The Australian Teachers of Media have a tough job each year, picking out their favourite student and industry projects and submitting them for judging by their peers. While video games have been involved for a few years now, the AToM Awards have started actively promoting their inclusion - and we recently sat down with the three finalist game developers before the awards night in late October, picking their brains to find out more about the games they've been working on, their plans for the future, and the awards process.

The first AToM Award-nominated game developer we're looking at is Victorian designer, Sam Mair, author of third-person strategy The Caterian Empire, who has actually landed a job at a local game developer since graduating his course.

First things first though, we had to ask: Why get into game design?

"I think I've always had a passion for it - many, many years ago when I was very young, I got into 3d, which kind of paved the way, back in the early, early days of 3d... I had a fair bit of experience at programming as a young kid, my dad did a lot of programming as well, and I think later on in life I just got really interested in all the actual behind-the-scenes stuff of games, all the AI techniques and all that kind of stuff, so I was reading up on that, and it blossomed from there!"

This blossoming resulted in Sam enrolling in the Advanced Diploma of Interactive Media at Victoria University, where the final year major project was to design and develop a game. Half a year was spent on the design process, with the second half spent hunched over a keyboard, programming and actually producing the game. While he worked hard on the project, Sam didn't really have any great dreams for The Caterian Empire, and didn't plan much for it after he finished the course, until one day the university contacted him, and said his teacher wanted to enter the game into the AToM Awards. Suddenly, Sam found himself a finalist in his category, being interviewed by the media and held up as some sort of expert. I think he's still pinching himself that this is all really happening!

Getting back to the game itself, The Caterian Empire focuses on a sprawling empire, running the length of the Obsidian arm of the Fortina Galaxy. The Empire's inhabitants are a ruthless race, hell-bent on conquering and dominating other worlds, with you stepping into the shoes of the leader of the Major Conquests Squad in the Caterian Empire Army - Jungle Warfare Division. You must lead a squad of war-hungry, militant Jungle Warfare Operatives throughout the galaxy, conquering each world among the Junestaä States. ...that's right, you are effectively playing the bad guys, looting and pillaging as you go. Sam explains: "A lot of games concentrate on the heroes, I tried to take the focus of the game on a race of beings that weren't necessarily the 'American heroes' style image. So you got to play the bad guy, in a way - I guess the player could justify it however they felt... that sort of thing appeals to me personally, you don't always have to save the damsel in distress, you sometimes can do the bad, evil type of things..."

He laughs. A lot of the story was made up off the top of his head, inspired by the Space Operas - "these long sagas that play out, who's invading who, and controlling what..." - and Tom Clancy's geo-political / tactical political elements.

"I guess like most games, they're really inspired by other games to some degree. I've always been fascinated by pure strategy systems, because I personally believe that a lot of RTS games don't actually contain a lot of strategy, they're more about the tactical side of things. So it really appealed to me, the idea of being able to use each troop - each trooper would have a very distinct usage, and that's the only way you could use him, so you had to use him in combination with other troop types.

"If I had to list a couple of games where the idea came from - way back in the day, The Lost Vikings was one that probably inspired it from a very early example - just as I'd said before, it had that dynamic where you had one player that could jump really high, and one player who could attack... that was the mentality that I was going for.

"Another game that was probably a bit more recent than that was Faces of War, which didn't do particularly well in sales, as far as I understand, but it was an exceptional game in my opinion. It was the spiritual sequel to Soldiers of WW2... that's a more recent example where I garnered my ideas from, it inspired them."

Also giving Sam some useful concepts was recent favourite, World in Conflict, which inspired the third-person roaming camera style.

"You have a floating camera that you can move over the battlefield at will, there's a fairly severe Fog of War throughout most of it, so the idea being that you couldn't just run in with guns blazing - you had to know what was ahead of you. That was the general gist of that!

"It's probably a bit more stoic in style - World in Conflict had a very flowing style to it - this will probably appeal more to the harder-core audience, I guess. That being said, I only had two and a half months to do the whole thing, so I personally believe that I probably could have worked the gameplay a lot more, had I been given more time. Possibly it would have ended up like World in Conflict anyway, in that respect!"

Speaking of time restraints, while the basic features and functionality of the game are fully implemented, Sam explains that he didn't get much chance to put real depth into the game - or to implement proper characters. If he was given more time, he explains that he'd "probably give it a revamp", revising certain elements and aspects that didn't work, or didn't work as well as he'd envisaged. He'd like to introduce new parts to the game, and tidy up some of the features that are in need of a good tweak.

One of these included features that's probably in the queue for some tweaking is the concept of Conquest points. These are sort of like RPG-style experience points, but they don't really reflect 'experience' as such, it's more about introducing fun into the game, in a "strategic, embedded sort of way". Sam didn't like the way that so many of today's sandbox games lack direction or any sort of motivation to keep going, so he decided to add something to give his game more direction, to give the gamer a reason for doing what they're doing.

"The conquest point system was basically the strategy layer of the game. The conquest system was spent on - and this is where I’d have liked more expansion but never really had the time - where you could spend conquest points to invest in particular equipment, in particular troop types - this part was never in the design document because I knew that I would never get this far - so I was being realistic about it... invading particular planets... I wanted a free-flowing game where you didn't have to go from this planet to this planet to this planet etc, I wanted one where the player could pick, but that the player would have to invest a certain amount of points in it.

And then on top of that, I put an abstract layer, which was the whole betting system... it came off a bit kooky! It would have been nice to have the time to have embedded that a bit more in the game itself, instead of being put on top of the whole game - but the whole point was that you basically risk x amount of points... if you were really confident that you could finish a level, or a battle or whatever, really easily and really quickly then you could bet more points on it, and you could get a bigger return, so you could spend it on bigger things!

Unfortunately, time wasn't really allowing me to really delve into the depths of that..."

...and, unfortunately for us, it doesn't look like Sam'll have too much spare time to get back to The Caterian Empire, having recently landed a job at Torus Games as a programmer. He claims that there's "never really a dull day - there's some very tense days though!", before explaining that he's very happy where he is now. (One day though, who knows - he'd like to start his own games development company, Melbourne's got a few already so one more can't hurt!) Every day on the job is different to the one before, and he's working to learn as much as he can and do as much as he can, as well as implementing some of the more interesting and fantastic ideas that get bounced around. These days, there are games coming to fruition that nobody would have even thought possible before (see Will Wright's Spore for example), and it's an exciting industry to be a part of. In his words, it's "ultimately thoroughly rewarding".


As our time with Sam drew to a close, we asked him perhaps the most important question of the interview - If you could be any video game character, who would you be, and why?

"Oh wow... um... I've never been asked that question! What do I say? do I say a popular title... I'd say something like Metroid - like Samus - but Samus is a girl, so... not so sure about that. I don't know... I could pick Mario - Mario would be good... you get to jump on goombas and have awesome music! ...this is a really hard question! I mean - Gordon Freeman! He's a good character... He's the ultimate avatar - he's fairly non-descript, but you can really place yourself in that character. So maybe that's it."

And, on that note, we both picked up our crowbars and went our separate ways.

Sam Mair's The Caterian Empire is a finalist in the AToM Awards for Best Tertiary Interactive Video Game, with the awards night to be held October 24th. In the lead up to the awards night, we'll be looking at the other video game finalists, to see what the competition's like!