Interview with Colony Studio’s Mike Wallis

Colony Studio CEO Mike Wallis has been very busy in the games media recently with several interviews given to promote his new MMO development studio, Colony Studios. We took the opportunity to interview him and he has some interesting things to say about his company and their plans for the near future with their sci-fi MMO. We sat down and tried to cover areas that hadn’t been addressed before.

The MMO Gamer: There has been a lot of talk about the vast experience in MMO design and development that the core team in Colony Studios has from working on solid titles such as World of Warcraft, EVE OnlineEve Online reviews, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes and the recently released The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. But what about experience in running a company? What experience do you bring as the CEO of Colony Studios?

Mike Wallis: Good question. I bring a wealth of experience in actual project planning and scheduling, as well as budget accountability. For administration and operation of the studio, I fortunately have an experienced management team, people who have run departments and cross functional teams before, including operations management and financial accountability. Finally, where needed, we will work with our investment team to help guide the studio in the proper direction. Game development is always a learning experience, but that’s why I’m working with some of the best and most talented developers in the industry-it takes some of the guess work out of the day-to-day process.

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The MMO Gamer: Was Colony Studios formed around a game idea you all wanted to work with or was the company formed around the core team; what brought the ten of you together?

Mike Wallis: Initially, it was formed around the BSG idea, but at that time there were only 4 of us. After BSG fell through, the company had a wealth of documentation to proceed (business plan, executive summary, full pro forma breakdowns), so we thought, “Why not move forward with our own space themed IP?” We pitched a few angel investment groups, and scored on our third try and secured enough funding to allow us to license the tech, bring on additional team members, and get a playable build up and running.

What brought us together was the common ideal of wanting to create the next great MMO. We’ve all been at companies where executives continuously look over and dictate to the development team how to do this, or to implement that. Those guys are not really qualified to be making design decisions-mostly because they have no idea why people play MMOs-and they often make those decisions on a whim. Our goal is to go back to what makes MMOs fun: advancement without the grind, item acquisition, community, and arguably PvP. Finally, we’ve all worked with each other in some capacity, so we know what to expect. We know we can count on one another. This is what has allowed us to achieve so much in such short time.

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TMMOG: How many developers are you planning to have on the team when all the positions are filled? The current number of 10 developers sounds like a very small team to work on a game development project.

MW: Of course we wouldn’t aim to make a full blown MMO with just 10 people – we’re not crazy! The initial 10 are just our core team. Our budget and project planning calls for about 60 team members when we are at full production. Our next milestone is to ramp up our team to a pre-production size of 18 developers. We’ve already identified the additional folks we want to bring on board and they’ve given us their verbal commitment to join us once we have closed the next round of funding.

TMMOG: In a recent interview you mentioned that your publishing deal with Universal fell through on the Battlestar Galactica project, do you have a publisher for your new debut game? How are you planning on funding it?

MW: Actually, it wasn’t a publishing deal with Universal for BSG, it was the licensing of the IP – we hadn’t even made it to the publishing talks yet. We are currently in talks with a few different publishers for our debut game. Funding will come from publishing deals (advances against future sales, a standard publisher/developer deal in the game industry) and investment groups who purchase an equity stake in Colony Studios. Fortunately for us, our budgets aren’t at the level of some of these next-gen MMOs ($25+ mil), which makes investing in Colony a much less risky option for a financial partner than some of the other start-up studios out there.

TMMOG: You are the CEO of the studio, are you also taking on a role for the development of Colony’s first game?

MW: No. While I always said that I don’t want to get too far removed from the development side of the studio, it just wouldn’t be beneficial to the company as a whole for me to do both the business side and to manage the development of the game. We’re going to be bringing in a very experienced producer team to lead this project. Yes, they will have MMO experience. Yes, they will have worked on big name games. Yes, I have worked with them before and yes, they have given us their commitment to join the Colony team.

TMMOG: You have just recently let slip details about your first project, a sci-fi MMO with a focus on PvP. Can you give us a time frame for when we can expect more tangible information, or perhaps ingame media?

MW: We are currently dropping in another pass at our in-game UI/HUD and have another polish pass at some of the visual effects. Within the next three months we should have a set of screen shots and new concept art ready to release to the public.

TMMOG: There are several MMOs in development which are moving away from the fantasy setting, will your next game be different enough to stand out of the crowd without being different enough to alienate players?

MW: We don’t plan on being different for the sake of being different. We plan on making the best game we can create and if it happens to be a departure from the norm then great, but we will more than likely have at least a few systems that are familiar with MMO players. We also aren’t looking to alienate anyone, on the contrary, we want to unite those players that feel there is something lacking in the MMO genre.

TMMOG: Lastly, will your next game appeal more to a broad audience like WoWWow reviews, LotRO and DAoC did or to a niche audience with games like CoH or EVE Online?

MW: Our philosophy is that if we make a sophisticated, robust game and present it in a format that is simple to grasp, it should appeal to a broad range of game players.

One thing we will never do is over simplify our game in an attempt to get more boxes out the door. We just have too much respect for the true gamers out there who want more game than what they are currently getting, and we hope to deliver exactly what they are hungry for.

We encourage gamers to visit www.colonystudios.com to keep up to date on our latest developments. Thanks for letting us talk with The MMO Gamer readers!

We’d like to thank Mike Wallis for taking the time to answer our questions and The MMO Gamer will continue to cover the development studio and its projects!