William Shick is VP of Creative Development & Strategy for Atomic Mass Games
What are your favourite Marvel and Star Wars moments?
Starting off with the impossible questions!
My favorite Star Wars moment is the Death Star battle over Yavin 4 from A New Hope. I loved that part so much I eventually wore out the VHS tape from so many repeated viewings.
For Marvel, it’s a lot tougher purely because there are so many different pieces of media all with their own great moments. Like for comics, I think my favorite all time moment is probably the Maximum Carnage run, for the MCU it’s probably the moment in Infinity War where Proxima and Corvus have Vision and Wanda cornered in the train station and Steve Rogers, Falcon, and Black Widow show up. The swelling of the incredible Avengers theme and the fight sequence still gives me chills. And animated wise it’s hard not to point to the 90’s X-Men and Spider-Man animated series. Two just fantastic interpretations of the comics into serialized media.
Where do you start with a game – the models, the setting, the rules or is it something else? Why?
AMG has a strong philosophy of always starting from the theme and story of any game we are trying to make first. Because we primarily work on creating games within well established and beloved settings, the most important element for success is that when players sit down to play the game, they feel like they are playing within the Star Wars Galaxy or Marvel Universe. Even for a non-licensed game, if the narrative or theme feels tacked on or simply painted over the mechanics, the experience won’t be as compelling or immersive. One of the best things about great miniatures games especially is that they can draw you completely into the world that is being represented in tiny form on your tabletop. But in order to do that, the way the game plays, from core rules to character abilities all must feel like accurate translations of those things from the wider media to the table.
What none AMG game do you love to play?
Ooo, another tough question, there are so many great games, and they all hit a different vibe. Really there isn’t a game I don’t enjoy sitting down to play, but there are ones I love based on the mood of the day. Our household is big on deck builders with Marvel Legendary, Dominion, and the Blood Bowl Card Game being at the top of the pile. I really enjoy racing games like Dungeon Kart and Heat, Pedal to the Metal for their mix of strategy and spatial awareness skill ask. I’m also of course a huge fan of tabletop miniatures games such as Flames of War, Halo: Flashpoint, and my all time favorite miniatures game Confrontation. And TCG wise I’ve been very much enjoying exploring the Gundam and Dragon Ball Super Fusion World card games.
How much cross over in terms of design is there between Shatterpoint and Crisis Protocol?
Honestly, not much beyond the very typical core DNA of all miniatures games. Most of the reason that they are so different goes back to the earlier question about where we start when designing a game. The themes and feel of Marvel and Star Wars are dramatically different. Crisis Protocol was designed to replicate fast and furious superpowered battles. One of its biggest inspirations was iconic arcade fighting games like Marvel vs Capcom and blending that experience into a wider battle miniatures game.
With Shatterpoint we were really focused on trying to bring the feeling of those iconic cinematic Star Wars duels to the tabletop. It’s why the combat system for Shatterpoint is so heavily weighted in terms of the gameplay. What’s more, the way characters fight in Star Wars is very different both tonally and physically than it is in Marvel. There’s a weight to their battles and a personal back and forth, a narrative within the fight itself, that we really wanted to try our best to capture and translate in a way that would make players feel the story they were telling as they performed their in game actions. Obi-Wan needed to feel like Obi-Wan, Vader like Vader, and the fights like they had jumped right off the screen and onto your tabletop.
This all meant that while we used our experiences of working on miniatures games over the last decade to help make the rules concept and game mechanics the best we could, the approach and decisions we made between the two were often starkly different because they both attempt to do extraordinarily different things in terms of the players’ experience.
Which other type of games would you like to add to AMG’s roster?
Oh there are too many to count! As someone who just loves tabletop games, there really isn’t a type of game that I haven’t thought about making or would jump at the chance to try my hand at. Currently though, Legion, Crisis Protocol, and Shatterpoint are plenty to keep everyone at AMG engaged, excited, and working full time and we’ve barely scratched the surface on where we want to take each of them with new releases and rules expansions.
What’s the stickiest moment in creating a game?
The moment you release it to the players! The thing that I love so much about getting to work on games like we do is that no matter how well you think you understand your game and rules systems the player base will also surprise you with how they approach and build on the game you created.
Oftentimes that surprise is good, it shows you a depth to the game that you may not have realized was there, or more commonly that you hoped was there but you just didn’t quite know exactly how it was there.
I’ve described game design and development as a dance where both partners lead. The key to success is to find that rhythm where you can both take players where you want them to go and that excites them, while also being able to follow them when they discover something you might not have planned or thought of that makes the game more enjoyable. It’s exceptionally challenging work, but there’s a joy to the challenge that is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced anywhere else.
Simpsons or Futurama?
Futurama, I’m a bit of a hopeless romantic so I love the Fry and Leela arc and the beautiful way the show originally wrapped up with them doing it all again.
Dungeons or Dragons?
DRAGONS!
Truth or Beauty?
I would say there is the most beauty in truth, so Truth.
