Grognard Trailer! And Ruminations On The Throughline From All Our Past Games.

[x4000]

Original: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2014/04/launch-trailer-for-tlf-and-ruminations.html

From the creators of AI War: Fleet Command comes an all-new grand strategy title with turn-based tactical combat, set in a deep simulation of an entire solar system and its billions of inhabitants. You are the last of a murdered race, determined to unify or destroy the 8 others.  But you must work from the shadows, using superior technology -- bring your cape and cowl. 

Check out its game page for details, or swing by the forums for the game.  This is Arcen's largest title ever, and we're really excited to share it with folks.

Alpha Information! Private alpha testing with players is currently in progress, and we will be adding more players throughout the coming weeks leading up to release.  If you're interested in signing up, please see this forum post.

The Last Federation really is a milestone for me as a designer.  This isn't something that I designed all by myself by any stretch.  Josh Knapp was instrumental, and Keith LaMothe also helped enormously along the way.  And of course there's been tons of feedback from our many, many alpha testers (up to 160 as of tonight), all of which helps to shape the game.  With a game the scope of TLF, it really does "take a village," to use the cliche, and it's not any one person's sole accomplishment.

That caveat out of the way, for me personally this game really does bring together pretty much everything I've been trying to do as a game designer since I started working on "Alden Ridge" in 2008 (which later became the 2013 release Shattered Haven).  How's that, exactly?  Well:

1. With Shattered Haven, I really wanted to create a sense of story and atmosphere and place.  I wanted there to be some emotional connection to what was going on.  That game was by far our most successful at emotional storytelling (particularly if you play all the way through the game), but TLF also gets at that same sort of itch for me.  There's a lot of personality to the various races and characters here (a lot of that written by Erik Johnson, and a lot by me), and that really gives me the sense of living characters more than any titles of ours beyond Shattered Haven and Tidalis.

2. With AI War, I've remarked in the past that originally that started out as a turn-based game in space.  Kind of like what TLF morphed into, actually, except that I couldn't figure out how to make it work back in 2009.  So AI War became realtime, and for the sake of that game, I'm glad it did.  But there were a lot of ideas that I tried and then shed with AI War, including the concept of true "squadrons" of ships, of mobile flagships that deployed said squadrons, and so on.  TLF, interestingly, picks up pretty much all of those ideas, plus a ton more, and (in my opinion) executes on them really well.

AI War and TLF are kind of two sides of a coin to me; they each do things that the other does not, and in fact TLF does a lot of the things that the AI War engine specifically cannot handle because of the nature of its design.  As an example, having politics and multiple true factions just doesn't work in AI War, but it's a cornerstone of TLF.  For another, having more realistic physics for the ships and shots just doesn't work with a game with the insane unit counts that AI War has.  TLF has more modest unit counts during each battle, although they are still very sizeable.

3. Tidalis wasn't a game I was lead designer on (that was my friend Lars Bull), so I don't count that one here.

4. A Valley Without Wind originally was something where I wanted to create a procedurally-generated world where you could be kind of a Link-like (from The Legend of Zelda) character running around and doing things.  I wanted to have procedural stories develop, and really get a sense of meaningful places out of procedural code.  AI War accomplished the latter already, so I thought I could do that.

We succeeded in a lot of things with Valley 1, but the procedural storytelling was not one of them.  But with TLF, that is something that I really get the sense of very strongly.  And with added quests in TLF -- another mechanic I wanted in Valley 1, but never could get to work a way I was happy with -- the game goes even further in that direction.

5. Also with Valley 1, it was essentially a SHMUP mixed with a sidescrolling platformer.  TLF went through a phase where its combat was pure SHMUP (its combat went through phases where it was a lot of things, to be frank), but even though that is no longer the case, the influences carry forward into the turn-based combat that did result.in TLF.  Each combat iteration that TLF went through actually left a permanent mark on the game, and I don't think we would have the current (awesome) combat model had we not gone through all the intervening steps.

Anyhow, by having some SHMUP-like elements in a turn-based combat model, TLF finally achieves another thing that I tried for years to do with AI War, but never could: create proper "terrain" in outer space.  Having to navigate through the shifting mazes of bullets in TLF is endlessly entertaining for me, and really has a lot of tactical though to it what with having to manage your power levels, choose whether or not to use special abilities on a given turn, and decide whether to get into ideal firing position or ideal don't-hurt-me position.

I tried a whole ton of things with AI War in an attempt to create that sort of feeling, and in TLF I found that feeling completely by accident!  Who knew that making a turn-based tactical SHMUP would be the answer to that problem.  It would not have occurred to me, but that sort of revelation is one of the many things I love about iterative design: you arrive somewhere awesome that you wanted to get to, but didn't know the precise address of to begin with.

6. Valley 2 was really a refinement of Valley 1 in a lot of respects, although it did switch away from being a SHMUP to instead being a Contra-like.  But a big (and perhaps overlooked) thing that we really experimented with in that game was a heavy blend of both procedural and hand-crafted content.  The result of that was something that I really loved, although it was something that I felt like we had only scratched the surface of.

With TLF, we take those concepts to an extreme.  There is procedural and emergent behavior all over the place -- ideas going all the way back to AI War and then carrying forward into most of our games -- but at the same time, all of the races have extremely distinct personalities that are hand-crafted, and we have a lot of hand-crafted actions, political deals, quests, and so on.  The mix is something that I feel is super compelling, and it's so incredibly flexible that I feel like we could spend another 5 years on TLF (as we have with AI War since its launch) and still not remotely run out of things to do.

7. Skyward Collapse was kind of a "solitaire" strategy game, if you will.  You play as yourself (kind of a god-figure), and oversee two bloody-minded factions, their gods, and so forth.  The control you have over them is pretty indirect, and basically the game is a matter of managing chaos and kind of trying to herd cats in an indirect fashion.  It's a really cool concept and really fun, but after one expansion and a bunch of free post-release support, I realized that basically there was nothing too exciting more to do with the concept.  Unlike AI War, this wasn't a game that had the legs to just be expanded and expanded and expanded.  It is what it is, and it's really cool, but it's not going to keep growing.

Anyway, the main point I was trying to make is that Skyward was all about indirect actions and controlling a strategy game basically by being a "bystander."  Unlike in AI War, you aren't a major participant, you are instead trying to "handle" the major participants, if that makes sense.  Well, with TLF, that is precisely what you are doing as well, except it's not as chaotic as in Skyward.  In Skyward there was a lot of humor value in having there be a ton of random chaos, and games are short enough in that that that's okay.

But with TLF, everything is based in some fashion on the underlying simulation, so when something happens, it isn't just completely out of the blue random -- which is what Skyward was.  So in TLF, that means that you get an awesome feedback loop, where you have to deal with what the simulation gives you (as in Skyward, or actually to some extent AI War as well), but then you also heavily alter the simulation through your own actions, thus really affecting what sort of things the simulation gives you in the future (to a degree that none of our other games remotely come close to).

8. Bionic Dues was about a lot of things, but two main things stand out to me in relation to TLF.  First of all, it was the first game where we really made a huge effort in the accessibility department, and where I think we succeeded.  Bionic also has a duality between a light strategic layer and then a quick-moving tactical layer.

TLF, of course, has an immensely heavy strategic layer, but then also has a quick-moving tactical layer.  I really like that combination, and they are very complementary.  The shift to turn-based combat for TLF was really perfect, because it made the tempo and thoughtfulness of the macro and micro levels match -- which was also the case with AI War and Bionic, but not the case with the Valley games (which caused friction with players who liked one style or the other).

At any rate, TLF also has been something that we've striven for accessibility with, and to make it something that could be exceedingly complex (ala SimCity) without being something that you can't hop into and do something with (again ala SimCity).  We started that sort of process with Bionic, and I think we were successful, although it is a far simpler game.  We carried what we learned there forward into TLF.  For that matter, that also goes for the art that Blue and Cath were doing -- so much of what was learned in Bionic was carried forward into TLF, even though TLF was a huge new challenge.

Anyway, long writeup, I know.  But when I say that The Last Federation is the culmination of what I've been trying to achieve in my career so far... well, the above is what I mean.  There have been many things that I've tried over the years, with varying degrees of success (though I am proud of every game we have ever made, even if the market and/or press didn't always love each one).  And I feel like TLF takes all the right lessons from all of those.

I really hope that this is going to be our new flagship title, so that we can take it on the same path that AI War has been on (and still is on) re: expansions and free updates.  I guess we'll find out soon enough!  Thanks for reading.

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[topper]

The trailer looks great! I think it shows off a lot of good parts of the game, though it was maybe a little heavy on showing the mission list screens 

I had not made many of the connections to your prior games, but now a lot of the design choices make a lot more sense.

[Pepisolo]

Pretty good trailer. Good job. Very interesting write-up, too. Double good job.

[x4000]

Thanks!

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Going to have to be frank on this, but this is the worst trailer Arcen Games has ever made. It is WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too busy. It throws WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much text at you. The use of the slightly-tilted text during the entire trailer is a really bad idea because tilting it requires people to focus on the text rather than the gameplay going on in the background. It doesn't help that the tilted text is always trying to be the center of attention and puts itself over the gameplay when it should really blend-in to the gameplay.

Additionally, for the majority of the trailer, it throws a lot of information at the viewer expecting him to know what's going on with the game. The only reason I picked up on some of it is because I follow Arcen Games' development of TLF but I'm an outsider looking in. I can't imagine what a person who has no idea about TLF's development process would react to seeing this trailer but I expect a lot of confusion. And for the most part, you gloss over the combat section in favor of the 4X part which I suppose is ok, in theory, but you don't really show anything off about the combat that is exciting, interesting or even new. And it really doesn't show off the 4X part of the game all that well either. It throws a lot of different mission and results screens, but it lacks a flow to it. How exactly is seeing this text and screens going to change my 4X experience? How does it all tie in? What is the end goal at looking at all these screens? What actual changes can I enact on the universe at large when I'm looking at these screens? The trailer doesn't answer these. At least, not very well.

Worse, it throws a ton of stats screens at people and that's definitely not a good idea. It's fine if people know it exists in the game but showing stats like that may be a huge turn-off for most. And it spent a lot of time on stats screens and summary menus. Take AI War for example: you know it has stats screens but as far as I can recall, you've never shown the stats screen in a game trailer/expansion trailer at any point in it's life. I would have kept doing that here as well. After all, there's no personal connection with those stats. They're just a bunch of numbers and graphs. If this was a game about that, fine, show all of them. But this isn't Spreadsheets The Game. In my personal opinion, I would have kept the stat screen menus to a minimum and talked about them briefly. Maybe show one or two but not all of them as it did.

I say all of this because I cannot share this trailer to anyone else and expect them to be interested in the game. With a few exceptions of RTS and 4X gamers that I know, many wouldn't be excited after watching this trailer. Most would probably have a luke-warm reaction to this trailer at best. I know you guys try your hardest but this is not a good way of showing off the game. Crafting a good game trailer is tricky. But this trailer has a lot of issues and most of them are this:

1) It's too fast
2) It's too text heavy
3) It glosses over a lot of game mechanics and doesn't show anything interesting
4) It makes assumptions about its audience
5) It doesn't show off anything that's exciting about this game well.
6) It's too long

Anyway, hope these thoughts help in some way.

[Riabi]

Honestly, I don't love it either... I know that there's nothing that can be done right now, but, it feels like the trailer is trying to sell the game on "see how much of the UX we've streamlined?" instead of "see how awesome of a story you can create with this game?"

[x4000]

You know, aside from the AI War 3.0 trailer, we've never had a trailer that everyone agreed was good (to my recollection).

A lot of folks go "focus on the story!"  And when we do that, we wind up getting lambasted by people who want to hear about the gameplay.
A lot of folks go "give me a really good feeling of the gameplay!"  And when we do that, then the story crowd complains (and we have a super long trailer).

In this particular case, my opinion is that it's an effective trailer because:
1. It does indeed focus on the 4x aspect of the game, which is the part that everyone has been so excited about.
2. It shows off interesting bits of combat at realtime speed, rather than sped up -- if we showed a full encounter that is interesting, that would take 5+ minutes at least just for that, and lots of explanation.
3. It shows off the depth of the game, and how you can get at that depth in various ways.  Being able to drill in and see what is going on in this sort of game is pretty important, and the ones that don't do so are the ones that tend to feel shallow or frustrating even if they are very deep under the hood.
4. It explains the overall quick story of you (you're a mercenary trying to unify the solar system), and shows the general kinds of things that you can do in the macro area, without going into detail on anything.

Overall, no trailer is ever going to give someone a complete understanding of a game that is of any complexity, and that's not its job.  Its job is to make people interested enough to want to learn more, or buy the game.  Teaching someone everything about it isn't the goal.  Which I know isn't what you said, but it's kind of what you implied.

1) It's too fast
6) It's too long

What?  Those two don't go together.  Unless you're implying I should show less.

3) It glosses over a lot of game mechanics

But wait, you don't want me to do that either.

and doesn't show anything interesting

For a game that takes place over hours, about the best I can do is show the relationships between things, show some combat, and show the visuals of ships moving around on the solar map.  What else is there to show?  You can't visually represent an hours-long struggle.

2) It's too text heavy

All our trailers are text-heavy.  When you have something that is novel, you pretty much have to.  If you don't explain what people are looking at, then they're just watching some pew pew shooting and there is no context or interest.  For a game like this, you can't just look at any screen and get an idea of the context.  The text provides the context.

4) It makes assumptions about its audience

In what sense?  That I assume that for someone to like this game, they have to be the sort that are in to 4x/simulation games?  That's true.  I can't try and court every potential audience with one trailer.  If I showed a trailer of fast-paced combat with no explanation, the core audience for this game would go "ugh, that looks like something twitch that I don't want to play."  So I focused on the sim-heavy parts of the game, as that is the core audience we are going for.  But I also showed off some faster bits of combat, WHILE noting that you can play it as fast or as slow as you want, to make it clear to those who want some action that it is there.

What other assumptions am I making?

Going to have to be frank on this, but this is the worst trailer Arcen Games has ever made.

This is just patently false, though.  The worst one ever was the Shattered Haven trailer, which did an awesome job establishing mood and story, but which a lot of people got the genre of the game wrong after watching.  They thought it was a turn-based tactics game in some cases!  I don't just say that to be argumentative -- but that's a trailer that was lauded by the people who already knew about the game, and then which absolutely failed in the wider market.  The two often have no connection to one another.

5) It doesn't show off anything that's exciting about this game well.

Which brings me to this.  That was the problem with the Shattered Haven trailer, was that it didn't show how cool the gameplay is as you get into it.  And the gameplay there builds slowly, so it was something that seemed to be pathetically easy at the start.  Combined with a story-centrci trailer, that was a really big issue.

Here the game is a lot more interesting right from the start in all senses, which is great.  In terms of the core assertion that the trailer doesn't show off anything interesting well, though, that's really the crux of your argument.  Everything else we could debate all day, and I disagree with most of it.  But what you're asserting here with #5 is subjective, and thus it's not something I can or will argue with you about.  What you are saying is a plain out fact, there: for you, this trailer was something that did not excite you at all.

All right then, what are your suggestions on doing a better one?  What would you focus on?  How long would it be?  How would I convey... anything... about the game without a bunch of text?  How would I make the grognards feel welcome without scaring off the somewhat more casual strategy gamers?  Bear in mind that the grognards, the hardcore strategy gamers, are who I'm after.  Those are the same people who are AI War fans.

How would you slow this down, and yet explain more and show more interesting things?  I am not asking this rhetorically.  I'm open to doing a second launch trailer and putting both up on Steam or wherever.  The reactions on youtube to this one have all been positive so far, which is the only real measure I have so far, as everyone here is mostly an alpha tester.  Anyway, I am open to suggestions from you or others on another trailer in addition to this one, as I also agree that it is of the utmost importance to have a trailer that just really kills it.  If this isn't that trailer, that's fine, it doesn't really hurt anything; it's not like we can't do another one and use that as the primary.

But right now I am not understanding how what you are asking for is really possible, or what you precisely mean.

But this isn't Spreadsheets The Game. In my personal opinion, I would have kept the stat screen menus to a minimum and talked about them briefly. Maybe show one or two but not all of them as it did.

Totally an aside, but I showed maybe 30% of those screens.  I think that for a game that has that many of that sort of screen to dig into, it's worth spending some time on that.  I may have spent a bit too much time on it, true.  But a lot of the people who like Paradox games, for instance, are the sorts of people who I'm trying to attract.  I want the people who like Dwarf Fortress, AI War, and stuff that Paradox makes.  And all the folks over at wargamer.com.  That's the core audience for this game, and everyone else would come to it as part of the extended audience, in my opinion.

Anyway, like I said, I'm open to ideas on a second trailer.

[Professor Paul1290]

I'm not really in love with it either, but now that I think about it a fix seems pretty easy. I think just getting rid of some redundant text than leaving the rest it as is would be fine.

I think you should just get rid of the following text:
-A living solar system housing a unique mix of grand strategy and turn-based tactics
-Easily trace relations between alien races
-Or look at the big picture via your computer advisor and federation status screens
-Graphs
-Everything is logged, easily see what everyone's been up to.
-Because in a world this deep, you'd rather be fighting battles.
-That quote at the end.

Leaving the rest as is I think it should be fine.

[x4000]

I'm not really in love with it either, but now that I think about it a fix seems pretty easy. I think just getting rid of some redundant text than leaving the rest it as is would be fine.

I think you should just get rid of the following text:
-A living solar system housing a unique mix of grand strategy and turn-based tactics
-Easily trace relations between alien races
-Or look at the big picture via your computer advisor and federation status screens
-Graphs
-Everything is logged, easily see what everyone's been up to.
-Because in a world this deep, you'd rather be fighting battles.
-That quote at the end.

Leaving the rest as is I think it should be fine.

You're referring to the text and the segments, I take it?  Or just the text?

[keith.lamothe]

1) It's too fast
6) It's too long

What?  Those two don't go together.  Unless you're implying I should show less.

I haven't seen the trailer, but I think he means that not only is the pace high (like running a sprint), but the distance is long (like running a marathon).  Or something like that

[Riabi]

1) It's too fast
6) It's too long

What?  Those two don't go together.  Unless you're implying I should show less.

I haven't seen the trailer, but I think he means that not only is the pace high (like running a sprint), but the distance is long (like running a marathon).  Or something like that

Yeah, Keith has it pretty dead on.

[x4000]

1) It's too fast
6) It's too long

What?  Those two don't go together.  Unless you're implying I should show less.

I haven't seen the trailer, but I think he means that not only is the pace high (like running a sprint), but the distance is long (like running a marathon).  Or something like that

Sure, I get that.  But he's asking me to make it shorter, slower, and show more.  Whoa.

[Professor Paul1290]

I'm not really in love with it either, but now that I think about it a fix seems pretty easy. I think just getting rid of some redundant text than leaving the rest it as is would be fine.

I think you should just get rid of the following text:
-A living solar system housing a unique mix of grand strategy and turn-based tactics
-Easily trace relations between alien races
-Or look at the big picture via your computer advisor and federation status screens
-Graphs
-Everything is logged, easily see what everyone's been up to.
-Because in a world this deep, you'd rather be fighting battles.
-That quote at the end.

Leaving the rest as is I think it should be fine.

You're referring to the text and the segments, I take it?  Or just the text?

Just the text really, and I guess the shortening of the segments that were lengthened to accommodate the text.

Showing the Graphs is fine, but it's already clear what those are as they're graphs, same with the Logs.

"Easily trace relations between alien races" and "Or look at the big picture via your computer advisor and federation status screens" should also still be shown, but they already fall under the previous "Try to unify eight races" and seem to be already somewhat covered by that.

The quote at the end has a bit of that "taking a selfie" sort of cringe-inducing to it.

[x4000]

Hmm, fair enough.  But typically people expect some quotes, and in this case we don't have press quotes to throw at it.  Putting my comment about it seemed like a solid thing to do.

[Riabi]

1) It's too fast
6) It's too long

What?  Those two don't go together.  Unless you're implying I should show less.

I haven't seen the trailer, but I think he means that not only is the pace high (like running a sprint), but the distance is long (like running a marathon).  Or something like that

Sure, I get that.  But he's asking me to make it shorter, slower, and show more.  Whoa.

IMO, there's a lot you can take out. By show "more" perhaps look at it as show "different". Show more fight detail, show some of the diplomacy screens perhaps. Show less (in-game) text. You brought up Paradox games, and I can't think of any of their trailers that show walls of text for even a second. They focus strictly on the action.