By Janette Turner

Edmonds entrepreneur Connor Brennan is your typical 22-year-old who loves video games. But Brennan is taking his passion a step further by developing his own game, called “SideQuest,” with the help of funding through crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter. My Edmonds News caught up with Brennan to find out more about his company, Fractal Entertainment, and his pursuit of Kickstarter capital.

My Edmonds News: Please tell us about how you decided to use Kickstarter.

C.B.: We had actually been developing the game for around four months before we decided to try a Kickstarter campaign. As the game developed, the list of features and content we wanted to add became longer and longer, and it soon became apparent that the original budget wouldn’t be enough to load the game up with all the goodies and awesomeness we were envisioning. To us, Kickstarter is less about “all or nothing” and more about “how polished and in-depth of a product can we produce”. Our stretch-goals reflect that mindset as for reasonably small amounts of money we are willing to add completely new content and even mechanics to the game.

My Edmonds News: What is your game about?

C.B.: SideQuest isn’t really about one thing. It’s a game within a game within a game — hence the title. As we talked about in our Kickstarter video, the game is built on layers, which each layer building upon and expanding on the previous one. For example, while the basic game-play is nothing more than watching your characters beat on monsters and picking up the variety of experience and phat loot that pops out of them, this game-play is revisited in each of SideQuest’s unique quests (we currently plan on having roughly 40~50 quests at launch). During the quests the experience is no longer about killing monsters, but instead completing a goal – and the monsters are just in your way. What’s unique about SideQuest, however, is that these goals are in themselves mini-games. For example, one quest has you playing red light/green light as you bushwhack through a bramble of Shreiker Bushes. Another has you frantically fending of the squirmy tentacles of a giant squid. You will never have to worry about grind though endless waves of samey quests and monsters that differ only in texture and status points.

From the story point of view, the game has your standard RPG plot about heroes saving the world, but we approach it with a seething amount of self-awareness. The characters are wacky and eccentric, the plots are cliche to the point of parody. Even the art direction reflects this. We purposely used very stereotypical RPG themes, and then twisted them to fit in line with our game’s zany sense of humor.

Finally, the game is about community. Being an online game we plan on providing a slew of features that will allow players to band together to face new and exciting challenges – while simultaneously competing amongst themselves. We even plan on drawing from the tactics of triple A titles such as Guild Wars 2 to create systems that provide players opportunities to find like minded individuals to play with!
 
My Edmonds News: What is your development process?

C.B.: We are developing SideQuest in discreet chapters. By breaking the content up by level (as opposed to spatially, such as a world map) we give ourselves much more freedom to fine-tune the content into something that the player’s will really, truly enjoy.

As far as workflow is concerned, we operate via the cloud. We have the added challenge of a language barrier between the art team and the writing. Between the time difference and language difference, it can be stressful communicating ideas efficiently.
 
My Edmonds News: Tell us about games that are similar, and why yours is better.
 
C.B.: SideQuest draws from a wide variety of games, but we feel that it will most readily fall into the “flash game”, or “browser MMO” category. Some samples of similar games include Monster Slayers, Epic War Saga, Cloudstone, Mafia Wars and Farmville. SideQuest will see a mash up of features from all of these. You have the mission-style story progression that is found in Mafia Wars, the strategic and action elements found in Monster Slayers, the RPG aspects found in Cloudstone or Epc War Saga and even the gathering and grind elements found in games such as Farmville.

We’ve played each of the above games (and many others like it) extensively. Let me points out a few good things about each, and then explain what SideQuest derives from them.

Facebook games – By far the best thing about Facebook games is the accessibility. Anyone, no matter their gaming history, can pick it up and be playing within minutes. What’s more, the social aspects let them include their friends in on the experience. The issue we find with most games of this variety, however, is that there just isn’t enough content to go around. Since there is no real “core” to the game, ultimately it just becomes watching a multitude of bars slowly tick up and down… which can be amusing for awhile, but we quickly lose interest.

Flash games – Flash games are the opposite of Facebook games, they are all “core”. Most flash games use some sort of upgrade system to give you a sense of progression as you complete the same game over and over until you reach an end. While this system is great to give the player a fun experience for a few hours (sometimes even days!) we wanted something more.

Browser MMOs – The “more” component can be found in any given browser MMO – end game. Be it PvP, guilds or just a way for the players to interact – what every good game needs is a sense of community. We at Fractal Entertainment know the importance of a good end-game and we are committed to providing a host of guild and cooperative oriented challenges and content.

My Edmonds News: Which high school/college did you go to?

C.B.: Edmonds-Woodway High School and University of Washington

My Edmonds News: Anything else that folks should know?
 
C.B.: Yes, I am a Leo and was born in the year of the Tiger. I do believe that about covers it!

Editor’s note: Folks can check out Brennan’s Kickstarter progress here.