We Are Fragment! The studio behind Firefighting Strategy game Rescue:Everyday Heroes, now on Steam! Ask Us Anything!

will you be making a cities of Finland or similar Finland themed DLC in the future?

Ilkka:We are definitely thinking about other regions as well! We have done a lot of training with the Finnish firestations and their crew and we are constantly looking at what is happening in that industry in terms of technology development, operations and so on. Finland would also bring additional element in terms of the weather and long distances! :D

Is there a story behind inventing this game?

Mikko: As the creative director of the Rescue franchise, I have always been fascinated by firefighting, even to the point of becoming a junior volunteer firefighter myself. Thus, being proposed to make a game about it was like living up a dream. From the beginning we at Fragment wanted Rescue to be a game about mundane heroism present in firefighter life, featuring the realistic procedures, vehicles and elements from characters to missions. This is our homage to a great profession, existence of which saves countless lives daily.

Have you given any youtube personalities like totalbiscuit any press codes/build? That would probably help spreading word about this game as I would not have even known that this game existed if I had not seen this AMA.

Steve:...Are you "totalbiscuit"? We have sent it out to a few YouTubers such as ArsenalRobert! He's doing a Let's Play!

Just realized I may not have told my Boss that I gave away a code...

Ilkka: No we have not, but we sure are going to giveaway presscodes etc. We are pretty new here so all help, advice is really great! We are also going to do some kind of contest and giveaways through our facebook page where we hope that any gamer can post their reviews

No he is a British man who makes first impression videos and gaming news shows :D. He has almost 1,5mil subscribers and has helped many indie game makers to get their games seen.
EDIT:more info

Steve: We'll look into it! :D Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm no PR / marketing expert, I admit that right off the bat. But I do follow many of Let's Play people on Youtube. If you want cheap PR and some help to get the word out about your game, in my opinion you really should approach people like TotalBiscuit, NerdCubed, Dasquirrelsnuts (he does A LOT of simulator games), and Robbaz on Youtube. I'm sure I'm not the only gamer around who follows the recommendations by people like them on what games are good and what aren't.

Steve: We have approached a few, like ArsenalRobert. We're working on it! Until now we couldn't do any releases, so I will get it done! :D

Being a Finnish company, why did you decide to have your game based on US emergency personnel?

Mikko: If you think about firefighting, the instant imagery points to the American hero wearing his huge helmet, saving lives and property from flames. Could there be better suited surroundings for firefighter game than a bustling US metropolis.

TEAM: All of us have watched the Backdraft and the Towering Inferno too many times and just wanted to make it interactive... :P

Steve: I came late to the party, but I have this comment: I was trained as a Firefighter in the U.S. Navy, and my brother is currently a practicing firefighter, so for whatever reason they chose it, I was super stoked. :D

And you're apparently the only person outside Finland, how did you team up with the others?

Steve: Interestingly enough, my brother in law was showing me the game, and it reminded me of some of my personal favorites, so I shot Ilkka an e-mail, sent in my resume and the rest is history! :D

Oh, I would've guessed you were a source of information and the person to communicate with fire deaprtments.

And just so you know, that Steam code was for one time only and has been used.

**Steve: I have some experience and such, and communicate with anyone who need to, so that will probably be a lot of my tasking in the future! :D Thanks for the heads up on the Steam code!

Do you mind if people start making let's plays off your game and monetizing their videos? I'm asking this because there has been lot of copyright attacks to gaming channels on youtube and now would be perfect time to let people know what you feel about this so there wont be any drama later on.

Arto: Go ahead, if you like! :D

Steve:Seriously, we don't mind, and we're not going to sue you for playing our game on YouTube...!

How long will I play on this? (:

Do you play the game yourself again now that its finished?

Steve: I do for sure. Haha. It's essentially my job. Though pizza and twitter are also involved...

Cool! Yeah, I meant just playing, without searching or bugs or improvements. Just taking an evening to enjoy your finished game.

Steve: I don't do technical stuff, I'm just a social media guy! :D

thats great, what exactly do you do? I mean, social media, but how is your workday?

Steve: I do other tasks such as PR and External communications, I've had a lot to do with communicating with our outside partners during the Steam release, attempting to garner proper media attention and various forms of community management. It's fun, but it is challenging for sure!

so, do you have a goal set for number of sales? What are your expectations, how big is your community/how far will it grow?

Also, how did the first hour of sale work out? Do you have real-time stats?

Steve: No real time stats, we'll be surprised one way or the other when they tell us, though it's currently just under Bioshock Infinite in the Steam front page chart!

Sales? We're just taking it as it comes. We put our best foot forward and did what we could for a very small company. From here it has to stand on it's own 2 feet.

Another 2 Questions:

• you wrote you were a trained firefighter. What are some things you got in the game that you only thought of because you actually did the job? How "realistic" is it meant to be?
• I just looked at the store-page (germany) and you´ve got a really good german german game-description, well done! Is one of you from germany? If so, how do you think would the game differ if it was about german firefighters?

Steve: I wasn't with the team during initial concept inception, but I would say they included what we called the "Foam Blaster" when I was in the Navy, and not many people would have considered that! :D

In regards to the German store page, we have German partners who are really awesome!

thanks a lot for all your answers! The game is on my wishlist now. Have nice day (:

Steve: Well we appreciate it. :D

Why game costs twice less on Russian steam ? Will you make an strategy game in future?

Ilkka: We here at Fragment LOVE strategy games and will be doing strategy games in the future. We are going to keep on doing for PC, but also other platforms like mobile devices. We believe that in the long run, great deep experiences come from games that have the story and strategy element

you ignored one question completely mokey, people on steam forum said that game is bugged. collision detection. Cars going through eachother ?

Arto: We have been informed of some bugs and are rapidly working to correct the problems. We're heavily committed to fixing all critical issues!

Will there be hard copies available or is it available on Steam exclusively?

Ilkka: The game will be released now on Steam but later on also hard copies will be available at least in Germany. We are looking to all the possible markets at the moment to bring this game to as many firefighting people as possible! This is a big story, a big roll-out and the story will get to you and it will continue..

TL;DR: At least in Germany, yep! :D

What was the development process like? What tools did you use? How was the process of publishing on Steam? How did development start out? Do you have any good stories from when you were developing the game?

I know it's a lot of questions, but thanks for doing this AMA!

Steve: Since everyone else is weighing in... I played video games, ate pizza and hung out. Pretty sweet.

Kristian: As Mikko said, the development process was kind of a challenge schedule-wise and we were often pressed to come up with new ways to produce stuff FAST without deviating from our quality target. Our "Team America" had a great internal drive to surpass ourselves and to deliver the best-looking, greatest-performing version of Rescue. I think we maybe succeeded?

Mikko: The dev process of the US version was very challenging due to multiple factors, one of them being very tight schedule, another one is the fact that both the distinct look of US environment and realities of US firefighting are familiar to millions. Thus we had to study both extensively to be able to nail down perfectly what actually makes the US look as it does. We also studied lots of manuals and textbooks on fIre & rescue procedures, especially to understand how they differ from European ones. Finally,there was the challenge to portray the iconic American firefighter culture in its essence as it is.

TL;DR: Really hard...! :/ (But also really fun! :D)

Essi: Publishing to Steam was obviously something new for us and luckily, it turned out to be pretty easy after some first hurdles. Also, publishing patches and updates can now be done in an instant which is pretty exciting!

Ilkka:The process was quite smooth from my point of view. Team drank all the coffee from Finland, so theres only tea left for most parts of Finland. I hope the game does well, so we can pay back :)

How did you meet everyone on the team? Did you know each other before starting production on the game, or did you meet as a result of wanting to develop the game?

Mikko:Some of us used to work in the same game studio together before but basically the whole Fragment crew was assembled during the development process.

Thanks for all of the replies! The game looks really cool, good work!

Steve: Thanks, mate!

Will there be a version for mac available? :)

Ilkka: YES! :D

How long did it take to develop the game? Could you give some timeframes for milestones (having the idea, assembling the team, writing first line of code, publishing day etc)?

Arto: To keep it short: All together around 1.5 years. Milestones 2-3 months apart. Code from day 0 of course :)

Mikko: The original German version took some 15 months from scratch (from the point of founding the company) to completion. Regional versions 3 months each. US version had the absolutely tightest quality vs time ratio but is still the most impressing one! We had the usual milestone split: first playable, pre-alpha, alpha, beta, GM. Around 2-3 months between these

Cool, thanks!

Some more questions on the technical side of things: what language(s) did you write the game in? The iVersion must've been in Objective-C I guess. What other tools (IDE for example) did you use? Any productivity/workflow hacks that you had?

Edit: corrected my misunderstanding

Arto: Game was developed wholly with Unity and using C#. Mainly Monodevelop as an IDE! We aren't on iOS, strictly PC!

Arto:And MAC! Forgot to add that...!

are you guys astroturfing the questions? 3 of the Users with questions have their only comment in this thread

Steve: I can assure you, we are not, but we did tell our Finnish fans through Facebook, and I don't think most of them were previously redditors...!

We didn't make an iOS game like this, but we did release a previous game with a similar title early last year. It was geared toward a European market. We created an entirely NEW game, then decided for brand recognition and etc. to call it a similar name.

Could you elaborate on this. Why not call the game Rescue: Everyday Heroes 2? Having two different games with the same name is confusing.

Steve: That is something I stated earlier. We had a limited release game earlier, which was release only in certain local markets called "Rescue 2013". We have added new, more impressive maps, updated the graphics, and stocked the game with multiple vehicles from a variety of US Fire stations (Notably Chicago, Miami and New York). It isn't entirely new, as we developed off the previous local versions, but it feels brand new to us. :D

Can you actually take control of the various vehicles?

Steve: I'm not sure how you mean... You definitely direct and use them!

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Steve: Unfortunately we don't have that feature! Thanks for the kind words regarding how beautiful it is, though! ;)

Seems like a pretty interesting concept. How big is your team? And how did you get your members excited about making the game?

Steve: We've got 17 people on board, and we were all super stoked because we loved the concept, and love making games! :D

Meh. I hope this thread is still alive cause I wrote my question in the wrong thread. So here it is again:

Nice!

How did you make music and sounds? Do you have your own sound guy or did you hire someone to do everything at their own studio?

I'm watching youtube videos about gameplay right now and game looks fun. Having a firestation (base), firetruck (ship) and firefighters (soldiers) brings memories about U.F.O/XCOM at 90's. :D

Good luck.

Steve: All music and sounds were done in-house! :)

We have a lot of inspirations, and if you check out some of the next things we do, you will see those inspirations shine through in some really fun ways! :D

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Steve: Get ahold of me at [email protected] and we'll see what we can do!

Interesting-looking game. Does it include various firefighting gear as thermal imagers and SCBA's?

Steve: Unfortunately, no! We'll keep this suggestion in mind for the future, though!