Q: Since this is Ritual's first episodic title, what lessons have you have learned so far during the development of the first chapter?

Shawn Ketcherside: There's been a lot. This was our first attempt at iterative design. The game is showing the benefits of the approach, but I don't think we knew the best strategies for this at the beginning. Also, I feel we learned the importance of focus. At the beginning we had so many great ideas, more than would fit in an entire game, let alone an episode, and I think we started off too broad. Better to find a few key things to make innovative and fun. We're getting to that, but it cost us time, so for Episode 2, I think that will be on the forefront of the design team's minds.

One other thing is to try and recognize a failed path earlier in the process. During prototyping we tried a lot of stuff out. I mean A LOT. It was all rough and ugly, but it was more about proving gameplay ideas than looking good. Some things proved to be bad ideas and we were able to cut them out very early, others were bad ideas masquerading as "almost good" ideas. Those are the tough ones. You keep tweaking and adjusting them, trying to get them right, eventually you realize there is no "right" and you cut the feature. Unfortunately it takes time to come to that realization.

All of this, though, is part of an iterative design approach - you have to expect that some things are just not going to work. As we continue to refine this process, I think we'll get a lot better at identifying dead-ends more quickly.

Rungy Singhal: Creating episodic content is a double edged sword. You don't have to put everything in the first episode, but anything you do put in has to be perfect. After the first episode is done, there is no need to redo any of the main characters or objects. The time used to make second game is cut in half. And all the time for the next installment is 100% for new content, story and action.

So each episode just keeps making the game bigger and better until eventually we'll have this awesome humungous world. Before we even started SiN Episodes we thought to ourselves...

"What if they released a new version of our favorite games every month?"
"Would people like that?"
"Would people want that?"

We all believe so, and thus SiN Episodes was born. This has to do with developing episodic content in the following way....

Rather than develop everything needed for a game over and over, take the content from one game and keep adding on to it. Combine this massive amount of content with cutting edge action and a comic book like epic storylines and I believe we'll have a winner.

Q: Multiplayer remains a topic of great interest for the community. How has the response been to the multiplayer survey and do you have any news for us regarding multiplayer?

Michael Russell: Our current focus is finishing up Episode 1. While some assets have been created for multiplayer already, we want to get "Emergence" done and out the door so we can then focus all of our efforts on creating the best possible multiplayer experience. On the upside, when we do get multiplayer working, that's a situation where we might be able to expand our testing program beyond Dallas city limits, if you know what I mean (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

Steve Hessel: The reaction to the survey has been great. We've had several thousand responses so far, which will provide a comprehensive basis for us once we start shifting resources over to multiplayer.