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The
Internet is a great way to stay in touch. We caught up with
Kevin Ryan, the main programmer for Top Meadow's game, Heaven Quest
via email. He graciously answered some of our questions about
his company, their games and what it's like to be a Christian game
developer. I was fascinated by his answers and I think you'll
enjoy this "peak behind the scenes." And if you've
ever thought about making your own Christian game, Kevin offers some
solid insights and advice for you.
CG: What is Top Meadow, where is it located and who makes up the company?
Kevin: We are two home schooling families that live up in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Shaver Lake which is about 1 hour from Fresno.
CG: What is your name and what do you do at Top Meadow?
Kevin:
I'm Kevin Ryan and I focus mainly on the creative aspects of game development while my partner Brian Supple focuses on the operations end of things and keeps things running smoothly. There's a lot of overlap between what we do though. Like many small companies we both wear many hats and some of them don't fit too well :^).
CG: Your main game currently is Heaven Quest. It's a straight forward
board
game with Bible based trivia. Why did Top Meadow decide on such a
"simple" game?
Kevin: When we were starting out our main limitations were time and money, so we didn't want to have a lot of development unknowns on our first product. Everyone knows what board games are and on the computer you can do so much more. You can add fun stuff like animation, movies, sound effects, music, and other things like that.
Our goal was to create a fun cool game that would run on the majority of computers out there. Lots of families that have older computers; so we didn't want to create a game that required a lot of horsepower to run smoothly. Many of my wife's friends in her home schooling groups have older computers and with tight family budgets couldn't afford to go out and buy the latest greatest computer. We wanted to make sure that they could run our games on their computers.
CG: Who is the intended audience for Heaven Quest and why?
Kevin: We wrote Heaven Quest for families; basically Mom and Dad playing with the kids. We both home school and have nine kids between us (so far). From personal experience we could see that there was a need for good Christian software for families. We felt called by God to use our talent and experience to help start creating some.
So we kept that family audience in mind as we created Heaven Quest. First we set it up so more than one person could play at the same
time. We let the players choose their difficulty level so kids/parents of different levels of knowledge could play together equally. The user interface had to be state-of-the-art and very easy to use, especially for the little kids. So we would craft things throughout the game like making the buttons you click on in the game large enough so little hands can position the mouse over them easily.
CG: How has Heaven Quest been received?
Kevin: Almost all of the feedback that we have received so far has been positive. We get email from people thanking us for taking the time to develop a Christian product that rivals those in the secular market. They seem to be genuinely grateful to find a Christian game like this for their family. I get the sense that they are a lot of people out there that are looking for fun safe games for their kids that aren't as crude as our culture is becoming.
You can find Heaven Quest in quite a few of the large Christian bookstore chains. The Family Christian stores
just picked it up in the last week [Editor's Note: This would
be the end of June] and its been on amazon.com and crosswalk.com for quite a while now. We are selling quite a few copies down in Australia and also over in England.
CG: Could you please describe the development cycle for Heaven Quest
(the point of this is to give the reader a feel for what it takes to make a
game and
give them a peek into the inner workings of a Christian developer).
What was
the toughest part for you? Was it tougher than you expected or
easier?
Kevin: I could go on forever here :^)
Since Heaven Quest was our first product we needed to first create a software library that all of our future games could use. These are the routines that allow you to draw graphics to the screen, play sound and music and other things like that. There are other decision that come first, like what 3rd party libraries are you going to use and what language will you be writing the code in. I put a list of the tools we used for development at
www.topm.com/tools.html.
Once the libraries were complete we then had to create a few tools to make the development process easier. We wrote a software tool that lets us manage our bitmaps in groups instead of individually (Heaven Quest has over 15,000 frames of animation, so this was very important). We also created a tool that let us build our user interfaces. This tool would handle things like how pictures on the screen highlight when the mouse moves over them, or what happens when you click on something in the game.
At this point we could then start work on Heaven Quest and it was pretty straightforward; coding, creating artwork and sound, and making design changes to the game play along the way. The final testing and debugging after reaching our first beta was very short because it wasn't a very complex game. The total development cycle from start to finish was approximately 6 months for the libraries, tools, and Heaven Quest. A very large part of that time was spent creating all the artwork.
Everything went pretty much as expected, but then I've been doing this for a long time so I've had a lot of experience with game development and what can go right and wrong. Back in 1986 at Dynamix I was one of the two guys that wrote Arctic Fox which was the first original game for the Amiga computer. That development was done on a black box computer with a wooden keyboard and the operating system would change every month or so. (If you want to know how to change your C code to work under build 27 of the Amiga OS and then change it back again to work under build 24 because build 27 had too many bugs then I'm the man to talk to.) I can remember tracing through 68000 machine code (the language the computer speaks) trying to figure out exactly how some of the Amiga's unique graphic chips worked. There wasn't really any documentation on the Amiga hardware then as it was still under development. Compared to that Heaven Quest was a pretty easy! :^)
CG: What was the biggest technical hurdle in getting Heaven Quest finished?
Kevin: The largest problem we had was getting all the walking animation artwork done in a reasonable amount of time. Heaven Quest has over 15,000 frames of animation. We ended up having to buy another computer dedicated to rendering the artwork. It was a Windows NT computer with two CPUs in it and it was running almost 24 hours a day for a couple of months creating artwork. Most of the game board artwork was done using 3D Studio MAX.
CG: What is it like creating games for the Christian market?
Kevin: Fun and satisfying. And the people that buy or ask about the game are concerned about the right things. For example, not long after we finished Heaven Quest we got an email from someone asking if "it was true you are using prayer as an element of game play?" He had a valid concern that we were trivializing prayer by putting it into a game. That's not the kind of feedback you get from the secular market.
Computer games are a fairly new genre especially when compared with movies, so we are still working out all the rules of interaction. In games your actions affect what happens. We have a Christian world view. When you pray, God listens to you and He answers. Prayer does work (and believe me with what my son and family went through I know). So, in our case, it came to the choice of either leaving prayer out of all our games or including it and because of the nature of the game genre it becomes a game play element.
I have seen so many movies where some disaster strikes and it never occurs to the characters to pray and that bothered me. Taking a step with your foot will move your body forward and praying will move your spirit forward. Prayer is just as real and effective as walking and much more important. It was because of the importance prayer that we decided that it should be in the games.
Anyway the point of this long and boring digression is that creating games for the Christian market makes you think and ponder about the most important things. I think if you open your heart to God he will put the most wonderful and amazing things there.
CG: Have you been happy with the success of Heaven Quest?
Kevin: If you talk about success in terms of number of sales then its been a mixed bag. It sold more than we expected for the first year, but not enough to break even; not even close. When you are a brand new company without a lot of marketing dollars it takes quite a while to get known and to get your product on the store shelf which drives
most of the sales.
We just recently completed demos of both of the games and put them on our web site
www.topm.com. People are able to try out the game before buying it. That has generated quite a few sales. Once people see the game and try it out they like it.
CG: Where did Top Meadow come from and why does it exist?
Kevin: Top Meadow was the name of Gilbert K. Chesterton's house. GKC is very hard to describe in just a few sentences. You could describe him as a prophetic defender of God and family that lived during the first third of the 20th century. He wrote "The Everlasting Man" which played a large part in C. S. Lewis' conversion to Christianity. We simply want to serve God however He sees fit to lead us.
CG: Where does Top Meadow plan to go in the future?
Kevin: Eventually we will be developing another kid's game that is more along the line of the "Putt Putt" type of adventure games. Its just a general concept right now nothing real specific and no development schedule yet. We'll also be developing more mature Christian adult adventure type games. We want to create games with more depth, more game play, and more complexity. Also with the Everquest example, multiplayer is an obvious route to take. I can see every single game we do having an online multiplayer element to it.
CG: The Christian game market for the PC has been rather sparse with mixed
success. Do you have any insights on the future of the Christian game
market?
Kevin: I think that it is fair to say that in the past the quality of the games has not matched that of the secular industry, but this is changing with good companies like Cactus Game Design, Eternal Warriors, Shine Studios, and others working on promoting and creating high quality products. I saw the interview with Two Guys Software on your web site. I'd guess that there are others just like them working right now on some great games. I think what we are seeing right now is the infancy of what will
someday be a thriving industry. Its hard to have a computer software section in a Christian Bookstore when there are only a handful of games available. And its hard to sell your software if its not on the store shelf.
VeggieTales may be a good example of what will happen eventually to the Christian computer game market. VeggieTales are entertainment that teach about God and the
Bible. Their production values are very high. Computers are
becoming almost as common as video players in the homes. Any family that bought a VeggieTales video would be interested in a computer game that was just as entertaining and educational. It will take time, but it will happen, there are just some obstacles to overcome right now.
CG: Do you have any advice for those out there contemplating developing their
own Christian games?
Kevin: The Christian computer game market has not yet matured which is an opportunity because many of the barriers to entry are not yet in place as they are in the secular market, but this is changing very fast. People are really going to want to see the same quality in Christian games that they see in the secular market and that brings you to the toughest problem: money to develop a high quality product. Let me give you a real example without mentioning exact dollar amounts.
I created The Incredible Machine in 1992 for Sierra . I did all the programming and design, a couple of artists created the artwork, and our in house sound guy created the songs and sound effects. It cost us $N to develop. Two years later in 1995 we finished The Incredible Machine version 3.0. It was very similar to the first version, but ran under Windows, had more parts, more artwork, more sound effects and music, and more puzzles. And it cost $Nx10 to develop. Why did it cost ten times as much to create only two years later? Because the consumer market demanded a higher level of quality. And the bar is always moving higher.
This spills over into the Christian gaming market because our games will be compared to the secular games by the end users. And if they are spending 1-5 million dollars to create their games it makes it tough to make games that look just as good. Eventually someone is going to create a breakthrough Christian product though. Maybe they are working on it right now.
If anyone wants any help at all with coding questions or just development stuff in general feel free to contact my partner or me at either
brian@topm.com or kevin@topm.com and we will help in any way we can.
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