Devin Kelly is one half of a two man team developing Fathom, an underwater Real-Time Strategy and First Person Shooter game that emphasizes base building and resource management. I was lucky enough to be able to get some pretty major details about both the game and the struggles of game development while working a full time job.

GameSkinny: How did this project come about?

Right around the same time, I had been playing Quake 2, and some of the other FPS games that were prevalent then. I started tinkering with modding Q2, and eventually came up with an official Devastation Quake 2 mod, which basically adds heavy mech-like battlesuits and tank-like turrets to Quake 2. It got some decent attention and received the mod of the week award a few times on Planetquake.com. Here’s a movie of DevQ2.

Through Planetquake, Joe discovered Devastation Quake 2 mod and volunteered to collaborate with me on future developments. This led us to doing a mod for Unreal Tournament called Systemic, which was similar to Devastation, and placed well in the Epic sponsored mod contest back in 2004. So from that, we knew we had a pretty good working rapport, and shortly after he told me about his ideas for Fathom.

But back in ‘04 the dev tools were pretty limited, and making a full-fledged high quality game was quite a feat. Too much for us in fact, as there were simply too many tools to be made, and too much groundwork to be laid. It was just eating up too much of our time, and we weren’t progressing very fast, so we went on hiatus for a verrry long time. But finally, just a few years ago I discovered Unity, and started tinkering with it. I started to realize how much power it availed the developer, so I emailed Joe to tell him about it. From there we pretty much picked up where we left off with Fathom. As we began to stand up a prototype we started with an FPS and gradually merged in some RTS elements. The game has been evolving ever since, but I think it still holds true to the design tenets Joe was originally intending for it.

GS: What would you say are the primary pillars of Fathom’s design?

Experimentation with game mechanics was probably another. Since we’re not developing Fathom professionally, and our livelihood isn’t dependent upon its commercial success, it does give us a certain amount of freedom to experiment. I feel that Fathom attempts to put together a few familiar concepts in an unconventional way, like how we’ve mixed structures interactions & units purchasing/queuing in with space-sim like command orders to control them once they’re are built, as just one example.

Intuitive controls are a big one as well. Fathom having 6 degrees of freedom control isn’t anything new, Descent of course is a big influence for us there, so we tried to mimic the feel of that to seem familiar. Fathom is a challenging game where we’re asking a lot of the player. We want you to basically fight in 3D, manage resources, and command a navy. So the controls have to be simple and fast, but robust enough to not feel restrictive to the player. I think through testing we’ve got a good combination right now.

GS: There’s somewhat of a negative stigma against underwater levels in video games. How is Fathom going to change that?

Aquanox just had a successful reboot on Kickstarter, and Subnautica also seems to be doing very well. So all in all, I’m not too worried about necessarily bringing a particular style or environment gimmick back into vogue. It’s really just what we wanted to do all along, and we just hope people dig it as much as we do.

GS: What do you think underwater combat mechanics provide to the player experience that on land/foot can’t?

We also felt that just the physics of underwater combat wasn’t enough for Fathom. We didn’t want to just do another version of Aquanox, so that’s where we started working in the original RTS-like mechanics. With the beacon mechanic we introduce in Fathom, you call down your structures from the surface and they descend into place, allowing you to ‘build’ a base in 3D. This made for a very unique mechanic that blended very naturally with the underwater environment as well. I’m anxious to see what people think of that, because I can’t really name you another game that does that like we do.

GS:  With lives outside of game design, what kind of development pipeline do you guys use to make sure you get stuff accomplished in a timely manner?

GS:  What do you think is the toughest part about getting exposure for Fathom?

GS: What has been the most rewarding moment since you started working on Fathom?

So yes, gaining exposure is going to be a real challenge, and is undoubtedly full of uncertainty. I’ve just been reading all the editorial articles, release post mortems, and marketing tutorials that I can, and hopefully being diligent in those areas will help. But to be honest, Daniel West’s recent article on Gamasutra “Good Isn’t Good Enough” does sort of give me a sinking feeling…

GS: What kind of challenges does working 9-5 present with trying to get such an ambitious game done?

A huge thanks to Devin for taking the time to answer some questions. Fathom is being developed for PC and consoles and you can keep up with the game’s progress on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, IndieDB as well as the game’s main website.