Rodina, a title created by Brendan Anthony, founder of Elliptic games, is a game that sounds quite familiar when you hear what it’s about, but when you consider how ambitious the project is, it becomes all the more intriguing to find out more about the talent behind it.

I recently came into contact with Brendan Anthony, a man who doesn’t only have experience that speaks for itself, but a vigorous personality to go with it.

K: Could you tell us a little bit about your development team and what experience they bring to the table? 

B: When I say “we at Elliptic”, I’m talking about The Royal “we”. You know, the editorial?

We at Elliptic Games are currently a team of 1 person. I’ve worked in the games industry for eight years- four years at Bethesda Softworks, working on Oblivion and Fallout 3, and then four years at Stumptown Game Machine making mobile games in Portland Oregon.

K: What are other projects you has Elliptic Games worked on before prior to Rodina?

B: OK- here is how it happened. I was actually working on TWO games before the Rodina announcement. Elliptic has a small mobile game that is sort of “on deck”, and I was kind of splitting my attention between the two. Then Notch announced 0x10c and my world exploded. I knew that I had to do something to establish Rodina in people’s minds, so I focused completely on getting the game ready for the tech demo. I never would have shown the game so early in the process unless it was necessary, but that’s the breaks, you know. Fortunately the reception has mostly been super encouraging!

Now that things are cooking so hot on Rodina, I’ve just got to abandon that mobile game for now. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to finish it someday.

K: How long have you been working on Rodina and are you considering public funding as an option to finance the game?

B: I’ve been working on Rodina for about 3 months. As far as funding, my intention has never been to raise money through investors or donations. I understand why 90% of businesses need to go that route, but I honestly hate the idea of asking for someone’s money based on a promise or a hope. This is for 2 reasons:

1. I want to be able to blow my money on hookers and cocaine without feeling guilty about it.
2. Protestant values.

My intention is to take some time to develop an initial version of the game which will be very simple, and then offer that for sale. If people like it, they can give me money and I can work on it more. If they don’t, then no big deal. Maybe someday, when I’m eating my shoes and belts, that plan might change but for now I have the luxury of saying I’m going to fund it myself.

As far as how long that will take, my hope and intention is to make that small initial release sometime this year.

K: Finally, what is your stance on the close resemblance Rodina has with 0x10c? What will separate the experience you will deliver from what Mojang is working on? This is not meant to be an accusation, I’m simply curious what individual “flavour” Elliptic will be bringing to the table.

B:I have no idea how to answer this. I don’t really know too much about 0x10c. I imagine that my game will have slightly higher-fidelity visuals than 0x10c, which means that Notch is going to have more time to spend on content than I will. Between that and Mojang’s 80 Billion dollar “Crush Rodina” fund, I imagine that his game will be quite a bit bigger in scope than mine will, but that’s just a guess.

The fact that you can reprogram the computers in both games is a heck of a coincidence, but it is kind of interesting how we’re both going about it in different ways. Notch’s system is in assembly language and as such is very built-from-the-ground-up. There’s going to be a huge DIY feeling about the computers in 0x10c, and it will be awesome to see what people can create with that. In our game, we’re using Lua, which is a high level language, and the code that you can hack in the game is going to be very, very high level. I’m not totally sure what the focus of Notch’s hacking is, but in Rodina the focus will be:

* Hacking enemy ships to make them malfunction in creative and hilarious ways
* Hacking your own ship to give it new abilities, straight from your imagination

I’m hoping that the hacking in our game will be accessible enough that anyone can destroy a ship or two with it, but deep enough that someone with creative ambitions can have fun with it too. As with everything else in the Universe, we’ll just have to wait and see how it turns out.