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.

Here’s that trailer:

The premise of the game:

Ghosts and evil spirits begin to appear all over town, corresponding with the impending reincarnation of a transdimensional demon. A group of teens, armed with weapons found in their homes and assisted by spirits of their ancestors or former residents of their homes, set out to prevent the rise of this evil being.

According to Banov, the demo contains about 30 minutes of gameplay. The demo will only be online until June 25, so if you’re curious to try it out, get the demo now. It’s available here.

Dubloon is a jRPG developed by Banov that sports a pirate theme, tile-based movement, and visible, wandering enemy encounters. Featuring an odd mix of inspired design decisions and sloppy implementation, Dubloon is the first RPG I can recall having played where the system I played it on made a huge difference in my experience of the game.

In my mind, there are two ways to do a good pirate RPG. One would be to make the game somewhat realistic, modeling factions and events on the foibles of pirates that actually existed (e.g. bandits such as the Barbary Corsairs of North Africa, privateers like the American boats that hunted British ships during the American Revolution, or government-sponsored pirates like Sir Francis Drake of Britain, who terrorized the Spanish Armada in the 1500s). The other way to do it would be to make the game silly and whimsical, treating piracy like the caricature it has largely become in present-day internet culture.

Dubloon opts for the second route. It tells a story that is both silly and, frankly, pretty slapdash. Consider the opening sequence: you start the game without a crew, somehow managing to operate a vessel single-handedly, sail right up to a Navy ship in the dead of night, board the thing, kill a few sailors and (inevitably) get captured. The Navy officers decide to throw you in jail rather than execute you on the spot. Naturally, you escape. The Navy then pursues you for about ten steps and gives up when you duck into some nearby bushes.

These sorts of inexplicable events occur consistently throughout the story. (Spoilers follow.) One character is a tough, take-charge woman who acts as the captain of a crew you belong to. At one point, out of nowhere, she asks for a vote that your character (who is as warm and friendly as a parking meter, and half as chatty) be appointed captain. She gives no reason for this move, and no one asks for any. And everyone enthusiastically votes for him. Why? Who cares! You get to be a pirate captain!

Another character has a father acting as a pirate double-agent within the Navy. (Don’t ask.) The informant father is run through right in front of his eyes, crumpling up and soaking in a pool of his own blood like crackers in a bowl of tomato bisque. And what does this character have to say about it? That’s right: nothing at all! Oh, sure, he says to his pet monkey that they’d better escape. And then he gives your other characters some weirdly detached exposition about it afterwards. He talks about it like it’s just part of a list of equally relevant information.  “My name’s Riley! My dad was a pirate informant! He just got killed! I have a monkey who travels with me!” A good while later, once you run into the murderer again, he finally decides it’s time to be upset about that whole dad dying thing. But his heart still isn’t in it. It’s like Banov wasn’t paying him enough to make the character care about delivering his dialog convincingly.

One thing I really like about Dubloon is the magic system. It’s actually a pretty standard RPG magic system, except that you don’t cast spells with magic points. Instead, your characters have alcohol levels. The alcohol levels go down when your characters use spells, and can be replenished by drinking hard liquor. As your characters level up, their alcohol levels increase. It’s never stated explicitly, but I like to think that your characters just keep getting more and more drunk as the story goes on. It would certainly explain some of their erratic behavior.

As much as Dubloon tries to be about pirates, I can’t help but feel that it could have gone further. Sure, there’s the Navy, and sea monsters, and a smattering of other pirates, and there’s that time you beat up a mermaid, but most enemies you fight have nothing to do with anything. You’ll quickly find yourself fending off animated suits of armor, bugs, wolves, electrified moles, mushrooms, evil bunnies, flying hippos, and things that look like Alf. There’s very little in the way of exploring the high seas, searching for buried treasure. There’s no first mate. There’s no boarding of enemy ships. There’s no making people walk the plank. I feel more like a pirate on Talk Like a Pirate Day than I do while playing Dubloon.

Still, Banov has gone out of his way to make the experience of playing Dubloon a pleasant one. Your characters level up very quickly, enemy encounters are seldom all that difficult, and the game is generous with save points and “song chests” (objects which restore your party’s hit points and alcohol levels to full). I’d be lying if I denied having fun playing this.

Combat is mostly standard issue, active-time combat of the Final Fantasy variety, but occasionally—typically during boss fights—you’ll get little mini-games to “defuse” deadly attacks before they hit your party. By the same token, you can pick up special “battle items,” like shake bombs, which require a little mini-game to charge up a special attack. The mini-games are cute, and help add excitement to some of the battles. By the end of the game, however, both you and your enemies will have such high speed stats that all combat encounters will progress at a satisfyingly frenetic pace, making even regular battles a test of reflexes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXL6CapLJbM

Outside of combat, the things that really make Dubloon stand out are the elements Banov lifts from Zelda games. It’s hard not to be reminded of Zelda: A Link to the Past when you have to use bombs to blast through weak walls, dig up hidden items with a shovel, or trigger switches to toggle colored blocks separating portions of different rooms in a dungeon. The Zelda elements may not be original, but they are nonetheless a welcome addition that help keep Dubloon from feeling too much like a mechanical jRPG.

The controls, however, would have been best left as standard jRPG buttons. Dubloon’s control scheme is clearly designed for a mouse, and becomes horribly clunky when playing on a laptop. Actions you’re expected to perform over and over (such as using healing items, keys and bombs) require you to drag-and-drop, which can be somewhat awkward with a touch pad. Wandering enemies can (and will) attack you in the middle of performing these tasks, which makes the unwieldy controls doubly annoying.

Moving with the mouse is even worse. Your character generally sort of moves in the direction of the cursor while you keep the left mouse button held down, but it’s not coded very well. You will frequently find your character hung up on walls because the game can’t pick a second direction for your character to move in that also heads toward the cursor, and getting your character to exit the screen is sometimes actually impossible because the game won’t allow your cursor past the edge of the screen. Thankfully, there is a keyboard movement alternative that lacks these weird snafus.

There is no keyboard control for running, however, which seems like an obvious oversight. To run, you must hold down the right mouse button. Playing on my netbook, I found this mechanism unresponsive—I often had to right-click three or four times before my character finally decided to start running.

While we’re on the topic of the controls, I have to mention the sailing sequences. You get a ship relatively early on in the game, but you aren’t allowed to explore with your ship directly. Rather, you click an island on your map and proceed through a side-scrolling shooter sequence against Navy ships, sharks, conch-spraying giant pufferfish, and fire-breathing lagoon monsters. Forget exploring the high seas. Apparently, it’s all pirates can do to move in a straight line and not get sunk.

The controls in these sailing sequences are miserably bad. Left-click to fire a cannonball, right-click to move a short ways towards the mouse cursor. It’s playable (albeit uncomfortable) if you happen to have a mouse and you just keep the left and right mouse buttons held down the entire time. Unfortunately, my netbook allows only one mouse button to be clicked at a time, which makes this already-clunky control scheme nearly impossible to use.

For reasons known only to him, Banov chose to have one of the boss battles take place using this engine. I would imagine he did it because ship-to-ship battles are an awesome idea. Unfortunately, the actual experience of playing through this is something like trying to navigate a bullet hell shooter by standing over your ship and trying to pull it around with a three-foot length of string.

The graphics are quite unattractive for the most part, though Banov has thrown in some neat visual effects here and there (most notably the impressive water-rippling effect that kicks off combat). The soundtrack by Prophecy features some good tracks, though it lacks a professional touch. A number of tracks don’t loop properly, many are regrettably short, and all of them have a distinctly MIDI sound to them.

Dubloon runs smoothly on my desktop computer. Playing on my netbook, however, Dubloon runs slowly, particularly when walking around the larger maps. This strikes me as odd for a low-res, tile-based game. Then again, the performance might just be a limitation of Game Maker.

The Verdict: 3/5. Dubloon is a cute jRPG with fresh ideas and surprisingly frenetic combat. On the other hand, it may run slowly on low-end computers, the control scheme is not particularly good, and the story is pretty half-baked. Still, this is probably the only RPG you will ever get to play where you beat up a mermaid—that has to count for something.

Meanwhile, I’ve received an email from Heather Albano of Choice of Games, who has recently released Choice of Broadsides, a “swashbuckling naval adventure.” The way she describes it, CoB is a text-based game with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style interface, only different. Heather writes:

Normal CYOA stories cause the plot to “fork” at every decision point; as a result, the story can’t have more than half a dozen decision points.  (If each decision point has about four options, then six decision points = 4096 pages!)

With stats, we can craft a new kind of multiple-choice game, where your decisions can change your character instead of (immediately) forking the plot. In later vignettes, some branches may open while others close based on your earlier roleplaying choices; ultimately, this determines which ending you get.

The game is available for free on their website, and on the iPhone as well.