We got the opportunity to ask questions of interest to one of the game developers - Bearlike. The interview was in the format of answers to a list of questions.

Русская версия интервью появится на сайте в ближайшие дни по мере готовности перевода.

 

Mechabellum.ru:  How did you come up with the idea of the game?
  Who came up with the idea to develop the game?
  What games inspired you the most while creating Mechabellum?

Bearlike: I came up with the idea in 2016. Me and one of my friends who is also a former colleague of mine began to work on it in 2017, and we actually post our first demo videos on Bilibili.com back in 2017. So this game takes us a long time to make.

I always have liked the idea of a competitive strategy game. I like the idea of generals forming a formation, and then battling it out, just like in ancient China and Rome, I like how Hannibal formed an innovative formation to win the battle of Cannae. I think RTSs require too much of a player's reflex, and chess with no hidden information requires too much calculation. What I want is a game focused on predicting your opponent,  forming good formations, and innovative thinking, so I made Mechabellum.

 Over the years, a lot of games have given me inspiration, C&C, Starcraft, Warcraft, Total War, Might&Magic Heroes, Planet vs Zombie, Kingdom Rush, Clash Royale, etc. I think a bunch of the warcraft 3 maps inspire me the most, especially one map called the battle of three kingdoms. Although Mechabellum is very different from all of them, I do have to thank all of them for inspiring me and giving me so many fun memories.

Mechabellum.ru: Let’s talk about your development team
How did your team get together?

Bearlike: I start to develop the game with one of my friends in 2017. We received some investment money in 2020 and begin to hire people. 

The community knows only you Bearlike, can you, please, tell us something about other members of the team?

We are a small team. Our team includes my friends, my wife, and other passionate developers from all around China, some of them are mod makers for old RTSs. We have 12 people in the office now, and 10 of them are working on Mechabellum.

Mechabellum.ru: Have you made other games before? Your studio's Steam page has an Out of Hands game. Was it also made by your team?

Bearlike: I have made one MMORPG as the project leader. Back then, nearly every MMO in China is P2W, and so is my MMO game. And I hate P2W games, so I quit after I finished that game. Then after some soul-searching and some failed personal project, I finally knew what kind of game I want to make. After some talks with my friend, I founded Game River Studio with my savings and hired my friend to work with me. And we have been making Mechabellum ever since.

Out of Hands is a tiny project,  it was a game jam game made by one of our team members. I really liked that game, so we decide to make it one of our studio projects. Currently, 2 person is working on it, and other team members help them from time to time.

Mechabellum.ru: The development of the game has been going on for a long time, has the Covid epidemic affected your team and the development of the game?

Bearlike: Covid hit us very hard. We experience 2 long time lockdowns at the end of 2022, and then everybody got sick at the beginning of 2023 after the Outbreaks. The EA release date got pushed back a lot, and now Mechabellum is set to release 1 day before the new Zelda game. Haha.

Mechabellum.ru: If it's not a secret, how did you manage to publish your game with Paradox Interactive? Did you pitch your game to the publisher or did Paradox reach you themselves? 

Bearlike: I always think Paradox is the ideal publisher for our game.  So when we finally begin to look for publishers in 2022, I contacted them on their website. And they really like the game, there are lots of Paradox employ plays Mechabellum regularly. I think even their CEO plays Mechabellum a lot. So we just hit off instantly and signed the deal.

Mechabellum.ru: Love for games is what unites players and developers. What are your team members' favorite games?

We love all kinds of games. And we all have different favorite games. I think  RTSs, JRGs, roguelikes, and action games are very popular among our team.

Mechabellum.ru: Some questions about current game state

The tournament server was recently overloaded, and it happened in the European region, which unexpectedly surpassed the Asian one in terms of the number of participants. Did you expect such an influx of players after Paradox Interactive showed teaser of your game? 

Bearlike: We are not expecting that. We thought people will come at the launch of the game.

Mechabellum.ru: Do you have plans to change the format of the tournament due to the risk that  256 players tournament can take quite a long time? 

Bearlike: Yeah, now 128 is the maximum number of players in one tournament group. If more than 128 players joined the tournament, the system just adds more groups to the tournament.

We are planning to add more tournaments to the game. Such as division-specified tournaments and high-level tournaments that have registration requirements. And don't worry, we are adding 2v2 tournaments to the game.

Mechabellum.ru: Many players are worried about the current meta. Players are talking about disbalanced strategies and overpowered units. Do you have any statistical confirmation of these problems? Should we wait for balance fixes in further patches? 

The statistic tells us that the game is relatively balanced right now, all of the units have a decent pick rate and win rate. That being said, the game is definitely not perfectly balanced. A game like this is complicated, and we learn how the game works alongside you guys, and that's why we put out balancing patches all the time.

Mechabellum.ru: Mechabellum's ranking system is significantly different from the ranking systems in other games. How did you come up with the idea for this rating system? Are you satisfied with its performance? 

Bearlike: Here in China, we have parks for chess players to play with each other, we always think the chess parks have a  much better vibe than typical online games. So we design our systems to provide such vibes to all of our players.

Maybe you have already noticed, that our ranking system allows players to improve their ranks even when they are playing against their friends. Almost all the other competitive games do not allow you to improve ranks outside auto-matched ranked mode, but we think that is not right for our game.

A typical elo system does not count personal skill growth, players' score tends to stay the same or even get lower over time even if you are getting better at the game. Elo only cares how good you are compared to other players, if 2 players get better at the game together, their score will not change despite both of them getting better at the game. And we think this kind of system is wrong for our game.

We think if a player gets better, the Combat Power score should reflect it. If the player base as a whole gets better with the game, then everybody's score should reflect that. And everybody should be able to play with whoever they want and still earn ranks during them.

As for the performance of currenty system, I think we are happy with the result. Then Combat Power score shows how good a player is at the game, and we have the leaderboard and tournaments to show players how good they are compared to others.

All that been said, we do found some flaws in this system, and we will try to improve it in the future.


Mechabellum.ru: Some questions about further development of the game

Many players have already seen the 3D model of the new unit that’ll cost 800 resources. Can you lift the veil of secrecy and tell us something about this huge unit? Does it already have a name? Will it have unique and interesting abilities? 

Bearlike: Currently, the supergiant is called War Factory. It has lots of different weapons on it and can produce lots of units.

Mechabellum.ru: Are you planning to add other new units or squads types in the new update? 

Other than the supergiant, we are adding another air unit and another ground unit in the following months.


Mechabellum.ru: If the NDA allows, can you tell us anything else about the upcoming big update? What should we be prepared for? 

Bearlike: Yeah, we actually have a lot of features planned for future updates. You can expect bosses to come to the survival mod soon, and later these bosses will show in PvP matches as experimental units.

Mechabellum.ru: Mechabellum is one of the few games where Russian and Chinese players can play together on the same server and it's very cool. Do you plan to keep it the same after launch, or will there be division into regional servers?

Bearlike: I have a very naive dream, that my game will help to bring players from all over the world together. So we will try our best to let the players have the opportunity to play together if they want to.

Mechabellum.ru The 100th anniversary weekly tournament is approaching. Are you preparing something special for it? //The question is out of date at the time of the interview.//

Bearlike: Unfortunately no, just too much work on our hands.  

Mechabellum.ru: Thank you for answering the questions!  Please have a little afterword for the players or maybe you’d like to add something 😊


Bearlike: Thank you. You and many others' efforts have given this game an opportunity to reach its full potential. For this, we salute you all!