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Interview: Bill Roper talks about starting Flagship, looking for office space, and a publishing partner.
Date: October 22, 2003
Source: IGN.com

IGN Interview

IGNPC: So...it seems you have a new job.

Bill Roper: Yeah, working for myself.

IGNPC: What's your boss like?

Bill Roper: He's okay. I know him pretty well and I have a lot of dirt on him so I can always hold him over a barrel.

IGNPC: You're in San Francisco now, right?

Bill Roper: Yeah, we're working in the classic start-up mode. We have a good space. (One of the guys had a lot of extra space in his house.) We're set up here and are going at it from a ground up setting, being smart with how we're spending our development dollars early and waiting until we find the perfect spot to move in to.

That's a big deal for us. We watned to have a good, cool, creative atmosphere. If we can help it, we don't want to just go in to a soulless corporate park where every single wall and doorway looks exactly the same in a horrible beige building. We want to, if we can, find a place that has a real nice vibe to it. That helps us approach the games from a creative aspect.

IGNPC: It's a good environment here.

Bill Roper: Yeah, we're definitely going to stay in the Bay Area just whatever we can find in the city and peninsula, between SF and San Mateo. We're Bay Area boys at heart and we want to stay up here. It depends on where we end up.

IGNPC: In terms of starting the studio, you mention the character of space. What about the flavor of the company in general? You keeping the same set up you're familiar with or doing things differently?

Bill Roper: A little of both. We definitely have a lot of great heritage that we've come from. Dave, Erich and Max built up Condor which eventually became Blizzard North. The biggest change is that we want to keep the company a lot smaller. When we left Blizzard North was up to two teams and was part of Blizzard overall. That was a lot of people to interact with and maintain ties with. We ended up getting in to much more management and much less making games. We want to get back to (as close as we can) spending all day every day making games, not figuring out how to keep 50 or 100 or 200 people all happy and working together. That's one of the bigger changes.

As far as how we want to set the team up, we're really looking at a flat structure. We're not in to hierarchies and levels of people you report up through. We're basically here to make a game together. That's how we structure the company and the way we all interact with each other. We can sit down over lunch or just walk up to each other and say "I was thinking about this" or "How would this work?" and put it in the game and mock it up. There's a very open back and forth between every body on the team. That comes out of the respect we have for each other. We've learned from each other over the years?

IGNPC: But isn't growth and stratification a consequence of success?

Bill Roper: Definitely. You have to make a very conscious decision to have a different kind of success. We want to figure out how to have a high level of success while still keeping the company small. At Blizzard everybody does a good job trying to keep things real, to keep the teams tight with each other and tight with themselves. When you're a small company (there are nine of us here) we all know what everyone is doing all the time. It's simple to have those quick, fast, intimate lines of communication going all the time with everybody on the project. With bigger companies, it's more difficult. That's always a focus Blizzard has had: how do you maintain that communication? We went through a lot of growing pains figuring out how to do that.

For us, it's great to get back to where it's simple, where it just happens. We don't have to use the techniques and management skills you try to acquire. We just naturally get it and we can focus our energies other places. It comes with the territory. As you get successful, you get bigger because people want more of your games. You need more people to do that. Successful companies grow in different ways and the most common way is that you keep bringing more people in. I hope we strike a good balance between that and not getting to the point where we feel like we're not making games anymore.

IGNPC: And have to start a brand new company.

Bill Roper: Exactly.

IGNPC: What's your ideal size?

Bill Roper: Our short to mid-term goal is looking at a team to a team-and-a-half. Somewhere in the 30 to 45 person range. We don't have any visions of running two or three teams working on multiple projects. We want to create a game and have a smaller-sized team that supports the game, through patches, more content or expansions. It gives us a lot of flexibility. If we have a team and a half, we can keep a whole team on that project supporting it. That allows the core group of guys to move on to start laying the ground work for the next game. As that game becomes more defined, you're usually able to pull people off that supporting team. This allows us to constantly support our game that's out while still working on the next one.

Really, we all believe that the best games are made in small studios. I think one of the reasons that the Blizzard games are great is that, though it's a big company, they do everything they can to get that small studio feel with each of the development teams. That's why the games are great. We're big proponents of keeping our team lean and reasonable and excited and into what they're doing. We can get a lot of success out of that.

IGNPC: For some reason, I'm reminded of CCR suing John Fogerty because his songs sounded too much like CCR. Do you anticipate that kind of comparison? How can you distance yourself from the Blizzard model while keeping true to your own spirit?

Bill Roper: The biggest comparison we want to have is to have people say we're making great games. That's always something people said and continue to say about Blizzard. I want people to look forward to what we're doing as much as they did the stuff in the past. The CCR stuff is interesting. That's his sound; unless he goes out and does something totally foreign, there has to be some level of familiarity.

We know that there's a lot of things that aren't technology tied or world tied and haven't been part of anything that we've done before other than that they're core development philosophies we have. There are ways that we make games, things that we think are fun, ways we want to reward players, ways that we structure and make the games. Out of that, especially if you're looking for it, you'll find similarities. Nothing that we've talked about or are working on will make people say, "It's just this." I think people can make those connections and see where the spirit is and say, "I can understand how this hearkens to that because the same guys made both things." I don't feel anyone will say we're just making another version of this game. Consciously and subconsciously that's in our every thought. We want to make sure people recognize this as a Flagship Studios game. This is the next big thing. We don't want to chase our success; we want to do the new thing.

IGNPC: Can you be at all specific about that?

Bill Roper: No!

IGNPC: Oh, well. I had to ask. Bill Roper: It's so far out. We're trying to be thoughtful of the fact that we're still not even with a publisher. We're sure they'd want to work out the timing. The first time we really talk about what the game is about, we want to be able to show it to people. That speaks volumes more than even someone who blabs on a lot (like me) can say. There's nothing like sitting down and playing the game. That's something we're huge proponents of. It's the way we develop the game. As soon as possible, the game is up and running and you're putting stuff in.

If you have a concept, you prototype. Whether you're using a Go board or pieces from another game or whether you're putting it in the engine, that's how you find out if it's fun. You can come up with ideas and write them down but you don't know if they'll be fun until you're actually trying it and seeing how it plays.

It works the same way with how things work and look. The best way to see is to get it in the game. We do massive amounts of iteration. That's what most of our development process is built around -- having this up and functioning as soon as possible. Then you do everything to make sure the game is always playable. We don't want any down time where you can't load the game up. Then iterate like crazy. Put something in. If it's fun, keep it in and you keep working on it to make it more fun. You find out how to attach things to it that leech off its funness. If you put something in and it stinks, you pull it back out. It sounds simple but it's a lot of work and everyone has to be very dedicated from day one to maintain that process. It's easy to get into big code rewrites where the game is down for two weeks or a month. That's tough; that's time that we can't try out new things in the environment.

IGNPC: So you're already up and running then?

Bill Roper: Yeah, we're putting things in. Something gets drawn and it gets put into the game. Somebody comes up with an idea and a day or two later it's in the game. Something that's essential is that we really don't care what it looks like; before we put a monster in to the game it doesn't need to look beautiful or animate. We're happy to put a big block with an M on it.

IGNPC: And if it's fun like that, it'll be fun when you add those graphics.

Bill Roper: Yeah. If I'm running around hitting a box with an M on it and having fun, wait until it looks cool and is making noises and spitting fire at me. I think a lot of developers are hung up on getting things perfect before they put them in. Just get it in there. Then start working on the fun. Once it's fun, we can make it beautiful and interesting, give it the cool factor. If we put it in and it's not fun, you've wasted a lot of time and effort.

People get emotionally invested in it too. If you worked for six months on something before putting it in and it's not good, you really want to make sure you spend a lot time making sure it's not good because you worked so long to get it in. If you spend six hours or days on it and it's not fun, you try it a while to figure out that it's not fun before pulling it back out. There's not as much investment beforehand. We'd rather do the work on the backend after we know the idea is solid.

IGNPC: I assume you're being contacted by publishers. I also assume you won't say much about it. Just tell us how much interest you're seeing.

Bill Roper: We've been very fortunate. People know us and what we worked on. Within the first couple of days of leaving Blizzard, we had just about every publisher call us. It's been really, really good for us. We knew a lot of people in the industry and they knew us. It was pretty simple to get beyond the first stage of meeting the publishers. That's not always easy for developers. In a lot of regards, we're ahead of the game. We're talking with publishers all over the world. We're excited to see what our opportunities are and they're excited to talk to us. It's a long process and a lot of work but it's also not making games so we hope to get through it in a timely but intelligent fashion. I love talking with people and playing the game of business but I'd rather be sitting down and write script and story and working on game design and figuring out how mechanics work.

IGNPC: When do you intend to start talking about the game?

Bill Roper: No time soon. We're really just a few months into it. We'd want to time it with the development of the game and whoever we work with as a publisher. That may mean we announce it at a big show or hold some event or go on a big press tour. We're not sure. Right now, people want to know where we are. If they're asking, there are probably a lot more people who want to know. That's the drive behind letting people know as much as we could. We're excited about what we're doing. The biggest thing is that, once we start talking about the game, we want to be able to show it.

IGNPC: How did you decide on the name of your studio? Are you worried that it seems kind of conceited?

Bill Roper: Yeah, it's funny. The name is the hardest part of the process. Every name is taken. We did hundreds of names and you have to get everybody to find one that's acceptable, if not cool.

IGNPC: The one that everyone hates the least.

Bill Roper: Exactly! You come up with a list of about thirty of those, find out they're all taken, then you start again. It took us a couple of hours to figure out what kind of game we wanted to make and a couple of months to figure out what to call ourselves.

When we were talking to publisher about what we wanted to make, all of them said they could see it as being a flagship title. We just kept hearing that. It's not that it's arrogant; it's just setting a goal, high bar for ourselves. We have to work our butts off to make this great. So we kinda decided to use that as the company name. Not that we're so great, but that's what we want to become. We wanted a name we had to live up to. More than anything it's a way to identify that we have a lot of experience. It's not like we all just came out of college and going at this without knowing what we're doing.

IGNPC: You still remember those days?

Bill Roper: Yeah, I still remember them. This sets a new mark. We like to be driven and motivate ourselves. If you want to blame anybody, blame the people who kept using that phrase. We had also gone out and seen Pirates of the Caribbean so we had a pirate thing in mind. That's how the nautical, ship thing came in. Plus a few of us were beta-testing Puzzle Pirates. There's a lot of nautical inspiration around here.

IGNPC: Sounds like fun.

Bill Roper: We're extremely excited about what we're doing. It's fun to be this energized and this pumped about doing something you've been doing for close to the last decade -- getting a rebirth and a fresh start. We hope people remain interested and excited about what we're doing and will be happy to go along with us for the ride. We've always been big fans of public beta tests and those are things we still want to do. We really view this as something that people who love games and played stuff we've done before can be involved in.

IGNPC: Awesome. It sounds like you're busy. I'll let you run.

Bill Roper: No problem. Glad we could hook up.