Talking Portals, Frags, & Wormhole Wars With 1047 Games' Ian Proulx & Fans

During DreamHack Austin there was a lot of competition going on, but all the action wasn’t entirely up on stages. Over in a neat booth on the showroom floor, developer 1047 Games was rocking their own slice of competition with a showcase of their unique first-person shooter, Wormhole Wars. Take the best parts of run n’ gun arena shooting like that of Quake and Halo and mix it with the mind-bending, level-traversing mechanics of the Portal games and you might have a good idea of what Wormhole Wars does and what kind of possibilities it allows.

To get deeper into this game, we got down and dirty with a little playtime ourselves, met with players and got their thoughts on this interesting title, and caught up to 1047 Games CEO and Co-Designer Ian Proulx to chat in-depth about how Wormhole Wars came to be and what he hopes to accomplish with the game.

How The First Portals & Frags Formed...

According to Ian, Wormhole Wars began simply as a school project bred by a love of two particular styles of games he enjoyed and an idea to bring them together successfully.

“I played the Portal games and Halo a lot and always loved the concept behind their mechanics,” Proulx explained. “I always thought I would have loved to have a game where I could throw grenades and shoot rockets while also using portals to move around the area. It was the basis of a project I did in game design at Stanford. I worked out the idea of a first-person shooter with portals as a proof of concept. As I was coming out of college, I made the decision that I wanted to continue to pursue this idea. As for the first-person shooter design, we tried to go the early Halo route. My Co-Designer, Nick Bagamian, and I felt there wasn’t a lot of games on PC that capture the feels of Halo and Halo 2, so we also wanted to bring that vibe back as we built the shooter side around this game.”

As Proulx and Bagamian went to work on strengthening the original concept, they found themselves bending their minds around how to design maps for such a game and how the portal mechanics would work within these maps.

“Early on it was really difficult,” Proulx admitted. “Our first map was the one we spent the most time on and it is by far the worst example of our designs so far, but we learned a lot from it. Once we had put hundreds of hours into the game, we started to see what works and what didn’t, and now it’s a streamlined process. We pretty much make the skeletal and functional designs of the maps and then we have artists that make them look pretty. When I’m designing a map, We’ll test it with bots until we feel good about it. Then we’ll put it into the alpha of the game in an untested state where we can get more feedback from live play and the community.”

Proulx claims ease of access and easy pick-up was also a factor in the design of Wormhole Wars to get new players acclimated quickly.

“We built in some quality-of-life mechanics to help players,” Proulx explained “When you come out of a portal, the game will orient your player right-side-up so there isn’t any confusion. We also added a jet pack to the game for a nice double-jump boost that helps with traversing the maps and making plays.”

Building the Wormhole Wars Scene

1047 Games knows that for a game like this, they need to build a community of enthusiastic players up who will engage with them in the design, but they’re fast on their way. According to Proulx, there are a lot of avid players looking to get in and engage with the Discord server they’ve set up for Wormhole Wars.

“Yeah, we’ve had a great turn out in the Discord,” Proulx proudly claimed. “Last I checked, we had over 8,000 participants in our channel for the game. We’ve been trying to grow the game naturally and get people excited about it and it’s done pretty well so far in the early running.”

And of course, one of Proulx and Bagamian’s goals is to cultivate a competitive scene for their game. They invite pros and players of all calibers from all competitive shooter arenas to engage in the game. They even had Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek of CS:GO and PUBG fame come by to check out the game during DreamHack, among others.

“During DreamHack Austin, Shroud came through and checked Wormhole Wars out,” Proulx recalled. “He picked it up quickly. There’s more to the game than he discovered in the time he had to play, but he’s an amazing shot in first-person shooter games and was able to figure out how to do what he does best fast in the game. I played on a team with him and he dominated the match. We’ve also had pros and semi-pros in Counter-Strike and another player who was in the top 500 of Overwatch and is now playing pro in Batallion 1944.”

Cooperating With Community To Make A Better Wormhole Wars

In addition, the team at 1047 Games is building onto Wormhole Wars regularly. They’re dedicated to working with the feedback their community provides to try to build the best game possible for all players. In a recent patch, Proulx spoke to a matter the community debated and he and his team addressed as a result.

“One mechanic we built into the game is that you can’t see through enemy portals and it caused concern that people would camp on the other side of their own portals to get kills,” Proulx explained. “It doesn’t actually happen much, but for that, we built a visual mechanic into the portals so the portal will flash if there’s a player sitting on the other side of them. Your cursor will also still light up red if you’re focused on an enemy player too. If people ask for something rational and we see an opportunity for it, we’ll work with the community to make it happen.”

It's fairly easy to be part of the Warmhole Wars community as well. Through their Discord and social media channels like Twitter and Facebook, Proulx invites all players to come on in and engage with the game to make it better.

“We’re doing Alphas and Betas regularly and preparing a full release in February 2019,” Proulx stated. “You can get in on the playtests in our Discord where we distribute keys for the game every few weeks. We want to be an esport and we want the game to be a complete product. We see the trend out there with Early Access and it seems like an excuse to put out a buggy product, but we’d rather do plenty of playtesting and get plenty of community feedback, so when we launch, Wormhole Wars is fully ready to go.”

What The Scene Is Saying...

Speaking of esports, it’s not all about the devs and Proulx and his team at 1047 Games know that. You need enthusiastic players to make the competitive scene of a competitive game and the Wormhole Wars booth had them in droves at DreamHack. With that in mind, we caught up to some players. Folks like Matthew Smith, Tanner Watts, John McCallum, Jacob Huff, Bobby Bickford, and Blaine Duncan were happy to oblige. Each of them had an enthusiastic point of view based on their time with the game.

“Wormhole Wars is definitely a game changer, the mechanics make everything more strategic than a lot of other FPS I’ve played,” claimed Watts.

“It really allows for a lot of skill ranges,” Huff added. “You can be really good at shooting, really good at portals, or a good blend of the two. And everything has its own place in the game where different levels of the two skills work. If you work well with portals, you don’t even have to be that good with shooting. You can strategize to get the drop on someone and bump them off easy."

Indeed, each of the players we talked to agreed there’s a great balance of easy-to-pick-up play in Wormhole Wars alongside an enormously high ceiling for mastery and expert skill.

“It’s not a steep learning curve, but there’s a huge ceiling,” Smith explained. “As you go, you learn to get better about your portal placement, positioning, and movement around them to make plays.”

“We played for a little while one day and picked it the basics that fast,” Duncan added. “Most people will get used to it fast. It’s managing what it offers and putting it together well that separates better players.”

“I had no idea what I was doing my first time,” Bickford laughed of his initial experience of the game. “I only knew how to put one portal and not the other, but the game is simple enough to learn as you go and eventually figure it out and maybe even do well by chance. Even then, there’s a huge ceiling and it rewards players who figure out intricate strategies to play with how it all works. You can tell when someone is really good.”

Wants And Needs Of The People

Each of the players also appreciate the level of dedication and evolution that Proulx and 1047 Games are bringing to the game. Many of these players enjoy the updates the game gets, but have some thoughts on how it can escalate even further.

“It’d be great to see some more game modes and maybe even hardcore styles that feature single-life elimination for some intense strategy, planning, and health conservation,” Huff offered. “The run n’ gun is great, but you could also get some great competition out of hardcore, round-based gameplay.”

It was a sentiment echoed by Duncan as he looked at other games he enjoyed.

“When you look at Overwatch, they’re fine-tuning and updating that constantly,” Duncan added. “But also remaining in communication with the teams. I hope Wormhole Wars will do that too. Just keep in contact with the player base, and especially any teams that spring up, to fine-tune the experience. I think that’s what will push it up to competitive scene and make it stick.”

For Bickford’s part, he wanted to see more and interesting tools to create different kinds of strategic and defensive opportunities.

“I would love to get some anti-portal tools,” Bickford explained. “Something like items that can trap an open portal to hurt or kill characters that pass through them or disable portals for a player altogether for a short time.”

Cultivating A Professional/Competitive Scene

As for building a competitive scene itself, the players we spoke to were enthusiastic to see a scene build for Wormhole Wars. In an event where Rocket League was playing a championship event nearby, itself a grassroots indie scene turned professional esports, many players of Wormhole Wars believe it has the potential to reach a similar tier.

“I believe it could become an awesome scene,” McCallum explained “Wormhole Wars has solid team-based mechanics and opportunities for players to coordinate and do callouts for excellent cooperative plays.”

“The potential is extremely high because of that skill ceiling,” Huff added. “Plus, it’s just awesome to see how someone who’s either equal or better plays their game. It looks amazing and it’s not incredibly hard to understand what’s happening. You might get team compositions where some people focus on good portal placement and mobility while others focus on shooting or a great blend of the two. And then there’s the opportunity of different strategies from different game modes.”

As for how this could be done, the players agreed that one of the biggest hurdles Wormhole Wars has to clear is getting it into the hands of influencers and well-known players who would enjoy the game and help offer that scene to other potential players, such as when Shroud came to play.

“You have to attract big names to the game,” Smith claimed. “Shroud was over here playing. That’s great. The reason why Fortnite and PUBG got so big is because you had big names like Ninja and Dr DisRespect playing them. Wormhole Wars could just as easily create an environment for stars to be born. They just need to attract those players.”

“They just need to move it out to good streamers and influencers,” Duncan agreed. “The gameplay speaks for itself. It’s a fantastic looking and playing game. This is a game that people will enjoy watching. We definitely do. The spectating aspect is great. They just need to get it into the hands of the people who will play in on large platforms and show everyone what this game is about and what Wormhole Wars can do.”

The Future Of Frags & Wormholes

Wormhole Wars has a lot of challenges ahead of it, but it also has the foundation to clear them. Ian Proulx and his team at 1047 Games seem more than prepared to get the game up and running and enthusiastically invite audiences to be part of the journey. It begins on PC with a planned PC release in February 2019, but Proulx has no intention of stopping there.

“We would love to port to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One,” Proulx explained. “We haven’t looked into it enough yet to know for certain how it will go, but we develop on the Unreal Engine, which will make things much easier. We’re going to focus on making the PC version complete and ready and then we’ll likely aim to get the game to other consoles in the months after.”

And with a growing community behind them, 1047 Games looks set to deliver. For the part of the players, it’s easy to get in on the action. You can follow Wormhole Wars on its official website and Twitter and Facebook, but the Wormhole Wars Discord is most certainly the most notable place to get involved. Even now, and every few weeks, the crew is doing Alpha and Beta testing and the Discord is the place to be to get a key for the tests and get in on the action.

Otherwise, we’ll be looking forward to February 2019 as the game and its community continues to grow. Just as well, we've got other reasons to the future too as we look back on Dr DisRespect's opinion PUBG esports at DreamHack.