After being developed under heavy secrecy with the moniker "Project White Rock" - an allusion to the game's intended addictive qualities - Nokia's flagship mobile title for its reimagined N-Gage mobile platform was unveiled in May as Reset Generation, an action/puzzle game that somehow fuses Tetris, Bomberman, and Super Mario Bros., among others.
The game is the dream project of producer Scott Foe, who has been bandying the idea around since his teen years. It is being produced in conjunction with Helsinki-based RedLynx, developer of Pathway to Glory, one of the genuinely well-received entries in the long-suffering N-Gage's prior incarnation as a fixed hardware device.
As Foe puts it, Reset Generation is "a game about video games," and that description applies not only to its schizophrenic but effective gameplay blend but also to its art and music design, which is sure to inspire waves of 8-bit nostalgia among long-time gamers.
The score was provided by chiptune band 8 Bit Weapon, and the pixel art characters are based on designs by well-known artists such as Dan Paladin, Scott Kurtz, and Feng Zhu.
The game is planned to launch this year for Nokia mobile phones - since the N-Gage platform is now built in to the company's smartphones, as opposed to being a standalone branded device - and for free on PC via the game's website. The two versions will be compatible in the game's four-player online, and will be tracked on the same leaderboards.
Nokia is even hoping gamers will become invested in Reset Generation that they make their own tributes - art assets and the game's soundtrack are being released for free.
Gamasutra sat down with Foe at Nokia's offices for an in-depth discussion about Reset Generation's formation and influences, its development, and - in notable detail - what Foe thinks about Scrum.
What was the genesis of this project? It's unusual for the mobile space in some ways.
Scott Foe: Well, the genesis really goes back to before there was even a mobile space. I mean, I've been thinking about this title since I was seventeen years old. I wasn't even in college yet when I started fantasizing about this. I cannot describe it, I recommend it to everybody, the experience of doing that thing you've been telling yourself you're going to do for so long.
So that being said, people always ask, because the term "producer" is so flexible, “What do you do? What do you do?” I'm kind of like Hannibal from The A-Team. I collect this amazing virtual network of amazingly talented people. We've got the character designers, we've got 8 Bit Weapon, and of course we have RedLynx and these fantastic people, and you know, I love it when a plan comes together.
So, it takes a village. Everything that we have is because everybody contributed and brought their A-game. And so, seeing all of that come together, and all of that cooperation - at the end of the day, companies don't make games. Nokia doesn't make a game. RedLynx doesn't make a game. People make a game. And we've been working with some amazing people. And because of that we have this amazing game.
So that's the short genesis version. The long genesis version is, of course, we are investing money in the N-Gage platform. It's mobile, it's connected. You need something that really flexes the platform, you know, a flagship title which is going to basically show off every feature that the platform has, and even features that the platform doesn't have.
At the same time, it's going to be the lighthouse, you know, the beacon - plant the flag for other people to look at and say, “Wow, mobile gaming isn't just this 64k experience that was in my phone in 2001.” It's now come into its own right as this very special form of entertainment, at home or on the go.
That's a very first-party console publisher mentality - trying to light the way for other developers.
SF: Set the bar. Yeah, and being at a first-party console publisher, or mobile publisher, as it were - a platform - that's definitely the way we went.
How did you end up in this area, having worked on more console type of gaming in the past?
SF: Nokia acquired the Sega Network technology infrastructure in 2003, and we had started a project called Pocket Kingdom, which was the world's first global, mobile, massively multi-player on-line game with Sega at that time, and both I and Pocket Kingdom went over with that acquisition.
And it's been in development for like two and a half years now?
SF: It's been in production for two and a half years... I mean, there was preproduction, and concepting before that, so two and a half years is when we brought the studio into the equation.
That seems pretty considerable for a mobile title. That's not typical, is it?
SF: It's not typical, but then again the things we're doing here... you know, we're running, running, we're way out ahead, and there are rocks in the road, and we only find those by tripping over them.
Earlier today you were speaking about the development structure. How does that work when you have development overseas, you're here, QA is somewhere else, and so on?
SF: Yeah, I like to think, going to our pop/schlock book collection, you always hear that “The World Is Flat.” Well, our tools aren't flat yet, but they are getting flatter.
This project being so distributed all over the world, and having so many moving pieces, because you've got not just a platform and development studio to deal with, you also have operators, and operator networks, and different operator network characteristics, and outsourcing firms, et cetera. This project just wouldn't have been possible a few years back.
But when we got onto the project, you know, you look around the internet, and you see all these off the shelf project management softwares, and different processes that help ease the pains, and you're able to pull those things down and get to working with them, and you're doing things that, again, just weren't possible before. And it's pretty amazing.
