Jonathan Smars is a senior developer on the latest huge indie title to make its way to Xbox and Xbox Game Pass Valheim. Before joining Iron Gate he worked on projects such as EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company and Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines as a 3D graphic artist. Alongside this, he’s also been involved with some other incredible indie and AAA projects but is now working full-time on Valheim. Sitting down with Jonathan we talked about bringing Valheim to console, how the AAA industry compares to working on indie titles and much more. You can check out the full interview below on both YouTube and other streaming platforms including Spotify, Amazon Music, Samsung, Podchaser, JioSaavn, and Deezer.
Interview conducted by Odhrán Johnson
Transcribed by JP (Gabbing About)
Odhrán Johnson (OJ): Okay, brilliant, well, Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me. Firstly I’m really happy to be doing this interview because well Valheim has recently come to Xbox and Xbox Game Pass and as someone who doesn’t have that huge sort of collective of friends on PC to get to play it with them on Xbox was a huge sort of great sort of time for a while anyways as we kind of stumbled our way through the beginning of what is Valheim I think only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to kind of delving into the content that’s already available in that game. I want to just kind of start out very quickly with Valheim. We’ll move over to a couple of other bits before obviously returning to Valheim but I want to talk about specifically the port to Xbox which is obviously a huge move for the game as well because it has such a huge popularity with players on Steam and on PC. What was it like sort of adapting that core gameplay over to console because I imagine like you know when you’re kind of putting the restraints of you know having a controller as opposed to a keyboard can maybe be a little bit daunting. Kind of what was the main sort of pressure points you were trying to hit as you went through that process?
Jonathan Smars (JS): Yeah, so, we had an external studio who did most of the work for the port because we are quite a small team at Iron Gate and we wanted to focus on building the game for our current players like finishing the biomes basically and working on the content updates. But of course, since we chose to have crossplay it does mean that we really have to make sure that everything that’s made on Xbox is the same on PC and that we have complete future parity and that we release everything at the same time so of course we have to be kind of quite involved as well. And, I mean the game in itself, we already had full controller support and everything kind of worked already but there’s definitely a lot of improvements to be made to the controller and to the UI to make sure that it’s 100% workable with only a controller like never being in a menu where you’d lose focus with a controller and things like that and text inputs and stuff like that and everything works with Xbox interface and stuff like that. As well as a number of other things like both of them is a bunch of requirements on Xbox like you have to…there’s this kind of huge list of things that you can and cannot do on an Xbox which does not exist on Steam so we’d have to like go through that and make sure everything is being followed. And as well, of course, the performance. The Xbox like since we released on all the series models and all the Xbox One models as well we had to make sure that it’s running good enough on all the consoles so yeah, quite a bit of work involved with that as well.
OJ: Do you think obviously with Valheim coming over and you know, it’s a great game on PC, it runs great on Series X and S, was there ever a worry that maybe there would be performance issues with the sort of base Xbox Ones and whatnot going forward or was that kind of not really in the equation at all?
JS: yeah for sure I mean it’s not a given that it’s going to work great on the lower-end Xbox One for example I mean Valheim is a game that kind of looks low resolution for some people we have this kind of the retro feel but it’s definitely not a low end, like it does require quite a bit of hardware to run well but because of all the post-processing and effect of lighting it is very modern and as well as players might end up building quite big bases like huge entire cities and things like that so like even on the most high-end computer you will see quite a lot of like low frame rate. So running that on a low-end Xbox is quite difficult so. We have done quite a lot of improvements already and it’s definitely working but there is quite a bit of room for improvement which is something that we hope to work on more in the future as well. To be able to support bigger builds and bigger cities, that’s all.
OJ: Yeah, no, for sure. I definitely like as soon as I was in the game I remember one of the few things me and my friends kept doing was we kept stopping to look at things like the beautiful sky box Valheim has because it’s like one of those things you don’t really expect because as you mentioned the game has this sort of low quality feel to it and then when you look up at the sky box and you see things at a distance it’s almost like a painting and you’re like this is amazing, I love looking at this. I want to ask specifically because it’s one of the programs we don’t really see a whole lot of on Xbox which is of course the Game Preview program and a lot of them kind of the game that kind of stick out in my mind are The Anacrusis which came out in January last year for the Game Preview program. Kind of, walk me through what it was like because obviously, early access on Steam is a tried and true formula at this stage – a lot of people have done it. Game Preview on Xbox is kind of more of a recent phenomenon that people have started to kind of delve into. What was it like kind of tackling that aspect going onto Xbox and was there a huge learning curve there for how they run things as opposed to how they run it on Steam?
JS: Not so much on my end to be honest like I mean yeah early access has been around for quite a while on Steam. To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of early-access games but I do think that there are games that do well on early access like that are kind of suited for the format and I do think that Valheim is one of them. I think with that more of an open-ended sandbox game where it can work quite well and we have made sure to really focus on polish and not having tons of bugs and work-in-progress prompts here and there like a lot of early access games have. We’ve gotten a lot of praise for that and I think that we’re doing something right in that aspect so I think that it should probably work quite well as well on the Xbox. I mean, to be honest, I don’t really know like the intricacies of how it is on Xbox compared to the PC at the moment but hopefully, it works well. I mean there are quite a few players playing on the Xbox at the moment. Probably they aren’t the ones who have reached 1.0 and are still in the game preview hopefully they’re still interested by then. We’ll do our best.
OJ: Yeah, fantastic. Another part as well, I mean I would kinda of be remiss to not ask about Xbox Game Pass which is obviously the game came to Xbox along with the service of Xbox Game Pass. Was there a specific reason for that? Because obviously, Valheim has as we mentioned this huge community on PC already so I imagine kind of advertising to the console audience at least completely from my own perspective would have been like okay well we’ve got this huge market that we could maybe bring over to console which maybe isn’t the case at all but was there a specific reason behind choosing to go down the Xbox Game Pass route. Was it of benefit to you guys as developers in that sense as well?
JS: I mean, we have had so many people ask us to release on consoles and it’s something that we think would be very fun to do just to be able to give more players the chance to play the game. I mean even though, it’s also a little bit difficult because we also want to give the focus on actually finishing the game and working on several platforms definitely can complicate things but that’s also why we have this external studio working on that. But yeah we had the dialogue with Microsoft and we thought it would be interesting to try to release it with them and we thought yeah going on Game Pass was…there’s…there’s pros and cons of everything but I think we had…we worked out a nice deal with them and the nice thing about it being on Game Pass is that there’s a whole lot of players who will be able to play the game without having to think about like do we want buy the game first or not. It puts the game in the hands of a lot of players quite immediately.
OJ: Yeah. Obviously, Game Pass before has had a load of titles in that same sort of survival open-world crafting sort of section. I mean, specifically thinking of ARK Survival Evolved. Those sorts of game have been on Game Pass before. When you were kind of bringing the game over to consoles was it a specific angle you were going for of maybe obviously you mentioned that there were people who were asking for Valheim to go to console but was it also a case of you want to attract some of the players who have already been on console sort of survival games like Ark and you wanted to kind of bring them in and show them how good Valheim was as well?
JS: I mean if I’m completely honest I’m not really involved in that part of it I’m mostly involved in the programming and building of the game. If we’re talking about it, but it’s mostly our publisher to think more in these kind of strategic ways of thinking in which ways we should sell it or which platforms we should reach and so on but you would have to ask Coffee Stain about that if you want some more specifics, I think.
OJ: Yeah, of course. Let’s talk a little bit about your work though because I was doing a bit of research before the interview and I was just kind of blown away first of all because whenever you see an indie game you kind of expect the person in that sphere to have worked on just purely on indie games and maybe that’s a prejudice on my part for thinking that they don’t go outside of that area at all but you’ve done quite a bit in the AAA space specifically with stuff like Gearbox and with EA in regards to Bad Company and then you go over to stuff like Colonial Marines. You know, you did 3D environment art for those games, you know. What was it like working in those scenarios with sort of, what did you learn specifically from those that you can now incorporate into Valheim?
JS: Okay, yeah, kind of a broad question. I think like, yeah like you said I don’t know the statistics. Probably a ton of indie people, like indie game developers are maybe like going into indie immediately and working on games and that can work out really well or sometimes not but I do think there is a big like there’s a ton of indie game developers who come from the more AAA space as well. My part, I mean, yeah I was a 3D artist like mainly 15ish years ago. I started out as a modder and then from that I was making like 3d models for like Half-Life 2 mods and Quake mods and Unreal Tournament mods and stuff like that. I think I had my first…I was working on like some old…like car models and I got and I sent like when I was in high school I sent a model to like an Unreal Mod called Unwheel which is like a driving mod for the Unreal Tournament 2003 and they were like oh nice car so they put it in their mod and then like PC Gamer featured this thing. I had like…my car in PC Gamer when I was in high school which was very cool for me. So yeah, so I started out as making 3d models and I worked on that for a while on some studios both on location but also as like a contractor but it ended up like I also had a huge interest in coding and programming and design so I thought it would be fun to be able to build more of like an actual full game by myself rather than having to be dependent on having someone else implement everything that I did visually and I mean like yeah if you look at engines there’s like real blueprints for stuff which is awesome. You can really build whole games without any coding knowledge but that wasn’t really the case back then so I just kind of started learning programming and now I’m much more a programmer than I am an artist. I mainly do programming and a little bit of everything like putting all the pieces together but I do occasionally do like 3d models here and there if there is a lot of work for them to do already or if it’s something that I…like, for example, we did the ballista for the Mistlands update and that was…like I was building that whole functionality anyway so I thought it was fun to model it and to do the whole process.
OJ: Yep. I want to kind of go back a little bit because I know you mentioned you did mods for stuff like Half-Life 2 and I’m particularly interested in that because I know Nuclear Dawn is one of the games you worked on. Was that like…was that purely at the early stage of just doing 3d modelling or was there a lot of programming involved in that as well?
JS: yeah, Nuclear Dawn is a whole chapter by itself. It was interesting and I met a whole bunch of really great people on that mod. Sadly we never released it as a mod – it was later released as a full game by a different studio that kind of got the rights from us as a mod team after we had kind of realised that this game wasn’t going to be finished. But at that point, I was only working as a 3D artist but also kind of how should I say, a little bit like trying to produce it, trying to get the team together and working a little bit on the game design aspect as well. But at that point the code was very it was yeah it was like a little bit of scripting like setting up Half-Life, I don’t remember like the model, the definition files and whatever you have to do for the animations and stuff, for the RTS structures and stuff like that but yeah.
OJ: do you think sort of working on stuff like that obviously with a smaller team the modding scene is a lot more comparable to something like when you’re going over to sort of try to help run and do the work on Valheim as well as opposed to when you were doing the AAA stuff with Colonial Marines and Battlefield and stuff like that?
JS: Sure, yeah, definitely. I mean I think it’s great to have experience in both areas like I mean working at an actual big AAA company definitely you get into the production mode more you kind of learn to actually yeah like producing full assets and being like effective and disciplined and like that. I think working on a mod team is much more similar to working on a small indie developer rather than like AAA because like for us we are like 13ish…I guess we’re like 7 people on the development side of it at the moment and everybody kind of needs to chip in a little bit where…it’s kind of a lot more like working as a group to figure out each detail talking usually talking about everything with everyone who wants to be able…to be involved and working in a big company, I mean it also has its pros and cons but you’re much more in one corner of the game working on your little aspect and you maybe don’t have as much to do to say about the whole game.
OJ: How do you think then when you … I know like your Twitter account makes fun of the fact that you’re like kind of just general person of just doing a lot of stuff on Valheim and you don’t have this like specific role on it but is there like an element of when you’re like going over to something like Valheim…like how do you describe your job definition because you kind of just do a bit of everything is…there’s not really a kind of catch-all phrase for everything you do is there?
JS: No, I mean….no, I think that goes for everybody at Iron Gate. I mean we are a little bit kind of more in one area, everybody, but we…I mean I think that’s also one of the aspects of working on a small Indie title is being able to do different things and also enjoying doing different things. Like I wouldn’t really want to go to work every day and do the exact same thing everyday which is…I’m not going to say that’s how it is at a AAA but it’s a little bit more like that. Everybody has to kind of be a little bit more jack of all trades and yeah. I mean also another aspect of this is that it…like in Sweden it’s not as super important with job titles like what is your official title…oh thinking about your career is less trying to get the next title or the next senior or leader or whatever it’s called. I don’t really even know what all the things are so at Iron Gate we basically just take whatever you want to be called and that is your title. And since we’re all doing a little bit of everything that doesn’t work anyway so…
OJ: I need…you know they say that success isn’t easy but Valheim has as we mentioned already a number of times accumulated this huge amount of success on Steam and given that it’s still already in early access do you feel there’s a certain level of pressure on you guys to kind of deliver really good update after really good update all the way up to release?
JS: Yeah, I guess so. I mean just having a lot of players play the game is just awesome and it’s just so inspiring for us to read like…we get a lot of nice emails like about people being very happy with the game and different praise but that also means there’s a lot of players asking when is the next update coming and what it is. Any update that we release we do get a lot of positive response but we also get a lot of people who are like why did you change this, why did you do this and why did you break my mods, something like that which is going to happen every time we update basically. So yeah it definitely does add some pressure. I guess the nice part about the success here is that we can really take our time on making it really good rather than having to push for a deadline. But with that said I think most people at Iron Gate…we put the pressure on ourselves. We really want to make something that is really good and we don’t want to take too much time. Like we don’t want it to take forever. People think that maybe we are a bit slow sometimes and I can understand that as well but it is a lot of work to work on every aspect of the game and make sure that everything is up to par and test it so that we don’t release something that all of a sudden breaks the game for many people.
OJ: As they say Rome wasn’t built in a day but in this case, it’s Valhalla wasn’t built in a day. Looking at the game obviously, your background in mods and all that do you have a sense of like sympathy for people who are like oh my god, all my mods are broken now when you update the game. Is that something that you want to cultivate as the game grows closer to 1.0 because we’ve seen games with huge mod scenes continue long after the sell-by date, if that makes sense, you know people keep building content for the game. Is that something that you’ve looking to sort of cultivate more in the future…for future updates as well?
JS: Yeah, I mean definitely. I really feel for the mod developers because I’ve been one as well and kind of know the pain but since we have like if we had official mod support now we would spend so much time. It would really make our development so much slower to really make sure that we’re not breaking things like breaking mods every update. I mean what we’ve said now is that we don’t have official mod support so if you’re using mods you really have to know that like okay you are welcome to. We’re not hindering it, we’re even allowing it, I mean we’re keeping the code basically open so people can see it and mod it and everything and we do support…I mean if we get questions we’ll give answers and we’ll try to support in any way we can but it is a little bit hard to see that yeah we’re always breaking mods. Nearer closer to release hopefully this is something that I would really like to see having better support for mods. Going forward after 1.0 is something we will see. I mean I’m not sure if it will come with 1.0 or after or anything like that but I would really like us to be able to get to a point where we’re not going to break mods every time we update. So yeah, it’s definitely a goal.
OJ: I’m interested a little bit in the general gameplay of Valheim if you’re able to talk to that. Is there any…I know there’s a lot of comparisons, especially with people who look at the survival crafting elements sort of the boss elements of Valheim and think okay Minecraft which is inevitable with this sort of genre of games now. Was there a sense of like…you know because when people originally go in it’s kind of left up to them to learn how to do things and that’s totally…that’s the way the game angles it at and it’s great in that sense. Is there an element that you guys want to strike this kind of balance between giving people tutorials for stuff like this but also not holding their hand constantly throughout the game?
JS: Yeah I mean we are definitely not the type of both developers or players who want to have a handholding game. We do like the game to be a challenge. We’re not huge fans of really long complex tutorials so I mean I can only speak for myself again here but I think that we kind of strike a nice balance of exploration and trying to figure things out but also having a few hints here or there like with the raven flying in to just make sure that you didn’t miss certain points and you can disable it if you don’t like it at all. And also part of it ties into that like the Valheim sort of design is to like not overcomplicate anything like if it’s too complex to understand by yourself then maybe it’s too complex so try to keep things simple but still having of course an interesting depth. That’s also kind of a challenge a lot of the time like what things should we add what things shouldn’t we add – is it kind of the Valheim way or is it too complex?
OJ: What do you think actually with the move over to console now and consoles players are now going to get the chance to play the game? Obviously, they probably heard a bit about Valheim, but they haven’t done too much research into it but kind of looked at it and thought oh all my friends are talking about this I’ll give it a go. What do you think is the one thing that they kind of least be expecting from Valheim?
JS: Well, I have no idea! Like I think it’s different for each person. I mean somebody going in blind which I think is always the best way to start a game or a movie or anything…not knowing anything. It’s really more of an interesting experience I mean Valheim, exploring it yourself, figuring things out, that aspect but then again there’s a lot of people who do like to learn…to maybe look up some videos on Youtube ahead of time or like they’ve heard tons and tons from their friends about this game and they can experience it after that so. Yeah, I think it’s very different and that’s one of the strengths of Valheim. It’s a game that caters to a lot of different types of players. Like some people…yeah, some people just want to, like they don’t care about…they just want to kill all the bosses and some people just want to explore. Some people want to sail. Some people want to plant carrots and onions and stuff and the nice thing is you can do…play it in any way and any pace that you want and you can play it together with your friends. And it even just like…it’s just good if you have a varied group. Like somebody wants to do the exploring, somebody wants to the building. I mean that’s just strengthening your multiplayer group basically. I think that’s also one of the reasons why it works so well and why it’s kind of created a lot of online communities playing together.
OJ: 100%. I mean is it like sort of the case where you want to move forward with the game now. How are you approaching like because there is the option to play solo as well how are you constantly looking at that element and trying to think like obviously this is a multiplayer game first you know you can have up to 10 players playing in one server. What do you want to look at in regards to the solo aspect of Valheim in the future?
JS: Yeah so I mean that is…that really answers a lot of….there’s a lot of great ideas coming in and we have a lot of ideas of course! But every single thing we want to put in the game we want to make sure that whatever it is, it works just as well for multiplayer as it does for single player so there’s tons of good ideas where like this would be awesome if you played this by yourself or this would be awesome if you played with friends but if it doesn’t work for both sides of the game then all of a sudden we are designing two games or we’re prioritising one over the other which we don’t want to do because I mean, we definitely have tons of players playing multiplayer but we also have tons of players playing single player and I really think it should be up to the player at the end of the day without sacrificing part of the gameplay – feeling like oh this would be cool if I just had a friend with me. It has to work both ways which it does…like I said one of the reasons that we can’t add every cool idea that we come across.
OJ: I want to ask just briefly because obviously, we talked about you mentioned at the beginning that the team wants to bring the game over to console and it is on Xbox now. Is there, obviously you can only talk about this as much as you are able to with regards to is there future plans to bring it to PlayStation 5 and also alongside that there was mention of how physically demanding the game is on PC anyway. Is it possible to port that game to a Nintendo Switch?
JS: At the moment we are only looking at the Xbox. That is what I can say about consoles. I mean, I would love to see it on the Switch but I kind of doubt that it would be able to run at the moment. Like maybe an extremely slimmed-down version. I mean it would be a fun experiment to try but yeah. You never know.
OJ: Talking about the constraints of the Xbox One, bring it to the Nintendo Switch and then you’ll see what we’re on about.
JS: Yeah if we’re going to be bringing it to the Nintendo Switch then you know it will definitely be running well on the other consoles.
OJ: Final question I have then. Obviously, you know Valheim is edging closer to that 1.0 release. For you personally then, what are you looking to do afterwards? Is there any talk about okay maybe I’m going to stick here and do more Indie stuff or would you like to do more contracts for AAA things or is that something you are constantly doing anyways?
JS: No, I mean we are working on Valheim at the moment and once that is finished we will either keep working on it or…well we don’t really know what we are going to do at that point. We have said that Valheim is not a live service game – some people may expect a game to be that way these days and for us to keep making updates forever and ever and ever. Valheim does have a beginning and it does have an end. That being said, we would like to support it as much as possible and have it live for as long as possible as well. Hopefully, we will keep working on it and on future updates as well but that is nothing that I can say for sure at this point. Whatever happens after that I mean we will also be making more games. Not in the AAA space or contracting or that regard. We are a studio and we are making our own games.
OJ: Fantastic. Jonathan, thank you so much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
JS: Yeah, no problem!
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