Hey everyone! As we’ve done a couple of times now this is the fourth installment of our Meet the Dev series. Today we’re interviewing Mark. He’s our Technical Director and general boss-man for March of War: Face Off. He’s an active member of the community and chat, usually lurking, and a lot of you have seen him popping in and out of the chat.
On a side note the Cardback Contest has closed. We’ve had some really great entries and they’ve been compiled. We’re going through them to find the winners – who will be announced Monday. Keep your fingers crossed through the weekend and look forward to that announcement. Without further ado, Mark~
You’ve been called a veteran employee of the company. How many years have you worked on March of War and March of War: Face Off? How would you sum up the experience?
I’ve worked for Isotx since the Modtoaster/CrosuS days so roughly 8 years. It’s been quite the experience watching our products evolve and improve.
What was your first project with ISOTX, anyhow?
Helping to recover a critical server that had been deleted by mistake by a vendor. That server was the entire company at that time.
When you signed on to help out with Face Off what would you say your primary goal for the game was? Has it changed as the game has progressed?
Well I’m the Technical Director for all Isotx products. My goal for Face Off was to bring to Face Off what we learned from developing March Of War in order to make Face Off the best possible product.
What’s the combination to your gun safe? Kidding! Would you call yourself a gun collector or just an enthusiast? Can you confirm the rumors as to whether or not the government of the Independent People’s Republic of Cheese Sandwiches has given you a license to kill?
I do have a modest collection of firearms. I like to go shooting (paper targets) whenever I can. As for my being an assassin, I could tell you but then I would have to kill you.
Which up-and-coming faction, of those yet unreleased, are you looking forward to? Are there any spoilers / peeks and previews / or just personal thoughts that you’d like to share?
The remaining 3 factions all have a lot of interesting possibilities for units. I think with each new faction we develop we learn from the previous ones, so some exciting things are in store for our players.
On the subject of factions, a lot of players have expressed the belief that the dev team extremely favors the Alliance. Onyxandria (speaking in the third person) has become solely Empire supportive. State your allegiance and what it is about that faction now, also in the future, that you’ll be supporting and looking forward to.
Well I’m currently playing Empire as well having switched from Republic. But I have good cards in all three factions and I enjoy playing them all. I’m planning on playing the remaining 3 factions as well. As for the dev team being biased we are not. What we want is a nice balance between the factions but one that leaves multiple game play options for each faction. It is true however that we developed the Alliance faction first so all the devs started out playing Alliance and Alliance was the mother (or father) of all other factions.
If the dev team were plotting something for your birthday (of course that’s not happening I have no idea what you’re talking about) what flavor of cupcake, cake, tart, pie, or dipping fountain would you be most hopeful to have on the scene?
Chocolate, death by chocolate.
Arena mode has been talked about on and off the scene for a while now like a carrot for the players to look forward to. Could you give us a little preview of how you see arena being set up and played from the player’s perspective? Nothing concrete, of course, but put some leafy green topper on that carrot!
Well Arena is the ultimate test of skill in Face Off. You get a level playing field with everyone else in the Arena your skills at deck building and your tactics playing those decks are all that matters. It’s the great equalizer. Got what it takes? Prove it.
No player in Arena has any advantage over the other player its just skill.
Arena specifically generates random cards from your faction and neutral, a selection of 3, and you pick one - you do this until you fill a deck of 30 cards up. You have to pick one per choice of 3.
Then you are matched to an opponent and you get prizes based on your win ratio, the better you do the better the prize
Some players prefer PVE over PVP. Is there a serious dedication to improving the PVE experience going on behind the scenes? What would you say the biggest current project for improving PVE is?
There is a very serious effort underway to improve PVE. Just check the recent changelogs. When we initially designed Face Off we viewed the PVE as simply a practice mode for PVP. We had low expectations for the AI being any good. However we did decide to use an interesting new technology called MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search). This technology has been used to help computers master the game of Go. Go is a very difficult game to teach a computer to play well. The AI in Face Off has a lot of potential and we intend to exploit that. Our AI dev is back from his long summer vacation and is hard at work each and every day making the AI beter. Look out!
You knew it was coming. Our readers/players are very interested in hearing your point of view on the Florida license plate story. How did you come to own that car and did you notice, before the interview, that the plates were a little on the risqué side or did they catch you unawares and surprise you? Do you still own the car? Inquiring minds want to know.
Well this is just an incredible story. It starts with a computer in Florida owned by the State Of Florida deciding that the license plate A55 RGY would be a perfectly good non-offensive license plate. So let it be written so let it be done. And that is how I came to own this license plate http://www.snopes.com/photos/risque/license.asp on my leased car.
So one of the programmers who worked for me at that time thought it was a funny plate and he decided to take a picture of it and he uploaded it to a small website he had. And then someone saw it and uploaded it to another web site and so on. Well the story ends with my being in that car with my wife and a stranger chasing after my car on foot banging on her window saying “you’re the one I saw that license plate in a Playboy Magazine article”. Oh and did I mention that was right after all these strange people started calling me telling me about how I was winning the license plate of the year award etc.
My wife who is a wonderful person had about enough at that point. She politely told the programmer who took the original photo that we were going on vacation and when we came back the license plate had better be gone. So the programmer took the plate to the Department Of Motor Vehicles and “exchanged” it. I do regret to this day that we did not keep the plate at least as wall decoration.
When I first saw the plate I was like “if you want to mess something up get a computer to do it” so yeah I knew it was an “interesting” plate. But I had no idea that one photo could lead to all that. Keep in mind this was when the Internet was a lot smaller than it is today.
He had some fun things to say and I’m glad he had a chance to tell us the license plate story. We’re working hard on Arena and trying to get it out to you guys. Hope you’re all as excited for it to arrive as I am. As always, see you on the battlefield!