The ToyTalk interview: Steve Mainprize

Steve Mainprize is the man behind Point Zero Games and he’s made a bit of an impact with his first launch, the puzzle/card game Army of Zero, which not only works as an original combat game, but also offers a cash prize of £1,000 for the first person to solve the riddle hidden in the cards themselves.

Having met up with Steve at the Toy Fair in London, we were keen to get to know more about how this intriguing game was created…

ToyTalk: The character artwork on the Army of Zero cards is very impressive. Who did you get to do that?
Steve Mainprize: The characters were drawn by a friend of mine called Paul Loudon. His brief was basically to draw up the 84 characters in what we ended up calling ‘cartoon medieval’ style, with the additional complication that each character also has traits of a particular animal – so although they’re all human characters, they might resemble pandas, or lions, or crocodiles or whatever.

Paul did a great job bringing a sense of humour to the artwork, too. So, for example, the kangaroo character has these ludicrous spring-loaded boots, and the elephant character has the least-practical weapon in the history of gaming.

If anyone wants to use Paul’s skills, they should visit www.paulloudon.com and have a look at his online portfolio.

TT: Does each character have a background story?
SM: Only in the vaguest terms. There’s obviously a consistent theme running through the design, and some hints about what their world might be like scattered through the packaging and the website and so on, but by and large the characters’ back stories are in the imagination of whoever picks up the cards, and I rather like that idea.

TT: What were your main influences when designing the game?
SM: It’s a real mixture of different influences. The particular thing that distinguishes Army Of Zero is this idea that the design of the cards includes a set of word puzzles and logic puzzles, and the idea of including a puzzle and a prize must have been inspired by a book called Masquerade by Kit Williams, which came out in 1979 and was quite famous at the time.

It’s funny, because when I explain Army Of Zero to people, most people of my generation get it right away, because they say “Oh, like Masquerade?” I have to explain it a bit more to younger people. If you’re interested in the Masquerade story, I recommend you go and Google it, because it’s fascinating.

As far as the gameplay goes, the key idea was that we wanted to encourage different generations to play together. Personally, I was always totally flummoxed by Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh and the like, and I think a lot of parents were in the same boat. Not that there’s anything wrong with those games, they’re obviously ridiculously successful, it’s just that we wanted to do something a bit different. So, ironically, we ended up making the gameplay simple in order to pander to the grown-ups rather than to the children!

Anyway, we wanted to design some mechanics that would be really easy to learn, and where you could get through a game in 10 or 15 minutes. For a simple game, there are quite a few influences: there’s a bit of fantasy role-playing, a bit of Top Trumps and a bit of rock-paper-scissors in there.

Playing at home with my own kids, we’ve made up a few games of our own, including one that we played with a standard pack of cards, called ‘Intergalactic Space Fleet Battle War’ (did I mention that my kids are boys?), and some of that ended up in Army Of Zero too.

TT: I think Intergalactic Space Fleet Battle War needs to be developed and released as quickly as possible. Speaking of which, how long did it take to get Army of Zero from concept to product?
SM: We started seriously in March 2008, and we launched in January 2009, so that’s about 10 months. It would have been quicker if we’d managed to get more processes happening in parallel, as it were.

In particular there was an unexpected three-month delay in the middle while we waited for the registration of the trademark – purely down to my ignorance about the process, I’m afraid! That stopped us going to press as soon as we’d have liked.

TT: What’s next for Point Zero Games? What scope do you see for further products based on the Army of Zero idea?
SM: There are two areas that we’re looking into. Firstly, ways to enhance the game mechanics, via expansion packs that change the way the cards interact with each other, or offer new gaming modes. For example, we’re very interested in developing a co-operative way to play. It’s important to be careful with this stuff, though, because the basic game is really well balanced as it stands, and we don’t want to mess that up.

The second thing, and this might take a bit longer, is a full second edition, primarily being a new set of puzzles. We had some good logic puzzles that didn’t make the cut the first time around, and we’ve thought of some new brain-teasers since that it would be nice to include.

TT: What sort of feedback have you received so far?
SM: Like you say, people love the artwork – that response is universal whenever I show it to anyone. Then there’s a certain type of gamer – perhaps one who played games when younger, who now has a young family – who see it as a jumping-on point to get their kids into gaming. And it’s always great showing it to puzzle aficionados. They immediately pick up the cards and start looking for clues. Most of them manage to interpret a clue or two correctly straightaway, but it’s not always the same thing, which I find fascinating.

On the business side, some people have suggested that the price is too low, which in retrospect might be right, but most of our sales are through our website, so there’s postal charges to add onto the RRP and that brings the overall price to the consumer up a bit, obviously – probably to about where it should be.

TT: What’s your background? Is this a long-held ambition or something completely new for you?
SM: I used to work in IT, and was fortunate enough to make some money when the company I worked for got gobbled up by a larger firm. I wanted to work for myself and in particular set my own hours around my kids, and this seemed like a wonderful opportunity to do that.

TT: Was there ever a stage when you thought “this isn’t going to work”, or did you always have confidence that you would get the game to market?
SM: The way I work is that I try and get any potential problems identified and dealt with as soon as possible, on the principle that if you’re going to hit a brick wall, you ought to make sure you hit it before you’ve wasted too much time and effort.

So by the time we were two or three months into it, everything had been thought through and there was a proper business plan in place and so on. There are always unexpected things that come up, of course, but if you’re prepared properly you should be OK.

The only time we almost wavered was when the credit crunch hit us all, and at that point we did think of delaying the launch for a year. But we decided that we believed in the product, and that we should seize the day. In any case, staying in (and playing games) is the new going out, isn’t it?

You can buy Army of Zero direct from the Point Zero Games website.