Focus on the magic: how we found the freedom to create Scavengers

Josh Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Midwinter Entertainment, on the advantages of being purely focused on the game [View this email in your browser]( Focus on the magic: how we found the freedom to create Scavengers Josh Holmes, CEO and co-founder of Midwinter Entertainment, on the advantages of being purely focused on the game With over 20 years of experience as a creative leader, studio executive and entrepreneur in the games industry, Josh Holmes' credits include creative director for Halo 4 and studio head for Halo 5: Guardians, as well as co-creating the NBA Street and Def Jam franchises for EA. These are games that have collectively generated over $2B in direct revenues. In 2017, Josh co-founded Midwinter Entertainment to build the ambitious PvEvP sandbox shooter [Scavengers.]( How far we've come Back when we started Midwinter Entertainment, before we'd met [Improbable,]( we were four people jamming on ideas to create this large scale PvEvP sandbox experience. Our time was mostly invested in thinking about what we could build. We didn't want to spend too much time thinking about how to build it. We were a very small team and we wanted to stay that way. At the time, we didn't want to grow beyond 25 people, yet today we're north of 40. Early on, one of our guiding philosophies was to find technologies to help accelerate our development. Tools that could let us focus on the magic of creating gameplay and refining game systems, rather than trying to build a bespoke core technology. Partnering with Improbable was important to achieving this focus on our game. Knowing what matters to players When we first saw SpatialOS, what excited us about the networking engine was its potential to expand the scale and fidelity of a game session beyond what you could reasonably accomplish with a single server. It allowed us to go far beyond what we would normally have been able to do as a smaller team. Going back to our philosophy, the way I see it is that the more time you spend not building your own technology -- like a bespoke game engine, physics engine or, in this case, a networking solution -- is time that can be spent on things that create more value and impact for your players, which is really about greater gameplay and cooler experiences. "One of our guiding philosophies was to find technologies to help accelerate our development. Tools that could let us focus on the magic of creating gameplay." - Eric Matteson, Improbable Networking is incredibly important and exciting. But the fact is, from the perspective of a player it doesn't matter at all. It's crucial to the game, but it doesn't directly differentiate the gameplay. The reality is, if we hadn't taken the SpatialOS route, we'd have compromised. We would not have been able to do the heavy lifting to offload our AI system from the main game server to build the rich, populated world of Scavengers. We'd have had a smaller world with less complexity. Partnering with Improbable, we were able to steer the evolution of the networking engine and how we could use it to achieve our ambitions for Scavengers. In fact, this evolved beyond networking to incorporate our hybrid hosting solution, online services, play testing and other aspects of Scavengers backend development. It was a win-win situation that also contributed to the creation of [Improbable Multiplayer Services (IMS),]( Improbable's new offering to game makers. [Read the full article here]( [Facebook icon]( [Twitter icon]( [LinkedIn icon]( Copyright (C) 2021 ReedPop. All rights reserved. You got this email because you signed up to an account on GamesIndustry.biz and agreed to receive promotional emails from our partners. Our mailing address is: ReedPop 1-6 Grand ParadeBrighton, East Sussex BN2 9QB United Kingdom [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe]( [Privacy Policy]( | [Cookie Policy](