Songs of Conquest released in Early Access last month, and developer Lavapotion is using the opportunity to see what fans want from its turn-based strategy game - called an adventure-strategy in the vein of classic 90s titles enjoyed by the team. Plenty of other games have gone this same route in recent years including Satisfactory, created by the development arm of Songs of Conquest's publisher Coffee Stain.
Game Rant spoke to Lavapotion lead game designer Carl Toftfelt about how Songs of Conquest came to be, the winding road to its Early Access launch, and how it will continue to grow under Coffee Stain Publishing. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: How big is the team at Lavapotion?
A: We're a small team, so we all work together and do a bit of this and that. When we started out the core team was four people, then we started growing one-by-one, and now the core team is eight. But then we have a bunch of freelancers doing audio and more, if you mash together all the hours you might end up with one or two full-time positions in a way.
Q: And you started working in 2017, right?
A: Yeah, yeah we did. That's a long time ago.
Q: Was it those core four members back then?
A: The four of us started figuring things out, we talked to Coffee Stain Publishing because Magnus Alm knew them. We'd been talking to people about wanting to make an adventure-strategy game, and they were like, "Yes, we want to do that." They gave us a small amount of money to try and crack these riddles for things we wanted to improve. Things we thought would be more fun in this genre that weren't there.
We did that for a little under a year or so, just playing around with prototypes. What we started looking at was battle, figuring out what we could do with that to make things more interesting. Once we found something we liked, we started developing the game, and it was very different graphics-wise. We always wanted to make a pixel game, but starting out we wanted a super high-res pixel game - which was a crazy amount of work. A lot of people think if you use pixel art it's to save time, but it's the opposite.
Q: If anything, modeling something in 3D is easier.
A: It's way easier! And way faster.
So, we decided it was too high-definition, we could have worked with it for five years and only had one faction. Then we had to decide where we wanted to be, how many pixels would be easier while still giving us high-definition art. We found a look that we liked.
I don't know if you've played the Heroes of Might and Magic (Might & Magic Heroes) games, but Heroes 2 was our main inspiration for its wonky fairy tale look. We were going toward that kind of feel for the game, but we strayed a bit, and our style was all over the place. Then we had a meeting something like two years in, when the game was almost finished graphics-wise. It could have been done maybe less than a year from then. We had a big change of heart on its looks and a couple of core mechanics.
Luckily we had publishers that were like, "We don't care about money, do it again." Of course, we didn't do it all again, we kept what we liked and reworked what we didn't, then worked for another two years. Maybe a year after that we announced the game at E3 2019. From E3 on it was pretty straightforward.
Q: Even with those changes, Songs of Conquest is still very inspired by games like Heroes.
A: Heroes, or my main game back then was Age of Wonders. Magnus' main game was King's Bounty. It's all in the same ballpark, so we started looking at a bunch of them: Disciples, King's Bounty: Armored Princess, Conquest of Elysium is something I played a lot. We thought, "Why don't these games have a genre name?" So we decided to start calling them adventure-strategy, because it's weird to not have a genre to discuss when you talk about your game. They're not 4X games, and they're not adventure games.
Anyway, we talked about how people would look at this game compared to Heroes 3. But we thought, "Is that a problem?" It shouldn't be. As much as we like it and want to improve upon the things we enjoy, we're making our own game in the genre; not an upgraded version of Heroes 3. If you want that, just play Heroes 3, it's great.
Q: When you shifted direction, was there any driving idea as the core for Songs of Conquest?
A: A big driving idea behind the game was its graphics, how it should look and feel. I'm not really the guy to talk about that, but capturing the 2.5D look in a way that's both retro, yet modern. We wanted it to look good in both the adventure and battle modes.
The other drive was finding a core mechanic that makes it spin. That's when we really started focusing on the magic system we have now, scaling everything around that. Before we had two different systems, so we tried to make that into one which fits all of it. Meanwhile, we tried to work on the campaign, story, all that.
Q: Did elements like the campaign and magic system come to define each other in any way?
A: Well, the magic system defined a lot of how units should work, building out different troops and buildings. That's still very much a work-in-progress, deciding how everything fits together.
Magnus and I love deck-builders, so a lot of it was figuring out how we can take what's fun about deck building and put it into a strategy game without forcing people to build decks. We wanted people to be able to just buy cool things and fight if they want. That's fine, you can do that, but I've always loved games like Magic the Gathering and Dominion where you can make loops. That was a core thing, figuring out how we can make a similar experience within a strategy game. It was a challenge, and still is.
For the campaigns, it was interesting for us to create our own world. With other adventure-strategy games like Age of Wonders, a lot of people just play skirmish matches where it isn't clear why armies are fighting, why they hate each other. So my main thing with the campaigns was explaining to the player why everyone is fighting.
We started out with these super-huge campaigns that would take 50 hours to play through. If you look at normal tactical-strategy games, those campaigns don't get played. So, if we think the story is so important, and we want fans to complete it, we decided to instead focus on shorter, more intense campaigns. Now that we've launched into Early Access, we see that people want to play campaigns. We were unsure if people would be interested, that's why we only dropped with two of them. At this point we're convinced to make more, which is fun.
Q: Talking about not knowing if people would like the campaign, what about multiplayer?
A: One of the main reasons we decided to go into Early Access at the end of last year is because we were trying to figure out what modes people would like to play. Two things we really underestimated are how much campaign they want to play, and how much multiplayer they want to play. Most people on the team thought they'd want to play skirmish, but we were unsure.
That's why when we launched the EA we only had two campaigns and not a lot of multiplayer support. Now we're focusing more on both those things.
Q: Got it, I was going to ask about things like the custom map editor, handing things off to the community.
A: Yeah, it was always important to us to be like, "Here, make maps." That way we can get more of the stuff you want, because we could never produce enough. It's also cool because they're working with the exact same tools that I have, so in theory they could do the exact same thing. I'm just excited to see what they make once the editor is actually not crazy-hard to understand.
I think we put something like less-than eight hours into trying to make the map editor understandable. The only people working on this editor have been the team, so we realized we need to put some time into making it understandable, but it has always been pushed down in favor of other stuff.
Q: Have you seen any kind of cool fan content at this point?
A: Yeah, lots. I've played a bunch of fan maps, and considering they're rolling into an editor that's wildly unruly and hard-to-use, they're creating cool stuff. With some people it's clear they just know how to use this now.
Q: Earlier we were talking the high-def art style. How difficult has it been finding that balance for a strategy game with so many combat choices and custom maps?
A: That's been such a hard thing, because if we make a map we can be sure to place things in a way that looks good. You know, I think it has caught me by surprise how good players are at using our resources to make pretty things. But that's always been a consideration, you have to be able to use things in a way that they look okay. Originally we wanted things to look amazing however they're used, but we scrapped that.
In hindsight, that's one of the big problems about working with pixel art. We love our look, it's super awesome, but once it's made it's hard to redo it. There isn't a 3D model you can just change a little, you've got to change all the frames and hand-trace everything. Sometimes the effect you're imagining doesn't match something else, and you have to work backwards. I don't mind working like that. I think it has been exciting, but it's a hard medium to work with.
Q: I understand the game was mostly designed before hitting Early Access, but with extra campaigns and things in the works, are there more ideas for environments and characters?
A: There are so many ideas, our backlog is like 10-years long. We're trying to zoom in on what players want, and keeping the EA within a reasonable amount of time. But there are a bunch of environments - or biomes, we call them - that we want and think could add a lot of flair to the map.
The way biomes are right now, they go together with different factions. If/when we add more factions, the biomes will come at the same time. That's likely how it will end up. But right now we don't even have a roadmap set up, we want to make sure we make the right decisions, set the right goals.
Q: Well based on early impressions, do you have an idea of what you're going to focus on first?
A: We do, there are a couple of big ones like trying to make multiplayer easier. There's a prototype in the works right now, we'll see if it's as easy as we hope, then we might push it out by the summer. If it's way harder, it may be down the line. Then we'll probably add two more campaigns - I don't want to make promises, but it seems highly likely we'll have one for Loth and for Barya.
Factions will take time. That's something we want to add of course, but just because we are in the medium of pixel art it takes a while. There are about six factions that we want to add, but that's not going to happen. We're going to start by picking two and seeing when we could start working on that and when they'd be done, what the cost will be.
We also want a random map generator, because that's a thing a lot of people have been talking about, and we already had a little prototype in the works. Haven't really decided how we'll go about doing that, whether we want to work close-to-the-chest for a while or release something we're basically not happy with and keep improving it - like what we did with the level editor.
Another big one we're working on right now is trying to add better difficulty levels, better scaling. There's been a huge difficulty spike in the first campaign, so what we're trying now is adding difficulty levels that way you can pick one. We'll keep toiling away a bit into the summer, and then we'll likely have a proper roadmap by the end of June or July. Something we feel confident with.
Q: In terms of new factions, since I'm sure that's the big talking point, are there mechanics you want to implement?
A: That's the thing, we're still missing some mechanics with the factions that are in the game. Some units don't have mechanics we want them to have, so there will be mechanics coming to them first. There are something like four factions that are talking points, we're trying to decide what to go with. If you play the game, read lore snippets, and really look into things, you can pretty much find the two we're thinking of using. But I'll be mysterious.
Q: On the subject of fan interest, your website has a feature suggestion forum. How much weight do those suggestions get, and what's your limit to implement?
A: A lot. We look at the attention from fans, and then weigh that against the amount of time it'd take to implement. If something has a lot of votes but would take a year, we're probably not going to do that anyway. Sometimes people will say "that's super easy," and we're like it's not, it just seems like it would.
Then sometimes you find something that has 50, 100 upvotes, but is quite easy to implement. We could do that in two days. Ultimately we look at that a lot, it's super helpful. It's 100 percent the reason we even wanted to do Early Access.
With some features it's funny, we have one that's really, really requested: being able to stop the Wielder as they're moving. Basically, the way it has been programmed is when you press the button, the Wielder is already there. You just see the animation. To be able to stop them, we'd have to go back and reprogram all the pathfinding, and that would affect so many systems. It sounds like such a small thing to do as a player, but it isn't a series of steps. We could do lots of other stuff in the time we'd take to do that one thing.
Q: It has been a few weeks since you launched into Early Access, how would you characterize the reaction?
A: A few weeks, but it feels like months.
We're super overwhelmed in a very, very good way. We had variation in how good we thought the Early Access launch would be, but nobody was close to the way it went. We're super thrilled so many people are interested in a game releasing in Early Access like this, and there are very active players. It took a week or two to even comprehend, like, that's a lot of people. It's been our own little echo chamber for like five years, so we're blown away by the reception.
Q: Something I wanted to clarify earlier, those four people who started Lavapotion - how did you come together?
A: So Magnus, the CEO, and Patrik Lijecrantz, our technical artist, used to run a different company that worked with mobile games. They were tired of that market and wanted to make something they wanted to make. Sitting down to figure out what they liked, they landed on King's Bounty, Heroes, Age of Wonders, those kinds of games. They started shopping it around a bit to different gaming companies in Sweden, seeing if there was interest in backing the project.
After getting some positive feedback they approached Niklas Borglund, our lead programmer. Then Magnus approached me, I was working as an actor and singer at the time; I'd been working in the entertainment industry for 11 years. Games have always been a big hobby of mine. Me and Magnus, we've known each other since I was six years old. A good, what is it now, 36 years? We've written stuff together like that before, board games, roleplaying games. I've been an acquaintance of Patrik's before, but I'd never met Niklas. That's sort of the constellation, and we hit it off really fast.
As a gamer, I look to break a game. For strategy games I want to be challenged beyond belief. My favorite strategy game is Dominions 4, which is an awesome little game that's super, super complex. Or I'll play Civilization on the hardest difficulty. I enjoy breaking games, so Magnus wanted to see if I could apply that to game design. And I did. And it was good fun. Now I just play relaxing games in my spare time, I get all my math interests going while working.
I've also been able to use my theatrical background when we started getting into the songs and music. It was really nice, I could work with the composer and know what I was talking about. When we started talking about our "thing," what our name would be, and decided Songs of Conquest sounded cool, we decided we should have a song if they're called "songs." I was like, I used to write songs and sing them, I can do that. I'm the bard in the game. To me, that's just fun.
Q: Are all the developers literally in the game?
A: Well, we actually are in a way. It's a very hidden little Easter egg. I'm the bard in the game, but also, if you look at the Rana Wielders they have really weird names. For four of them, if you switch around the letters they'll be our names. That's pretty much it.
The funny thing about that is my co-designer/producer Johannes from Coffee Stain started throwing names into the mix and I said, "Johannes if I respell this it's just my name." And he said, "Yes. There might be more of them like that."
We didn't tell the others until we actually launched into EA, I think. They didn't notice.
Q: Speaking of Coffee Stain, you mentioned their openness with money, but how integral has it been for things like the game design?
A: You can't ask for a better publisher. They're so focused on making a good game, one the team thinks is good. They don't want to work with games where they don't have a bunch of passionate people in their circle who want to be involved. They're quite different that way, they want to get into the nitty-gritty and talk about numbers or lore, how icons look.
Q: I've spoken with devs like Ghost Ship Games who say similar things. Would you say they foster a community between their published teams?
A: I would say they try, but it's a really hard thing to do because everyone is so involved in their own thing. But Coffee Stain does do, like, a Christmas party and a summer party. There's another developer called Box Dragon working on a different kind of strategy game, but they've come in to help me with some of my design problems. So we do a bit of stuff like that, but it's easy to get caught up in your own team.
I'd say they're trying, but we might not be coming along.
Q: I know you're honed in on Early Access now, but do you see any room to do other things or find time for yourselves?
A: We're trying to return to normal working hours now, but we won't be thinking about anything except the Early Access and continuing our game after for quite a while. A lot of us are looking forward to the summer, it's fun to work with us and you can lose track of time, but it will be nice to go back to normal working hours. We're almost there, I'd say.
[END]
Further clarification as to the founding of Lavapotion was provided by CEO Magnus Alm after this interview. His comment is as follows:
"The Lavapotion team was formed around the idea of creating the type of games we loved to play ourselves back in the 90's. Since I had known Carl Toftfelt for over 30 years I knew he was one of the most dedicated gamers and clever designer minds I’ve ever encountered. Seeing that he also has a personal grit and an ability to push on no matter what, I knew I wanted to work with him on this project. Me and Patrik Liljecrantz had already founded a game studio in the past and his creative mind and quick turnaround when implementing new features was integral to hit ground running. Niklas Borglund was one of the employees at one of my previous studios and he added that sense of northern Swedish calmness, structure and organisational skills that would balance Patrik’s Gung Ho dev style perfectly. As for me, I think I added the business sense, recruitment experience and marketing skills that a small indie team desperately needs but often lacks."
Songs of Conquest is available now in Early Access on PC.