Indie Illuminator - Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds

If you’ve got an interest in old-school JRPGs and/or hulking leonine warriors, you might want to take a look at developer SEMISOFT’s Legrand Legacy: Tale of the Fatebounds. After a successful Kickstarter campaign that ended last February, the game was just released this week on PC, and should also come out on the PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in the future. The developers describe the game as a “love letter” to the classic JRPGs they grew up playing.

Image found on SEMISOFT Studio's Tumblr page.

The game uses a blend of 3D graphics and hand-drawn 2D backgrounds that can be quite eye-catching. In particular, I like the animated character portraits that show up in dialogue sequences. When it comes to the characteristic turn-based battles of every JRPG, Legrand Legacy includes a few extra wrinkles. A simple button timing system determines if you receive certain attack bonuses, and a front/back placement system helps differentiate between melee and ranged characters. Additional gameplay elements include special tactical scenarios and mini-games such as fishing. Overall, it seems like there’s quite a variety of things to do in Legrand Legacy. If you watch to check it out, you can visit their Steam store page here. 

Dev Take Tuesday - Fullmetal Salvatore

R.A. Salvatore has been my favorite fantasy author for over a decade. His novels feature memorable characters, compelling narrative themes, and crisp “cinematic” action sequences. I’m currently reading an older novel of his titled The Orc King. In contrast to my long history with Salvatore, Fullmetal Alchemist was an anime I’d heard about but never looked into. When I saw the latest version of the series (Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood) was available on Hulu, I decided to finally take the plunge. I’m glad I did!

This one time I met R.A. Salvatore at SLCC

Fullmetal Alchemist follows the story of two young brothers who lost parts of their bodies as a price paid for essentially trying to play god. As they search for a way to recover their bodies they unravel a dark secret that threatens their entire nation. While the narrative focuses on the brothers’ tale, plenty of time is granted to literally dozens of side characters and branches off the primary plot. Eventually, all those characters and branching subplots unite at the end of the anime’s arc in an immensely satisfying way. This careful and patient weaving of interconnected stories is one of Salvatore’s strengths as well. Ostensibly disconnected characters—including, usually, the villain(s)—eventually find themselves entwined in the main narrative by the novel’s end.

A small selection of Fullmetal Alchemist's extensive cast (Image found here on Pop Verse)

Of course, other stories in all sorts of mediums end up trying to perform a similar type of weave. But if the weaving goes poorly, side characters and subplots seem more like distractions. So what makes Fullmetal and Salvatore so effective? I believe it’s a combination of a confident focus on the nexus point where all the various subplots will merge into the main storyline, as well as careful and consistent pacing with the primary narrative.

What can we take away from this as game devs? Many games, especially roleplaying games, are frequently criticized for how side quest content detracts from the urgency and significance of the game’s primary storyline. Game writers and designers will often blame story pacing issues on the inherent interactivity of games, since they can’t control the players who decide to ignore the impending doom of civilization by seeing if they can spam the jump key all the way up a seemingly impassable mountain. 

I've done my share of mountain hopping in Skyrim (Image found here)

But setting mountain hopping aside, I think side quest content could often be much more thoughtfully connected to the main narrative. Side quests and minor characters can and should be compelling by themselves, but connecting them to the chief plot in a satisfying way will help prevent them from feeling like distracting and unneeded “filler.” Not every problem will be fixed this way, and not every optional quest needs to tie in to the protagonist's main quest. However, every little step we take as game developers to encourage player investment in our game worlds will help our games be more compelling and fun.

Dev Take Tuesday - Death of the Designer

I’d say it’s practically impossible to get through an English degree without learning about Roland Barthes and his essay “The Death of the Author.” I became quite familiar with that essay during my studies, and referenced it in more than one paper. In the essay, Barthes argues that an author’s background and biases should be set aside in favor of an analysis on the text by itself. Since meaning doesn’t exist until the reader interprets the words placed there by the writer, the concept of authorial intent is inherently flawed, according to Barthes.

Image found here

My growing pains while running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign have taught me that players will end up interpreting events much differently than I, the author, intended. I created a small town with an eerie Children of the Corn vibe that I thought would provide some cheap laughs and then send the party running after a while. Instead, my players wanted to learn more about the creepy cultists and I found myself scrambling to flesh out the town and its customs. I can probably attribute some of those misinterpretations to mistakes on my end: not providing enough details in my descriptions, not preparing enough material beforehand, or not considering likely alternative viewpoints. However, I believe that any D&D campaign will have moments like these where the players surprise the DM. That’s simply the nature of language.

Looking at game design in general, I'm sure we understand all too well the “death of the designer.” We know that players will always find startlingly different ways to interpret and play our games. But that needn’t be a source of despair. I’d say that the scenario from my D&D campaign above ended up being the most powerful and most interesting moment in our adventures so far. And although the inherent interactivity of games might scoff at any thought of authorial intent, perhaps it’s comforting to know that other mediums of expression have been grappling with these concerns as well.

Indie Illuminator - Celeste

I only played TowerFall Ascension once—slowing my brother-in-law down in the game’s two-player survival mode. But despite my short time with the archery combat and platforming game (it’s similar to the popular Smash Brothers series or the vintage classic Joust) I had a blast. Well the same mind behind TowerFall, Matt Thorson, is releasing a new game called Celeste later this month on January 25^th.

A Celeste gif from Mini Boss's blog

Celeste’s Steam description says the game is a single-player platforming adventure. Players will help the main character, Madeline, scale a challenging mountain as she struggles with personal demons as well. Matt teamed up with artist/programmer Noel Berry, pixel art squad Mini Boss, audio team Power Up Audio, and composer Lena Raine for the project.  Lena and the Power Up Audio team already earned Celeste an IGF nomination for excellence in audio.

Another Celeste gif from Mini Boss's blog

If you enjoy platformers, Celeste looks like it will be another great indie hit. Check it out when it launches January 25^th on PC, Mac, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch. It will also release a day later on the Xbox One. 

Dev Take Tuesday – Because Survival is Insufficient

Over the holidays I finished reading the critically acclaimed novel Station Eleven. The story mirrors many other post-apocalyptic narratives, from civilization-ending viruses to eerie abandoned homes that might harbor unspoiled food. Yet the book still manages to feel immensely different from most other apocalyptic stories, and I think that sense of distinction results from a concept that the author herself describes as the novel’s thesis statement: survival is insufficient. I won’t expound on that any further in hopes of avoiding meaningful spoilers.

That line—the motto of the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic orchestra and troupe of Shakespearean actors that tours the post-apocalyptic landscape—actually first appeared in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager and two characters in the book argue over if that fact cheapens the impact of the motto. Like the character Kristen, who also has the line tattooed on her forearm, I disagree with that sentiment. Art takes many forms, and there’s no inherent disconnect between someone who loves Shakespeare, symphonies, and Star Trek.

"Inspiring people to rise beyond mere survival and reach out toward the stars"
(Image found here on Cubed3)

As a game developer, I take pride in the idea of games as art. I don’t bat an eye when a pop culture critic like Dan Olson (from the YouTube series Folding Ideas) follows a critique of the film 300 with a review of Skyrim. I don’t think that means every video game needs to strive to be philosophically dense fine art, any more than Star Trek: Voyager needed to attempt to be Shakespeare. But video games, sci-fi television, classic theater, and novels all offer a glimpse of humanity, inspiring people to rise beyond mere survival and reach out toward the stars. The mundanity of actual game development can sometimes obscure the potential of the final product, so I’m grateful that Station Eleven reminded me of the impact art, in all its forms, can have on our current society and even societies of the future. 

Dev Take Tuesday - A New Year

2017 was a great year for me as a game designer. It was my first full year spent designing games, and I learned a lot in those 365 days. Unsurprisingly, I often use this time of year to reflect on the past year’s accomplishments and plan for the future. So if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to provide a quick recap of last year’s development, followed by the next steps we plan for Alkanaur in 2018.

As a team we capped off this past year with a finished pre-alpha demo build of Alkanaur. We’d completed a rough demo for our game in the summer of 2015, just in time for a local game convention. However, thanks in large part to feedback from that convention, we decided to change our engine and rebuild from the ground up. While this meant that 2016 was spent climbing back to a similar spot that we reached in 2015, it was the right choice for Alkanaur. We built the game on a much more stable platform now, and that choice will also help on the art side of things as we focus more on creating content to fill out the game.

I’ve learned to help our programmer out in some ways, but the engine change definitely required work from an experienced coder. With my extra time as a designer and creative lead, I focused on refining the battle system, class system, and other game mechanics of Alkanaur. Additionally, I had plenty of time to expand our game’s narrative, world, and character arcs and backstories. Heading into 2018, we have a lot of the framework for Alkanaur’s systems and story already constructed, which should mean much faster and smoother content creation as we plow forward.

As we collect and review feedback from our pre-alpha demo, we’ll work on polishing everything in that demo to provide a great user experience. We plan to create a fully-polished “vertical slice” of Alkanaur that should look and play exactly like the final product, except for being a short section of the 20-ish hour game experience we intend. We’ll make that vertical slice a public demo and launch that demo alongside our Kickstarter project so that any potential investors (backers) know that we can follow through on our plan. The Kickstarter campaign will be for a relatively small amount of money, intended to cover a lot of the small fees that come from organizing a company and releasing a game on Steam. Any surplus money from that Kickstarter will go to stretch goals for additional professional art, sound, and music to make Alkanaur truly shine.

I’m excited to see what 2018 has in store for Alkanaur as well as for my own life and growth as a developer and designer. If you’re also excited to see what’s in store, keep following our blog for updates, and sign up for our Alkanaur.com newsletter (link at the bottom of the page) to be notified about big events like our Kickstarter campaign.