Across the Fence Interview with Lead Dev Spoffy

Alright everyone. We’ve been tight-lipped about Across the Fence for a while now. The runup to Nickel Steel 1.1 is over and it’s about time we talk about it. You’ve been asking questions and we’ve seen that. We decided the best place to start was to have a conversation with Spoffy, the lead developer. What follows is a brief interview about our upcoming new game mode Across the Fence. We’ll be following up in the next few days with more information about ATF.

Interview with Spoffy:

You've been working on your own game mode called Across the Fence. So this is where you get to tell people about it. Let's start with, for everyone who hasn't seen the whispers in Discord, what is Across the Fence? Like, the 10,000 foot view?

It's a new recon style game mode that, I would say, is historically derived.

A lot of it is focused around core recon gameplay, but we've taken creative liberties in various places to make mechanics work - more so than we have in the campaign. And what we're looking to do is create a single player and multiplayer recon experience that offers mechanics such as RPG elements, character progression, overall strategic choices between individual missions, and bringing sort of an extra dimension to that style of game play. 

So it’s a new campaign with a recon first focus?

I don't know if you wanna call it a campaign. It's not its own campaign. I guess I would call it a campaign, just not in the sense of, like, a traditional Call of Duty or Halo campaign.

It's not a fixed sequence of missions that's been put together. It's more, a series of dynamic missions that are procedurally generated and span the whole of Cam Lao Nam and, I guess, vaguely from the start to the end of the Vietnam War, but that's, again, quite loose. 

What are you most excited about within this? This has been your personal project. I see you working on this all the time. What gets you the most hype about it? 

That's quite hard. There's a lot of really interesting individual bits, and I'm trying not to just talk about systems or cool bits of tech we built in there. 

I mean, feel free to talk about that if you want. 

I'm most excited, I think, about the feel this is gonna have going into recon missions compared to a traditional Arma mission; and that can be like a vanilla game, or even, you know, something modded like Antistasi or the campaign in Prairie Fire. We've put in a bunch of new systems to try and change the feel of the gameplay.

So things like how ATF [Across the Fence] is running a completely custom AI layer on top of Vanilla AI. We've got a completely overhauled medical system, a health system that's, you know, distinct from vanilla, distinct from ACE, and distinct from the Prairie Fire one as well: it’s designed to make things like single player much more feasible. 

And then we've got very open ended missions that are looking to try and capture elements of that, hey, you've been thrown into a grid square in Laos and Cambodia. You know, we kind of know what's there, but we also kind of don't. You know, you'll figure it out, you’re smart.

How did you narrow in on these are the things that are most important? How does that contribute to this unique thing that you're working on? 

Skipping a little bit of the history lesson because there's quite a few steps we went through to eventually get here. And, you know, we’ve had a few different gamemode designs over the years. Originally, we were looking at a large scale, almost wasteland survival style game mode, but this is where we ended up.

And that was from conversations around what really mattered to us as a team when designing this. The concepts that came out of that were things like; exploration, a character driven focus, a sense of having a persistent identity in the game. 

We also want that flavor of being thrown into the jungle and having to discover things for yourself and develop strategies for yourself. 

We want you to make choices that, you know, you might find in some other missions in Arma, but you wouldn't find in our campaign, for example, because our campaign's quite directed in the mission that you run.

And we're looking to do more of the, ‘Hey, I wanna see if there's AA cover up the valley, so I'm gonna go up onto that ridge line. We're gonna sneak up there. We're gonna try and avoid these patrols. We're gonna try and avoid being, you know, chased by anyone and see if we can do this quietly’. Then, you know, you get spotted and everything goes to high hell.

But that’s sort of freedom of choice, I guess. 

Gotcha. Very cool. This really rings true when I am reading books about the era right? There's so much self direction once you're on the ground. There's so much individual initiative shown across teams, right, at the recon level to really determine ‘how do we approach these problems, how do we map this out’. So it sounds like you're giving a lot of that ability to the player. Is that correct? 

Yeah, I'd say that's the goal. I mean, some of the missions that have sort of inspired bits of this were, I think it was Tilt went on a mission that was essentially ‘Hey. We think there's an NVA battalion here. Could you check for us? Yeah’.

And that was about it in terms of information. We’re trying to capture that sort of sense of unknown going in there and just being left to your own devices. 

That's excellent. Okay. So you talked about that, this development cycle has been going on for a while. How long have you been working on this project, and how many people are working on it with you? 

There's a fair amount of history there. In short, in one form or another, I'd say that, as a game mode, it's been on people's minds for… I mean, it’s originally sort of Rob's brainchild back before the CDLC released, before the project even really got going that much. But then in its current incarnation, which, you know, has changed a lot over time, has probably really been going for a couple of years at this point. Like, between 1 and 3.

I'm not sure on the exact dates. 

Sure. And, who's working on it with you? 

Yeah. So we've got Veteran … who pretty much did all of our campaign implementation, along with Wyqer, who also did a great job in the campaign. We've got Aceb, who helped out with the design of Mike Force and some of the early [Across the Fence] prototypes, early design ideas for Across the Fence. We’ve got Terra working on UIs … and then we've got a few other members of the team that pop in here and there to contribute like Jaazier with graphic design and and others. 

Very nice. That’s a good team. 

Yeah. It is. They've done a great job keeping momentum up and putting in ideas and making sure that everything gets put together in a healthy way.

So how many people can play in this game mode?

Oh, yeah. That's a good one. So, to some extent, that's sort of to be to be decided.

Sure. 

The goal at the moment is, I'd say, 1 to 6 players per [recon] team.

That said, single player is gonna be a focus of this, and making sure that it is fun and enjoyable to experience without other people there supporting you. But equally, we want it to be a blast with friends as well.

And each individual server will also support having multiple teams running missions on that server. So, you know, you could have 30 people on the server and 8 missions running simultaneously, potentially, with a beefy enough server. 

Wow.

And then, you know, some of the designs we have at the moment that I'm hesitant to fully commit to, have those players all contributing to the overall success or failure of the campaign. 

That would be very cool. I can see why that's a blue sky idea, but that would be very cool. 

I guess it's a starting point anyway. That's what we're looking at doing. We've got lots of ideas to, you know, expand on things over time as well. So, one thing that is definitely exciting is that once we've got this to a point where we can release it, there's so many different ideas of where we could take it afterwards, that we'll just have to see what kind of feedback we get.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Well, that's about it for my questions. Is there anything else you wanna say about Across the Fence before we go? Anything that we didn't cover?

Probably only that the whole team is looking forward to actually getting it into the hands of Patrons and starting to get some of that early feedback. And, you know, the gameplay may be a little janky at that point, a little rough around the edges, but there's a lot of excitement on the team just to get feedback and see what we're doing right and what we're not doing so right.

Sure.

Then we can adjust accordingly. 

Interview over.

Hopefully this gives you all a sense of what we have coming up. We'll be releasing more info about features, specifics of the gameplay loop and so on in the coming weeks. Very excitingly the alpha is going to be available to our patrons at the Captain and Major levels very soon so that you'll be able to help us test, give direct feedback, and contribute to the final product.

Thanks so much for all your support and we can't wait for you to get your hands on Across the Fence.