Supervive's Studio Of Ex-LoL, Valorant, & Overwatch Devs Have Cooked Up A Playmaking Machine (2024)

Supervive - previously referred to under the codename Project Loki - is an upcoming squad-based shooter that combines elements of the battle royale, sandbox, and strategy genres. Developer Theorycraft Games has a superstar team behind it, which have collectively worked on a wide range of popular titles like Apex Legends, Overwatch, and Destiny. The game’s executive producer Jessica Nam worked at Riot for many years on League of Legends, eventually serving as its vice president.

Supervive pits 10 4v4 teams against each other in an increasingly shrinking map until only one is left standing. The game - which will enter its first open beta later this year - currently features 15 characters, which are split into three main categories: Fighters, Protectors, and Controllers - however, members aren’t mandated to fill specific roles in a team’s make up. Playing Supervive requires strong teamwork, though there’s also an emphasis on personal mastery, with developers aiming to create a “10,000-hour game.”

Screen Rant interviewed Supervive executive producer Jessica Nam to discuss creating a new kind of multiplayer experience, her time at Riot Games, and how players influence the development process.

Supervive's Executive Producer Talks Its Creation

Crafting A 10,000-Hour Game Through A Multitude Of Methods

I've previously talked to Joe [Tung] a little bit about this game, and we talked about the concept of a 10,000-hour game. Now that I've played it, I can definitely see from a mastery standpoint being able to spend that much time with this game to get to know all the characters and all the moves perfectly. I'm curious, from your perspective, your thoughts on what defines a 10,000-hour game and why it's so important for Theorycraft to be making a game that is that.

Jessica Nam: I think we probably all have our personal takes, so this is mine, but I think something that we share in common is that we want to have really high gameplay depths, high variety, high replayability. I think there's a lot of games where you're playing for 50 hours and then you're kind of done. We talk a lot about how part of our philosophy is designing for that universal human need to master something, to get good at something, to show off to your friends, to be able to just talk, s***post, fail miserably, succeed greatly, I think that - especially in today's day and age - gaming has become a much more universal way to do that. I think that's something where we don't want to make something that's throwaway - we want to make something that you can actually rely on and be able to engage in that deep way.

Also, for us to be able to support that. I think that's something where there are also games that you see them be live services for a while, and then they kind of crash and burn, or they disappear, and so all that investment is kind of gone. When you look at all of these live service games that are out there right now, even then you're like, "Oh, can I count on it in the long term, or is it kind of just a flash in a pan?" I think for us, a lot of things go into that, and a lot of it boils down to we want to make a game that's worth investing into, worth your time and investment from a bunch of different angles, and so that hopefully you can depend on it to have it be super engaging and not just alone in a hyperbolic time chamber, that it is actually a social experience.

It was so fun getting to know the roster more, because when I talked to Joe, he had to keep things very under wraps. It was just like, "It's a diverse roster." Now that I've gotten to know them a little bit more, I'm really curious in general how it was developed, but also the balancing process, because I noticed that they each had their own difficulty level - some, the move sets are way longer in terms of the things that they do. How did you guys balance making more approachable characters and the beefier, harder characters?

Jessica Nam: I think the one thing that we really wanted to do is - like I mentioned, variety is a big part of what we think is important about the replayability of the game, and I think a part of that then is we want that variety to come through in the roster. If we're thinking about it that way, we want to make sure that depending on what game you're currently maining - players have multitudes, but if you're coming from a MOBA or you're coming from a shooter and you've been playing that for a while, we want you to have a great landing pad so that when you look at the roster, you're like, "Okay, cool. This character is kind of more focused on your primary fire, on your LMB. I can focus on aim skill for a while and kind of get good at that, and that can be the thing that I'm focusing on."

Or if you're more strategically minded player from MOBAs, or you're thinking about more about positioning, macro strategy, itemization, things like that, there's still a good landing pad for you with more of our crowd control characters, or we have characters that do AOE teleports and can AOE teleport your team around in different places. I think we're just thinking through that player journey of: depending on what game you're coming from, where we're deriving some inspiration from, whether it's MOBAs, shooters, hero shooters, BRs, that there's a great variety that you can still have some familiarity to attach to, but hopefully in our own way that we've kind of spun it, given our combat sandbox.

I was also learning as I was going, when I was on a team with multiple devs, that there are a few characters who have moves that synergize well together. Do you have any favorite synergies in the game that are kind of crazy?

Jessica Nam: Yeah, there's a couple. I think the one that is very iconic right now is I was mentioning the AOE teleporter character, Void. There's also a crowd control character named Celeste. One thing that players have done in recent times is you'll alt as Celeste, which is an AOE, hard CC ability. As you're channeling it, your teammate that may be Void will swap you to a different position, and so you're kind of aiming that crowd control in an angle that other enemy teams may not anticipate. That kind of combination, it makes it an interesting spin on the wombo combo, but in a way where it's more mindful of the level design itself and also being more responsive, so we find that to be pretty interesting.

You mentioned level design, and I only got the main glimpses of the map as you're flying over it and making note of, "We want to drop here." Can you talk a little bit about what designing this world was like?

Jessica Nam: Yeah, it was kind of chaotic to begin with, because we're starting from scratch. I think a lot of us have come from already pre-developed IPs, and so when we were thinking about, "Hey, how do we want to come at this?" a lot of it was starting from the core gameplay points of interest that we want to be imbued in the level design itself.

We think that there's a value in having very tight combat spaces or really tight chokes that kind of funnel players into each other and have these interesting collisions. As we're talking through that, we are trying to make each biome have its own sort of point of interest or map feature, so some places might be super open and have tons of grass, some places might be really choked out and really hard to get into.

As we're designing that, we start talking, gathering references, mood boards, building that out as a team and thinking about how would we imagine this space to be? How would we contextualize this to players? A choke then becomes maybe a hallway, and that hallway might be actually into a living machine nest, and that machine might actually be alive and might have lasers and just might happen to shoot at you. That's what I mean by there's this kind of chaotic but really exciting and engaging brainstorming process, where once we're trying to figure out how to make those level design points of interest really intuitive to the player, we can kind of go crazy within those constraints and come up with something hopefully very delightful as well.

In terms of characters, do you have a favorite that you tend to main when you are playtesting the game?

Jessica Nam: Yeah, the two that I play the most is Alluna, who's the bunny healer, and then Oath, who's the robot paladin.

Oath was scary!

Jessica Nam: [Laughs] Yeah, and I say paladin in the most aggressive way possible. He is like the vengeful paladin. I'm a huge support player in a lot of competitive games that I play it's either that or usually those mage-type characters. So for me, both of those, especially Oath who can kind of do both, and also Alluna who's - because of our combat model - also able to hold their own; I kind of benefit from being able to get a high agency character no matter what role I'm playing. That's been pretty fun.

Drawing From The Past & Looking Towards The Future

The Influence Of Riot, Perfecting Gameplay, & Entering Open Beta

Obviously the team size is much smaller, but in general, how has this experience compared to your time at Riot, and what are the biggest lessons you feel like you took away from your time on League that have helped the most in this new game?

Jessica Nam: I think what was really beneficial about League was just being able to see what players actually care about at a large scale. At that scale and global nature you can, and players aren't a monolith, but you can start seeing what they don't really care about so much. They care about polish and high production values and all of that, but what they really, really care about when they say "quality" really goes back to the gameplay and making sure that that's really sticky and engaging, and that the skill checks are deep and that it feels like a very fair and balanced environment.

A lot of things just go up in priority. It's very freeing, because it gets you to be able to focus on the design problems and the gameplay problems more to make sure that - for Loki's instance, we're trying to deliver or over-deliver in those areas as opposed to trying to be a master of nothing and try to be the best in each and every area. I think, if anything - and I'm sure this is true for a lot of other folks on the team who have worked on Overwatch or Apex or any of the competitive games that our team has worked on - is that depth in gameplay, mastering gameplay, being able to have that viability in characters, a lot of that comes up top.

When I spoke to Joe, he briefly mentioned how stuff like the movement in the game has gone through some big changes. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest iterations that this game has gone through where it's really changed a lot?

Jessica Nam: That one was a big one, but lethality was pretty big, too. I go back to agency and freedom a lot, because I think about MOBAs, just because my history has been in MOBAs for such a long time. One thing I think about a lot is just how in MOBAs over time as you're trying to make content, new content for MOBAs that seeks to be differentiating, it can feel more like rules-y or just more complex, and you're just having to learn a lot of stuff basically in a MOBA. Especially when you're coming back to a MOBA, that can be really tough, and so what we've talked about is: how do we make a competitive game that can remain intuitive and high agency and have you not worry so much about every single little detail about the game, but have you be able to more think about the overall, "Here's how pieces kind of work together"?

That's actually why - when we were talking about the combat model before, actually, the combat model was quite similar to what I would say a traditional MOBA was. It was very predictable, very deterministic. You were kind of walking at a specific pace, like Joe was saying. Traversal was a lot slower back then. You were taking turns casting abilities. It was very methodical in a way that I think that pacing would probably be more familiar in some ways to people coming from MOBAs, but it also didn't give you a sense of the high that you get, what the dream is when you play MOBAs like that, or even BRs, where you're like, "I want to be able to show off, be able to make these crazy plays," and so we're like, "Hey, how do we increase that solo carry potential? How do we increase those dream moments for players? How do we give that to them more immediately without having to read a ton of texts?"

Creating a combat sandbox that is driven by physics or open-endedness, where abilities can not just play off of other players, but the environment or objects, or when we say, "This ability can affect anything," it means anything. A lot of that is built into the kits now, where they are more lethal, so that you're one play away from doing something amazing all the time. That's true for movement as well, and that's true for items. That's a big philosophical difference we've moved towards with this game.

In terms of, like you said, the pacing and that sort of thing in rounds, I had noticed that it can get very chaotic very quickly, and just as quickly become calm again; part of that is the things like the barriers and the different objects that you can find. What was it like trying to balance that sense of: you are maybe one action away from something really epic, but also, you don't want it to be so chaotic all the time that players aren't able to think of strategy or anything more macro like that?

Jessica Nam: Yeah, it's like a huge balancing act. A lot of it, we talk a lot about player density, actually. There's 40 players in a match currently, we actually have tested with 48 before. The map has been different sizes over time. Depending on what that ratio that is, we've been trying to find that magic ratio so that at least you can over time feel like there's enough action, but it's not crazy chaotic.

There's also different things we've played around with. The circle shrinks over time - there's different tunings that we can have, different timings, where it gets repositioned, you can make it random or you could make it kind of thoughtful in how it progresses and moves and shrinks over time depending on the player density. There's some pretty neat tricks that over time our designers and engineers have kind of thought about in the goal and the pursuit of making that feel as natural as possible, so that it's managed chaos.

In that same vein of slight variations each round and stuff, something I thought was really cool was the storm shift mechanic, where it's sort of an overarching thing each game. In general, how did that storm shift system come about? I'm not even sure if I saw all the variations of it in my timeframe.

Jessica Nam: A lot of roguelikes have this kind of feature in some ways. We think a lot about different genres, and even though we don't call ourselves a roguelike, we still get inspiration from a ton of genres. One of the features that we love about them is that you have a different play session that inspires how you should be moving and fighting throughout the world, and so it gives you a different opportunity to think critically about what character you have, what equipment you should get. It gives you kind of a starting point, too, and so that can be kind of interesting.

Especially given the complexity of this game, we want to make sure that there's also storm shifts that help you, like the soul powers one, that help you get your starting build. You're like, "Okay, cool, I have this power. If I get another power that plays well with it, then I can make magic happen." That's the sort of thing where there's a variety aspect of it for sure that we're inspired by with roguelikes to create that variance, the game-to-game variance, but there's also other goals that we found to be equally delightful, or equally educational, where it's like, "Oh, this can be a great guidepost for players."

I think in the future, too, we'd love to see how far we can push this. There have been times where we've tried - I don't want to say totally different modes, but we've definitely tried very different game rules to test, "Hey, what do you guys think? If we did this and we put this in the base game, what do you guys think?" That's been really fun to get player feedback in real time. Or if we wanted to tease something in the future, I think that's also a really great opportunity for us to maybe tease new content or a new part of the map or something like that. We're thinking about a bunch of different opportunities there, which is really exciting.

June is going to be a really exciting month for you guys, in terms of the announcement of the first open beta and just getting a lot more information out there. How has the team been feeling about this really big sort of milestone month coming up?

Jessica Nam: Terrified and amazing, amazing and terrified. Every time we're gearing up for something like this, where we're cracking the door open a little bit, it just gets your heart pumping in a way. That's always been true to some extent with the community play test that we do every month. I think that's something that always drives the momentum, and you just want to get your next thing in to show players. That's hugely motivating for us.

There's nothing better feeling than players being able to just talk about it and laugh about it and s***post about it, and that's just the best feeling, and so June being a really juiced version of that, it makes our day. I think that'll energize us for months and months, but the stakes are higher. The expectations are higher. We can't take this back, so there's a lot of refinement and making the game easier to enjoy, engage in, not require dev goggles for a bunch of different parts of the game. Even ones where we're like, "Oh, it would've been okay before," it's driving us to do a lot of that. Everyone's been pretty heads down, but I think we're ready. I think we're excited.

What are you most looking forward to seeing players react to when they get their hands on the game?

Jessica Nam: I just want them to just try and break it. I think this is the kind of game where there's a lot of people who when they make games, they want people to have a very certain type of experience. For us, we're just like, "We want you to show us things that we haven't ever seen before." There have been times post-play test - this happens after every play test - we'll sit around as a community and people will just start showing highlights and showing plays that they've made. There's new things all the time where they're just like, "Oh, I moved this object here and just killed five teams. I was able to move on the grind rail and be able to jump and make this crazy traversal play." There's a ton of things where we've been inspired by that, too, and it's actually snowballed into new gameplay features or new aspects of the game that we wouldn't have imagined adding.

Because players are playing around with the game, it inspires us to add new stuff to it and be like, "Oh, lean in more into that." Even traversal itself, that wasn't even a core thing we were talking about at the beginning in the start of Loki, and now it's just like, "Oh, this is something that really adds to your creativity factor," and being able to do things mid-air, gliding, jumping, casting abilities in the middle of it, using momentum, all of that has given us a bunch of ideas, and I'm super excited to see what people come up with.

I'd love to learn more about that sort of same feedback and excitement from players that you've really leaned into. You mentioned the traversal, but I'm curious if you have any other examples of that.

Jessica Nam: Power is probably a huge part, and this is true for combat as well. Those two playing off each other actually is what results probably most of the most surprising plays that we've seen, especially in our show matches where we present high-level play and even cast it to players. What we've found is that we have 60 powers in the game right now, and you run into different ones every time. Because they're kind of open-ended as well, there's things like physics and momentum and heliporting and portals and all of the stuff that you've seen both in the kits themselves, but also in the map and the items, that once they kind of interplay, the intersection of those things end up with some pretty crazy outcomes.

It is easy for a competitive game to be this really stress-inducing game of inches, where when you look at it from the outside, it looks like maybe nothing is happening, but it's like two forces against each other for a really long time. For us, we're like, "Hey, if we're going to fight, let's do it flashy. Let's actually show it off." We talk about Dragon Ball Z. We talk about these kinds of moments that other people can appreciate and get excited for. Even if they're on the other side of it, they're like, "That was cool. I want to try that next time," and rethink and look at those combinations and try it out for themselves.

I think every character, we try to create a differentiating skill that is not something you would typically find. There's traversal, for sure, and there's different types of traversal, but there's also different types of things that we wouldn't normally - like rezzing, for example, people having different states, like, "I'm alive, I'm a wisp, I am dead." None of that is as permanent as most competitive games, where once you're down, you're out.

We get to play with that concept a ton in this game, where revival is actually not just like a comeback mechanic. It can actually be a playmaking mechanic. When I was talking about Aluna, she's able to rez a wisp while dashing around, while being able to fight one v one with another person, maybe even be able to have that person teleport and come back and they can fight together. There's just this snowballing, really flashy set of plays that we try to imbue in every kit we have that hopefully gives them higher agency to succeed and not feel beholden to being someone who serves other parts of their team. I think that's what we're hoping for, that people lean more into that.