When I asked Ashley Monif to tell me about Fieldrunners, the first thing he did was start rattling off awards the game had won. Small wonder, because the game spent six months in the top twenty on the iTunes App Store, made Time Magazine’s top ten games of 2008, and won best game in the IGF Mobile competition. That’s not bad for a tower defense game that started out with four towers and no sound effects.

Pixelsocks: Tell me about your game.

Ashley Monif

Ashley: Fieldrunners is a fun, cute tower defense game where you can creatively build your own defense maze. As enemies become more difficult, you have to adjust some of your defenses, and depending on the level of difficulty and the gameplay mode, each maze is unique. We’ve released new levels, sound, new units, and new gameplay modes as downloadable content. When we first offered the game, there was one map, no sound effects, and no extra gameplay modes.

Pixelsocks: Can you tell me a little bit about the different gameplay modes?

Ashley: The first gameplay mode is Classic, where we give you four kinds of towers to defend against 100 waves of enemies. There’s also Extended mode, where we offer two new towers: the flame tower and the mortar tower.

We’ll hopefully be releasing an update this fall that will offer two new maps and towers. With Frostbite, one of the new maps, the exit point is in the center, so you have a very limited amount of space to build. It’s one of the more challenging maps, so we’re offering the ice tower, which has an area slow effect.

The other map is a ruined platform above Grasslands (the original Fieldrunners map –ed). The tower that we offer there is the laser tower, which fires across the entire map, but only in four directions. So the key will be channeling enemies to take advantage of that new tower.

Moving forward, in order to continue providing high quality support, we’ll be selling new towers as downloadable content purchases for about a dollar. We’ve talked to the community, and we feel that it’s a fair price for the amount of time and energy it takes to make the art, create the gameplay, and create the new units for each map. So, as long as the community keeps on buying the maps and liking the game, we’ll keep on building it.

Pixelsocks: Tower Defense is a specialized branch of real time strategy, a genre that is notorious for being inaccessible. What steps did you take to make the game pick-up-and-play?

Ashley: We tried to make sure the game would appeal across all audiences, so we made sure our art style was colorful and very friendly and that you could relate to the units. The bad guys are fun, playful characters, and even when you defeat them, they just fall down on their backs and fade out. The violence isn’t over the top, and that makes it much more playful.

As far as the gameplay goes, we realized that tower defense has traditionally been more of a hardcore category. To make it accessible, the game was designed on the iPhone so you can just drag and drop towers. It’s a very easy user interface because there isn’t much to learn.

We also made the attack waves very simple. The first map, Grasslands, is our all time favorite map. The enemies come from the west and their exit point is to the east, and we progressively build the difficulty [of each wave]. So after you play the game 2-3 times, you kinda get a sense of how to build their maze up. It has the same kind of flow as the NES Super Mario Brothers. You first learn how to jump, how to run, and how to dash. However, after a while you’re able to get a hang of all the levels because you understand the mechanic.

Pixelsocks: Chronologically, did you decide to make an accessible tower defense game, and that lead you to the iPhone, or did you want to make an iPhone game, and the platform lends itself to accessibility?

Ashley: Actually, we were first looking to do a game for XBLA, and it was a completely different game. We were going through the submission process and found that the submissions, interviews, and revisions took a long time. So when we first heard of the App Store and how there is no content approval, that appealed to us because we felt we had some good ideas and we just wanted to get them out there.

At that point, we realized that the tower defense genre didn’t really have any really good games out for it. We wanted to take a fresh look at it, and thought we could do a really cool game with the iPhone. So far, its been doing really well.

Pixelsocks: If you ever decide to move on from Fieldrunners, do you have any ideas on the direction you’d like to go?

Ashley: We have some ideas, but we haven’t announced anything yet. However, we’re definitely working on some new intellectual property, and we’re going to be showing that to everyone next year. In the meantime, we’re taking Fieldrunners to the PSP and DSi.

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Tags:   Ashley Monif · DSi · fieldrunners · iphone · PSP · Subatomic StudiosNo Comments

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