Brutal Gamer Interviews Arcen Games

[cupogoodness]

Originally posted: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/05/brutal-gamer-interviews-arcen-games.html

Brutal Gamer's Amy Nelson followed up her Tidalis review by interviewing us on all things Arcen and indie games. We discuss several topics including potential consoles/handheld devices we've considered for our games, as well as our selling points for A Valley Without Wind.

Here's one of the questions and responses from the piece:

"AI War: Fleet Command is a RTS, Tidalis is a puzzle game, and A Valley Without Wind is an action adventure. You seem to be hitting on all the popular genres. What do you have in store for us next?

Chris: Well, these are the genres that I have a lot of personal interest in — my goal was to never be thought of us “just a strategy game developer.”  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I have broader interests than just strategy games, and part of the freedom of being an indie is getting to pursue your interests.  I think we’re going to be busy with AVWW, and expansions and free DLC for both it and AI War for another year or two — ideally, anyway.  Beyond that it’s hard to say with any clarity, but we’ve got a lot of game designs floating around the team.  If there’s one thing we never have a shortage of, it’s ideas!  I think perhaps the most popular next project idea at the moment is a very streamlined turn-based tactics game built partly on the AVWW engine."

And here's a portion specifically relating to AVWW:

"Your newest game, A Valley Without Wind, is scheduled for release in October of this year. What can you tell us about the game, and why should we buy it?

[Zhaine]

Cool interview, nice to get an idea where you guys are coming

(edit: uh, I meant where you guys are coming from, whops)

[x4000]

Glad you like it!

[Teal_Blue]

   Soooooo....... 'What' is this new project...? Do you have a name, or something you can talk about?

-Teal




re:

          " I think perhaps the most popular next project idea at the moment is a very streamlined turn-based tactics game built partly on the AVWW engine."

-Chris Park

[x4000]

Nothing at all concrete, sorry! That's probably two years out, anyhow. Maybe sooner, but avww and ai war are going to take up most of that time. There's no story there yet, just a bunch of ideas that keith and I kick around every so often. I'm a big fan of final fantasy tactics, and he's a big fan of brigandine, if that gives you any insight.

[zoutzakje]

hehe I'm a big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics games too. I still reguarly play one of them just to try to clear a few more quests.

[x4000]

Yeah, me too on FFTA in particular.  FFTA2 grabbed me less, but was more streamlined.  The only thing that bugs me about those two games is that the battle music is always the same in almost every battle, and loops until I want to scream.  It's good music, but I've heard it for dozens of hours, which is way too much!

It looks like the original FFT is coming out on iPhone this summer, and I'm looking forward to that.  In the meantime, I just discovered Dofus Battles, which is sort of similar and really charming.

[Nalgas]

FFTA in particular

If you can make something that's like FFTA but the interface is less tedious and frustrating, I will be happy.  I could never get into those games no matter how many times I tried, because it was just so much work to get anything done.  It didn't help that the setting for the tutorial was way more interesting to me than the real game world.

I've always found stuff like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem to be much more playable but still not perfect.  I think I've been spoiled by Heroes of Might and Magic and particularly the recent King's Bounty remake/series, which is awesome and frequently on sale so cheap that it's almost criminal.  They can't be making any money off it when it's going for $1, and not much when the sequel is all of $10, but apparently it's somehow enough to keep them making sequels/expansions, which is ok with me.

[x4000]

FFTA is definitely more tedious than I would want to make our game. Advance Wars I also enjoyed, but something about it was less fun to me -- it's more of a strategy game / tactics mix, in a way I didn't prefer, I guess. It was still fun, though. Clash of Heroes was pretty fun, and certainly clever, but I felt like it got really repetitive in it's chapter structure and like it wasnt progressig difficulty or tactics fast enough for me. Also very much worth playing, but I think of it as a puzzle game first and foremost.

[Nalgas]

Advance Wars I also enjoyed, but something about it was less fun to me -- it's more of a strategy game / tactics mix, in a way I didn't prefer, I guess.

Yeah, I actually kind of agree with that.  It's one of those things that in theory I would enjoy a lot, but in practice I've never finished any of them.  I made it farther than in FFTA, though, just because the process of actually playing it is easier to get into.  It seems like there's a lot more interesting stuff going on in FFTA, except it's hidden behind 75 button presses per turn.

[x4000]

The number of button presses per turn in FFTA is somewhat high, but if you stick it out long enough to get familiar with it, it's not really that bad -- you start being able to do it in about four presses per turn when you know the ranges of all your attacks, and can judge the damage it will do to each enemy better.  Most of those button presses come from having to check each enemy and each attack to see what will be ideal.

On the flip side, the two things that annoyed me the most about FFTA were that the same stupid music track plays for most of the battles (good track, but played to mind-sloughing numbness) and that the system for equipping characters and so on is so complicated.  Not that it's all that hard, but you wind up going through hundreds of menu button presses between each battle to make sure that everyone is equipped the way you want and no AP are being wasted on fully-complete equipment, and so forth.  I like customizing the characters a lot, but it's done with such frequency and for so many characters that it feels like a grind.

[Nalgas]

I think many games like that, Advance Wars a bit less so, would benefit a lot from a larger screen so you could see more info at once instead of having to cycle through tons of separate screens.  Even if the gameplay mechanics and underlying systems are fine, there's only so much you can do with half a dozen buttons and a 240x160 screen when you have that much complexity to manage.

[x4000]

Yeah, that's probably part of it at least.  I think that there should have been a different buildup all together, though.  In FFTA in particular, the rate at which you get new equipment and new characters is too fast -- you wind up with too many things to manage that don't really matter. 

On the other hand, the rate at which you get meaningful new tactical options in battle is too slow, so that gets repetitive.  So there's this odd mix of kind of clutching at new items hoping that they will give you useful new skills to learn, when mostly you'll wind up leaning that stuff "just because" and then you'll never actually use it.  So there's quite a bit of fairly useless fiddling around there, where I'm equipping items to learn abilities that I'll never need, just to have some feeling of progression (and I think that the number of abilities your character knows also determines when they can get to the higher-level classes, so that is progressing things but just in a very menu-driven fiddly way).

I think that if all my choices in that game were more meaningful, that would really solve most of my complaints with it.  When I'm trying to learn an ability like counter-attack on a white monk, that's something that's very exciting.  Although, only somewhat because the item gives that ability immediately, and I'm then just putting in the time tax in order to keep that ability when I later switch equipment.  I'm  not sure if that's smart or stupid from a game design standpoint, honestly -- on the one hand, you're giving players the goodies up front without holding it over their head; on the other hand, you then make them tied to one item in a limited number of slots for a while after that, which feels like a penalty with very little reward at the end of it.  It would feel more rewarding to only get the ability after learning it off the item, but that might also feel less fun in other senses.

And THAT largely comes around to the fact that you've got very few tactical options with each character at the start, and so you really rely on items to give them any useful abilities at all.  And even then, you wind up with just a few things.  The monk has various shaped attacks, and so does the dragoon, but the characters move so slowly and there are so few of said shaped attacks that it's rare to really get to use them well.  All the magic spells that are directed -- fire, lightning, etc -- all work basically identically, hitting the same sort of range.  The only reason to choose one over another is based on monster immunities or susceptibilities, which involves checking each one against each monster.  When it comes to the earth mage, all those things hit every monster equally, and the amount of damage done is on some formula that I can't figure out; random, I guess.  When it comes to the time mage, almost none of that stuff works except on monsters that you don't need to use it on, as per usual in FF games.  When it comes to the white mage, they are useless in every way except for healing, and even that is something that is brain-dead simple: choose the highest heal spell you have, since you'll only want to be healing when someone is really hurt, since your white mage has such limited magic points.  The fencer is actually kind of an interesting class, and they have some interesting abilities, but about half are useless.  Archers are useful for range, but most of their abilities like focus really don't seem worth it compared to using another class in most cases.  Gunmen seem pathetically weak and prone to missing.  Animists seem to have the collection of all the useless "gray" spells from FF6, plus some new ones.  A couple are quirky enough to be useful in some situations, but not broadly enough so that I'm usually wanting to choose them.  Blue mages are very interesting, but using them is a bit grindy as again per usual (Strago in FF6, etc).

Maybe that's not a ringing endorsement of the game, but I really liked a lot of the concepts of what they were trying to do.  And the game is balanced, in a lot of senses -- it's just that the way they chose to balance the game makes a minority of abilities useful at all, and the rest of them completely trash.  And too many of the abilities are too similar to one another.  With an awesome grid layout like they have in those games, this is the perfect opportunity to actually make a lot more interesting shaped attacks of all sorts, to do things with position adjustments, to do things with blocking, and so on.  But they barely scratched into any of those concepts from what I can tell.

A lot of those complaints are what prompt me to want to make a tactics game like that, but actually working the way I want.  On Keith's side, he is absolutely enamored of Brigandine despite his list of faults with it, and he wants to do something very much like that but with the interface/gameplay streamlined and the faults smoothed out.  And for my part, a lot of the ideas I had based on playing FFT and FFTA and being somewhat enthused are going to be built into AVWW if I can.  I think a lot of the ideas I have can also work in action-adventure gameplay, and can give the whole experience a bit more of a tactical feel than usual for that genre.  And we have some other AVWW surprises that are tactics-related in store, but I'm not quite ready to share those yet.

[Nalgas]

I think that if all my choices in that game were more meaningful, that would really solve most of my complaints with it.  When I'm trying to learn an ability like counter-attack on a white monk, that's something that's very exciting.  Although, only somewhat because the item gives that ability immediately, and I'm then just putting in the time tax in order to keep that ability when I later switch equipment.  I'm  not sure if that's smart or stupid from a game design standpoint, honestly -- on the one hand, you're giving players the goodies up front without holding it over their head; on the other hand, you then make them tied to one item in a limited number of slots for a while after that, which feels like a penalty with very little reward at the end of it.  It would feel more rewarding to only get the ability after learning it off the item, but that might also feel less fun in other senses.

I'm not really sure which of those is better or worse, since they both obviously have their good and bad sides.  I can think of a couple possible ways of handling it differently that might be interesting.

One is that the equipment that you learn the skill from grants you a weaker version of it immediately/while you're wearing it, and the permanent version you eventually learn from it is more effective/powerful/whatever, so you do get some sort of immediate benefit, but you're earning more than just the right to not lose it when you take off the hat/belt/sword/etc.

Another is to grant the more powerful version directly from the equipment itself, and then (relatively quickly) learning a weaker version that you can keep using after removing it.  That weaker version can then possibly be improved (either to the same power as the original, or possibly better), whether by continuing to wear the equipment longer or using the ability or the character leveling up or whatever makes sense in the context of the rest of the game.  Different variations on that idea give a lot of options for how it would ultimately work in a game, which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader, because the more I think about it, the more a lot of them seem interesting from a conceptual point of view but brutally heavy on micromanagement if you were to actually have to play a game with them, at least one with any significant number of characters.  Heh.

Maybe that's not a ringing endorsement of the game, but I really liked a lot of the concepts of what they were trying to do.  And the game is balanced, in a lot of senses -- it's just that the way they chose to balance the game makes a minority of abilities useful at all, and the rest of them completely trash.  And too many of the abilities are too similar to one another.  With an awesome grid layout like they have in those games, this is the perfect opportunity to actually make a lot more interesting shaped attacks of all sorts, to do things with position adjustments, to do things with blocking, and so on.  But they barely scratched into any of those concepts from what I can tell.

Yeah, that is sort of funny to basically say, "Look how awful this game is.  Isn't it great?"  I come up with lists of complaints like that for things I like, too, though.  Many, many games in that genre don't take much advantage of those specific things you mention, which is a shame.  Something like King's Bounty does do some interesting things with movement/positioning and a little bit with different shapes/ranges/etc. for attacks, which lets you do things like turn a fight that would normally kill half your army into a lossless victory if you're clever enough, but not really any of the fun stuff you'd be able to do if it had things like blocking.

There are a lot of possibilities for what could be done in a game like that by taking an "add features that are interesting, fun, and make sense" approach like you have a tendency to, instead of the usual "it wouldn't occur to us to change that, because that's how this genre has always worked"...

[x4000]

One is that the equipment that you learn the skill from grants you a weaker version of it immediately/while you're wearing it, and the permanent version you eventually learn from it is more effective/powerful/whatever, so you do get some sort of immediate benefit, but you're earning more than just the right to not lose it when you take off the hat/belt/sword/etc.

Ooh, that's perfect!  Immediate small reward, and later larger reward.  That's definitely how I'd handle that if I were writing the next version of FFTA.

There are a lot of possibilities for what could be done in a game like that by taking an "add features that are interesting, fun, and make sense" approach like you have a tendency to, instead of the usual "it wouldn't occur to us to change that, because that's how this genre has always worked"...

Yeah, thanks for that.   I'm not much a fan of genre conventions, as you can tell.  Except when they actually do make sense; but as I go, I wind up questioning everything and why it's there.  If there's not some actual solid reason, some positive effect on the player, then it has to go.