Squad: Interview with Keith 'Litoralis' Weisglas and Kory 'Trancer' Postma

At Gamescom 2016 we had the opportunity to meet with Keith "Litoralis" Weisglas and Kory "Trancer" Postma from the Squad development team. We had our phones out, were ready to record and were prepared for a quick interview. While we had planed to ask roughly ten questions, we ended up with around 18 (more or less). Thanks again to the two Squad guys for enduring this 20 minute long interrogation. It's a good thing that the trade visitor beer garden usually is comparably comfortable. To the rest of you: sorry that it took us a week to get this online, but rest assured that writing all this down and translating it was a lot of work. But its all done now, and you can find the full interview below!

Auf der ersten Seite findet ihr das ganze Interview auf Deutsch!

Page 1: Interview in German

Page 2: Interview in English

BF-Games: So I guess we are going to start off right where you already began (before the interview, ed.), just tell us something about yourself, if that’s ok?

Keith "Litoralis" Weisglas: I am the one called Litoralis, otherwise known as Keith, Community Manager, and did the marketing through the early days, through Kickstarter, did the outreach through the different clans and communities that joined us as we built the game.
Kory "Trancer" Postma: My name is Kory Postma, I am senior programmer with Squad. I’ve been in software for around 20 years, so...

BF-Games: I guess we have an idea what you are doing, some code stuff that normal human beings don't understand?

Kory: Sure, anything and everything that the artists require. Whether it's mainly like particle effects, how to improve the visual fidelity of those. Or even with the audio system. For instance we work with Anderson, he's the sound engineer. And what we do is basically create specialised audio building blocks that he can utilise to make a much more immersive experience for the player.

**BF-Games: What is the press guy doing all day? What does a typical work day look like for you?**

Keith: Ehrm… hundreds of contacts coming in from 12 different timezones without any real understanding what I am going to be doing when I wake up in the morning, because I am always either putting out a new fire or finding new people coming at us to cover the game or find a server or find a community. Whatever comes through the door.

BF-Games: Before we get to the more content related questions, what do you like most about your own game? Any gameplay element, any content that is like your absolute favourite?

Keith: Absolute favourite gameplay? The ability to hide under the skyline… actually, the ability to flank through the valleys, the way they built the terrain, and pop up behind enemies undetected. I was never the guy who went straight down the middle, so I am always the guy pulling the flanks.

**BF-Games: And from the programming perspective?**

Kory: I personally like the immersion. You know, as soon as you're getting out to the battlefield and then once the bullets start flying it's like you just got to hit the ground because you get the snaps and the pops and everything, and the visual cues to let you know that stuff is happening and if you don't get out of the way, you are not going to make it.

**BF-Games: With the release of alpha version 7 last week you just brought the first vehicles into the game. What's in the next update for us?**

Kory: The next major update from what I've heard is more a quality of life. We're going to try to improve performance optimisation and also tweaking perhaps the GUI and other things to try to make it easier for the user. So the kind of things that have been left by the side while we were working on the vehicles.

BF-Games: Are you working together with the Epic guys, the developers of the Unreal engine?

Kory: We work with them, get some pieces, it depends. Epic is very supportive of us and what we're doing. And if we can make the engine better, we always try to contribute back to the engine.

**BF-Games: And beyond the next update? What's the roadmap? You got a plan, or are you just going to see what's finished?**

Kory: Oh boy… I think there is the kind of, you know, overall general plan but then…
Keith: … on some level we are actually here to meet each other, to go through various options and roadmap ideas. We've been doing this a long time and we've had buckets and buckets of ideas, then narrow down. Now we'll have to make the final paths for the next year. I mean, that's really what we are doing here right now.
Kory: We'll be discussing it later this week among the team, so we just haven't gotten to that point yet. But of course we've got a very long list and a limited amount of time, so we're going to have to prioritise what we feel is important for the game.

**BF-Games: So the next couple questions are mostly from when we went on Teamspeak and asked the guys that play Squad a little bit more than us and the first one that came up is: How many factions will be included in the final release? Do you know yet?**

Keith: I am here with our character artist, who is still actually finishing his undergraduate degree, incredibly talented young man…

**BF-Games: …he must be an awesome guy….**

Keith: …he is! On some levels it depends on how much time he wants to put in and then maybe we'll supplement that with another artist. But I think the only one that I can tell you right now that will be added would be the British and then there are deep discussions about going further so that we can have more Redfor forces in the game, conventional or unconventional.

**BF-Games: You recently included all these modding abilities and you seem to be very supportive of that. The next question that was brought up was whether the community developed faction that we are probably going to see and also community made maps are going to be included in official releases as well?**

Keith: The general concept right now is to use something like steam workshop. The general idea would be that there would be official vanilla servers that would be on the main browser window and then what we hope would be a very robust modding community that goes in a separate browser or window. We've seen beautiful maps, especially that jungle map. And the winter map. And the WW2 map (laughs). There is some amazing stuff in the pipeline. However we've been modding a long time, we know sometimes life interferes. You get 95% done with a map and then something happens, right? And then we don't see you for two years! The factions have large numbers of people who are working on them. We have 2000 active people on the modding discord group at this point. Part of my job is to try to manage this, but all I can do is to kind of shift the flow of the tsunami's wave. I literally don't know what's going on, because there is crews working in languages we don't speak, doing their own national armies, which might just show up some day. Some of them have extensive experience in other games, in our genre, already. So they have existing artwork and experience doing this. But we don't know if they're going to show up with completed projects.

**BF-Games: Would you consider adding them into to the game? One thing this player was concerned about, is the community splintering that happens if you have to much user made content and too many servers that run on too many different versions.**

Keith: Yeah. He is absolutely on point, and we understand that concern. It has been a concern of ours from the start. We have no idea how many people end up buying the game yet. And we are also very much roll your own game. So the idea was to make sure that that vanilla experience was always the primary window when you first play your first to hours of the game and then if you want to dig deeper, then you can. Your modpack hopefully doesn't become a pain like it was in competitors' products, using steam workshop to make it simple. Maybe on a per server basis to have their own rotation? We've all been doing this a long time, we know simple ways to make sure you can download content and make sure you get in the game immediately. We're thinking through all of those options and we're trying our best not to make it as hard as some of those earlier situations where you had to know the exact version number of each mod that worked together to be able to play on Sunday morning. We're never going to get to that point. It should be: turning on the computer, boot up Squad and you're on the server within 3 minutes. That's the goal!

**BF-Games: Maybe an easier one to answer with yes/no/maybe: Will there be player controlled mortar and artillery systems?**

Keith: I am just going to say yes. Kory: Actually, we have art that was just released in the last monthly update that shows a mortar. The only thing is, I think it is still being textured or was textured, I am not quite sure…
Keith: … it's rough…
Kory: Yeah, it is still very rough, but you know, we just have to add the programming and the gameplay support for it… Keith: …and then on the short side: Merlin, the founder of the game, created the mortar system for Project Reality. So he basically built the entire game so he could add something like that again...

**BF-Games: Pretty much going in the same direction: Will there be a player controlled commander, or something like a flyable drone?**

Keith: Will there be a commander? There will be a commander! Will there be drones? It depends on the scale and scope of how we want the game to play out. So in a larger picture we're at the end of warfare as we know it with the amount of drones available to modern militaries, right? When we're going to make a game, we don't want to make it too simulator… we'd all like to see it (drones, ed.) but it would have to be balanced. The game is asymmetrical and if you start giving drones out to Bluefor, with the insurgents not having the option, balancing starts to become an issue. But let me add to that: we'll probably also have fireteams in the game soon. So instead of going uphill, we'll subdivide the squads to allow more movement in that direction. That should balance out the lack of the higher level stuff by making the lower level stuff much more modular, or however you want to call it.

**BF-Games: Perhaps the last content-related question: Will there be a civilian class in the insurgent faction?**

(For a moment both just look at each other)

Keith: It's been thought through, but at this point we don't have any official announcement on it. That's about it.
Kory: Yeah, because it was the original gamemode for Project Reality, some of that code was actually built to support it. But yeah, there is a lot of missing pieces and whether or not we want to invest the addition time to do it: someone will have to make that decision. Probably one of the things we will discuss later this week.

**BF-Games: Before we wrap this up, one more technical question. We'll leave performance issues aside, but there has been some users that have been criticising sometimes the vegetation turns quite blurry at a distance, making it quite hard to distinguish other players from the backdrop. Players have been connecting this issue to AA-filters used in the game and apparently, it was news to me too, some users have been going as far as disabling the ingame AA and then using injection filters, such as SweetFX, to get a result. You aware of that issue? Can you comment?**

Keith: So, to the AA in general the answer is yes. The other side of that is: some of the injections are now being blocked by easy anti-cheat. Because once you have access, there is no way to control how much access. That's as far as I know it. The technical side… you should probably jump in (looks at Kory).
Kory: Basically, in the latest update we looked at a lot of the AA thing and when we realised that there was some incorrect settings on the maps, we fixed a lot of those settings. We've also added a few additional AA modes, so now when you select any of these AA modes it should actually work on the map. Previously they would sometimes work and sometimes not work and it was very confusing. Sometimes the maps were overwriting it, but the latest update, alpha 7, should actually fix that or resolve that, so that you should be able to select those AA methods and it should be working now.

**BF-Games: Okay, maybe one second last question. From what I can tell you've enjoyed a pretty loyal following of fans from day one and surely they have been giving a ton of feedback. I imagine there are features or designs included solely based on that player feedback. And if so, what are they? What is the most prominent example you can think of?**

Keith: On a lot of levels we are still part of that community (laughs). I mean, we literally gave out a thousand of the pre-alpha keys to those guys. So when were designing this from the very start, they've know us a long time, they had no problem calling us out on our bullshit (laughs). Hell, we still have a thread on the old mod forum that I go to check myself when we're doing these releases, to see what the response is from the old forum hounds that still hang out there, because they've been some of the hardest critics we ever had. A feature? It is like one and the same when we're designing the game. You got anything (turns to Kory)?
Kory: Hmmm. I mean it's though. There is always the quality of life issues that people like fixed. I know you mentioned optimisation and performance earlier. Every now and then we try to address it where possible, but I know that is something that is always on our minds, to try and help to improve the performance. But then the thing is, that trying to run 72 to 100 players can be quite taxing on the clients and we're always trying to think of new and novel ways of addressing that.

**BF-Games**: Okay, something I think players wanted, and which I also think you already promised to bring in, is the independent head movement, similar to Armed Assault?

Kory: There has been talk of that. I know we would actually like to improve the animation system, because that is actually one of the major issues we have on the client side. And we're hoping, I believe by the end of this year - don't … I guess you have to quote me but … - by the end of this year is when we're hoping to try to improve the animations system. But it is quite a large task, so… But once we do that, once we improve the performance, then we can add additional features, one of which I've heard was regarding head movement, look-around and stuff. If we get to it.

**BF-Games: Alright, this is the last question. But is the question of all questions. In your Kickstarter campaign you promised not only helicopters, but also fast ropes if the highest tier of 1 million $ was reached. Now while the campaign was quite successful, you didn't make the million. I imagine there is a good chance you went there now with steam sales though. So when are we going to see helicopters, and more importantly not only helicopters but also fastropes?**

Keith: Yeah, if I give a timeframe I will get interesting responses from our development team... I am telling you there will be fastropes. I literally signed onto the project after they promised ME fastropes, as well as some of the other original guys (laughs). So they will be there and we'll definitely have some air assets. We are building these maps to be large enough that they need to be part of the meta to increase the players, right? It's always been part of the plan for the larger maps. We'll get them, but I don't have a timeframe. We did however see a rope simulation by the way. So there has been some interesting looks at it already.
Kory: Yeah, we do actually have prototype systems for cables and ropes but then also we have a prototype system for helicopters. We're just basically waiting for the arts, sounds and effects and everything. They'll come together and then we'll be able to bring that on. But the helicopters also bring in their own own challenges, which would be once you get above a certain height on the map we have to come up with new and novel ways of addressing how we can call objects at distances and stuff without losing the detail. So, there are some technical issues we need to solve before we get there.

**BF-Games: Thank you for the interview and good to hear that you got personal leverage over your own dev team for the fastropes. We'll all be relieved to hear that.**

Both: Thank you!

The interview was conducted by El_Exodus and TASS and has been translated into German by TASS. Big thanks to bigmumu for his great support with regards to the questions.

Bilder