'Star Trek Fleet Command' - Scopely | Ft. Game GM Steve Huff and SVP of BD Henry Lowenfels

everybody today we are here playing Star Trek fleet command a recently launched game from Scully who are the publishers and digit who are the developers this is a game in the genre of what's called 4x or what I call March battle and I call it March battle because typically in these kind of games you send out different troops that are on a time march so it takes them a while to reach in a reach who they want to attack and in that time it also gives time for some folks in your Alliance kind of join up with you and join that attack but this is a beautifully produced game great music and uses the Star Trek IP which is you know definitely a more recent phenomenon we saw machine zone use the Final Fantasy IP and launching their update to game of game of war the Final Fantasy 4x game and in this case scope

Lee has taken a little bit of a different approach in trying to make the game it seems a lot more accessible to to the audience and integrating the Star Trek brand into this type of a game and so what we want to do today is actually talk to a couple of folks from scope Lee in particular Henry Lowen fells who runs business development for scope Lee and was essential in terms of finding the developer and working with digit to develop the game and Steve Huff who is a general manager for the game and as you'll see this is a typical type of 4x game in terms of the core gameplay mechanics but has some you know key differences in terms of how it plays in some ways it is a little bit more of an RPG more of a sim and certainly a game that is a work in progress as a stevelou to later in his talk and so without further ado let's take it over to Henry

and Steve and if you haven't done so already please hit subscribe please hit the bell notification and welcome to game makers [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey everyone welcome we are here at Scully with Steve and Henry and I thought we'd just go ahead and jump right in can you tell me a little bit about Star Trek fleet command like what kind of game is it and what are the type of players playing the game yeah great we set out with this game to appeal to a pretty wide audience we wanted to make a game that Star Trek fans would see a lot of value in and and find a lot of what they were looking for but that would also appeal to just the widest kind of aperture of gamer that we could you know consider pleasing we think a lot about RPG players strategy game players for sure and some of the combinations of

those kinds of gameplay are pretty evident in the product but also as we're looking at the specifics of feature design of how we're running you know live operations etc we think about more of like a broader even broader kind of understanding of what player types might be enjoying this game so as we are structuring the universe for example we want to do something different that would lean in more to like exploration elements which is really important for a lot of gamers also important for a lot of Trek fans the mission system there's a bunch of different elements where we lean in I think more strongly than is typical on mobile at least to PvE content and then we look for ways that the PvE content can still loop back into the social systems in player-versus-player constructively and you know destructively so we try to set a very wide net you know we're trying to appeal to strategy game fans RPG fans Trek fans there's obviously some overlap but they don't have to overlap we're not just going for that section of the Venn

diagram it's right in the middle right for some audience that aren't aware so Star Trek fleet command is a 4x sort of marched battle game I mean maybe Henry can you talk a little bit about how did you guys arrive at that specific genre yeah yeah absolutely so you know we have decided as a company that we wanted to enter the strategy category in some form we had you know already green 'lets mid court titles and we felt there was an opportunity in strategy and could be an extension of what we were already doing so as we assess the market we first were thinking we wanted to make well we were considering to be an RTS something more in the vein of clash of clans that was the big game at the time games were starting to come to market in a similar space and as we look at the market we realized wow if we look at this other subsection of the genre of what we call market battle for X we call it an empire builder at the time it felt much more wide open you had game of war which had a lot of users that had come through it but not all of them had really stuck around and then you didn't have a lot of you know players right behind it so we felt that there's a real opportunity to go deep in that area of

the market and you know as we realized what those games were actually all about we discovered that they're really more about Alliance gameplay diplomacy how people are interacting let's so the action so that's how we arrived at Star Trek the IP and can you take me back to the origin of the game like how did this idea even come up like who kind of drove it how did you get you know tied in with the developer digit if you just kind of go back to the whole sort of creation process sure yeah yeah so I think ideation at scope Lee is very chicken-and-egg you know what comes first developer IP concept it all sort of comes together in real time so you know as we were going deep in the strategy genre you know my team and I were looking at all the developers in the space who's interesting who's got games that are out there that we think are really special and we uncovered kings of the realm which was a game that at the time Kabam was publishing and digit was developer and we felt that this was a really interesting approach to the march of battle genre they were doing some things

that a lot of the other games weren't it wasn't fully fleshed out in terms of a lot of the the real big features that they needed to realize their vision but the baseline was there and they had something that was clearly driving towards something bigger so we really liked what they had it really dived well with with how we were thinking about the aspects of the genre that we wanted to go deep on as well as the IP and as we sort of pieced everything together it just was a really natural fit I think we met digit you know early 2015 for the first time and then over the course of the next couple months we continue the conversations visited their studio in Dublin really got to know the leadership team and felt very strongly that these were the guys who could work together with us very collaboratively great you're the GM of the game right and could you talk about like the structure of the team both from the perspective them you guys as a publisher here at scope Lee and then digit like like you know how many people who are the types of people both on the publishing side a minute on the digit side sure kind of like Henry was saying I mean we have to

work super closely together we have to have one vision for the product in the game we're trying to make you have to have excellent lines of communication we have to reinforce that shared vision over time and make sure you know because new people will come on to the teams or sometimes leave the teams so making sure like we're we know what we're trying to make and we're constantly looking back to that kind of North Star as we go as we sometimes pivot and make new decisions go in different directions add new things to the experience making sure everyone understands big picture what we're trying to build because everyone who's here trying to build these things it's here for a reason you know we have a lot of people who worked in other industries and if you're basically making games for most people they want to be games makers as a creative element that people care about whether you have more of a finance background or a coding background or whatever it may be and so that's a big unifying force you know across across the team we tend to focus more we have more of the kind of product management live operations on more of

the scope lis side but we're also and then more of like the typical like development elements at digit but there's a lot of bleeding back and forth and we work very closely as we're like thinking about the specifics of individual features or what the prioritization of new features that we want to add when we're evaluating what is the user experience you know where do we need to improve all that kind of stuff is incredibly collaborative structurally I mean things have changed a lot you know it also became clear I think as the project kind of started to commence and then ramped up the our ambitions were huge and so in order to support those ambitions we needed to scale up both teams and I keep saying both teams but we really do view it as one team it's really important philosophically to how we operate and how we're able to be successful and so yeah what started out you know as like a 20% your development studio is now four times that size and

then you know in our side it was a handful of people at scope we for a long time and then we you know I've scaled up substantially since then and we're gonna continue to do so because now we now we know what we have and you know we want to continue to invest to make that better and better as quickly as humanly possible okay and what about the game itself like what's coming next in terms of features or or you know new improvements for the game so we've been lucky in that you know I think a lot of what's making the game resonate so well right now out of the gate are a lot of the innovations there's a bunch of areas that when we tried to be smart about where we innovated where we leaned in on things that we knew worked and we've seen work broadly in other games but things like the free roam combat where you can win one of our goals that I've played a bunch of other strategy game is very deeply myself one of my frustrations was how rarely I can use my

best stuff and so we wanted to have an experience where if you spend all this time or in some cases money trying to get the best officer is the best equipment and our you know the best ship we wanted our users to be able to use those things you know frequently and it really lends itself to some cool emerging gameplay when you get the Enterprise crew and you get the enterprise and you put them together maybe just won some awesome you know week-long event that helped you you know achieve that you can actually take that thing obviously you can go pick fights with it you can just fly around in space our users do this they just fly around they talk they show off you know that kind of like being our players male to show off their mastery and show off their achievement is super important it goes back to like World of Warcraft players sitting in Orgrimmar you know showing off their epic gear and epic mounts so a lot of that stuff works really well is new some of that you know was in King's of the realm as well which is a really exciting product and that has and then we I mean we built I mean a

lot of the things that we knew were foundational and required at launch but we also have a massive backlog of awesome stuff that we want to over time so some of the the near-term roadmap priorities are around building out the social elements there's a lot of great emergent gameplay that we see our players just creating non-aggression pacts forming their own rules enforcing their own rules kind of determining their own interpretations of how they want to interact with the game and the content we are gonna be focused on systematizing that a lot more going forward the diplomatic stuff that Henry was talking about which aligns very well with the genre but also with the IP you know we have a feature that we've been advertising in-game for those who are familiar armadas this is kind of our take on like kind of bigger scale social heavily player versus player but in our game again we have a bunch of elements of player versus environment and in our

game armadas feature which allows players to come together in bigger groups and you know attack things together or defend things together will be applicable not only to kind of player conflict arenas but also some of the PvE elements of the game which I think will also be super exciting and they're obviously like closely connected too so that's some of the stuff there's a whole bunch of big features that we'll be rolling out there's a ton of new content the game was designed very purposely to allow us to add new content to the game along multiple vectors quickly and in ways that like you know has already been you know considered as we were you know building out the initial at one year plus roadmap of the game great so last question Henry like in terms of scope Lee do you have any ideas or can you speak to sort of what's coming up next from a product pipeline perspective like the next game or another game you guys are going to do with digit for example sure so we haven't announced our next

game we have a handful of things that are in the pipeline and a couple of releases coming in 2019 which we're really excited about and we're definitely focused on finding what's next with digit we haven't defined that we're really focused on Star Trek right now and making sure that it can be as big as it can be and the best experience for our players and you know we hope to work with digit for many many years in the future and make multiple products with them alright great thanks a lot guys you [Music]