What gave you the idea for Phantasmaburbia?

I grew up in suburbs, and I’d frequently go out and explore what wilderness was available to me for the fun of it. A lot of those imaginary adventures fueled what would be come my later day work in video games. For this project I thought I’d try to work in a suburban setting for the game, and try to communicate the joy of suburban exploration. To that end, I also based many of the characters in this game on characters I’d drawn back in the day. Conceptually, the whole project is very personal to me.

That’s funny; I did a lot of that same suburban exploration when I was a kid as well. It never would have occurred to me to actually make the suburbs the setting for an RPG, though. Much of the game’s exploration seems to occur in spirit tunnels (extra-dimensional pockets that lead between suburban subdivisions); how do those relate to the suburban exploration motif? Are you going for sort of a Narnia thing, with the fantastic carefully hidden within the folds of the everyday?

That’s a great way to put it. The Spirit Tunnels are these celestial little zones where ghosts travel through, and they’re said to have always been there–it just took some awakening of the sixth sense to be aware of them. They serve as the game’s “dungeons,” where I was a lot more free to arrange puzzle elements and stuff in ways that are interesting to play but totally unrealistic for something human built.

They also add some spiritual “color” to the suburban landscape. In a remote area of the woods, for example, there’s a old wooden shack that burned down years ago. Right on top of it is a Spirit Tunnel that houses this ancient spirit of heat and flames. In subtle ways like this, the game suggests unperceived supernatural explanations for certain events and the placement of various landmarks in the town. So, yeah… that “fantastic hidden within the folds of the everyday,” for sure.

What made you decide to move from free releases to a commercial model?

I’ve been making games for a while. At some point I decided I wanted to sustain myself off of them, and so all of my latest work has been geared in some way to earn a little money on the side. I’ve done a flash sponsorship, and put out a mobile app–selling this game is what I see as the next logical step, getting my feet wet in another market, so to speak. I don’t expect this game to fare very well, but that’s OK, because I really do it for fun and for myself. It’s something of an experiment, I suppose.  Making it commercial also gives me some healthy incentive to work harder on the game and keep a better eye for quality to make it worth the price.

You mention the issue of value for money. I remember seeing somewhere that you plan to release this game at a $5 price point. Is that still the case? What made you arrive at that price?

Whoop! You are a little behind the times, mister… around October I announced the starting price would be $10. Picking that number was a very difficult process for me. I’m sure anyone who’s put thought into their game’s pricing has faced the same crisis; set the price too high or too low and the game either appears overpriced or without confidence.

I’ve seen a lot of RPGs priced at around $15-20. I chose $10 to stay competitive with them, but to also set myself apart from the cheapo casual games. Initially, I saw this project as being relatively small and something of a casual RPG, but since then the amount of content’s ballooned and the way I look at the game has changed, too.

Do you think it’s sustainable for RPG developers to price their games to compete with casual games?

I have no experience with pricing or with selling PC games, let alone an RPG, so this is the sort of question I may be better suited to answer once the game is in postmortem. That said, my guiding belief with this has been that RPGs should always be priced higher than their casual counterparts; there’s just so much more content and commitment involved for the player.  You can’t really put them next to casual games and expect people to buy them on impulse the same way they may purchase Angry Birds or something.
Pricing RPGs higher is more fair to the developers, and I think one way or another most players recognize that.

Have you been able to take anything from your experience with making and releasing Dubloon and put it to use with Phantasmaburbia? (Other than reusing the core engine, I mean.)

Dubloon was a huge project and I learned a lot from it. Just having that experience of working on and finishing such a big game made me feel a lot more prepared coming into this one. More importantly, Dubloon left me feeling a lot more comfortable working in the RPG genre… a lot of Dubloon was formed on concepts pulled from other games, whereas in Phanta I’ve felt a lot more comfortable to try things that I hadn’t seen in a game before. Having the engine core already there and working gave me a lot more space to focus on story and design, too.

What are you doing in Phantasmaburbia that you haven’t seen in a game before?

On the largest scale, I’ve structured the game’s story and dungeons in a way I haven’t seen before. To keep my explanation simple: the order of levels and what levels you see aren’t set in stone and will be different each time you play the game based on your choices. Most RPGs focus on “story” decisions, giving you dialogue trees and upgrade options that ultimately lead you to one of several endings. I feel that “choices” like that are meaningless in video games. In Phantasmaburbia, the story that plays out is always the same–no set of decisions is going to land you in the “good” or the “bad” ending, so no choice is “right” or “wrong.” I opted to create an RPG where the player makes choices that give them different gameplay, with the hopes that this makes the decisions you make feel more meaningful. This also leaves the game with great replay value, naturally. Liquid level order is nothing new to video games, but I haven’t seen it done in an RPG, or at least not in a way that’s so central to the structure of the game.

Another major component of the game are the puzzles. That should come as no surprise to those familiar with RPGs, but the types of puzzles here are conceptually different from those I’m used to playing in this genre. The puzzles are all built around 4 simple “ghost powers” introduced early in the game which are used to manipulate the environment in ways that are interactively interesting. There are no puzzles that have to do with talking to characters and trading items; in fact, there are almost no NPCs at all in the game, and no stated system of currency. There are also essentially no “puzzles” where you’re confronted with “Obstacle X” and simply must remember to use “Item Y” on it to proceed; each puzzle is meant to force some thinking and consideration, where you have control of many of the room’s elements but have to arrange them so that everything is “satisfied.”

These are the big 2 ways in which I really worked to differentiate my game from the crowd as far as gameplay. I’m already getting a little wordy here, so I’ll shut it for now.

How do you like using Game Maker? Do you have any plans to try out other platforms in the future?

I really love Game Maker. I’ve been using it since I was 12 and it’s never let me down. I’ve been dipping my toes into other tools like Flash and Unity, but I’m just so familiar with Game Maker that it’s hard not to use it for my big projects. In Game Maker I feel like I can program anything I want with it and thus never feel limited by technical ability. It’s been a huge factor in how much time I’ve been able to devote to the “fun stuff,” and how much content I’ve been able to add in what’s been an under-12-month development cycle. I always say there’s a chance I’ll turn my back on GM forever as I’m finishing the “next big project,” but I always come crawling back… so I think I should stop tempting fate and just keep doing what feels right for each project.

It’s probably a little early to ask, but do you have any plans for future projects post-Phantasmaburbia?

I tend not to think about this sort of stuff very much, which is also probably why I’m always able to finish these ambitious projects I start. I know for sure that I won’t be making another RPG for a long while… undoubtedly my next project’ll be something small and fun. My work tends to go in phases like that.

Anything else you want to say?

I’d urge interested parties to keep an eye on the website in the coming weeks–we’re looking to release an extended demo of the game for a limited time once some more music’s been filled in. Also, thanks so much for the interview! I had a lot of fun.

Thanks for your time.

Drox Operative is a starship action RPG with warring alien races, fierce space battles, a dynamic, evolving galaxy, and co-op multiplayer.

Eons ago the Drox ruled the galaxy through their mighty Operatives. These elite starship captains were trained to accomplish the impossible at whatever cost necessary. Whether employing stealth or brute force, they were always deadly. Using these Operatives, the Drox built a starlane system for quick travel amongst the stars, colonized and conquered millions of planets, and ruled the galaxy with an iron grip for over 100,000 years. Eventually realizing their Operators were a threat, they attempted to assassinate all of them. They failed. The following Galactic Civil War was devastating.

Thousands of years later, the Drox are extinct, but the secretive Drox Operative guild lives on. They have learned their lesson though: loyalty to any one race is foolish. They now work for whoever can pay. And pay they do! Empires might span hundreds of planets and thousands of ships, but when a critical task arises, they still turn to an Operative.

In the new space race, the major races are scouting, colonizing, and expanding, trying to take over the galaxy by diplomacy, technology, war, or any other means their scheming minds can contemplate.

As a Drox Operative it’s NOT your job to manage all of those annoying people, build thousands of buildings, play nice with your enemies, or balance the budget. It IS your job to pick the winning side and maybe even help them conquer the galaxy if you’re being nice, more importantly though is to rake in as many credits as possible, well that and build the coolest, deadliest ship in the known universe. Not many screw with an Operative captaining a Dreadnaught!

Drox Operative is scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 2012, however it will be released when it’s done.

I asked Peeler if he had any screenshots I could show; unfortunately, it seems the game isn’t yet at that stage of development. However, Peeler did give an interview to Space Game Junkie about the title earlier this month, which you can read here if you want to find out more details.

What you may not know, however, is that he is a veteran game developer working on a humorous first-person dungeon crawler called Frayed Knights. Jay likes writing words, and his responses below reflect that proclivity. Buckle in for some lengthy discussion of Frayed Knights and RPG design in general!

Hi Jay! Why don’t you tell the readers a little about your background and what got you interested in making RPGs?

I am a refugee from the mainstream game development industry.  I learned a lot of my chops working at a company called SingleTrac, making games for the Sony Playstation. We had a reputation for making games that were really fun to play and did some amazing things for the time that really broke the mold, but didn’t always have the most fantastic graphics in the world. It’s a trend I’m pretty comfortable with as an indie.

I’ve always been a big fan of RPGs: pen-and-paper, computer RPGs, console RPGs, even MMORPGs (starting way back when they were text-based and “massively” meant over 30 users at a time). I made crappy little RPGs and adventure games to teach myself to program as a kid. When I was in mainstream development, we kept lobbying to make an RPG-like game, but were shot down at every turn. Even back then, few people in the games biz got to make the game they wanted to make, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

I went indie to make the kinds of games I wanted to make. That’s not been exclusively RPGs, but even when I started I was working towards that goal. The engine I wrote for Void War was originally planned to power a multiplayer RPG. I had a tiny, crappy dungeon and everything. It ended up using space ships instead.

Has the concept behind Frayed Knights changed at all as you’ve developed it?

I don’t know if the concept has really changed at all, but the details – and my understanding of the concept – have evolved a lot over the *cough*years*cough*.

I felt that just being a long-time fan and experienced action-game developer didn’t translate to expertise in RPGs. Frayed Knights was supposed to be a “quick-and-dirty” project for me to get my feet wet making RPGs. Two years, tops, that was my plan. Yeah, right. I even had to chop the concept into three pieces because what I thought was a tiny, manageable scope was still far too huge. I ended up breaking it into three parts. This first game still has about twice as many hours of gameplay as I envisioned the full game taking originally.

My initial vision was one kinda like the classic first-person, grid-based RPGs of old. In fact, Wizardry 7 was kind of my mental model (I hadn’t played Wizardry 8 yet when I started development). First-person perspective, turn-based combat, party-based RPG with a reasonably detailed rules system and western-style gameplay. Old-school!

The whole humor part of it came almost immediately after I made that decision. I didn’t want to make just a rehash of a style of game that over-saturated the market in the early 90s. Remember when it seemed we had too many games of that type, and that they’d never end? Anyway, I wanted to do something different with it, something to make it stand out on its own and take the style in a somewhat new direction. That’s where the humor came in. Not crazy, absurdist humor that just mocks everything, but the story and character based humor that has fun with the genre, like Knights of the Dinner Table, Dork Tower, Order of the Stick, and the Gamers movies.

Once those ideas came together, it felt like The Right Thing. And I’ve been going down that path ever since. It’s been a strong concept from the get-go. I found pretty quickly that I was pulling in a little more of the classic pen-and-paper experience into the game than I’d originally expected, but that’s proven to be nothing but a good thing.

You chose to give the player exactly four pre-made characters to play through the game with. For a game of this sort, that’s fairly unusual. Is that something that grew out of the game’s initial concept (that is, to play as a small party of adventurers who constantly bicker with each other)?

Yeah, exactly. I was thinking of the table-talk we have in our Saturday Night D&D games, and I think fond memories of Mystery Science Theater 3000 also contributed to the idea. As part of the humor angle, the idea of the characters in your party engaging in in-character table-talk like veteran gamers really stuck with me.

But to really make it character-driven and not just generic snarkiness, I felt I needed a handle on the characters. So I came up with Arianna, Dirk, Benjamin, and Chloe. So I really try and blend two worlds — the old-school western RPGs where you usually created your own characters, and a little bit of the more character / story driven aspect of more modern and Asian RPGs.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but that mix has bugged some folks watching development. It’s proven pretty popular among the testers, even those who were skeptics at first, so I think it worked.

It’s strange: at first, I really disliked not being able to customize a party from a stable of classes. However, the way you’ve chosen to do it, it injects a lot of character into the game via…well, you know, characters. Most games of this subgenre are seriously lacking that; I could never imagine my party in Wizardry bickering the way these guys do. Still, I can’t help but wonder if you couldn’t have just made all of the dialog non-class-specific, but kept the core characterizations.

Yeah, in retrospect I probably could have approached it that way. It does get kinda funky by the end of the game if you’ve basically turned Dirk into an acting priest and he’s still talking like a rogue. But they originally came to be by me subverting the classic fantasy RPG class roles. You had a warrior who was actually somewhat dainty and smart instead of a big bruiser. You have a rogue who just can’t stay sneaky because he’s a braggart and an adrenaline junky. You have a sorceress who is a space cadet.  And then the “cleric” is really a druid, a class I always loved in my old games but all the other players tended to resent them because they couldn’t be a heal-monkey as well as a regular cleric.

So it never occurred to me to really separate the personalities from their base class, because it was always linked to their concept and origin stories in my mind. And that remains something of a source of humor – Dirk is probably more suited to being a swashbuckling warrior than a rogue. Arianna would probably have made a better sorcerer. Benjamin is really too mellow to be an adventurer at all, and a nature-priest remains a sub-optimal choice for that lifestyle. And Chloe… sheesh. Nobody knows about Chloe.

Incidentally, only a few people have noted that the initials of the characters are A,B,C, and D. That was another goofy idea inspired by a description of combat by Gary Gygax back in D&D. All of the characters of one team had names beginning with an “A”, and everyone on the second team had a “B” name. It was just one of those dumb things I use to amuse myself. If nobody else gets a kick of out this game, I will.

Their rivals, the Heroes of Bastionne, are named Edgar, Florentine, G’rash, and … Selena.

The “grid” is a huge staple of the dungeon-delving genre. What made you decide to go for free-form movement? Was it a design decision, a limitation of the Torque engine, or a little of both?

Some days I really wish I’d done that. It would have made things so much easier. I did it in full-on 3D environments “because I could.” Again, it was kind of the idea of marrying the old-form of RPGs with slightly more modern technology. I really wanted to take advantage of the vertical element and more open-ended level design. Later, I played Wizardry 8 – an awesome if flawed game – and found they’d done the same thing, to great effect.

A more restrictive environment would have been far, far easier to develop, to create editors for, to code for, and to do even cooler things with. Greater flexibility means greater complexity.

But I’m still happy with the decision. We’ve been able to do some really cool levels and concepts that wouldn’t work in a Cartesian grid. So problems and all, I’m pleased. And this is an area where the strength of the Torque engine came in handy.

Speaking of engines, how is Torque working out for you? Are you going to stick with it for subsequent episodes, or have you been seduced by Unity’s sweet siren’s song?

If I were starting over today, I’d be about 80% likely to choose Unity.  At the time, the version of Torque I chose – now no longer supported – seemed like an okay choice. I designed Frayed Knights around my expectations of the engine’s strengths and limitations. I guessed wrong on some things.

I’m tempted to look at the newer version of Torque or Unity for the sequels – REALLY tempted – but I dread the amount of work it would take to port the game over. There’s a ton of game code in there. Besides just porting the game over and going through a whole new round of testing, debugging, etc. there’s the need to learn the new pipeline, processes, etc.  Changing the engine would definitely delay things.  And then there’s inevitably the surprises and limitations you don’t learn about until deep into development.

I’m not ruling it out. That siren’s song is dang strong. But now that we finally have the game running, and the thousands of issues mostly resolved, and have worked out a process within the existing framework, it’d be nice to just focus on content and small improvements for the sequels.

One thing I like about Frayed Knights: I appreciate that you can oftentimes see enemy encounters before they happen. Sometimes encounters occur from out of thin air, though, which is jarring once you get used to dodging enemy patrols and seeing guards from around corners. Are the truly random encounters a holdover from before you put in visible parties of enemies? Or is it just a matter of “I want more enemy encounters but don’t have the time to add and balance patrols that cover every area of the map?”

There are three general kinds of encounters: Static, patrols, and random. Static encounters are the meat of the game (as they are in most RPGs), have the most interesting variations, story elements, and treasure, but with a few exceptions, they are – well, static. They appear in a certain location, or when a certain sequence of events occurs.

Patrols make your wandering around more interesting. They respawn, but are avoidable. If you are looking for trouble to get the last fifty experience points to level, you can go hunt down a patrol or whatever. But they are also an exception to the turn-based rule of the game, so I don’t want to overuse them.

Random encounters are really an old-school game mechanic that adds risk to actions but plays within the turn-based rule system. People tend to think of turn-based games as being “slow,” but they can actually play a lot faster than real-time. You can spam a dozen searches in a few seconds of real-time if you want, and that’s perfectly fine. You can rest and heal completely in an instant, with no cool-down period timing down until you can do it again. You can pick locks as fast as you can press the buttons, and keep trying until you get it right.

Random encounters make any of these actions risky in dangerous territory.  They are based on turns passing, whether you do nothing for three hours while you leave the game running and go out to the movies (and thus no time passes in-game), or spam turn-long searches several times a second. Or if you try to set up camp in the middle of a hall in a thickly occupied hobgoblin military barracks.

There are some tricks to it. Not all areas are created equal as far as encounters are concerned. Some areas have a lower chance of encounters happening. Also, even the random encounters do line-of-site checks from random spots around you to detect you, and if after three or four unsuccessful attempts, it skips the encounter. So be careful where you rest, and you will minimize those ugly surprises.

What lies behind the choice to gradually reduce each character’s maximum endurance as you move through each dungeon? I ask because the first dungeon in the game (which is where the game actually starts) will not allow you to leave and recover your characters’ maximum endurance to its normal levels. Which means that you have to try to limit the amount of combat you engage in so that you can complete the thing before your party becomes completely useless. (Not that the game tells you that.) In a way, it’s a pretty harsh introduction.

This is really three questions in one: The endurance mechanic, the exhaustion mechanic, and how they work together in the very first dungeon.

In Frayed Knights, most actions – particularly combat actions, active feats, and spellcasting – cost endurance. There’s no special “mana” pool for magic or anything – it all comes from your personal store of energy. Completely depleting your endurance leaves you vulnerable – your character is not only forced to rest for their next turn in combat to recover endurance, but they are more vulnerable to attacks. Endurance management is key to success in the game. It’s a constant risk / reward factor: You don’t want to blow your wad and overkill at the beginning of the fight, and nothing left over for the end. So you can manage that resource by using less tiring option, like less powerful abilities, magical items, and picking times to manually rest a turn in mid-combat.

Then there’s resource-management in-between fights – the “attrition” mechanic. In older games (particularly D&D), player characters had to take a night’s sleep to recover all spell points. In pen-and-paper games, the mechanic worked pretty well, as combats were slow to resolve and thus relatively rare. You had to be careful about spending your resources between combats, as blowing all your high-level spell slots on the cannon-fodder meant you would have to return to base early and let the bad guys build up their defenses for your return trip. Or you could try and find a safe spot to sleep in the dungeon where you’d be vulnerable. It added an extra layer of strategy and resource management to the game. The player was constantly dealing with these kinds of risk / reward decisions below the surface, and it was a lot of fun. But CRPGs are a different beast from pen-and-paper, and combat could be resolved much more quickly and thus tended to be far more plentiful, and that kind of strict “number of times per day” limitation often proved just as frustrating on one level as it was valuable on another.

But removing the mechanic entirely robs the games of a lot of interesting gameplay and flavor. You lose the surge and retreat rhythm. Players ignore expendable magic items, as there’s rarely any need to rely on them. And perhaps most significantly, it results in an endless stream of boringly similarly challenging encounters: Since there’s zero reason to not unleash on a “lesser threat” with everything you’ve got – as you’ll get it all back again thirty seconds after the fight – they are useless encounters, and should be removed.

The exhaustion system attempts to bridge that gap a little bit. There’s no hard limit on your ability to fight, but your maximum endurance degrades a tiny bit over regular exertion, requiring more than just a quick breather in the middle of a dangerous dungeon to recover. Full recovery can come from potions, drama stars, or (most commonly) finding a safe place to get a full night’s sleep – usually back at the inn. Your abilities never degrade to zero, so there’s never any point at which your party is rendered helpless, but it does exert a pressure and constant choice on the player about whether or not to keep pushing forward, and if they do if they want to burn some expendable resources to do so.

As far as that first dungeon is concerned, that is where we’re doing a lot of fine-tuning. It’s really something of a tutorial to learn to play the game, but I didn’t want it to be an inconsequential or tedious bunny slope the player has to endure to get to the “real” game. The lack of access to a safe place to sleep is supposed to encourage the player to become familiar with alternatives to running back to the inn after every couple of combats. But it’s also a stage where the player characters are the weakest and have fewer options than they’ll have at any other point in the game.

The trick is to make it challenging enough that the player must learn to take advantage of the options they do have rather than brute-forcing their way through it, but not so difficult that players get frustrated.

Let’s talk about the drama star system. For those who aren’t familiar with it, what’s the idea behind it?

It’s actually an idea that’s been popular in dice-and-paper gaming for several years. I steal from the best sources. The concept is that the player has a resource that they can use to change the story to their benefit – a little bit of “game master” power that they have as a player that isn’t really a character ability. Traditionally it’s used for things like re-rolling the dice when it really counts.

In Frayed Knights, it is also used as an alternative to save-scumming: reloading a saved game and re-playing whenever don’t go as well as you like. I should probably be a fan of save-scumming as a developer (and for that matter, limited save points) because it encourages players to re-play the game and pads out the time to completion. But I thought this would be more fun.

Whenever interesting things happen in Frayed Knights – combat happens, certain discoveries, quest stages, combats, conversations, etc., you get a “drama point” that fills in one of three stars at the top of the screen. The stars go through bronze, silver, and gold colors. You can spend a fully-filled-in star of various types to change the game. You can give your characters a huge bonus in their next few actions, recover their health and endurance, and even bring them back from incapacitation. They are rewards for taking risks and taking action.

The trick is that they aren’t recovered in saved games – you start each play session back at zero again. So if you have a run of bad luck, or made a decision that you don’t think was best, you can certainly reload from a previous save like any other game. Or you can roll with the punches, and rely upon the build up of drama stars to help offset the additional challenge caused by accepting a sub-optimal result.

There’s an exception to the saved game rule, which is when you save-and-quit. You can continue exactly where you left off and keep your previous drama points.

Do you feel that the drama stars are effective enough? I know that you’re still balancing the game. In the build that I played, however, you begin with only one character who can reliably deal 6-10 points of damage per hit. In under 5 minutes, you start encountering groups of enemies who each deal that amount or more. The only available healing spell heals roughly 4-10 points of damage. That’s all very much in keeping with the story, in that your characters are a gaggle of desperate, incompetent underdogs. But you have to survive something on the order of 24 encounters before you have a prayer of bringing back a single incapacitated character through drama stars. I never felt like I could rely on the drama stars as a viable alternative to save scumming.

The drama star system is intended to supplement, rather than replace, your other in-game options. There’s no way they can or should – by themselves – offset the danger of a couple dozen encounters (though actually, combat rewards the player between 1 and 3 drama stars, depending upon its relative danger, so it will often be less than that, plus there’s a small drama point bonus when a character is incapacitated).

Let’s say there’s a lock that’s really hard for you to pick, and you may try eight times to pick it before succeeding. While spending time futzing with the lock for all those attempts, you ended up encountering two or three enemy groups. When you are done, the lock is picked, but you’ve used up a bunch of endurance and some potions fighting those optional encounters.

Now if you saved the game right before you started trying to pick the lock, you can just keep reloading the game until you successfully pick it, never having to fight those encounters. Or, alternatively, you can choose the “fool’s luck” ability – spending some points accumulated over the last few minutes of gameplay – and all but automatically pick the lock in a single try. Same effect. Or you could have faced the encounters, and used your existing drama points to reduce the exhaustion level of your healer(s). Again, you end up at somewhere around the same place, but you also get to keep the experience and loot that you gained from the fights.

That’s really what the drama stars are about – increasing options for people (like me) who really don’t want to play the save-scum game. It evens out the game difficulty. It gives random events or successes meaning again. So I guess that’s a roundabout way of answering your first question.

We’re still tweaking, of course, and we’ve found that players really use the drama stars in vastly different ways. Including using the weaker powers frequently so as not to interfere with lots of reloading saved games. That’s fine. I’m not trying to police the game. You bought it, you play it how you want.  I just want to provide options so players can do that.

Not that long ago, I remember reading a blog post of yours where you took issue with Greg Laidlaw’s comments on making RPGs more accessible to new players. Do you have plans to draw in people who aren’t already immersed in the culture of RPGs—and if so, how?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of having more accessible games out there. The fact that so many millions of players are out there playing computer and console RPGs and World of Warcraft leads me to one conclusion: We won. The D&D geeks of the 1970’s and 1980s were trend-setters. Booyah!

I’m just concerned that the industry is abandoning the rich potential of the genre in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. That leaves us with simple action-games with big, slickly-presented stories and some key player decisions. I don’t dislike this – I enjoy these kinds of games too. But it’s like pizza. I love pizza, but if I had it for every meal, I’d get pretty sick of it and crave something different.

Frayed Knights is not supposed to be some holy grail example of what all RPGs should be either. It’s a little bit of a backtrack into some old-school themes, and then it goes it’s own direction from there. My intent is to add some variety to the landscape. There’s a lot more to the genre that Diablo-style fighting combined with name actors doing dramatic readings!

Anyway, if somebody hates RPGs, Frayed Knights is not the game to win them over. But my hope is that the humor, characters, and story will draw interested players in and hold their attention long enough that they can come to grips with the mechanics and the more thoughtful pace of the game.

There is a lot of unrepentant niche humor in Frayed Knights. The characters talk openly about their relative Constitution and Dexterity stats, and one of the first things you encounter is a time-to-crate gag. Are you concerned about confusing people not already steeped in gaming culture?

Sure. But someone’s gotta make games and jokes for the niche, right? It may as well be me.

I’m thrilled that a few people are getting the “time to crate” joke. That’s one of the most obscure ones in there.

Most of the humor isn’t like that. I can guarantee that not all of it will hit the mark with any given player. Hopefully it won’t have to. Most of the humor comes from the situations and characters, and just a generally light touch with things that are normally treated so seriously.  Hopefully the more broadly humorous jokes and character-based comedy will appeal even if a few individual gags fall flat.

Quick! Pick the better RPG setting: high fantasy or sci fi.

My knee-jerk reaction: high fantasy. Mainly because it is has roots in a history and culture and tropes that players are more familiar with. You don’t have to spend too much time trying to explain knights and dragons and how a sword is supposed to work, and you can focus on the parts that make it unique.

That being said, I refer you to my pizza analogy above. Bring on the sci-fi RPG settings!

Who would win in a fight: Captain Kirk or a papier mache dragon?

I love the dragons, but there’s no way I’d bet against Captain Kirk. He made a friggin’ cannon out of crap he found in the middle of a desert.

Depiction courtesy of Mr. Barnson

Thanks for your time.

Well, that’s the end of the interview! For those of you want to hear even more of what Jay has to say, here is another interview he did recently with RPGWatch.

From the sound of it, this is going to be an extremely open-ended game with a strong emphasis on role-playing. Interestingly, they’ve decided not to include a traditional magic system in the game at all:

Will it be possible to utilize magic? If yes there will there be even not-combat spells (for exemple to utilize in “social” context or to resolve determinate quest)?
No spells.
The magic in the game is a form of energy. You can’t cast fireballs or summon monsters, but you can use it to power up some relics of the past, ranging from “power” armor to entire locations. Something like:
You carefully insert the power tube into the opening. For a long time nothing happens, but then the console lights up and a low humming sound spreads through the cave.
[lore] Recite an appropriate mantra.
Leave.
You put your hands on the controls and recite “commanding fire elementals to bless ore” mantra, performing the rite as you speak the ancient words.
The mantra doesn’t require you to understand what you are doing, but it does a good job leading you through a series of steps grouped into chapters. Some chapters require you watching the dials and adjusting the valves to achieve divine harmony; other chapters warn about dangers of overheating and tell you how to keep the fire elementals under control.
1. Complete the ritual.
2. Overheat the machine

So far, it seems like they’ve made all of their design choices quite deliberately; it will be interesting to see what effect a “no magic spell” approach has on the game’s feel.

We discussed the reaction to Avadon (his latest game), what his next move will be as a game developer, and what the heck Matt Findley could have possibly been thinking when he opened his mouth to Gamasutra. While we were at it, I also pressed him for specifics about his recent development choices, and got some details about what we can expect to see in Avadon 2.

Intrigued? Hit the jump and find out what Mr. Vogel had to say.

As you know, Avadon received a less-than-enthusiastic reaction on the RPG Codex forums. Many there evidently saw Avadon as an attempt to appeal to the casual market by streamlining player choices and ratcheting down in-game difficulty. On your blog, you responded that you have to make design choices that are “best for what you’re trying to do.” For the record, what were you trying to do with Avadon?

Make a good role-playing game, one that is accessible and easy to understand for people new to the genre but has enough gamey details and difficult bits (on harder difficulty levels) to please hardcore gamers. And I think I did a pretty good job at both tasks.

Remember, a gaming genre is only viable if it is trying to bring in new players. If most of the new RPGs are made to be scary to people who have never played them before, it is just bad for the genre.

Your games have appeared on causal game portals like BigFishGames for some time now. Are these the venues you find yourself drawing most new players from?

I honestly don’t know if we’re getting the bulk of new players, but such portals bring in a lot of new faces. The rise of gaming portals has been an enormous good for small indies. I could never get my games on, say, the shelves at Best Buy, but Direct2Drive and Wild Tangent and the like are very good to us.

You’ve stated that Avadon’s sales exceeded your expectations. Without getting into specific numbers, would you say that adopting Avadon’s more linear, class-based approach was a good business decision for Spiderweb?

I can’t point at any one decision in Avadon and say, “That was the one.” Avadon is hundreds and hundreds of discrete decisions, each of which add up to one full game that turned out pretty well. What I will say is that changing everything up every few years is a good decision. I need to keep things fresh to not burn out. I don’t think a lot of people realize how important this is.

How about from a developer sanity perspective? (It seems to me, for instance, that discrete classes would be much, much easier to balance than amorphous balls of skills and stats.)

Not too bad. Happily, Avadon has no PVP. Having to balance classes against each other is the really tough thing to do.

Is there a danger in poking your head out of the small niche you’ve carved for yourself over the many years that you’ve been making games?

Change is always dangerous, but Avadon still very firmly in the same niche we’ve always been in. Low-budget, story-rich, indie RPG. The differences between Avadon and, say, Geneforge is really not that large.

You’ve made an entire career out of designing turn-based RPGs. I’m curious to get your take on the recent Matt Lindley interview scandal. (Is “scandal” the right word? Maybe “controversy.” Anyway.) Did all of those old turn-based RPGs really want to be action games at their heart?

The best way to get attention for your product/blog/whatever is to say outrageous things. Everyone has done it. I have done it. He was putting down the types of games he’s not writing and building up the sort of game he is writing. It’s marketing.

Saying turn-based games are outdated is kind of silly. I mean, people still play Chess, right? Go? Settlers of Catan? Turn-based games are less popular than they used to be, but they will always be a thing.

Have you ever thought about doing a real-time RPG?

Occasionally, but that is a little bit outside both my programming skills and our established niche. Maybe someday, but not for a long time.

Just a few days ago, you mentioned on your blog that you’ve made enough sales to enable you to create Avadon 2. Is Avadon 2 in development?

Not yet. We’re working on the first Avernum rewrite right now. Avadon 2 is next year.

What changes are you planning to make to Avernum 1 in the remake? Will there be substantial changes to the dialog, quests and/or in-game systems, or is it mostly going to be a graphics and interface overhaul?

Everything. We are spending months and doing major changes. To the world, to the storyline, to the game system, to the interface. It will be a major revamp. We aren’t half-assing it, and we hope to provide screenshots and details soon.

However, I want to make one thing very clear. It will still be Avernum. It will have the same story and characters and towns. There is still an outdoors that is huge but separate from the cities. I want to make sure that the things people love about the series are still there.

What will change between Avadon and Avadon 2?

The only thing I’m sure of is that Avadon 2 will have a much flashier demo. That is my main regret about the first Avadon.

Are you sticking to your guns on health regeneration and auto-resurrection of fallen comrades?

Absolutely, without question.

How about outdoor exploration?

Nope. It just doesn’t fit the story. Some sorts of storylines support a big, expansive outdoors to wander around in. (Fallout 3. Elder Scrolls.) Other stories are best served with individual, highly-detailed areas. (Dragon Age: Origins. Avadon.)

If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that you’ve chosen to use detailed indoor environments because of the game’s focus on factional conflict/political intrigue. What would outdoor environments detract from a game like this?

To put it simply, the outdoors isn’t where the game is. If a game is about exploration and travel (and I really enjoy such games), it needs a big outdoors. If the game is about politics and intrigue, it needs to be where the politics and intrigue are. This will not, largely, be in a huge, swooping outdoors.

Is it true that you are not cool anymore?

There has never been a millisecond in which I was cool.

And if so, have you considered making a pile of money in your backyard and setting it on fire?

I try it to do it every year. I just keep failing.

There are some detractors out there who dismiss Legerdemain because it lacks certain roguelike features – the world is not randomly generated, for instance, and instead of permadeath the game has a hybrid system that relies on the use of inns.

…

The story in Legerdemain is pretty non-linear. You are often free to choose where you’d like to go next, and many of the game’s obstacles can be tackled in different order. There’s also a bit of sandbox play depending on how you want your character to develop, so that one player may spend stretches of time hunting or gathering mushrooms while another focuses on studying spells. That being said, the game does have a definite ending, and even though the plot spends plenty of time bifurcating and forking around it all gets drawn up into a single conclusion. There aren’t too many side quests, per se, everything in there is designed to fit in such a way that it all makes sense by the time you reach the ending.

Here is a video showing some gameplay:

According to Jerpe, the game features 200 hours(!) of play time. The unicode version is free to download; however, there is also a modestly priced version with both tiles (i.e. graphics that aren’t just text) and a clue book.

My name is Steven Peeler. I do all of the design, programming, and business stuff here at Soldak.

It’s not really that a Diablo type game attract me more than something like a turn-based RPG, it’s that I feel that the main features of our games that we have created so far work better as action RPGs. For example, an enemy covenant in Depths of Peril raiding your covenant or Demons attacking your town in Din’s Curse are much more intense when everything is real-time and you can actually see everything because of the isometric camera position.

Yes, this is definitely one of the things that we have purposely changed in Din’s Curse and Depths of Peril. In most games when an NPC says solve this quest quick or we will all die, it really means nothing and the player knows it. There isn’t any emotional impact when everyone is 100% sure that the threat is a bluff. Well in DC and DoP there are no bluffs. When an NPC tells the player that an Orc uprising is planning on attacking the town, that’s really what he means. If nothing is done to stop them they will eventually attack the town and at least attempt to kill everyone. Once players realize that the threats are real, they feel actual pressure to stop that Orc uprising in time. Well that or they will feel the intensity of trying to quell an Orc town attack before everyone dies.

Basically in the base game of Din’s Curse the world was very dynamic. The monsters, the environment, and the quests all evolve based on interactions with everything else. Now with the Demon War expansion the NPCs are also very dynamic which matches the rest of the game much better.

The NPCs now have money, happiness, and have relationships with each other. This helps the NPCs impact and interact with the world a lot better. Let me give you an example that touches on all of these things. Gregor is superstitious so he tends to gamble more than he should. Eventually he runs up a sizeable debt gambling and is having trouble affording food. Luckily the vendors, other NPCs, and player keeps him fed enough to not starve to death. However, starving, always in debt, and gambling losses makes him really unhappy. Eventually he resorts to stealing and taking bribes from monsters to sabotage the town. Since the player tracked down the source of these problems, the townspeople are quite pissed at poor Gregor and finally banish him from the town. The cool thing about this scenario is it is just one of many possibilities that can happen, it isn’t just a set script that happens, and the player has many chances to do something about it. He can help Gregor with food. He can donate money to him. He can even kill him.

This actually started with Depths of Peril. In DoP, the core feature is the covenants that trade with one another, go to war, and eventually raid each other to attempt to wipe out their rivals to become the supreme covenant of Jorvik. All of this is naturally very dynamic. Once we had this in place and working it felt a little strange to have a static story line especially once your enemy covenants could compete with you and solve some of the quests. Ultimately the finally version of Depths of Peril had a small normal story line, but most of it is dynamic. With Din’s Curse we have followed along the same path (minus the covenants), but we have expanded greatly on the idea.

So the focus on dynamic enemies in Depths of Peril was originally an AI feature that expanded to become a storyline-generating feature as well?

Yeah pretty much. One of the nice things about being an indie is that I don’t have to write a huge design document at the beginning of the development cycle. Instead I can start with some solid ideas and iterate from there. Personally I call this exploring. I’m usually pretty accurate, but sometimes cool ideas just don’t work in practice and sometimes you don’t think of the awesome ideas that really make your game standout until you are halfway through the project because they build on other ideas.

What’s next for Soldak? Will you make another action RPG, or are you going to branch out?

We are still too early in the process of the next game to really say anything yet. Although, one of these days I’m pretty sure we will branch out some more. A turn based RPG, a more strategy focused game, a sci-fi game, or any number of other things are all possibilities.

Thanks for your time.

For anyone curious to know more, you can read my review of Din’s Curse right here.

Unlike a lot of other RPGs, you don’t gain XP from killing things – you get skill points from completing objectives, which means that the player can go about things in any way that completes the task, rather than have to kill everything that moves. These objectives are both reoccurring and also reactive to events that have been set off by the player’s actions. In a lot of cases, avoiding combat or using the zombies against opponents is a better strategy than going in guns blazing. Reaching certain key milestones (like recruiting a certain number of strangers to your shelter) or making critical decisions in your role as a leader can unlock choices of new perks for your character. We definitely want to encourage players to play the way they want rather than grind for success.

Check out the full interview here. Hat tip to RPGWatch for the story.

Rather than simply post a rant, however, I decided to put the question to a handful of other indie RPG developers:

Some designers have demonized narrative as an inherently limiting and unnecessary distraction from the emergent storytelling arising out of pure gameplay. Why have narrative in games?

As you might expect, I received a variety of interesting and thoughtful responses:

Jeff Vogel: Someone is demonizing narrative? Really? That seems odd.

Emergent gameplay is great, if you can get it. It is a very difficult thing to do. But storytelling, whatever the medium, is one of the oldest and most fundamental human activities. Human brains are naturally receptive to telling and being told stories. As long as that is true, people will use games to tell stories.

Thomas Riegsecker: Narrative is certainly not required for all games, and in some cases in can be unnecessary baggage for the player. When it comes to role-playing games, one world think that a strong narrative is an absolute requirement. However, countless variations of Rogue shows that you can have a marvelous role-playing experience with little more than a single sentence explaining the goal. Likewise, many successful mainstream RPGs rely on nothing more than the overused plot of “Kill the powerful bad guy”, and any narrative in between the start and end of the game is really unnecessary.

However, narrative can be exceptionally rewarding as well. It can turn a generic role-playing game into a unforgettable one if done correctly. Certainly, when someone fondly remembers an RPG that they enjoyed playing years ago, it is often the story they remember and not the hours of level grinding and monster killing. Likewise, narration can guide the player through a seemingly immense world, preventing that unwelcome feeling of “I don’t know what I should be doing now”. Overall, it really is a player preference. As a developer, I need to find that balance between not enough narrative and too much narrative that will give a rewarding role-playing experience to as many potential customers as possible.

Amanda Fitch: I don’t think narrative is limiting and unnecessary, but if it is presented in manner which takes the player out of the game, then yes, it isn’t any fun.

Jay Barnson: I think I may be one of those demonizers. Sorry ’bout that. Didn’t mean to give any more ammunition to the haters.

Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.

Nevertheless, I love a good story in games. It’s a big part of why I’m such a fan of RPGs – I love the stories. The human brain is hard-wired to tune into stories. And I think even a mediocre story is more fun when you get to live it through a game. So in spite interactivity and narrative being something of a shotgun marriage, it works. The big question is how to make it work better. The almost universal approach today is to reach some compromise between the two, and keep trying to find a happier medium that works best for each game. Another, much more challenging approach, would be to rig the game mechanics to encourage adherence to more dramatic narrative formulas. Score bonus points for making dramatically interesting mistakes or something. And interactively build the narrative around player actions. We see glimmers of that in the Left 4 Dead series, where the AI engine seems to spawn enemies more based on the rhythm of the game than on location.

It’s not an easy blend. Narrative and gameplay are always going to have contradictory goals and tend to inhibit each other. But I also feel that the blend of contradictory elements is often greater than a sum of its parts.

[EDIT: We have a late entry! Added below.]

Vince D. Weller: Narrative is a good feature. I doubt that there are many people who’d tell you that they don’t like a good story in their games, so the problem isn’t that narrative is some kinda outdated thing of the past that gets in the way of emergent gameplay (I’ve yet to see a game that actually delivers it, but that’s a different story), but that like any other feature it can suck for one reason or the other. A story can be bad. A story can be uninspiring. A story can fail to grab the player and make him care (Alpha Protocol). A story can suffocate the player (Witcher, many Bioware games). Much like anything else, good story-telling is a talent. Not everyone can tell a good story, especially in a video game format. If you can’t, then it’s better to skip the narrative and focus on features that can replace it, like the sandbox elements, for example. If you can, then it won’t take much effort to make the story flexible enough to support decision-making and it would enhance your game. Simple as that.

As for narrative being limiting when it comes to emergent gameplay, I disagree. There are many ways to craft a story that doesn’t force the player to move along a pre-determined and very narrow path, but lets the player make decisions and craft his or her own story within the story arc. I can tell you what these ways are, but it’s boring, so let me throw stones at Jay instead:

“Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.”

The amount of drama depends entirely on the story-teller and the paths he creates for the player. If there is a path that can be described as the optimal path to victory, then yes, it’s boring and uninspiring, but only because the story-teller has failed. That’s what consequences of your actions are for. By applying consequences to the hero’s actions you can infuse the story with as much drama as you need and make the “optimal path to victory” the “hero does in the end” path, should you so desire, or “the hero fucks everything up, so things now are way worse than before, so thanks a lot, you fucking douchebag” path, not to mention the much desired “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” path where the seemingly optimal, no-brainer options lead to the hero slowly become the villain, without even realizing it. I assume that the moment when the player realizes what his hero has become would be quite precious.

So, the moral of this story is that choices without consequences don’t mean much and it’s the consequences that are the link between the traditional storytelling and emergent gameplay.