Wildgate’s Jason Chayes and Dustin Browder on going indie, the game dev honor code, and giant space dragons

For years, Dustin Browder and Jason Chayes worked together at the heart of one of gaming’s most hallowed names: Blizzard Entertainment. After having worked on games like StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, and Hearthstone, they moved on to a StarCraft shooter — but the game never saw the light of day and ended up being canceled. With no project to look after, the duo stepped off the ship to embark on a bold new adventure, which ended up becoming Moonshot Games and its newly revealed debut title, Wildgate.

“The day before we all met in my living room at my house, I was walking through Staples, a big office center, trying to buy some whiteboards and post-its and some markers, and I had this initial moment of existential dread when I realized that we have nothing — we have zero,” studio co-founder Jason Chayes tells me. “This was before Moonshot Games even had a name.”

Chayes says that the founding team started simple, merely “throwing some ideas up on a whiteboard,” but gained some real momentum quite quickly. “Not long after that is when we connected with some of the founders of Dreamhaven and decided to make this broader enterprise together.”

Dreamhaven was a natural connection to make for Browder and Chayes, as the publisher had been founded by their former boss at Blizzard, Mike Morhaime.

“We’re building everything from the ground up, whether it’s process, infrastructure, new game IP, new game mechanics, and that’s both terrifying and also super exhilarating, because you have such a tremendous amount of agency to do it in a way that aligns with your values,” Chayes describes his feelings on going indie again.

A few surprising challenges waited on the way, as Chayes remembers: “I think there was a day where we got together when we were a big enough company and we said, ‘You know, we should probably have a 401k to help people with their retirement.’ And you kind of look around and say ‘Have you ever set up a 401k before?’ ‘No, no.’ ‘Okay.’ So what you do is you jump online, you research how other people have done it, and you learn a lot through that process and it’s a very empowering feeling. So that part has been great. I think it’s allowed us to build this organization in a way that reflects our values and bring people on the journey with us to help contribute to that. We’re five years in now at this point and it’s been awesome.”

“I love that story, Jason. I’m sorry I’ve told it for you a couple of times,” fellow co-founder Dustin Browder chimes in.

What drew him to this path was the opportunity to enact the lessons he’d learned over the years. 

“We spent a lot of time at a lot of different organizations and if you’re paying attention, you can learn something from everybody around you,” Browder explains. “I think Jason and I learned a lot from our time at Electronic Arts, we learned a lot from our time at Blizzard, I learned a lot from my time at Westwood, and I think Jason learned a lot from his time at Disney. We’ve got several decades’ worth of experience that we’re drawing from and we’ve learned really important lessons from all these organizations. I think we’re pretty excited to try and combine some of these lessons into something new.”

“Some of the lessons you take from EA won’t work at Blizzard, but they’re valuable — there is some use to them,” he adds. “We believed in them.”

Their StarCraft shooter, which was reportedly codenamed Ares, being canceled is what allowed both developers to think about their options. Otherwise, they’d have been committed to it for all the years it would have taken to launch it.

“There’s sort of an honor code among developers in gaming,” Browder elaborates. “It’s very much like an ancient warrior code in the sense that it’s not written down, but we all know what it is. So you don’t leave a game team when you’re about to ship and you don’t leave a game team when your work is important to that team’s success.”

“There are exceptions. If you got your dream job and we’re six months out of shipping and you have some backup, maybe you’re within the bounds of honor to leave. It’s your dream job, right? We’ve got backup for you and we’ll survive. So we all kind of know the rules and Jason and I, at this point, once we commit to a product, we need to be there to the end. That’s the code of honor. There’s no way for Jason and I to step out. We can’t just go ‘I got a better job.’ So what? You promised, you started this, so you’ve got to pull through.

“And so we had a time there at the end of our tenure at Blizzard where we’re looking around and we were within the code of honor to make our own choice. And that doesn’t come up very often, right? There could be years and years where you’ve committed to something, you need to stay because you’ve made promises to people and you can’t just walk out, however hard it gets. We got to a place at which we technically were allowed within this code to do as we pleased. And so when those moments come, you take them really seriously, because you’ve actually got the option. We looked around and were like ‘We kind of want to combine all of this learning that we’ve gotten in the last couple of decades and want to see where it takes us.’ So we took the opportunity.”

Both developers worked on some really competitive games at Blizzard, a category that made it difficult to collaborate widely with members of their teams.

“We really want to try and to create a space where it’s easier for developers to really contribute ideas to the product and it’s not isolated in the hands of a few. I hadn’t gotten a chance to do that in a while,” Browder says. “StarCraft, for example, is a game that’s very tightly designed and if you’re not a Diamond level player, it’s very hard to contribute a unit idea, right? A lot of people could add ideas to the campaign, that was cool. But we wanted to create something that’s a little more open and I think we’ve done that. There’s still room to improve, but that’s been really fun for us.”

I’m interested whether their final project at Blizzard had any influence on what they ended up doing at Moonshot Games — after all, Ares and Wildgate are both sci-fi shooters.

Chayes responds: “We had a lot of different ideas when we first got here and, to be perfectly honest, a shooter was not necessarily the driving direction. We had about 30 pitches, each of them about a page long. They were all over the whole gamut of different types of games and we went through and voted on those and picked our top five as a group. We then ended up spending two weeks exploring each of those things where we did IP exploration, gameplay exploration, team size, technical exploration, what the aesthetic was going to be, feasibility, market fit — all these things. We got together with our founding team and seven of us dug into them and figured out what was the right thing for us to chase and it wasn’t an easy decision.”

“On that list there was only one PvP shooter,” Chayes emphasizes, “and the other four pitches were very different, so I don’t think it was a done deal driven by that. We’re excited about all those different ideas, otherwise they would have not made the top five — and who knows, maybe one day one of them will show up again. But for right now we’re excited about Wildgate.”

"If you’re not nervous in video games, you’re very lucky or you’re not paying attention."

- Dustin Browder

Five years have passed since those days and the world looks a lot different than back then in almost every aspect. The games industry, though, has been especially turbulent. How nervous are the two veterans ahead of going public with their newest baby?

“If you’re not nervous in video games, you’re very lucky or you’re not paying attention,” Browder states clearly. “I’m always nervous. Every game I’ve ever worked on, I’ve always been nervous before going out with it, no matter what large organization I’ve been working at in the past. How will it be received? Did we do a good job? Have we crossed our Ts and dotted our Is? That’s just the nature of it. For five years, we’ve given everything of ourselves to this: Decades of learning, every move we could make. We’ve tried to make a great product for our players. So yeah, I think the stakes are pretty high.”

He continues: “You’re always like: ‘Is this okay? Are we doing it? What’s happening?’ And you totally lose perspective, like you have no idea. You can’t tell. And that’s why we do all these tests. That’s why we played it internally for years and then we had strike teams for people who were of our team, friends and family builds, partner studio builds, and now we’re going to a community preview and then we’ll go to beta — you keep increasing the size of your audience from what is essentially more friendly players to harsher and harsher critics. Hopefully you’ve taken all that feedback and you’ve found ways to welcome all those players into the game.”

Wildgate is a chaotic ride, but the multiplayer shooter actually has quite a high skill ceiling, so there will certainly be the usual discussions around how much balancing the devs should do — given Browder and Chayes’ experience in this field, what is their approach going to be in the grand old debate of balance versus fun?

Dustin Browder invokes his approach from the StarCraft 2 days: “Balance matters to all players, right? For me, the process has always been the same: You try to push the extremes as far as you possibly can to make sure that players have all kinds of exciting tools to use in the space and that those tools feel meaningful. We’re always going to be looking to push those things as close as possible to being just broken, but without crossing that line. So that will remain the goal: How can we keep pushing these things to be really, really powerful tools for our players without feeling that there’s no counterplay? I have choices. There are things that I can do to make it work. It’s been the same approach for me since day one, right? That’s the same approach as in StarCraft.”

“A big part of what we think makes Wildgate awesome is that element of unpredictability, the randomness that leads to the different stories, but our goal here is to make it so you have some agency to control the randomness,” Chayes adds. “As players, you may not get the same distribution of loot from your nearby points of interest as another team or maybe you’re the ship that got swarmed by Reach Leeches at the very beginning and the other crew didn’t, but that’s okay, because you’ll have the rolls to deal with those things. And I think that’s what makes for an interesting narrative. It’s not that everybody has the exact same starting conditions, but the enterprising group can find ways to take the hand they’re given and find a way to use it to their advantage.”

“Sometimes you may have to run,” Browder continues the thought. “You may come to this game saying ‘Alright, I’m here to kill some players,’ but they got better loot than you. And there’s an artifact out there. How can you leverage that artifact to win. So yeah, they have better guns, but maybe you can hide behind that asteroid and heal up your reactor long enough for another ship to show up, which might attack them and then maybe you can sneak out. You’ve always got to be willing to roll with the punches in Wildgate. You can’t just say ‘My strategy is the strategy I’m going to run’ if you want to win. Like Jason is saying, there are so many variables with cosmic storms and leeches and loot drops and positions and where the artifact is, you need to be flexible and realistic about whatever your current game state is.

“Sometimes you do get all the loot and now it’s time to terrorize everybody and try to win that way. And sometimes you don’t, and you need to be the rabbit when they’re the wolf. So let’s play the rabbit game, right? That creates a lot of those narratives and stories that Jason’s talking about, where the game feels different from match to match.”

Browder has another StarCraft allegory for the problem: “It’s a little bit like a rush strategy in StarCraft. When you first see it, you’re like ‘How do I possibly stop this?’ And then you learn a few tools and realize there’s a whole little mini game here around stopping the rush.”

At this point, I relay some of my experiences from the playtest that preceded the interview and how it seemed at first that engagements between ships felt too decisive, with getaways being only possible if one side allowed it. Browder quickly disagrees — and I agree with him, finishing my point by describing how a crew of more experienced players used some Clamp Jets, an item designed to force enemy ships off course, on our own ship to give it a massive speed boost as we got chased by another vessel. That really illustrated the freedom in the game to me.

“Don’t underestimate the value of a good pilot,” Chayes adds. “We have people on the team – and I think this speaks to Dustin’s point about this being a learned experience – who find ways to use the cover of the Reach like asteroids, points of interests, and so on and just know how to navigate through those things where they can actually shake people who are chasing them through the whole thing. So that combination of the Clamp Jets and the piloting, how you can go out and mine fuel on the fly, and importantly boarding, where you can fly off and disrupt the people chasing you, as well as sniping their engines — there’s all kinds of stuff you can do.”

Browder delights us with a war story of his own to further illustrate the point: “I had a game towards the end of the playtest this weekend, where we were a new crew. We were really struggling to be effective and we got jumped and we got hit pretty hard. We had two ships chasing us at one point and so I went and hid behind an asteroid and I just kept circling that asteroid, while the other ship was circling us and we were icing the whole time and getting more and more health back in the pool. They kept chasing and we kept firing our rear guns, hiding, icing, hiding, icing. Pretty soon, we were even on health, just through sheer determination.

“In the meantime, I’m thinking to myself ‘You guys better leave. The artifact’s about to be in play. You can kill us if you want, but you will lose.’ That was the message I was trying to give them: ‘Chase me and lose.’ Eventually they did pull off. They were wounded and they limped away to go lose the game to somebody else in the end, because they chased us for too long. So I think a good pilot using the cover of an asteroid can absolutely make that final kill very difficult to get. We’ve had a lot of one and two HP scrapes, where a ship will get behind an asteroid with one health and they’ll come back to win the game. That’s always really exciting.”

Speaking of boarding, though, one of the potentially problematic aspects of the game is that it’s quite easy to get spawn-camped by boarders on your ship. Is that, too, down to inexperience or an issue the developers have been trying to solve?

“Jason and I were talking about this this week,” Browder confirms. “We had a situation with this preview where we invited a bunch of brand-new players to play with a bunch of streamers. You do the math on how that’s going to go. It’s a small pool, so we had probably the top 20% playing the bottom 20%. That’s going to be a rough game, no matter what we do. We are going to have some light skill-based matchmaking to try and keep those two groups apart from each other. It’s not really tight, but just to get some broad grouping.”

Browder also tells me about some measures already in place to deal with spawn-camping and goes into detail why solutions used in other shooters don’t necessarily work in Wildgate: “When you spawn in, you get a second of invulnerability to find your feet. If you’ve died too quickly a couple of times, we give you up to four seconds of invulnerability. I’m not sure this is the right answer. I think we need some of it because we are consistently spawning you in the same spots to help you find your bearings on the ship. A lot of shooters will spawn you randomly to protect you from being camped, but it’s also confusing. I think we’ve made the right choice to spawn you in the same spot over and over again so you know your bearings.”

An advantage of the way Moonshot Games works is that things can be experimented with fairly quickly and so Browder confirms to me that the devs are running tests with a higher frequency and extended duration of invulnerability on the morning of the interview. He still has concerns, though — and that shows that even a seemingly simple solution has its caveats.

“What I’m nervous about is, is my new player who just got killed too quickly going to understand that they’re invulnerable and aggressively use that window of time or are they going to feel nervous and be like ‘I need to sneak up on this guy that just killed me so fast.’ Like, dude, you just lost your invulnerability,” Browder muses. “That’s not the way. So we may need another buff in there, but we’re not afraid to add some. I think we can cover it. We’ve got a lot of balancing tools and we’re not afraid to use them.”

As far as Browder is concerned, boarding is powerful enough even without the potentially very toxic ability to repeatedly frag spawning players. “There are enough mean things players can do on your ship, so it’s okay for us to give the defenders having a hard time a little something-something as long as it’s very clear to the attacker that that’s going to happen,” he says. “Like, hey man, if you’re just in here killing people, maybe get something done and go, right? Eventually, whatever is happening in there is going to start to wear you down. There’s also some good negative feedback loops that we need to keep an eye on. Attackers do run out of ammo, so we make sure that armories are positioned close to where the players are spawning in. So an attacker that runs to the armory is someone that’s exposed to responses. So I think we’ve got some tools here, but you’re not wrong. We are going to try to address it.”

I’m curious about the team’s post-launch plans — it is the year 2025 after all and a multiplayer shooter without long-term support might as well be a unicorn. I throw in some random ideas to get the ball rolling and mention possible additions like active NPC battleships and giant space dragons. The latter gets a “Love that idea” from Dustin Browder, which goes straight onto my CV.

Chayes tops that by confirming that “We even have concepts of the aforementioned giant space dragons. The team is very excited about this concept.”

He elaborates: “One of the great things – we think – about Wildgate is the number of different directions it can go. We talk a lot about awe and wonder, we talk about the Reach as this amazing procedurally generated location, and I think we’re only at the beginning in terms of the types of things you’ll be able to see in there. We have a backlog of many, many things we’d love to bring to the surface, so we think of this as the starting point. If you look at the years to come, I think things exactly like what you’re talking about are things we’re very excited to look at and pursue.”

Naturally, this begs the question of the business model. We were already told that Wildgate will be available as a premium purchase during an earlier presentation — but what about all the new content?

“We’re still working through the specifics of the business model,” Chayes says. “I think our main goal for that is, first of all, we want to put out an insanely awesome value for our players. So when we think about what is the best version of this relationship we’re establishing with our community, we want to make sure that anybody who comes to join us to play Wildgate feels like they got something awesome. The second thing is that we also want to make sure it’s something we can sustain for years to come. Those are the two biggest factors that went into the structure that we’ve been working towards and how we reached this premium model.

“For the seasons, we’re still working through the details. We’re looking at the idea of new gameplay content, new characters, new ships, new hazards in the Reach, new weapons, all kinds of things like that. Those will all be released for free to everybody who has purchased the premium version of the game. What you get by virtue of having that is the new ongoing gameplay content that we’ll be generating for months and years to come. Then, beyond that, we’re looking at potentially having some cosmetic things that we’ll have locked into an Adventure track. We’re working on the details of how it’ll work. That might be something that’s an additional purchase, but the details of that we’ll probably be able to reveal in the next few months once we know a little bit more.”

Currently, Adventures are free reward tracks to unlock additional content, so the infrastructure for something like this is already in place.

I played a couple of matches with Chayes during the playtest and we both turned out to be Star Wars fans, so for my final question I ask about Wildgate’s ship design — given our tastes, both of us know how important these are for any sci-fi IP.

“There’s an aesthetic answer and there’s a design answer,” Chayes begins. “On the aesthetic side, we’ve talked a lot about one thing that’s super important to be aware of, which is that we want the ships to be characters just like the prospectors themselves.” 

Chayes names a couple of great space franchises – Star Wars, Star Trek, The Expanse – and says that Moonshot wants the same amount of recognizability for the ships in Wildgate. There’s another commonality between the original Star Wars films and Wildgate, though.

“They’re not beautiful, elegant, clean, or pristine ships,” Chayes explains. “These are designed to be tough, right? These are what’s keeping you alive in the Reach. You have a few inches of this durasteel alloy that’s keeping your little squad alive as quantum asteroids and black holes and all kinds of other horrible things that might exist in the Reach are threatening you with lethal damage. They need to be durable. We think of them almost more like tug boats or dump trucks instead of a sleek racer or something like that. So that was a big inspiration. They’ve also seen a lot of wear in their years out there.”

As Han Solo said, she may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.

Browder confirms this aspect, saying it’s part of the world-building the team did for Wildgate: 

“Jason and I both played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and Cyberpunk and all kinds of role-playing games together and one of the things we talked about on these ships, when we were talking about the lore of the game, was this imaginary scenario where somebody comes from the core and they’re going to be a prospector and they’ve brought this big, expensive ship with them and it’s all shiny and sleek and beautiful. It’s got all the highest tech stuff and all the other prospectors are like ‘Sure, man, it looks great, but it’s going to be blown up like everything else. You should just take something cheap. You could buy ten ships for that.’

“It doesn’t matter how shiny it is, the Reach is brutal. Take the cheapest thing you can, it is a demolition derby out there. You don’t take fancy sports cars to the demolition derby — they don’t do any better and are super expensive to replace, so just take something cheap and tough. We liked the idea that the environment is so difficult that it just doesn’t make any sense to take something very expensive.”

Browser also brings up points on the gameplay-side of the designs: “These are really flying shooter levels in space, right? We need to make sure that they have interesting angles and fun corners and then they’re even more complicated in the sense that they need to be something that players can invade and then there’s a back-and-forth in that invasion activity that needs to feel plausible and create strategy. But you also need to work cooperatively in it with your crew. And each of the ships have different strengths and weaknesses.”

He gives an example: “For instance, the Privateer has this really nice helm position, where the pilot can see all of the guns and the crew running around them, and so it’s very easy for that pilot to orient the ship to get maximum benefit of that gun deck. If we didn’t have the helm there, those guns wouldn’t be as fun to use because the pilot wouldn’t have an awareness of what’s happening.”

“An enormous amount of work went into playtesting both the competitive and the cooperative nature of the ships and sometimes those come in conflict and that’s always a party,” he laughs. “So that’s always a bit of a dance. Of course, we’ve got some amazing artists. Steven Provost [another former Blizzard dev] is sort of our lead ship guy and he does amazing work putting these things together, making sure they feel real and look cool.”

Browder also highlights a technical aspect about the ships that I didn’t think about much before: “Every time that ship moves forward a centimeter, the server’s got to go ‘Hey everybody, who’s on board? Armories, players, bullets, reactor overload buttons, doodads. You also just moved a centimeter. Hey it’s the next frame, guess what? We just moved another centimeter.’ Just the amount of work the team has put into the art, the design, the technology, and the lore, it’s all amazing. The ships are a huge effort.”

All the more impressive, then, that my playtime with Wildgate had yielded zero technical issues. For impressions of the game itself, check out our hands-on preview of Wildgate.