Every tribe has its chieftain, and for The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game development team, Mr. Tim Gerritsen is the superchief. Tim was kind enough to take some time away from devising more and better ways to destroy us in Middle-earth and answer some questions. We think you’ll enjoy hearing about his history in the business, his personal thoughts on design, and his insights into how Fantasy Flight Interactive works. Enjoy!

Derek: How’s everything in Madison?

Tim: We’re having an early winter, with a few inches of snow falling the last Monday of October and several inches of snow on Halloween itself. Our team has been insanely busy throughout the console launch and after. Now that we’ve resolved the server issues we’re focused primarily on new content.

The Witch King’s Grasp was already underway before console launch, and what started as something initially pretty straight forward turned into our biggest and most complex content release yet. Our goals were to focus on replayability, shaking up the game play in new ways that would make players seek out new ways to solve issues and to add many more options for Sauron to challenge players. We’re in final testing now for this, though we’re not yet ready to announce a release date.

Additionally we are working on another surprises we hope to announce soon. This surprise we’ve hinted at in the past, but not discussed in any detail, so we can’t wait to start sharing details, and more importantly, putting it in players’ hands.

You have quite the history as a game designer, working on big studio projects like Prey, Bioshock Infinite and Mechwarrior. Please tell us a little bit of your story in the gaming industry: how did you get started? What was it like working on a large franchise like Bioshock?

I got started back in 1992 in possibly one of the strangest and frankly lucky ways possible. I had recently graduated college with a degree in History and a minor in Film. In addition, I was previously in the Navy and had a degree in the Russian language from my time as a crypto analyst. I joked that I was qualified to teach the history of Russian film, but there aren’t many jobs there. I had always been a gamer, and had written my own sci-fi table top RPG, Sphere back in the day and had used that as a way to apply to video game companies. One of them, Dynamix, called me back and asked me what I would do if I were to create a sequel to their game A-10 Tank Killer. They saw that I had military experience and a gamer and that it might apply.

I wrote a 30 page design document over a weekend with illustrations on design concepts and sent it in via FAX machine (we didn’t have email back then). They ended up liking my treatment and asked me to come in for an interview. Once I got there, my interview turned out to be what we call a ‘green light’ meeting. This is where the people in charge get together to decide whether a project will be funded or not for production. Right there in my interview, I was lead into a board room where the company big wigs had already gathered and I was asked to pitch my concept. This was a total surprise since I was told it was just a job interview. I gulped hard and then dove in to make my case. They green lit the project and I was offered a job as lead designer for A-10 Tank Killer II. I was simply at the right place at the right time and with the presence of mind to roll with when presented an opportunity that I grabbed on to and didn’t let go.

Over the course of my years in the industry I’ve had the chance to work on both very large and very small projects, being a part of or leading teams from just one person to more than 300. All of these projects have similarities, but scale obviously creates the biggest difference. Working on large franchises is exciting since everyone is interested in what you are working on. Everyone takes your phone calls and wants to hang out with you because you are working one of the ‘next big thing.’ You have more budget, and more staff, and you can get more done, but the risks are higher since you’re spending more money. You also have more people to communicate the vision to and direct work on so that all of the work going on is in the same direction. The stress level is much higher as a result, but if you thrive on that, you will find the daily rewards of work well done to be that much more satisfying. However, the price for all this is that individual developers tend to be restricted much more on what they are able to influence or touch. With larger teams, everyone is compartmentalized so that while you might have huge impact on your aspect of the game, you might not ever see other aspects of the game at all or see how your aspect of the game fits within the overall vision. Things can also move more slowly since you can’t just change on a dime and adopt new information quickly without changing the whole plan from top to bottom. The management team then needs to make sure that the vision is constantly reinforced to everyone so they understand how their bit in the project fits in to the overall puzzle.

Smaller projects, conversely, require you to wear multiple hats, and are a great opportunity to work on multiple aspects of a game or stretch your wings into areas you might not normally get to. However, you usually have far fewer resources in terms of budget and staff, so you often have to restrict your vision to what you are able to make reality with your own two hands. Savvy developers, however, learn to develop smartly and use innovation to ‘hit above their weight class’ and create interesting new techniques. Smaller teams also can act more nimbly- navigating away from features that aren’t working out or embracing new features quickly as they arise. You just have to weigh these opportunities versus the cost and schedule impact they bring. Also, working on smaller projects shows you who you friends are, since they take your call or want to talk or hang out simply because they are your friend, not because they see an opportunity.

How did you come to work with Asmodee and Fantasy Flight, and what was the transition like founding and then designing for a relatively small studio in Fantasy Flight Interactive?

I knew the former CEO at Fantasy Flight quite well over the years and he knew that I’ve been a lifelong table top gamer as well as video game player. Over the years he reached out to me from time to time asking me if I wanted to get involved with FFG, but the timing was never quite right. Finally, he contacted me with a great offer at the right time and we were finally able to work together. I’ve been a part of smaller teams and independent teams before, so making a transition to a smaller group wasn’t outside my experience or even difficult since I got to use my creative hat more often rather than purely my production hat. I’ve started or grown studios before many times, so getting established and running was a pretty quick affair for us, so we procured our initial staff and off we went.

Were you aware of or playing the The Lord of the Rings the Card Game before working with FFG?

I was certainly aware of the game and the fact that it had such a robust number of expansions and a strong following, though I wasn’t myself a player at the time. Much of the early design work had been done by the core team at FFG before we were even involved as Fantasy Flight Interactive, so I sat down with them and got caught up to speed on the design vision and direction they had intended and started putting together our own plan to carry that forward. I made strong relationships with the FFG team and they were very welcoming and happy to have us pick up the game they had started. It was, in many ways, forging new friendships as much as it was working with new teammates.

What is your history with The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien?

Purely as a fan before this. I, of course, read both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time when I was younger, and I’m old enough to remember both of the Rankin/Bass productions when they were broadcast on television in the late 70s (The Hobbit and The Return of the King). In the 80s I became a huge fan of the Ralph Bakshi animated production of The Lord of the Rings as well. As a gamer, I was a huge fan of War In Middle Earth, which was an action/strategy game by Australian developer, Melbourne House which I put way too much time into on my Amiga computer. Later I played various incarnations of games based on The Lord of the Rings throughout my time as a gamer, and was an early adopter of The One Ring Rpg by Cubicle 7 when that came out. In general, I’m a fan of Tolkien’s work both in Middle-earth and elsewhere (I count amongst my favorite reads Farmer Giles of Ham) and his correspondence back and forth with C.S. Lewis, whom I also greatly enjoy (though Moorcock’s Elric was my biggest influence as a teenager).

You guys had a bit of a hiccup with the launch of The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game on consoles and it seems like there are a lot of different pieces to the Asmodee/FFI team. Does it present any particular challenges that FFI is setup to work alongside your publisher Asmodee, not to mention FFG and the various smaller studios you contract with? Or is it pretty standard fare in the game industry these days to have so many moving parts?

The industry term for this type of work is called ‘distributed development’ where teams from all over the world work together to create and deliver games. Our studio acts as the lead developer, while our Paris office acts as the publisher. There’s different time zones and languages to navigate, and each group is responsible for different aspects of game delivery, but the core communication channels are very solid between the teams. We live in a time when technology allows us to work far more closely, even separated by thousands of miles, than when I first joined the industry at a time there was no email or internet. Make no mistake, however, making games is difficult. It’s multi-disciplinary and even if your entire team is within one location, keeping everyone informed and on track is a constant fight for every developer in the industry.

As a group, we weren’t able to deliver the game when we had originally hoped. We planned to deliver three separate versions of the game on three platforms and have them all integrate into an already live game on Steam across two existing platforms all at the same time. That’s no mean feat in the best of times and we simply fell short. I would have loved to have messaged that delay better but the parts were moving literally up to the last minute and changing your marketing plan across several territories at the last minute just wasn’t possible. We made the collective decision to delay and take the time to make sure that the game was fully playable on all platforms before trying again. We also decided not to speculate on a new date but rather get our game certified on all platforms and then make the public announcement, which we did, a few days before launch.

One thing I’ve noticed in being a part of both video game and tabletop game fandoms is that, while both are quite vocal fanbases, video gamers might be a bit more aggressive in their critiques. And while it seems like there is a lot out of your control, the grief still appears to land on your door since yours is the name on the package. Is there a favorite comment you’ve gotten from someone online that you found especially absurd as a game developer?

Honestly, a lot of the feedback has been really well received by our team- even the negative feedback. We read everything, and collectively, the suggestions and remarks led to improving the game’s quality. While we can’t simply wave our hands and do all of the changes and enhancements we’d like to, we’ve been able to use this feedback to focus on the items that would have the most impact. There are comments from time to time that show someone doesn’t understand the impact of what they ask for in terms of time and staff effort, but it’s not their job to understand this, so I can’t honestly complain about any one comment in particular. You need a thick skin as a developer.

Let’s pivot and talk a bit about the game itself. I’m always curious about the decisions game developers have to make during the design process. With that in mind, was there a particular mechanic or aspect of the game that you and the team went back-and-forth on? How did you make the final decision?

There are really two and they are related, so I will discuss their impact on each other- Guard and Order of Play. In the original design, we had a planning phase where you’d play all of your cards and then Sauron would play all of his cards and then you’d have an action phase where you’d take all of your actions and then Sauron would take all of his actions. This led to a VERY swingy game that felt too random in outcome. Either you’d have the right cards and play them to allow for the maximum effect on your action sequence, leaving Sauron with little or nothing to do- or- you’d have nadda and Sauron would wipe you out. Additionally, initial damage was reciprocal, so weaker allies would basically go on suicide runs against enemies, or have nothing to do, and that felt very unthematic within the lore of Middle-earth, where heroes go out of their way to protect their friends and make valiant sacrifices to turn the tide.

Changing to an ‘I go, You go’ system made the game feel much more tactical- making each decision important. Losing reciprocal damage also made the game feel much more in line with the lore, with players able to pick their moments and make their heroes protect one another (not to mention making low attack characters useful in combat). However, with these changes, we had to implement and reimplement Guard over and over to deal with the differences. Guard went from being super useful to super frustrating or super useless depending on the implementation. Somewhere along the line we decided to make Guard reciprocal in terms of damage, which helped a lot, and then we hit upon active defense as an action for all characters, which made it one of the most critical decision points in the game, and one of the keys to playing as a master. It was a long road, and sometimes it was hard to keep it all straight in our heads, but when we arrived at the current implementation, it finally felt ‘right.’

What do you find is your favorite part about the development process, or perhaps what element of the game do you most enjoy working on?

I love all periods of development for different reasons, but the period I enjoy most is the pre-beta period where you are playing and balancing the game and looking for ways to improve the experience. It’s at this point that you can finally see the fruits of long periods of design and development efforts actually on screen and in play and see little ways to fine tune the game into something better.

What is the internal development process like for cards? How do you manage card balance, avoiding overpowered cards, for a cooperative game? Please take us briefly through the steps.

We have a fair bit of design space within which to work, so usually it starts with someone identifying a need to fill a gap in game behavior or an opportunity to implement something innovative that will open up new design space. A designer will have a basic idea of what the card is and come up with a plan for it, though usually this is part of a larger release- say a new campaign, encounter or vault release, so take this times 10 or 20 or 30 depending on the release. We will get together and review the design, talk out its merits and drawbacks and decide on final functionality. We will give an initial cost for the card based on the expected behavior and based on an internal formula we use.

Then we create what we call a ‘stub’ for the card, which is the basic card name in the engine and raw data. From there, a designer will then code the card’s behavior within the engine while someone else will find a suitable piece of art for it and create the associated assets (icon, banner image). Another person looks up a proper quote from the books for that card, we’ll add the artist who created the art featured and if there is voice work, we will schedule that in groups where we have several cards to create. If there is no voice acting needed, but rather a sound effect required, we’ll craft a sound effect set for the card’s play onto the board, attack and eventual defeat.

When the card is ready, we put it into a development build of the game that only we have access to and will test it between the designers, qa testers and development team, giving feedback on how the card feels and how it fits into the existing decks. We will then alter the card based on that feedback or to simply fix any technical issues that come up. Once we think the card is ready, we will add it to a localization queue so that the text on that card can be translated into all supported languages.

After all of this, if the card is ready, we change its status in the editor to ready and put it into the live build for players to enjoy.

Even with all of these checks and all that testing, something occasionally strikes us or gamers at large as unbalanced or unfair, or a new card will create situations we didn’t see in our internal testing. In these situations, we will fix broken behavior or determine if we need further balance work or if the original design stands up to scrutiny.

Campaign 3, The Witch-king’s Grasp, is coming “soon.” At Con of the Rings you spoiled a bit and told us how there would be no orcs to fight and that there were many other things to set this campaign apart from the previous two. Can you give us a few more details to help whet our appetites? Maybe even a release date?

I would love to, but unfortunately I cannot at this time. I think it’s our best campaign yet and one that really shakes up the game play as well as introduces new game design space for us for some time to come, but we’ll discuss that as we get closer to release. All I can say is that we are in final stages to get it live to audiences.

Tim, thank you so very much for taking the time to answer our questions!

Thanks for this opportunity to share insights into our development.