Dean

Following up on the recent Six Questions feature we have put the most common themes to SixOkay, Robot’s Community Manager to answer your burning questions. Without further ado here are some answers to your questions:

1. Will Hero Academy have any more updates?

At this time, we are not planning any new updates to Hero Academy. As with everything, we need to balance the available resources at the studio. Currently, we’re focusing our attention on a big, exciting new project that we’ll reveal to everyone soon.

2. What do you think of the idea of giving fans the opportunity to participate with the further development of Hero Academy? As example Robot Entertainment could allow the community to design new maps?

This is an interesting idea. It’s a lot like creating mod tools for OMD games, however. The amount of work that would need to go into supporting community-built and distributed maps for Hero Academy is actually pretty significant. As I mentioned above, our resources are focusing currently on a new project, and we can’t focus on building UGC tools for Hero Academy at this time.

3. I’d like to ask what an average day at the office is for you. I can imagine that you’re in contact with a lot of different publicists after a game has been announced, and you’ll be quite busy with the community in the few months after release, but what’s your average day during down time, like now?

There’s never really “down time” around here. Even when we’re not public on new games, there’s always a ton of prep work going on to make sure we’re prepared to support everything once the game is announced. Aside from that work, there’s also all of the support work that needs to get done for released games. There are support emails that need to be answered, social media that needs to stay engaged after release, tons of discussion about how new games can support community, event planning that usually goes on for months before a major trade show, and a lot of writing and rewriting for things like websites and press releases. It’s sort of like an iceberg. There’s the small portion that you see publicly, but a massive amount of work that goes on below the surface to support that public material.

4. Design question for OMD2: Were The Hive and Chilled Caverns set up specifically so that the fliers could not be managed by ceiling/wall traps? The fliers in The West Wing were total cake to manage due to grinders and then you get The Hive. Yikes.

It was a deliberate decision. Because that DLC pack introduced the Dwarven Missile Launcher, the designers wanted to make it harder to kill flyers with traps, encouraging players to turn to the DML. It’s one of the most powerful flyer-killing items in the game, so we wanted to make sure we gave people a real reason to use it.

5. Will Orcs Must Die! and/or Orcs Must Die! 2 be linux-compatible to work on Steam Machines any time soon or at all?

This isn’t something that we’re focusing on currently.

6. When will we be hearing about that new game you’re working on with Gameforge? An approximate time period would be nice

Very soon. People who’ve been following Robot since we opened have probably noticed that we have a tendency to reveal new projects around PAX East. No sense changing our habits now if they’ve always worked before.