“We wanted something that you could pick up and play with friends,” says Brad Sheremeta, marketing and community manager for Crowbar Collective, when describing the studio’s new game, Rogue Point. Out in Early Access today, the co-operative PvE (player versus environment) shooter is a response to the overly complicated, time-sink nature of modern titles in the genre.

“Right now, you’re seeing a lot of these games that are ‘sweaty games’ that you have to grind at, especially first person shooters,” says Sheremeta. He gives Counterstrike as an example, saying the competitive nature of the game often leaves him feeling frustrated. The aim with Rogue Point, by contrast, was to create a title that was more about having a laugh with friends.

It fits into the broader narrative we’re seeing with the rise of ‘friendslop’ titles like RV There Yet? or Peak, which have garnered huge audiences with the promise of simply mucking about with mates. And beyond that, the retro, no-frills nature of Rogue Point fits a gap in the market for titles that echo the simpler times of old – like the hugely successful Warhammer Space Marine 2, which won players over with its unashamedly Xbox 360-era gameplay.

Crowbar Collective owner Adam Engels describes Rogue Point as “a little bit of a back to basics.” He’s particularly keen to trumpet how everything is contained within the one package, rather than being bundled up across various batches of expensive DLC. “We were talking to some other people earlier about how we used to get a game and it was the game,” he says. “And we’d like to encourage that and see more of that industry wide.”

“To give a good example, when Rocket League came out… if you wanted to, you could go and buy a car for a small amount of money. The game had a low barrier to entry, the DLCs had a low barrier of entry. We don’t have any DLCs planned yet, but that type of really player friendly model seems fair, like, ‘I want this one car, I bought that one car.'”

“And then going back to games like GoldenEye, too, if you wanted the cheats for the game, you played the game, and you did these challenges to unlock these different modifiers – which is something we want to implement post release in the game.”

One of the old school

Perhaps most importantly, Rogue Point is considerate of players’ time. It comes down to eight missions spread across different areas of four maps, where teams of four players go up against increasingly hard waves of enemies, collecting and buying weapons along the way. Game sessions are relatively short, but it’s eminently replayable thanks to randomized objectives and objects, as well as different difficulty levels. “It’s a shorter, tight-knit game,” says Sheremeta. “But that’s OK. I think a lot of games nowadays, you’re on this constant grind… and it’s like, ‘I’ve got to keep playing to get to this, to get to this…'”

Rogue Point is an attempt to create the kind of game that its developers want to see more of: a casual, approachable title that can be played for as little or as long as you want, says Sheremeta. “If you want to play and just YOLO through the whole thing, you can. If you want to play tactically, you can. It’s easy to pick up, it’s hard to master.”

“It’s something we’re really proud of, because especially for first-person shooters, there’s nothing out there right now that has that classic feel. It feels retro without being derogatory, like it’s too old school.”

Even the online functionality feels retro, running on peer to peer rather than dedicated servers. As Engels points out, this means that if you “buy the game and want to play it 10 years from now, it’ll play just fine,” which will be music to the ears of the Stop Killing Games crowd.

It’s also retro in the sense that it’s tiny: Engels is proud that they managed to get the game down to around 10 gigabytes, a far cry from 100 gigabyte-plus install sizes of shooters like Call of Duty Warzone. “I mean, certain other games, you’d be like, ‘Oh, I’d really like to revisit that game’,” says Engels, “then you look at the file size, and you’re like, ‘Maybe not’.” Rogue Point loads lightning quick, too, which Engels says they achieved by using an efficient texturing technique called trim sheets. “We’re not loading a thousand textures onto the level, we’re loading a couple and then just using them all throughout the space.”

This kind of coding trick was learned the hard way through Crowbar Collective’s experience of remaking Half-Life over the course of well over a decade. “We did not do that stuff on Black Mesa, and it haunted us,” remembers Engels. That wealth of built-up experience meant the development of Rogue Point started off on a much better footing when the game entered pre-production in 2020 – but the studio still faced plenty of other problems.

Funding drive

Crowbar Collective is unusual in the sense that because it emerged from a fan remake project, it’s founded on the principles of profit sharing – something they are “really proud” of, says Engels. Nevertheless, he’s the first to admit it has made his life hard as a CEO, “because the company’s not making a ton of money off of Black Mesa, the developers are. And that’s the way we want it, but it does make operating a company quite difficult.”

Funding for Rogue Point has come from Team17, but Engels recalls that finding a publisher was a somewhat chaotic process. “People would ghost you. They’d be like, ‘Oh, well, we’ll be in touch,’ and then they actually don’t get in touch. And the best ones were like, ‘Hey, we had a great meeting. We don’t think your game’s right for us, but hit us up in the future if you have another game’.”

Sheremeta adds that the whole thing was quite confusing. “You have no frame of reference going into those calls,” he says, adding that the packages on offer from different publishers varied widely, leading Crowbar to constantly ask: “Does this make sense for us?” His conclusion was there is no right answer. “I think when it comes to finding a publisher, like anything in life, you have to do what makes sense for you and your team, but that was a giant hurdle in itself to learn that.” In the end, Team17 just “felt right.”

Engels notes that it has become even harder for developers to find publishing deals in the years since Rogue Point was funded. “[They want] a demo or a vertical slice before they even talk about your game, which is insane. Getting this game to vertical slice took so much money and effort. I couldn’t imagine how people do it out there.”

He has some sympathy for publishers, though. “I’m not here to defend giant conglomerates, but I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding as to a publisher’s role, and the repercussions of what the deal is and how it affects the publisher,” he says. “The publisher has a stake in the game, they’re fronting you a ton of money. They have a reason to crack the whip, if you will. But Team17’s been great with us. They’ve given us a ton of resources that we wouldn’t otherwise have, like QA.”

Engels adds that Crowbar Collective was more fortunate than many other developers in that the studio had forged plenty of industry connections through its previous game. “People knew our name, and we could be like, ‘Hey, we made Black Mesa’,” he says. “It gets you the call with people, which most people don’t have.”

Leap into the unknown

“We wanted to do a very small game, learn an engine, and build a company,” says Engels, explaining the mission brief for Rogue Point. Black Mesa was built using Valve’s Source engine, but for Rogue Point, development was switched to Unreal Engine 4 – which partly explains why this “small” game took around five years.

“We knew we didn’t know what we were doing, because going from the Source engine to the Unreal Engine is just a massive jump,” says Engels. On top of that, there was added difficulty in the sense that Rogue Point is a multiplayer title, whereas Black Mesa was a narrative-driven single player game. In addition, because Black Mesa was a remake, Crowbar knew exactly where it was going to end. “You kind of had your groundwork laid out for you,” says Sheremeta. Rogue Point, by contrast, was a terrifying blank slate.

Unreal Engine 5 came out around halfway through Rogue Point’s development, but Engels says the team wasn’t tempted to switch from UE4. “It would have taken a ton of resources for us to flick over.” More to the point, Rogue Point didn’t particularly need the extra graphical tricks that UE5 offered, since the main focus was to make the game run as efficiently as possible.

“For me personally, I do think that art direction is much more important than technology,” says Engels. “So you can turn on all the switches in your game, and it’s not going to be the same as art direction. And that’s why a lot of the older games still hold up, because they have really masterful art direction. Titanfall 2 is a great example: that’s on the Source engine, the same engine we used for Black Mesa.”

“Zooming out, I think you probably could save a lot of time and money by not diving into as many graphical features. I don’t want to name names or anything, but I’ve heard dev diaries of people talking about this tech that they did for this little tiny feature, and it’s like, ‘Wow, is anybody going to see that in the grand scheme of things?'”

“For me personally, I do think that art direction is much more important than technology”

Adam Engels

He gives Ironwood Studios’ Pacific Drive as a recent example of a good compromise. “The fidelity that they have when you zoom in is fairly small, but the grand scheme of the picture that you’re looking at is just fantastic. I thought they struck a really good balance with their technology and their art direction. I don’t know anything about their development cycle, but I assume they made really good decisions that helped their development by making sure it was style and not technology.”

Looking ahead, Engels hopes that more games will aim for the AA market that Rogue Point occupies. “I think there’s a big gap in the industry for that now, and there has been for a while. We want to make games in general that are a pilot for the idea, so that publishers or developers, they’re not risking tons of money on ideas that may fail, because you never know until the game’s out. So I think we’re going to get a lot more interesting ideas if we have that AA market where we test things. Like, hey, there’s something here, now let’s go bananas on that for the sequel, so that the industry’s not risking tons of money, and we’re still getting those fresh new looks. Because really, the indie space is just filling in all the gaps for creativity.”