Welcome everyone to our weekly Meet the Team Q&A of Black Eye Games, which will introduce a new member of the team and give you some insight into the people behind the magic of Gloria Victis.
This week our new victim is: Jan Jog Grochowski!
1) What is your position on the team?
I am the Black Eye Games studio owner, and so my main job is to make sure there’s a flow of information between team members as a Producer, but also I am a programmer and sound designer/composer. Since the second half of last month I have also been helping implement the new combat system as animation support (I do stuff like transitions, mixes between animations, not animations itself :))
2) What is a typical day like working on this project?
I start by making sure everyone knows what’s the short and long term plan for their position, make sure there are no issues with pushing the tasks forward, and after its all done I can start working on my daily tasks – coding mostly.
When I go home I am carrying a bookkeeping and I sometimes do sound design or compose music.
3) How did you first hear about Gloria Victis?
I have started this project with some of our team members actually ;)
4) What do you enjoy most about being part of this project?
I used to work on more or less 50 other games on industry, mostly as a sound designer. Most of them were mobile, young kid targeted games. Honestly, I felt I was missing the “epic” feeling of Gloria Victis nearly all the time, but since we’ve had no budget at all for a long time of the development process, I had to do freelance work to make money for living. That led to a burnout as a composer, but overall I think that was good as I turned to coding, which is pushing the GV progress much more, as we already have a long soundtrack done. TLDR; I love the epicness!
5) What are you working on at the moment?
I am working on the animations controller, which means I am working on moving the controller prototype into the multiplayer version on the “controller side” (as other members are working more on the “coding side”). The prototype from the trailer looks great, but after internal playtests we found out some disadvantages from a few solutions used in that version. For example, as our character was moving quite “wide” it was very hard to counter a player who attacked our back. A second example is that the prototype camera was following the player with some delay, which gives a great view feeling, but as we gave a big focus on synchronization of player position and rotation, our character can only rotate “a little bit” until ping comes and allows the player to move into the mouse position. This “anti desynchro” method and camera movement based on player rotation didn’t work on ping higher than 100, as it basically gave a very bad input-lag feeling, so we needed to do a workaround.
There are so many cases like this that cause a delay of the combat/animation update. As a lead of studio I feel very bad about it, since before this we’ve been able to set a date of updates more or less in time, and now as we want to try to make this update as good as we can it creates lots of delays.
6) What is your best memory of Gloria Victis? Any funny/interesting in-game stories?
Moving to our office after releasing the game on Steam. As we were working remotely for that entire time and meeting each other face to face a few times a year, it was a big deal.
For example even before the GV project launched I worked a few years with one of our coworkers on other projects. Steam release was the first time we met face to face, even though we were working remotely together for about 8 years on GV and previous other projects!
Working non-remotely made a great improvement to development speed, but even half of a year before launching on Steam there was a big step forward, as we’ve made some big changes to our development process. I am sure that we’ve made a few times more progress last year than we did in previous time when we were working remotely.
7) What is your favourite aspect of Gloria Victis - any specific feature(s)?
I love global events. I am the “social” player type and it gives a lot of social activity.
8) What is the feature/addition you're most looking forward to?
Of course combat/animations/synchro update but also the implementation of the new nation, as it should help a lot regarding the current balance issues. Oh, and I made a soundtrack for the Azebians about two years ago, which has yet to be used. I am looking forward to implementing that too :)
9) What type of character do you usually play (role, weapon, armour, play-style, etc)?
I love playing archer. I like to mix my stats/skills as both in my real life and ingame characters. I like to be able to “multitask” and support - looking forward for support skills!
10) In 3 years from now, what is your vision for Gloria Victis?
I do hope our project will be growing larger both in terms of features and player-base. We all spent a big chunk of our lives to create GV, so we want to make sure that it will grow big and strong!
11) Weirdest bug you've ever seen in GV?
Long before Steam release I was showing our game to my friends; and while messing around someone was constantly shooting arrows close to us, but he was always missing. I couldn’t find where those arrows were coming from but there started to be more and more of them flying around all of the time. The next day at the office I found out that there was bug on client side which made arrows not disappear and not collide with anything. As our arrows fly with parabolic shape they were doing something like “flying around the world” over and over again. Something like randow arrows rain, lol!
12) Your biggest accomplishment in GV, either personal or for the team in general?
Making my colleagues believe in me and into GV so much that they all moved from their home towns to our office - also having so many users from Steam supporting our project. It makes me very proud.
13) Are there any features you had in mind that could not make it into GV; and if so, what are they?
Not sure - there are many features that I know we won’t be able to push on release, but as we are totally planning on working on GV further, I hope to be able to bring all of those great features to our players.
14) Outside of Gloria, what are some of your favourite games?
I am very much of a nostalgic player. I do enjoy and play as many new titles as I can, but I love getting back to some titles I used to play a lot when I was a kid.
For example, a strategy game I used to play a lot when I was a kid was “Knights & Merchants”. My “main” MMO was Knight Online. For now I like to play a multiplayer round or two in Total War games (Shogun 2 was my favourite!)
15) If Gloria had a $10,000,000 budget, what would be the first feature you would want to add?
Very advanced tracking/analytics system to check for the biggest issues and feedback for players on all early/mid/late level. Of course we are using tools like this already and they are great, but with such a big budget I would be able to hire specialists who could focus only on that aspect - telling us the information even before players could recognize what made their session not so great ;)
16) Favourite type of music?
I think the older I get the more open I am to different music genres. I do love games/soundtracks music the most but I also enjoy artists like “Emancipator”,“Bonobo” or “Sigur Ros” or even “oldschool” rap music.
17) Favourite movie/type of movies?
I enjoy historical movies the most. I think for the last few years I've enjoyed “Vikings” the most, especially the first seasons when each episode showed something new about their culture. Me and my wife are much more into series than movies lately – Netflix for the win ;)
18) Something unique or interesting about yourself?
I would like to answer that another way than the questions asks, as when I was a kid I always felt like my favourite game developers were something like “stars”. Then when I started doing them (developing games) myself and had the pleasure to meet or even work with people I have always been a fan of, I found out that they are just like any other passionate person. I have never been taught the skills I am using now from school. I don’t know.
19) Anything else you'd like to say to the players?
Thank you for your support. There won’t be us if there won’t be you!
20) And final question: Ismir or Midlander?
Ismir all the way!