It's true, I'd say. I'm always excited about every project we do, but this one scratches some itches I've had for a very long time. "Interactive storytelling" is something that I've always been fascinated with, and in some respects that what this game is. Same as Dwarf Fortress, really. This doesn't have a ton of text, that's not what I mean. Even AI War is kind of an interactive storytelling game, to a lesser extent -- you form these long relationships with planets and the AI, and that's what drives the AARs/LPs.
My wife and I still grumble about a planet called "Cuasnomas" that we haven't seen since about April 2009, before AI War even came out publicly -- that's what I mean about there being this kind of emergent story. To us that was a real and meaningful place, and yet nobody else has ever been there but us, and nobody ever will be there. That sort of thing is so cool to me!
With Valley 1 I had hoped to do that in a more direct fashion, with more text and characters rather than wider places, but that just didn't work out. We made a really cool game, but it wasn't really an interactive storytelling experience in at all the way I'd hoped. Instead it was a really fun procedurally-generated Metroidvania. That was fine, because that was also an itch I had.
With Skyward Collapse, once again we toed into that water, but it didn't really work out in the sense of interactive storytelling. Once again we made a really cool game, this time kind of subverting the god-game genre and making this hilarious chaos-management simulator. In some respects it has "hilarity generation" in the same vein as Dwarf Fortress, which I was really pleased about. But while that is fun, it isn't the sort of game you are going to see an LP or AAR about, because it's all too chaotic and magical to really have the same sort of meaning. You are also riding herd over the factions, versus being more directly vested, and I think that also has an influence.
TLF is kind of the opposite of AI War, in some respects. AI War is about scope, TLF is about depth. In AI War there's so many ships and planets that it can be a struggle just to simulate it all even on modern processors, so there are limitations on certain things that we just can't do. We also introduced things like the Champions for giving the player a more direct hero-like character, and while that is fun, it's sort of a sideshow. The game isn't built around it. So with TLF I wanted to build the experience around being a mercenary, kind of harkening back to my Star Control 2 itch. And I also wanted to keep the number of planets and ships to a reasonably small number so that we could do incredibly detailed simulations of them, scratching my SimCity sense.
I also wanted it to be kind of the opposite of Skyward Collapse, too, and it is. Rather than being distant and disconnected, you're right in the middle of it. Even though you can't control the world, you control yourself and your ships very directly. And bargain very directly, etc, too. But even more than that, while Skyward Collapse is a chaos-management game where anything can happen rapidly, I wanted TLF to follow from "first cause" more. Yes all sorts of crazy things can happen, and unexpected twists and turns are all over the place and are really fun. But there is still the sense of a logical progression and build to the whole thing, versus just getting jerked around like in Skyward Collapse (which is, admittedly, part of the charm of that game; but not what I wanted to do here).
In a lot of ways, this game is a reaction to AI War, Valley 1, and Skyward Collapse. It scratches a whole lot of itches for me that I've been struggling to scratch for most of my professional career at this point. So yeah, I'm happy.
