If you haven’t heard of Rusty Axe Games, chances are good that you’re missing out on some high quality and high fun games! Battle Castles is a favorite around here (you can read our review of it) and they have another exciting title called Real E$state Empire right on the horizon. CEO Lennard Fedderson talks to us today about how he came up with the idea for it, life at an indie development studio, and his take on the casual market.

CR: Tell us a little about Rusty Axe: Who are you, what did you do before this, and how did you get into casual games?

Lennard: My name is Lennard Feddersen; I’ve been making games for 24 years, 20 of those more or less professionally. My last corporate gig was at Cryptic Studios where I worked on City of Heroes as a senior engineer for 2 years. Previous to that I was at Midway Games West where I helped out on Gauntlet for PS 2 and DreamCast. I left Cryptic because big game development wasn’t my cup of tea anymore - the attached picture was from that time frame. I’m the blond guy and, among other things, I just wasn’t up for 70-80 hours a week away from home while the red head was growing up. No regrets about moving on and going indie.

CR: Tell us about surviving as an independent developer. What are the biggest challenges you face every day? How is life as an indie different form being a developer at a big famous studio funded by the major publishers?

Lennard: The pay scale is pretty different! We consider ourselves semi-retired as we bought rental units that allow us to do what we want with our time. My wife writes, I code, we boss the kids around and lately it seems that we buy houses and renovate them - good research for my latest game, Real E$tate Empire which is about buying, fixing and selling houses. I’ve been lucky to find great talent to work with across the internet and this lets me lead a life that, for me is pretty ideal. I get to pursue the designs that are interesting to me and to change those ideas into products. I always felt envious of the people who started computer game companies when the Apple II was young. I missed the zip-lock game in a baggy period but, thanks to the internet, that kind of opportunity is here again.

CR: OK, we admit, we’re very biased. Battle Castles is one of our favorite casual games of all time. Tell us a little bit about the development of this game – where did you get the idea, what ideas did you throw away, and how did this game get so cool? Why can’t we stop playing? And when do we get to play the sequel?

Lennard: That’s pretty flattering! The game is in negotiations with a company in Europe for retail distribution in a few countries there. That deal would actually make the game ever so slightly profitable (i.e. I not only paid the contractors but earn a couple of bucks for pizza and the college funds) so a sequel is becoming more likely. I would like to add internet high scoring, multi-player, a more strategic mode that is slower paced, possibly a mode where you play as a ship, a map editor and possibly a “classic” mode where you rebuild castles with Tetris-like pieces. That is getting pretty close to Rampart - which I loved and to which this game clearly pays homage - so I don’t know if I can legally accomplish that. I used to play a lot of Rampart at Atari and took a bit of money from the lead programmer of the arcade version of Gauntlet (Legends and Dark Legacy - Ed wasn’t a Rampart guy but a pretty competitive volleyball player) during our games. I’d like to do a bundled trackball version of Battle Castles.

Anyhow, I’m really glad you like the game, it’s something that I feel turned out well but just didn’t resonate with the market place well enough. The sequel is something that I’m partial to so it could happen - I’ve got to clear the decks of a few other things first.

CR: We hear you are working on a great new game based on real estate – how is that coming for you?

Lennard: “HouseFlip!” has become Real E$tate Empire and it is currently at a public demo state. The game has been playable since last spring and it’s just been a process of adding, removing and tuning the game. You can find out more about the game at our site (link) and there’s also a link to a free download of the demo there. There has been more interest in this title from the big portals, so hopefully this will be the “breakthrough” title that gets Rusty Axe onto the map! A hit would also make a Battle Castles sequel a lot easier to accomplish although I might have to figure out a different business model for BC because it isn’t a true casual game portal kind of game - it’s not fluffy enough. Maybe we’ll do micro-payments or just give the game away from the Rusty Axe site in exchange for traffic.

CR: We hear your “office” has moved recently. How’s that working out? Was your experience in real life real estate anything like the game you are developing?

Lennard: I grew up in a small town on the Northwest coast of Canada called Terrace in British Columbia. When we left California in 2004 to come to Canada we bought an old fixer upper just out of town. Walking distance to the golf course actually. It was a good house, we did a lot of renovating in between coding and writing and we were able to sell the house ourselves for a profit and move into town. We won a bidding war (see my blog entry at our site entitled “Real Estate showdown in Prince Rupert”) for the place we are in now and I spent 32 days straight (actually I took a Sunday off) getting the place ready to move into. It’s a big house that was neglected a bit - 3500 sq. feet - and we are going to be puttering around for the next year before everything is the way we want it. But we are pretty happy with the place, the kids have plenty of room to roam around downstairs, much of the place was painted before we got in, lots of old carpet was removed and replaced by laminate flooring so it’s coming along. I wish we had taken photos every couple of days. I’m typing this from my new office and we can walk just about everywhere downtown within 15 minutes.

So, to answer your question, yes - we bought a house, fixed it up and then sold it for a profit so we are on our way to our own Real E$tate Empire! As an aside, in California our mortgage and property tax payments for 8 months on our modest 1650 sq. ft. house totaled as much as the first house we bought up here. Caveats would include that we bought in the late Fall after the local market had tanked for about 7 years so we got the place for about the price of the lot. We sold that place ourselves as well using an FSBO type service when we sold our place in California and all three modes of selling are represented in Real E$tate Empire. The price of real estate in North America is a thing that I find fascinating and I’ve blogged about what I think it can end up doing to our global competitiveness. If you have to pay over 4K USD a month for housing costs then you are going to be hard pressed to compete with IT workers in places like India and Romania with their reported 11K per year salary. Since the bulk of the Silicon Valley programmers money goes to his housing costs he isn’t significantly better compensated than the East Indian programmer - but he (or she) is at a significant cost competition disadvantage.

CR: Tell us about your customers – who is playing Battle Castles? We always hear that the “classic casual gamer” is a woman over 40. Are they shooting cannons at pirates? If not, how are you targeting a different customer?

Lennard: You guys! Seriously, with the portals doing the overwhelming majority of BC sales, such as they are, I don’t really get any stats on who is buying or playing the game. The most recent broad market casual gamer data I have seen suggests that the casual gamer is not necessarily who we think she is. The over 40 year old woman may be playing the games but it sounds like she is just as likely buying something non-threatening for her kids to play. I’m taking the 70% number with a grain of salt these days. More importantly, my wife and I have gone to extreme lengths to get to do things our way so I’m going to keep on making the games I want to make and just trust that those games will find their audience rather than trying to figure out exactly what games women over 40 might want to play.

Interestingly, the first thing I did when I went indie was to convert The Green Myste, a dungeon crawl game I had written years before for the PC to run on the Pocket PC and the Zodiac. Maybe half of the people who bought the game directly from my site were, very surprisingly (for me), women who were out in the work force. My MO is to try and make good games and trust that people will play them.

CR: Comparing your former life in retail game development to your current life in indie game development, what do you miss and what do you NOT miss?

Lennard: California was home for 18 years so I miss the California coast, San Francisco, Santa Cruz (that’s a whole chapter right there - SC is one great place), some very good friends and a couple of great Indian food places in Mountain View, Milpitas and of course Asian Rose in Santa Cruz which is Ceylon vegetarian. They don’t have that here in Terrace… But, we now have a very laid-back lifestyle that we can spend closer to my family. We trek to upstate NY for 2 months in the summer to spend time on Lake Sacandaga with my in-laws from all generations. Lake Sacandaga is a big lake with great swimming water and I have DSL access there so I just keep right on coding. I’m a big fan of swimming, it does wonders for my back, the kids have a blast and we get to spend a lot of time with my wife’s family. Many things have changed - I’m really glad I went to California, got to code a lot of games and work with some great people - but life is pretty good right now.

CR: Sounds fantastic. What more could a programmer ask for? Well, thanks so much for talking to us today, Lennard! We’ll be keeping an eye on Real E$state Empire and we’re excited to see how it turns out.

To see more of Rusty Axe and the games they make, head over to their website at www.rustyaxe.com. Make sure to check back soon for more great developer interviews, special features, and reviews.