[00:00] FawkenAwesome:

Hello Viewers this is Fawken Awesome and welcome back to another episode of Talken Hawken, I got OldKnockOut with me and he is a veteran players from the 12.12.12 days of open beta, and together we are gonna sit down with CapnJosh, the new owner and producer of Hawken, CapnJosh would like to introduce yourself?

[00:20] Capnjosh:

Heya! This is CapnJosh here, I work with Reloaded Games, I am freaking thrilled to be a part of Hawken , this is kind of a dream come true… it’s mind blowing… it’s Awesome.

[00:32] FawkenAwesome:

Thank you and we really appreciate you joining us. So let’s quickly ask you to explain reloaded games maybe to us what the company structure is, maybe your history with the company.

[00:46] Capnjosh:

Yeah sure, so Reloaded Games is now a free to play company, so there’s Reloaded Games, and subsidiary to that is Reloaded Productions which’s in the UK, they are the development studio to APB:Reloaded, Fallen Earth Inc which is obviously the Fallen Earth development team out on the East Coast, and now the new one Hawken Inc and it’s a company setup in California, southern California specifically and so all Hawken assets are held by Hawken Inc, I am effectually operating all those assets at the moment, and that is the current structure. We also have a couple of years ago, we started what is known as a delivery business called SuperNode which optimizes the download of really large files, like 6 gigabyte heavy clients for PC’s.

[01:49]

The history of the company it was K2 network back in the day, which was actually the first company in western countries, like the U.S and Europe to really do the free to play model for games. Be that as it may, some people probably hate that, other people probably be love it. I don’t know, it’s kind of cool you get to play games for free; it’s not too bad I guess. I started at K2 Network in 2007, and I was a GM for a year, then I moved into analytics and business intelligence, and then I became a data manager, which is what I kind of what I have been doing ever since, but I have been in a whole a lot of other things in the IT and tech side… so I have been exposed to …games at this point, sort of the deep inners and back ends, so I have a decent idea of how things work.

[02:35] FawkenAwesome:

Great, let’s talk about how did reloaded games come to hear about Hawken, and maybe if you could explain the purchase process?

[02:48] Capnjosh:

I am not sure when, our CEO first became aware of it, I’m not sure if it was conversations with investors, friends, others in the industry, conference and things. So I am not sure, if it was earlier than December or January. All I know is I came into the office, January 12th or the 8th maybe, and there was a bunch of servers sitting on the floor. I said what are these things, and everybody is like I don’t know, they just got here. So I asked our head IT guy, and he said “I think that’s Hawken. Some guys just delivered this stuff, some liquidators.” “Hawken? Are you kidding me? I thought it was still running?” “No, no, I think this is the dev stuff, it’s not the operating servers and things.” So I started asking around, so I said “What’s the story, what’s happening?”

[03:40]

“Well, it’s a bankruptcy thing, the main investor, who then owned all the assets because they were the chief creditor, wanted us to try and rescue what we could or get what we could, so that nothing got lost just in case the servers got shut off or shut down. So that launched really up until last Friday, it has been a giant process of moving servers, we actually worked with the company to completely migrate the entire backend of data, the data storage systems, and move all the servers over to the entirely new infrastructure. I think I expanded on your question, but that’s generally what’s happened.

[04:31] OldKnockOut:

So you kind of have touched on this a little bit, but what’s your impression of the current state of the game, and what are your top three things to fix first.

[04:46] Capnjosh:

I am thrilled on how stable it is. It is absolutely fantastic; I know there are times over the last several months, Fawken Awesome I know you had a YouTube video about this where servers would go down or come back up or your friends list would disappear. That was all migration stuff, but the game is extremely stable, and it’s a testament to some really good development to adhesive games and meteor.

[05:08]

The Things that need to be fixed right now. Are, well we fixed the back end data, storage system already, that was actually extremely limiting with how it was structure, in sort of deep technology with how they data models and things, with this new data back end it’s a lot cleaner, it’s going to be faster, it’s going to be a lot of more flexible, ongoing development should be much easier, quicker, cheaper.

[05:37]

So that’s already been fixed, which is kind of nice, the next thing obviously is going to be the forums, we are going to be doing all new forums. We are in the process of doing that right now, the customer support portal is going to be very soon, there are still some bugs in the tools, then after that really it’s a process of getting oriented and familiar with the code base, we have to setup all the servers in the source code that’s there to check things out to build servers, asset servers, and licensing servers, it’s a daunting task the more I look at it, but that’s what the next few months are going to look like.

[06:13] OldKnockOut:

You know since we have been playing Hawken for awhile now, we have notice that there is a lot of map glitches, and people get outside of the map, do you know when this might be addressed or fixed?

[06:26] Capnjosh:

This defiantly will be a high priority item, both because it’s extremely annoying when some one on Frontline is jumping up and running in the air and is shooting at you and your like “dude come on, stop” and they say “no I am having, fun” _“uh…Ok!?”

[06:44] FawkenAwesome:

If my team was here, I would stop.

[06:46] Capnjosh:

Yeah Really, So it’s kind of a good specific thing to research and fix, especially the branding code base, because you have a very specific goal, and in getting to that, specific goal you touch on other code, so you’re able to sort of accelerate the process of getting oriented to the code base.

[07:08] FawkenAwesome:

Now let me just add this, a lot of the map glitches, and there’s like Invisible walls, things you get stuck on, I guess were reported on the forums, are we going to have to just make new reports of these things, when the official forums come back?

[07:28] Capnjosh:

Yes and No, I am actually looking through my twitch stream from earlier, because one of our dedicated players Ashfire had mirrored the content of the forums at some point in the past, I guess he had hacked out over thirty minutes, because he thought it might be interesting. As it turns out it’s extremely useful. So the content exists, which is nice, but things like the links were broken, because they were Relative vs. Absolute , now it’s going to be hosted some place different so all the sort of stuff.

[07:59]

But, one player named Thantism is actually in the process to fix all that so that in theory they will be able to host it up on some web server some place so you will be able to browse the old forums as they were, when he ran that, you will be able to find the old content, at least browse it. I really don’t think we will be able to import it into the new forums, even though they are the same forum software, that would be extremely painful, but at least you can copy and paste a lot of stuff.

[08:36] FawkenAwesome:

So while we are on the topic of fourms, do you want to talk about the reddit post that you made putting it out there to the community for input for the forums and what decision you came up with?

[08:48] Capnjosh:

So the initial thought, was IPB we already know sort of as a company, I have been in the process of the growing pains when the post table gets too big in IPB, what happens when you are using??? In the back end, so we already kind of knew well we know what to do when it gets really big. But we are like is there any chance that a different forum software might actually be just a better ship? So if we are going to jump on something like that now would be the time to do it, so maybe it was a little of a impromptu snap decision, but I just wanted to put it out there to the community, just in case there was some other kind of forum software out there that was drastically over and above, crazy better than IPB or something, and they had a fantastic experience with it, because I just don’t have the opportunity to test out every forum software.

[09:36]

So vanilla forum defiantly came up, discourse was one I found that was kinda interesting, we looked into it a whole bunch, and it’s really nice that Vanilla is open source, and we would really like to have a project would could contribute to and things, but in the end it kinda seemed like it would take an unexpected, whole bunch of dev time to actually get it to the point of functionally we want, we could do it yes, but do we really, really want to do that instead of work on the game, or do we really, really want to put money into that instead of putting money into development of Hawken the game, and I looked at the features and functionality between the two, and it wouldn’t really be a huge improvement over IPB, so we took the more bang for the buck route, I think performance will be great, there’s a lot of fantastic communities that use IPB, we know how it works, and I think it’s a good future.

[10:44] FawkenAwesome:

Great so with that how soon can we expect the forums to go live?

[10:50] Capnjosh:

Today we setup the machines that are gonna run it, we setup the firewall rules, put them in all the right subnets, and got the SSL certificates for it, and we dug up the code for how the old single sign on authentication scripts and data transport worked, since we didn’t have what was running on the other side we kind of had to infer how it worked, I mean granted it’s documented and not rocket science, I guess, but it’s a little difficult for me, It looks like as though it’s very similar implementation to what we have done before so, it took awhile but I think we have a pretty good solution to that, we will defiantly start firing up tomorrow, at least through the early stuff, this would be the raw machines starting up, and then we need to make sure all the SSL work, make sure all the certs work, and the forwarding works, and then start testing, confirm it. I was hoping we would have something done by this weekend but realistically that just feels like one of those too optimistic hopes. But, if we can, then yeah, but defiantly do that but defiantly next week.

[12:09] FawkenAwesome:

Great!

[12:11] OldKnockOut:

So, a little bit back to map glitches and stuff, as a new user coming on, you probably have notice this as you have been playing the last few months, you run into a some hackers with aim botting and stuff, do you have any plans to how you are going to deal with that, and are you going to have some type of reporting system so people can report these?

[12:33] Capnjosh:

I know people have talked about something where you can quickly report in game, there are a number of ideas we have been kind of tossing around over the past several years, in fact, of how to actually do this. We have seen a couple games that we have actually operated for the devs added in this sort of feature, and ultimately kind of just depend on getting the right design and doing it I think, so I am completely into that. Client Side protections defiantly we are into, there’s all kinds of hacks that you kind of pre-solve.

[13:08]

Granted once you go client side protection it kind of becomes an arms race. Someone is always going to come up with some clever new way to circumvent it and haxploits… it’s expensive in the long run, but yeah you know what can you do? We have some server-side solutions we have experience with, you know like Fair Fight, they are very effective to get, you know especially the flight gren? hackers, and so you know we are going to be exploring all those things, we actually had a couple of anti-hack solutions contact us over the last few days.

[13:55] FawkenAwesome:

You mentioned a previous video of mine, with the flurry of the server activity, was there a story behind that server migration?

[14:08] Capnjosh:

Yes there was, so we kind of went into all these things cold, like we didn’t know what was what, [defter?] however was there to step us through some of these things, that guy is awesome, seriously hats off to him. So there was two big times things would actually have go down, the first time things went down is when we migrated the chat server, so your friends list disappear for awhile, there was some dramatic moments with that one because it’s running erline code running on it, let me tell you man, it’s kind of arcane if you don’t know what that stuff is, and really it was things like game servers would lose connection with the main server, so they would behave funny when that happens when they would reconnect or re-talk, there were times where you would start up a bunch of servers, like you would clone them, to make sure that when you cloned them again in the future and you started everything up they would just work, or just massive redeploy everything.

[15:16] FawkenAwesome:

Now were you guys like in a hurry, was there some kind of deadline imposed on you?

[15:22] Capnjosh:

Oh yes, this was a fuzzy unknown deadline, so when we first heard about it as far as we knew, the virtual hosts that had a lot of the sort of guts and data of this stuff, were impedingly, they were about to be shut down, like they could shut down any day because the bills were past due, no one had been paying them for months, and it was almost this feeling “oh my gosh, just get whatever we can and just pull it!” So I was trying to find all kinds of credentials for servers just get in and just start copying off as much as I could. That was basically it.

[15:55] FawkenAwesome:

So there was always a real fear that from the player base, so there was a real fear of the plug being pulled?

[16:07] Capnjosh:

Oh yeah defiantly, the outstanding balance is big, and you can’t just expect someone to just leave the lights on.

[16:14] FawkenAwesome:

Right, did you actually have a date or month, when that almost happened… or is that when all that server activity happened?

[16:22] Capnjosh:

That’s during that time when all that server activity was happening, the very first server we moved was the chat server, and then right after that was the control servers, the back end, and then the tech guys the [chrono team?] had to do a migration, that generally speaking they did it live, and it was for the most part seamless, and there was obviously, hooks, hang ups, problems, but generally speaking the game stayed up online the whole time.

[16:47] FawkenAwesome:

Yeah you defiantly kept us guessing.

[16:52] Capnjosh:

Yeah we really would have liked to do it, so that no one was the wiser, but I am happy it happened and that everything is safe.

[17:04] OldKnockOut:

What can you tell us about the development team you are putting together and will you have any members from the previous team?

[17:55] Capnjosh:

We are in the stage now, where, provided Hawken stays stable, players sort of come back, and it continues moderate growth, revenues sort of stays where it is or grows modestly, and it shows that it’s stable and that it’s not just going to just fall apart or something. That’s where when we are going to start seeking significant development resources in to rebuilding it.

[17:45]

We have already hired a tech lead; well he is actually going to be the tech director I suppose, for the unreal client games, although he has a lot of cry engine experience, and basically has been doing games for a long, long time. Client side as well as some server things, and game play, and all that. He is actually going to be building a team and this team will jump on Hawken when it’s ready, so when we get past the stage gates that we really need to have done and things we really need to do before we sink a huge amount of money into it, that’s I think, how it’s going to look over the next bit of time, we are going to take our time, hire the right people, put together a really good team, because we don’t want to be hasty, it’s fantastic that we are in a position that we don’t have to be hasty, I think Hawken is in a really, really good spot.

[18:40] OldKnockOut:

So realistically, how long do you think until we see new content, are we talking three, six, twelve months from now or is it all dependent on how much revenue is coming in from the game, depending, moving forward?

[18:58] Capnjosh:

A combination, I guess my priority over the next thirty days is to fully catalog where everything is at, because there is content and art, and assets in the game, in the client that people have talked about and that they found, that they exist, I need to absolutely make sure they exist on the server, so when I inject onto it into like my account it doesn’t break the game, because really weird things can happen, and so, that kind of content if we find something that’s releasable we defiantly will, and I know some of the former devs have mention, sort of hinted that Yeah theirs sort of something that we could release Which to answer your previous question Fawken, we are completely open to bringing on any of the former devs, it’s just is it the right fit, the right person, the right time? That’s all that really matters I think.