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Gabe Alvaro
United States
Berkeley
California
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To date we have seen a number of good games get ported to iOS, but as great as it is to have those games right now, we've yet really to see someone release any good solid wargames. They don't claim to be only about wargames, but The Shenandoah Studio (formerly known as Project Simonsen) have burst onto the iOS board game scene promising great things for gamers and their tablet devices.
The Shenandoah Studio said "Hello World" with their blog on March 31st. Soon after Eric Lee Smith dropped in at BGG on April 4th to announce the launch of their company, then named "Project Simonsen", in a BGG press release. That post appeared as an exciting and welcome announcement about some folks with deep gamer roots who wanted to bring some real hobby games, namely wargames, to the iPad. TSS was very keen from the get-go to lay out their company's philosophy as:
• Focus on game play first
• Avoid the animation and 3-D art Death Star
• Insist on great solitaire play from the start (not an afterthought)
• Use turn-based game systems that can be played asynchronously
• Focus on “game systems” that can evolve over time
Lastly, and most importantly:
• Start as a game designer-centric company – and stay that way[/center]
They also emphasized the late great Redmond A. Simonsen, of SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.), as inspiration and called themselves the "new player in town".
So far, response has been very positive and we at iOS Board Games thought people might be ready to hear more about TSS, the folks who run it, and the games that they will be working on.
iOS Board Games: Ok. First off, congratulations on naming your company from the formerly known "Project Simonsen" to The Shenandoah Studio. Did I get that right? Because in Eric's blog post, he used it different ways both plural and singular. I just want to use it correctly.
Jeff Dougherty: We are "The Shenandoah Studio, LLC". Eric will be duly keel-hauled.
iOSBG: Alright then! On with the questions.
I know there is quite a bit of good info on the blog (I read it all and then some), but why don't we start by finding out a little more about Eric Lee Smith, Jeff Dougherty, and James Terry of TSS. What will each of you be doing for TSS to bring these games to our iOS devices?
JD: Great question.
Eric is our idea man, CEO, business guy, and overall leader. Besides his years of experience in game design, he's also a veteran of several successful startup companies and other business ventures here in Philadelphia. His track record, know-how, and connections are all going to be invaluable in getting us funded and then keeping us in business long enough to get revenue going.
He also knows a lot of people in the game design world, which means we've been able to attract some really top talent, and he's been around the block enough that he knows what is and isn't a good game. As hokey as it sounds, though, the most important thing he brings to us is vision- he was the one who first had the idea of bringing board games onto the iPad, and everything we've done has really been a riff off of his idea.
James is our tech guy. He's a veteran software developer who's already released several apps for both iPhone and Android, as well as a host of other platforms. (He's been in the business for over 20 years!) We're looking to him to design the program behind each game (as opposed to the game itself) and then lead the team that actually implements it.
He's got a lot of experience in all of those areas, but that wasn't what made us decide to bring him on board as our CTO. James is a gamer- he's the only guy I know who owns more games than Eric- which means that he's just as passionate as Eric or I about making sure that we make good games that are faithful to the quality of the original design. He gets us, we get him, and we're really excited to have him aboard.
And me? My job title at TSS says "Founding Producer", which doesn't really tell you much. So far, most of my time's been spent as a talent scout, evaluating games that we think might be good fits for our company and deciding which designers we want to approach. As some of the projects start to move along I'll do any additional design work needed to get them from the board to the touchscreen- for example, making sure that the software interface works well, designing tutorial missions, and writing help files. I'll also be coordinating playtests and, as the launch date moves closer, taking charge of publicity and marketing for our titles the same way I'm doing for the company now. In other words, I'm more or less "Lord High Everything Else", as Robert Heinlein put it.
iOSBG: How was it that three of you came together as a team to form this company?
JD: In a funny way, the whole TSS story starts at a Halloween party. I was at a party at the University of Pennsylvania and met an exchange student from the National University of Singapore named Catherine Zhang. Eric is a mentor for the NUS exchange program, so when Catherine found out that I'd been working on a board game of my own- the design that became War Patrol- she offered to introduce me to Eric. When I didn't respond fast enough for her tastes she offered again, and finally told me that she'd set up a meeting! So, after a moderate amount of poking and prodding, I finally met up with Eric and we really hit it off. He was impressed enough by my design that when he decided to move forward with Project Simonsen and the whole idea of making board games for the iPad he recruited me to ride along.
We actually met James through John Butterfield, one of our game designers and a personal friend of Eric's. James and John had worked together on a few different projects in the past, both gaming-related and non, and originally James was only along because he'd done some work on John's Battle of the Bulge game. But once we met up we found that we all spoke the same language and that he'd always wanted to work on these kind of games, so recruiting him was a no-brainer.
iOSBG: Sounds like you've got a pretty tight team.
So you've come together to make game apps for tablet devices as mentioned in the Goals area of your company web site. Besides being inspired by the tablet form, your company is also inspired by Redmond Simonsen, the late great game designer, and his work with SPI. Will you run the company and design and produce games the way RAS might have? What does that mean in regards to tablet board games? How will you apply his values and methods to the operation and output of TSS?
JD: Again, great question. There's a reason we started out calling ourselves Project Simonsen, and it wasn't just to get all the grognards buzzing.  I think you make a good distinction when you say "design and produce games the way RAS would have". Our goal isn't to somehow re-create the glory days of Eric's youth at SPI, because you can't do that- the world moves on, times change, and methods have to change with it. Our goal isn't to copy what Redmond did, but to try to do what we think Redmond would have faced with these new technologies. We deliberately chose the name Project Simonsen because it reminds us every day, every time we talk about the company, sign a document, or stick on an email signature that we're committed to doing things Redmond's way.
iOSBG: What does that mean, exactly?
JD: I'm sure you could ask all three of us that question and get three different answers, but I can tell you what it means to me.
1) Good design. Redmond was about making sure that the games SPI put out were well-designed in every sense of the word- both that they were fun to play and free of rules glitches, and that their components conveyed the information the player needed to know. We want to make sure that we do the same. Everyone who's tried to play a board game, a computer game, or especially a board game on a computer has experienced unbalanced scenarios, poorly written rules, counters that don't provide useful information, incomprehensible tutorials, and map screens that you spend all your time scrolling through. We don't think Redmond would have tolerated any of that, so we're not going to do it. That's why we're seeking out games from proven designers who have shown they can put together fun and challenging game systems. It's also why we're putting a lot of effort into the user experience for our games--interface, tutorials, help files, all of it.
2) Systematic Approach. One of Eric's favorite sayings about Redmond is, "Anything the man had to do three times, he'd sit down and figure out a system for how to do it". SPI put out an astonishing number of games and magazines in the years of its existence- if you look at their publication schedule it's like they were being turned out by a well-oiled machine. Well, that's because the company was run like a well-oiled machine, and that meant they could do all of that with a staff made up mostly of teenagers and twenty-somethings. We want to do the same thing here.
That means while we're putting together our first few games, we're also going to take the time to document how we do things, what worked, what didn't, and what we learned while doing it. This is especially important because our founding team contains a lot of extraordinary people- Eric and James are both very senior professionals and we're working with some of the best game designers out there today. The hope is that we'll be able to constantly improve over our first few games, and eventually have a system that lets us consistently produce top-quality games. Then, as long as we can expand the company without losing that system, TSS will be able to keep producing top-quality games even if all the founding members are struck by lightning. At once. All of us hit by the same lightning bolt, at Origins or something I suppose. Hey, it could happen.
What it boils down to is dedication to honestly evaluating your work, learning from your mistakes, and then preserving what you learn in institutional memory. That's what Redmond Simonsen did, and it really "made" SPI and Victory Games. We want to do the same thing here.
iOSBG: There's a big difference between the tried and true user experiences of print versus the user experience of video games. I would argue that the multi-touch capabilities of tablets now have us at a point in time where conventions for good user experience with components and information of board games is still being worked out and common conventions have yet to really be settled on. Since Redmond made some eminently useable graphic designs in his productions, I think we will expect for TSS to do the same for digital productions. Do you think that will take a lot of time?
For your the first few games that you mention, will you be spending a lot of time working that out and testing with user experience experts (and do you have your own?) to get it absolutely right before launching them? Or will you be more concerned with getting games out quickly and then working through problems iteratively based on user feedback?
JD: One of the big things we're counting on at Project Simonsen is to be able to use our board game designers to bridge the gaps in areas like these. An iPad is not a physical board- no question about that. One thing that you see come up a lot when people talk about the iPad user interface, though, is the idea of it being a "window" onto a notional game world rather than a display device. In my opinion the best games- heck, the best apps- out there for iPad let you interact with them in a way that's as much like the physical as possible. You touch things to affect them, drag them point at where you want them to go, and choose from a limited set of action icons to affect them. Good examples of what I'm talking about here would be Civilization: Revolution and the Neuroshima Hex iPad edition.
Given that, what we're hoping is that a lot of the board game experience that Eric and our other designers bring to the table will transfer over and enable us to create good information design for our user interface. James, our CTO, also comes from a background programming touch-screen educational displays, so he was doing this touch thing before it was cool. We're also looking at leveraging the skills of some of our designers who have a lot of experience in the UI/User Experience area.
So to answer your first questions: yes, we think that having good graphic design and good presentation of information is an integral part of doing things Redmond's way. As for taking a lot of time...we hope not. The demos we've done so far have been promising and we'll have a good amount of time to refine the UI while our coding team works on other core modules, so we don't think that getting the UI right will be a major rate-limiting step.
That said, we're committed to getting this right. We're planning extensive blind testing of the interface, we're looking at getting some of our own experts on board, and if worst comes to worst we'll delay a launch and get the interface right than launch something with a bad user experience. That's not what Redmond was about and it's not what we want to be about either. If the user experience is just "okay", I'd rather keep it in development until it's great- but that's really a decision we're going to have to make on a case by case basis. It's still very early in our development effort, there's a lot of unexplored ground for us out there, and I don't want to make too many absolute pronouncements until we're a little further down the road.
iOSBG: Can I ask you to clarify a few things on your philosophy statement? First, what do you mean by "3-d art Death Star"?
JD: By "3-D art Death Star" we basically mean the graphics and animation rat race that's consumed a lot of computer and video gaming today. A lot of the competition out there centers on who has the slickest cutscenes, the best frame rates, and the most realistic death animations. The thing is, all of those things soak up a lot of time, talent, and money, all of which are very finite resources for startups like us. So, like a master game player of my youth, we decided that the only way to win is not to play. We plan to focus on getting "good enough" 2D graphics in our games, and to avoid real-time play to keep from running into the headaches of realtime rendering. By doing so, we remove a major pressure on our design team and free them to concentrate on things like gameplay and user experience, which we think are much more important to our core customers.
The thing about 3D animation and art is that, like the Death Star, they can absorb just about any amount of effort you care to throw at them. We think that by eliminating them we can hold our development costs down and eliminate some potential development snarls.
iOSBG: Ok. Let's clarify the next thing. By "solitaire play", I'll assume you mean AI, right? How much relative effort will it take to have good AI for your games and will "good enough" ever be good enough?
JD: I'm glad you asked about solitaire play and AI, because it gives me the chance to clarify something that I frankly should have a while ago. Every Simonsen game is going to be playable by a single human player against an AI opponent. Many of our games are also planned to be multiplayer, either face-to-face or asynchronously online. We hope to partner with a third-party multiplayer platform such as GameCenter and/or OpenFeint to help do that. I can't really say how many of our first series of games will be multiplayer or how exactly it's going to work, because we haven't made those decisions yet. What will probably end up happening is for our first one or two games to be solitaire only- we have some good titles like that on contract already, such as "Soviet Dawn", "Hornet Leader", or Joe Miranda's Waterloo game. Multiplayer will come later, once we've had a chance to get a handle on more basic issues.
Now, to actually answer your question: the beauty of signing games that, for the most part, already have solitaire systems is that a lot of the hard work on the AI is done. If you look at any commercially successful solitaire board game, it already has a system that can provide a decent level of challenge to players and can be run by a human using physical components such as cards, tables, and dice. John Butterfield's "RAF" is a great example of this. Since the AI system is already worked out, that makes implementation into computer form a lot easier. The situation is obviously more complicated for games like Washington's War, which don't yet have a solitaire system, but in those cases the original designers say they can deliver a solitaire component and we believe that they will. Another advantage of taking on existing board game designs is that the AI system can be tested from very early in the project, since we can have human players go up against the designer's solitaire system playing a physical copy of the game before the game is playable on a computer. That's going to help us a great deal. As for what's "good enough", all I can say is that we're going to make these great games and I'd say the minimum standard would be an AI that provides a fun experience for the majority of people we test a game with. If we can't get that, there's always next project.
iOSBG: And here's the last one. What do you mean by "'game systems' evolving over time"?
JD: By "game systems evolving over time" we mean being able to expand and adapt our games to cover multiple situations and time periods. Just one example: "Hornet Leader"'s system has already been spun off by Dan Verssen to make physical games like "Phantom Leader" and "Thunderbolt/Apache Leader". We'd like to do the same thing, enabling us to put out a wide variety of games relatively quickly and cheaply. Ultimately, we'd really like to have something for everyone, even if it doesn't come along right away.
iOSBG: So let's get to the games! Your blog says nine games. I only see eight identified so far. What's the ninth?
The blog also mentions three more to come. What are they? If you can't yet tell us, then can you tell us WHEN you will tell us?
JD: We're not yet ready to announce our ninth game because it's a big one and we want to make as big a splash as possible with the announcement. I'm meeting with Eric to discuss the exact timing of that announcement tomorrow, but it will probably be within the next week. Depending on how this interview goes, I might be able to discuss it later.
We do have more games on the line, but we also don't want to talk about that because we're still negotiating with designers, or in some cases waiting to hear if they're even interested in working with us or not. We want to make sure we're not raising expectations we can't fulfill, and out of respect for the designers we work with we don't want to associate their names with us until they're ready to have that happen.
iOSBG: So then let's talk about the games you do have in the pipeline. Which one(s) do you think we'll see first? Let's talk about those. How are they coming along?
JD: Where we are right now is this: we have letters of intent signed with all of the game designers we've announced, plus our "one more" that I keep talking about. On the basis of that, we're currently doing cost estimates and budgets for those games, which we're going to use to seek out investors. Once we have some investment capital, we'll be able to take the specs and plans we've generated and start actually implementing the games.
So, right now we're at a very early stage. However, for various reasons we're very optimistic about getting investors and we expect that things will start falling into place very quickly after that.
iOSBG: I must admit, that I thought (hoped) you guys were further along. So in a sense, your company, and certainly your products, are going to be having a very public birthing process which, judging by your prolific blogging and tweeting, is exactly how you want it.
I didn't think that this interview would go in the direction of finding out more about your funding situation, but since you brought it up, I might as well ask how is it going? Have you heard of Kickstarter.com? I keep seeing it come up in regards to creative projects of all kinds. Could your projects apply to its funding model?
JD: No worries. We actually have thought about Kickstarter, but we're not sure if we want to go that route yet. Possibly if other funding channels fail.
Again, we are planning to move pretty fast once funding comes in, and we're very confident that it will soon. We plan to have our first game out before the end of this year, if that helps.
iOSBG: Clearly your goal is to bring the kind of games that you want to play to tablet devices, but you mention playtesting paper games. Will you be printing games as well?
JD: We will not be printing physical board games. What we do insist on is that each game we consider for implementation on the iPad exist in paper form first, complete with all game mechanics and at least some scenarios. This can be either a published game (which is what most of the games in our first string are), or it can be a physical prototype supplied by the designer. What that lets us do is evaluate each proposal *as a game* before we decide if we're going to publish it for the iPad. Paper prototypes are much quicker and cheaper to make than electronic ones and much easier to change when testing inevitably uncovers some problems. By the time we write the first line of code on a game, it should already have had a lot of the kinks worked out, which we expect to speed up the implementation process considerably.
iOSBG: Given the kind of games you've got in the visible pipeline and the focus on deep quality "gamer" games, it would appear that TSS is aiming directly at a war gamer audience. Yet as an "omni" gamer myself, I'm still interested to take a beginner's approach to war games in this medium. So perhaps your aim is also at general gamers, like me, as well? What about casual gamers (arguably the biggest market of all)? Is TSS aiming at all three? If so, then how will you achieve that?
JD: The Shenandoah Studio is aiming our products at hobby gamers, people who are willing to invest more time and money than the average person in a game and who demand a good gameplay experience. We are aiming at both wargamers and "omni" gamers, as you put it, and we hope to eventually have something out there for everybody. When we started gathering up games for TSS to work on, though, the first people we talked to were mostly folks Eric knew from his days at SPI or had heard of since then. He mostly plays wargames, so that created a definite tilt towards that genre in our first batch of games. We're hoping to redress that balance soon.
iOSBG: Will there be any plans for iPad "console-mode" apps?
JD: What do you mean by "console-mode" apps?
iOSBG: "Console mode" is my label for those rare but interesting game apps that make use of an iPhone or iPod Touch as a controller and the iPad as a console. For a board game app, it can be a way to keep hidden information when playing face to face. Example: Scrabble for iPad. For arcade games, "console mode" apps have used the iPhone as a controller for a space ship or race car or other some such game toon to control on the iPad.
JD: "Console mode"- I like it. To answer your question, yes, we are planning on doing that. Obviously, we can't make it a requirement to play our games since not everybody who owns an iPad also owns an iPhone or even necessarily a smartphone. (I don't own a smartphone myself.) We do want to include it as an option for games where we think it has the potential to enhance the gameplay experience. For example, in our edition of Washington's War or other card-driven games the iPhone could show an individual player's hand of cards or other status display, or players could use the iPad to display public information known to all while using their smartphones to hold information meant to be kept secret.
All that said, it's probably a technology you'll see emerge after we've gotten our first few games out. Not everyone in our audience has a smartphone, and it's likely that initial versions of this will only work with iPhones. That means it's a lesser priority for us, and something we'd rather push back to later versions of a game than let it hold back release.
iOSBG: So how will you price your apps? And do you intend to mess about with the prices, having sales and such?
JD: We're probably going to price them towards the higher end of things on the App Store for a number of reasons. First, our audience is hobby gamers, who are used to paying for quality. We don't think it'll be a hard sell to convince somebody to shell out eight bucks for an electronic version of a game when they already buy board games for $40 and up. Second, we know we have to deliver that quality, so each of our games is going to represent a significant amount of design, artistic, and programming effort. Aiming at hobby gamers means we're not going to have the mass-market appeal of casual games like Angry Birds or Cut the Rope, so that means we are going to have to charge a bit more for each download.
That said, we're very open to alternative price models and experimenting. We almost certainly will do sales, although it's too early to say what form they'll take. We're also looking at doing in-app purchases, which we think are potentially a big win for gamers and developers both. That way you could buy, say, Across Five Aprils II for a few dollars with two or three playable battles, and then be able to buy additional battles for a dollar each. That way each player can pick the battles they're interested in, without having to pay for the ones they aren't, and we can keep turning out new scenarios for the game long after its initial release. There are a lot of possible models, and we're very open to experimenting to see what works best for us and our customers.
iOSBG: Since you can't yet tell us the order or timeline for TSS's releases, what will be next in the flow of information for those releases? Do you have any exclusive visuals you can share with us?
JD: Response on that soon. Here is a screen shot from the demo for War Patrol, our game of submarine combat in the Pacific Theater. It's just a control demo and we expect it to change a bit before the final release of the game- in particular, we're probably going to replace the default iOS windows with something a little more topical. Still, it gives you an idea of what we're going for. It's sized to match a 1024x768 iPad screen.
iOSBG: Ooh War Patrol! That one sounded rather intriguing to me. Thanks!
Well, I think we've covered a lot of territory. Is there anything I didn't ask that you really want our audience to know about TSS before we sign off?
JD: I think the most important thing to say is that we want to hear from people. To a large extent, BGGers and other people reading this are the people we're making games for, and we want to hear what you have to say. Ideas, suggestions, challenges, criticisms- we'll take anything and everything, because it all sparks thinking and the creative process. So pretty please, visit our website, read the blog, and sound off! Help us make sure the games we make are ones you want to play.
iOSBG: I'm sure many people here who have now become aware of your company will be visiting your website, reading the blog, and hopefully will let you know what they want in a great iOS board game app. I sure will. Thanks for granting this interview. We'll be following you guys and will really be looking forward to watching your company's vision materialize into some really cool products.
JD: Thanks for talking with me, Gabe. I really enjoyed our conversation and we hope to have some good news soon.
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