts. What will really bring all these kick-ass features to the fore is the extensive Steam Workshop integration – players will be able to trivially share worlds, designs, injections, schematics and detail blocks easily and quickly. We’ve got Twitch.TV support coming (as soon as they fix their plugin, hope you’re reading guys!), and Steam has great in-built media support. You just press F12 for a screenshot, whereas on the Xbox, taking a screenshot was a mind-bogglingly complex task.

Review Fix: How will they make for a better game?

Sawkins: My motto is that FortressCraft should be limited by your imagination, not your time. The Copy/Paste stuff lets you design 1 floor of a building, turn that into a skyscraper in a matter of seconds, then duplicate that skyscraper a thousand times. This means you’ve skipped all the boring stuff, and after an hour or 2 of setting up, you’re already into the detailed design and unique features per building. When you look at the Game of Thrones or Zelda maps in Minecraft – those things are amazing, but they’ve taken 10,20,30, 50, a 100 people multiple months to make. My goal is to allow people to create the same sort of incredible epic structures in a fraction of the time – and on top of that, we support very high-resolution blocks, whereas most games in this genre stop at 1m3.

Review Fix: What’s your favorite new element in the game?

Sawkins: It’s a toss up between the best creative feature; Build2Me, and the summonable meteorites. Build2Me is a little hard to describe on paper, but incredibly intuitive in practice. If you hold CTRL whilst building, instead of building a single block, it builds along the axis you’ve chosen, until the building lines up with you. So if you point at the other side of a canyon, a single click builds a bridge all the way across to you, but no further.

Review Fix: You guys have been very successful on the 360 Live Arcade. A lot of other developers would let that success go to their heads. How do you stay grounded and focused?

Sawkins: Who said I’ve stayed grounded and focused? I ran out and bought a second-hand motorbike as soon as the money came in.

Seriously tho, I think a number of things kept me focused. Firstly, I was a AAA dev for 12 years, with a huge number of titles under my belt (including Burnout 3, the all-time #7 metacritic rated game on PS2!), so whilst FortressCraft was an incredible success, relative to the many multi-million selling games I’d worked on, it wasn’t quite so impressive – I knew that I was the tiniest of fish compared to Call of Duty. Secondly, Minecraft, with the full weight of Microsoft’s marketing department behind it, completely flattened us (and the all-time sales records!); being the underdog stops you being complacent, and it ensure you strive hard to do what your community wants. And lastly, I am in close contact with my community and I watch a great number of their videos; nothing brings you to earth quicker than someone breaking your game in such a way that you didn’t think possible, and nothing makes you work harder to improve the game than looking at something someone has created in your game and genuinely gawping and going “How the bloody hell did you managed that?”

Review Fix: How do you want people to respond to this new game?

Sawkins: I’m hoping that people take a fresh look at FortressCraft, and discover some of the amazing new features we’re adding. People who have played FortressCraft will be blown away by the improvements we’ve made. And I’m hoping there’s a huge number of players out there that want a modern-looking game that lets them express their inner creative desires… to the max.

For more information on the game, click here.