What a crazy year! For the world, for the game industry, for games culture, in my own personal life and for RetroNeo Games.
I really can’t pick a topic for this month so I’m free-styling a bit.
There’s no shortage of topics to choose from.
It’s been the year of the Loot Crate, but that’s been done to death. Even my blog of lost month dealt with it indirectly.
Relatedly, EA has been seeing nothing but negative headlines all year even apart from the Loot Crate issues, due to Mass Effect Andromeda, closing Visceral Games (and shutting down the single-player Star Wars project), and more, but I don’t really see the fun in rehashing that out.
Reportedly, the new Assassin’s Creed was great and sold twice what its predecessor did (proving the benefit in breaking the yearly release cycle), but I haven’t played it so I can’t really talk about it.
Horizon: Zero Dawn is one of the top games of the year, but I haven’t a PS4 so I can’t speak about that either (borrowing one is top of my to-do list though).
The Nintendo Switch is doing far better than anyone expected, and Zelda and Mario are another two game of the year contenders, but I’ve no Switch so I haven’t played them either.
One thing I can say is that I was wrong in my predictions of this time last year that the big shooters would be 50% off again this Christmas. The sale prices this season on Battlefront “2” (it’s 4, really) and Call of Duty are decidedly more conservative, with only Wolfenstein 2 being discounted all the way down to 50%.
Today’s news that a man was killed in Kansas during a swatting “prank” is very newsworthy but I don’t exactly want to end the year on that note. Though I will link to the PC Gamer article. An arrest was made, at least. Conventional wisdom is to keep your business channel quiet on anything political or controversial, but I don’t fully subscribe to that idea. If something is plainly wrong and needs opposing, then staying silent helps the offenders, not the victims. I hope the perpetrator goes to prison for a very long time. I personally can’t believe that the ‘set an example’ harsh sentencing of another swatting case last year didn’t stop swatting in its tracks. In that case, police non-fatally shot the swatting victim. The perpetrator, a teenager, was charged with domestic terrorism and given a heavy sentence (if I recall correctly. I can’t find the older articles today as the current tragedy is dominating the search results). He cried for his mother as he left the court room. Anyway, now a man is dead, and we have toxic gaming culture and manchild streamers to thank.
That segues into a personal note. I like coding, and I like creating, so making games is a great fit for me, but looking at the problems of the world this year, and then looking at the types of people I’m creating disposable content for (whiney sexists & racists and swatting scumbags) really turned my stomach all of a sudden. I’ve struggled with feelings of anger, frustration, and depression on and off for years. While I’m coming through it, I used to use playing games as escapism, and making games as my way of fitting into the world productively. Lately, though, I’ve felt an urge to help the world more directly. To stop contributing to distractions and start taking positive action – whether that be for charity, fighting toxic gamer culture, or something else. I’ve wrestled with the idea of leaving this industry (that I’ve fought very hard to become a part of – more on this next month) and beginning a coaching practice to get unhappy young men out of their gaming escapism and give them meaning and purpose. Then, as fate would have it, a couple of amazing opportunities came my way from the games industry and so I’ve stayed – though I still feel the call to do more. As I said, more on this next month.
I want to update the world on what all of that previous bullet point has meant for Sons of Sol, but, next month.
I’ve also barely played any games in the last 5 months (reasons next month, again) and when I do I’ve only managed to enjoy the ones that I know I can beat in an evening, like What Remains of Edith Finch or Tacoma. Just why this is, I’ve a few ideas on, but that’s a blog I’ll write another time. I was seriously looking forward to Wolfenstein 2 as I loved the original remake, but after a few hours playing it over Christmas, I was just stressed by playing it, which defeats the purpose. Great game though, and I’m all for its themes and marketing. Would like to hear if other non-parent gamers (because the reasons for parents not having time are obvious) experience the same thing.
Click for short video.
My main goal for Christmas (and my reward for the year) was to play through XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, along with several other games, but with it more than half over I feel I’ve barely started.
I asked a friend who’s staying over what I should blog about, and she said to write about “how to find more time to play games”. Together we joked that the first thing in the article would be “stop writing blogs”!
So, I’m actually just going to go with that and stop this one here!
Happy New Year to all of you fine readers, especially the regulars. Thank you. Your support is greatly appreciated, especially the notes or the comments when we meet in person. They keep me going.
I’ve a lot more life changes coming up shortly and some Sons of Sol questions to be resolved in the next month, so I’ll fill in all the blanks next time. It’ll be a sort of a follow-up to the quite-popular first blog I wrote after starting full-time development on Sons of Sol.
It’s February 28th, 2017. Last day of the month, second day of GDC (the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco), and our Greenlight campaign for Sons of Sol (please vote here) is 15 days old, but was born prematurely. The original due date was approximately February 26th.
So this month’s blog is a bit more personal than usual as a major industry change affects RetroNeo Games directly.
What is Greenlight?
If you already know, consider skipping this section, but to sum it up quickly; Valve are the company behind Steam, an online digital storefront responsible for 90+% of all PC games sales. If you want to have a business that develops PC games, you need to be on Steam, basically.
Up until 2012, it was very hard to get on the store because each game was vetted on its way through to the platform. This takes time and so the bigger titles from bigger studios/publishers were prioritised. That’s probably an oversimplification, but it’ll do..
In August 2012, Steam Greenlight launched. It’s a process where first-time developers pay $100 to place a game on a community voting subsection of Steam, called Greenlight. They can’t sell their game from here, but instead throw up early videos, screenshots and a description of what the game will be, and the community vote on whether or not they would buy the game if it became available on the actual store.
To this day, nobody really knows what it takes to get through. A few thousand votes and waiting a few weeks is a virtual guarantee, but a few hundred can get a completely fake scam game up as well, or see real games languish in limbo.
Even Valve said that it was an imperfect system, and was basically a stop-gap, but it’s taken them nearly 5 years to move past it. The theory of crowd-sourcing some quality control and democratising access to the platform was solid enough, but in practice it allowed all sorts of scams and asset flips (where you buy a functioning game prototype or several assets, intended for learning or fast prototyping, then try to sell that as an original game on Steam with a minimum of effort to get from A to B) to flood the store and give Greenlight a bad name.
Broforce was one early Greenlight mega-success.
To be sure, Greenlight is also how the real indie successes got through to Steam as well (“over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each” – do the math on that!), whereas before they may never have had a platform to be noticed, but the rubbish gets through as well. Greenlight has done a lot of good, but it’s broken, with all sorts of workarounds (trading game keys for votes, for example) gumming up the gears of a well-intentioned system.
There are community groups and YouTube channels like Jim Sterling dedicated to highlighting the scams.
Red Light for Greenlight
On Friday February 10th, Valve announced that it would be shutting down Steam Greenlight forever “this Spring” and replacing it with Steam Direct, a system that does away with the community involvement in favour of a verification process “similar to setting up a bank account” and then a recoupable fee for each game submitted. Greenlight used to allow the same developer to submit additional games for free once their first had passed through.
This is intended to reduce “noise in the submission pipeline”, which most would agree is a desirable goal. The problem is how much the fee will be set at, and how exactly it can be recouped. It has to be high enough to dissuade the scam artists, but low enough that legitimate small-time studios (and especially ones based in countries with lower average incomes) can still manage to get their games on Steam.
To be blunt, there is going to be no good number here. Valve are taking feedback and mentioned that they’d been advised on fees ranging between $100 and $5,000! No matter what it is, some scams are going to get through, and some developers are going to fail to get on the store. Since profitable games are meant to be able to recoup the fee, perhaps less well off developers who believe in their game could borrow to pay the fee, but frankly, game development is already very expensive and risky. A high fee here is quite an unwelcome added expense for the little guys.
In true Valve style, they seem to be prepared to make sweeping changes and “listen to the community” (which is good, but also points out that they don’t really have a solid plan) just to see what breaks, and fix it later.. well, that’s one way to do it, and it’s their platform so what can I say?
They’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater and waiting to see what the next baby looks like, basically.. and it’s not actually the worst idea..
Re-emphasis on publishers
..for them at least. They can set this fee quite high to try and clean up their store. This just means that serious indies will have to go to people with deep pockets to get their games published. Re-enter the publisher!
The Kickstarter revolution (also circa 2012 – for games anyway) meant that games could raise lots of capital from the public, without needing to be beholden to a publisher. But with the success rates for Kickstarter campaigns (for digital games) falling off in the last couple of years, and with a potentially high barrier to entry to the commercial storefront in this Steam Direct fee, we may see the power back in their hands.
Kickstarter changed the way that games are made.. well, some games… a little bit… for a while..
Publisher Raw Fury announced just days after Valve’s statement, that they would cover the Steam Direct fee for developers who couldn’t afford it, without obligation. They won’t own part of the game or anything. Their aim is to develop closer ties with talented developers, and to garner good will and make a bigger name for themselves, generally. That’s a great idea, since personally I hadn’t heard of them before, and now I think of them as quite a forward-thinking publisher who isn’t gunning for your back pocket. Good will earned!
How many others will do the same, or similar? That’s when I realised..
Valve’s Genius
Raw Fury will obviously be vetting the submissions that they get to try and put through the games most likely to recoup the Steam Direct fee. That means they will be doing quality control for Steam!! Think about that! Valve have just outsourced their quality control department, and Raw Fury will pay Valve for the privilege!
People were long arguing that Valve, a multi-billion dollar corporation that employs approximately only 360 people (2016 figure) should hire more staff to oversee Greenlight submissions. They could most definitely afford it. The number of new Greenlight submissions averaged just a few dozen per day normally. That’s certainly something that a small new department could handle. Valve just don’t want to say ‘no’ to anyone truly deserving, or ‘yes’ to any hate speech or copyrighted material that sneaks by a human worker. They’d prefer instead to let their automated systems take the blame for any missteps.
Again, that’s probably fair enough, though.
How this all affects RetroNeo Games
RetroNeo Games’ plan was to launch our Greenlight campaign to coincide with our new ‘vertical slice’ demo of the game that shows off our home carrier, some characters, new sound design and music, and a bit more gameplay. This same demo would be ready for GDC for any publisher or press meetings we might stir up.
But with Valve’s announcement that Greenlight would be gone during Spring (when I was in school in Ireland, I was taught that Spring was Feb – Apr, so we were already in it by my count..) and that it would be replaced with a potentially very high pay wall, the team had a quick emergency meeting over Skype on Saturday and decided to shift focus to doing a Greenlight trailer and page, sprucing up the website, and launching by Monday. The trailer would basically be the one we’d released just weeks before but with a Greenlight logo at the end. Previously the plan had been to shoot new footage from a playthrough of a newer demo and put that on the trailer.
We chose to move up our timeline because we knew that hundreds of other developers would be thinking the same way as us, and that the Greenlight servers would be absolutely flooded in a matter of days. We were only a few weeks from our intended launch anyway, so we figured we had an advantage in terms of the quality of the submission that we could make.
It’s a pity because I’ve done a lot of research in the past year (one 2016 Gamasutra blog stood out in particular) as to how to maximise your launch on Greenlight. This included having a playable demo ready, having YouTubers play said demo, try to get press to talk about it, translate the page into multiple languages, and hook up Google Analytics.
Now, just two weeks shy of accomplishing all of this, we had to go off half-cocked. Seeing the green light turning red, we basically had to rev the engine to try and make the amber, because the red might be too expensive to… eh.. this metaphor is falling apart, sorry!
So, without translations, a press mailing list, a MailChimp campaign, or a demo, we launched. About the only thing we did get from our list (because it was the quickest thing to set up) was the ability to take some preorders on the site to prove to certain legal bodies that we’re “in commerce”. They’re still available at the time of writing, heavily discounted, but limited in quantity.
How have we done so far?
Well in the first week we got about 300 votes and made it 18% of the way to the top 100. There’s no specific target to meet, but thousands of votes and being in the top 100 is certainly desirable (and normal for games getting through in the past).
The problem is that now, after a second week, we’ve gotten almost no further!
The reason we wanted all our ducks in a row was to maximise the ‘yes’ votes while Steam’s algorithms were still sending natural traffic to our site. Just by launching, you’ll get a certain number of referrals from normal Greenlight users browsing, but after that you’re on your own to generate your voting traffic. In normal circumstances, the Steam algorithms send people your way for a few days.
Our natural traffic died off in under 12 hours. That’s a measure of just how many other new Greenlight games were going up just 3 days after Valve’s announcement. At that stage we were closer to 200 votes. The next 100 votes we got during the first week were basically from friends and colleagues through Facebook and Twitter shares.
I’ve heard similar stories from many developers who are struggling with the campaign because they were forced to launch early and are just drowned out by the noise.
Our votes after 24 hours
What did we try?
Since the launch I’ve been working every day for at least 12 hours, but not so much on the Greenlight campaign. Getting the demo ready for GDC to wow press and publishers was still a better priority – after all, nobody knows how many Greenlight votes you really need anyway, nobody knows when Greenlight is actually shutting down, and we had a request from a publisher to see a new build of the game. So, after launch and until yesterday, a new demo was priority number one!
I suspect that once Valve stops taking new submissions for Greenlight, they’ll probably let through a lot of what remains in the following weeks, though they have kept their options open by declaring that anyone who has paid the $100 Greenlight fee and who doesn’t get through will be reimbursed. So, who knows?..
That doesn’t mean that I’ve ignored Greenlight either, though. Not at all. Over the coming days I ran a tentative €5 Facebook and €5 Twitter ad campaign (well targeted, with video) to see what happened. We got about a dozen clicks total and about 2 new votes. So, probably not worth investing too heavily there, then. One issue is that you have to log in to Steam (if you even have an account) and often have to be emailed a security code for a ‘new device’ (so sick of doing that!), so anyone clicking a mobile or browser link would not likely be logged into Steam, and probably wouldn’t bother doing so.
I got the Greenlight page translated into Russian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese and German. Even though the algorithms had stopped sending us traffic, I hoped that a new language detected might send us users from those territories. It didn’t. Absolutely nothing! So I decided not to proceed with French, Spanish and Italian.
I also contacted about two dozen Greenlight community user groups who exist to highlight legitimate Greenlight games. I especially targeted groups interested in space games. We did get included in four collections, but I saw no corresponding increase in traffic to us, unfortunately.
What now?
Well, with the GDC demo complete, I now get to turn my attention to contacting proper press outlets and YouTubers. I’m a big fan of grassroots marketing and using your own networks, but having tapped the social circles and developers that I know already we seem to have reached the limits of what that can offer us – namely, 320 votes.
Contacting press and YouTubers is a very low probability game, but one good bit of coverage can do wonders, and there are some existing relationships that I can leverage. That’s now the stage that we’re at to try and get more votes.
I have confidence in our game, our trailer, our demo, and our team, but we’re fighting in an oversaturated market.
To Conclude
This has felt like a bit of a weird blog to write. I often write about the industry somewhat abstractly, but I’m right in the middle of this one, and it’s an incomplete story. Greenlight isn’t gone yet, we haven’t yet been accepted for or refused press coverage, and nobody, including Valve, knows much about Steam Direct yet.
I do hope I can do a positive follow-up to this blog in the near future. Until then, I can just thank you for reading, ask that you vote for us if you haven’t yet, and consider sharing our Greenlight campaign with your friends.
Thank you! If you’d like to hear the end of this story, sign up to our mailing list below to be notified when new blogs go live.
I’ll leave you with our Greenlight trailer. And don’t forget to try our free demo. Download it from the Sons of Sol page.
Hi! This is Part 3 of me offering some insight into the development of my game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.
In Part 1 I explained my pitch “Asteroids meets Total War”. In Part 2 I talked about the games that are influencing the design of Crow’s Nest. In Part 3 I discussed a design challenge that the game faces.
Now we’ve reached the final post of this ‘Making Crow’s Nest’ series. You may recall from Part 1 that these four posts were written together and scheduled to post while I was on some down time. Next week I’ll be back to blogging on more mainstream game topics.
Today I’m talking about what Sons of Sol and Crow’s Nest actually are. This will be a more autobiographical post than normal, so you have been warned. This tale will interweave a little bit with my previous blog on how I got into game development, which I was uneasy about writing but which people seemed to respond very positively to. This won’t be as much of downer, though, promise!
Together, “Sons of Sol” and “Crow’s Nest” are the working title for the game that I’m working on, which is my (and RetroNeo Games’) first game ever. Hopefully there’ll be no need to change those names, but these things happen sometimes in development. Better names come along or products with similar names get released before yours.
An Evil Empire
Sons of Sol actually began in 2012 not long after Disney bought Star Wars from George Lucas. I was a life-long Star Wars fan. The films, games, and especially the books. My brother bought me one of the Expanded Universe (EU) novels in 1997 for my 10th birthday; a Han Solo trilogy one. From then and for the next 15 years, 4 out of every 5 books that I read were probably Star Wars books. I loved how the stories interconnected. I loved that a character could be introduced in one book, and survive fifteen fictional years, then be killed off when you least expect it.
There were a lot of bad books in the Expanded Universe, but far more good ones. I loved how you were rewarded for your time by seeing threads of stories affect each other decades apart. The rebels eventually take Coruscant, Han and Leia have three kids, these kids get dozens of their own books and become their own proper characters, grow to adulthood and war with each other, for example. There’s a book for more than every year of their lives. You can observe their whole character arcs from birth to… well.. if you put the time in. The EU was all internally consistent, and all canon. It all worked together.
There are a few early exceptions and a few game stories that don’t fit, but otherwise the EU really rewarded fans for their time. In 2012 I finished reading to the end of the Star Wars chronology. That’s 40 years of story after Return of the Jedi, not to mention the Clone Wars books and books set between and during the movies. I didn’t read all the books, but read most from the timeline of Episode 1-6 and beyond. None of the Old Republic stuff, though.
Anyway, I felt I’d achieved a monumental reading goal that I set myself in 2007 (before that I’d read the books a little randomly). Five years of reading little but Star Wars, and the stories I got out of it were great. No other franchise could achieve this (well, maybe Star Trek).
Then Disney bought Star Wars, and soon announced that there would be a new trilogy, but that they’d be throwing away all of that canon. The EU didn’t count any more. Timothy Zahn started with Heir To The Empire in 1994. 18 years of work and some great stories now didn’t count because Disney felt there was more money in movies and merchandise.
I’m not naive. I know there is. I know entertainment is a business, but I’m just trying to convey my disappointment at the news. They could have set new movies inside the EU, easily. Instead they threw it away for.. well, we don’t know yet. This blog is posting 1 month before the release of JJ Abrams’ Episode 7. We’ve no idea if the new movies will be good or if the stories will be better than the ones discarded. I’m still totally reserved at the time of writing this.
I also know that I now have two timelines. More Star Wars! Yay! Well, that’s just not how I feel about it. I’m allowed to feel disappointed, particularly after the loyalty I showed the franchise.
A Great Journey
Anyway, also around this time, I moved back to Ireland after unsuccessfully attempting to get a permanent visa in Australia. So I was back in Ireland and unemployed with no decent chances of starting a career any time soon. I decided to start writing science fiction to fill the Star-Wars-shaped hole in my soul (okay, I’m being overly dramatic. I’ll watch it. Sorry).
I was going to write a universe of my own that I would promise to keep consistent with itself. I didn’t believe that this would become a big thing, or even necessarily that I would get a single book published, but it occupied the time.
Building a Galaxy
I started watching tonnes of science fiction movies and documentaries and designing my universe. This took a long time. You have to design whole new physical rules for your world. You have to say “you can do this, but not this” and consider if that statement even makes sense. If you have one technology available, like artificial gravity without rotation, then you have to consider what else you can have. With that, for example, you’re kind of saying that the theory of ‘gravitons’ existing is correct, and that we’ve managed to develop technology to manipulate them. Well, keeping someone fixed to the deck in a spaceship (as seen in almost every sci fi movie and show ever) means that you can cause attraction towards a point. In that case, you can probably cause repulsion in the opposite direction. This would make hover technology a reality. Did I want hover cars and hover crates in my sci-fi? Because if not then I have to solve the artificial gravity problem in another way.
How long does it take to travel from one star system to another? That’s going to have a major impact on stories later on. Armies can’t reinforce one another in the middle of a battle if it takes two weeks to travel to the nearest star.
In the end, I came up with rules I was happy with. It’s a lot like Battlestar Galactica with some Mass Effect and Starship Troopers thrown in. A cold-hard-metal feel to things but with certain sci-fi tropes like artificial gravity. Warp speed is accomplished assuming that Alcubierre’s (real) theories are correct and realisable. There’s no light swords, weapons fire hard projectiles, and there are no shield technologies. Armour and photo-chromatic materials are all that you’ve got in battle. There’s also ABSOLUTELY NO TIME-TRAVEL OR ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS, EVER!!
Next I was writing broad story arcs and setting up so that the universe could grow wide, and so that you could have human factions appear in all parts of the galaxy. After all, it’s easier to dress the actors as humans than aliens. You’ve got to think forward! 😉 Look at Stargate!
I sketched out a 3 part story that told the tale of Earth’s first expansion beyond our solar system, our first contact with aliens, and our introduction to the wider galaxy. I designed alien races called the Cestral and the Skulaari, the latter being the villains, themed on terrifying sea creatures like giant squid and crustaceans. I even wrote a little language for these factions.
I Need a Name
This all took several months, and I got a job for a few months which led me to drop the writing project for a while. Then I lost the job and took the writing back up again. I started writing the real story, finally, and decided to call the story at large “Sons of Sol”, after conducting extensive web searches for similarly named things.
At the time, I found none. I bought the .com address and set up a wiki to lay some sort of claim to the name. I’ve since found some similarly named games, a Korean TV show called “Sons of Sol Pharmacy” and a hoody company with the very same name. Apparently, I’m still fine to be using the name, so for now I’ll keep it unless I can think of a name I like more.
In early 2013 I started studying tax in Ireland, believing this would be my route to eventual (permanent) employment. I worked hard at it, but I was unemployed and it was a part time course, so I still had some time to give to writing and designing the world. I also had been writing down game ideas as they came to me and designing them out in .txt files for fun. I never expected to make a game, though, as I didn’t want to study another degree course just to go into a risky profession.
A Flirtation with Games
One day I was very sick of studying this boring topic and posted on the forum Boards.ie to see if any game developers needed somebody with “great ideas” (I know, right?! haha) but who could also record audio, compose music, write, and manage the business/marketing side (okay, that’s a little better).
A guy called Rob Reinhardt in Dublin got back to me and he was actually interested in doing some collaborating. We struck up a friendship and met a few times, talking about games and what we might make together. I was only going to be involved part time as I was studying and hopefully going to get a normal job, but I’d help with the writing and other stuff as much as I could. I wasn’t looking for pay or anything.
Eventually, we decided to use Sons of Sol’s universe as a setting for a game. It would be a prequel for the book I was writing. The book focussed on the people of Earth (at first), but the game would focus on a lost human civilization called the Kolrir and how they came (secretly) to Earth, setting up the events of the book I was writing.
Nothing came of the game ultimately, but we’d designed a lot on paper for Sons of Sol: Exodus (that name would have to change if we’d done it because Sol: Exodus came out from somebody else).
An Earth-shattering Kaboom!
2014 rolled around. I got a job in tax.. for 6 weeks, then lost that one too. Rob and others had told me that Unity was easy to pick up and start using, so with game design now on the brain and no tax to work at or study, I started at Unity and learned how to do some basic programming through their tutorials. It was only a couple of months before I had a very early version of a space game up and running. I later returned to this very first game for Crow’s Nest.
I started going to gaming events in Dublin and meeting the great community here, as well as improving my own skills and looked into starting a company through the unemployment enterprise scheme.
The game that Rob and I had designed was still well beyond my skills still (probably his too. We weren’t good at ‘scope’) but the space game currently on my screen could work inside the Sons of Sol universe too. After all, I’d designed it very openly. I can plug in new civilizations wherever I like and the story still all holds together. I’d put a lot of time into the ‘Exodus’ story (with Rob) and thought it was solid, so I wanted to keep it in tact. I decided to write a prequel to the prequel and tell the story of the characters that you would meet in Exodus and call it “Crow’s Nest”.
My very own Game
The game would be ostensibly about a private military company from Kolrir protecting their territories from pirates. The ‘Crows Nest’, the lookout spot on a sail ship (like a pirate boat) sounded suitably pirate-y for a name. In space, though, particularly in another non-Earth culture, the crow’s nest wouldn’t really be a term in use, both because you can’t sit outside a spaceship, and the Kolrir culture may never have had sailing ships as far as we know. So in this case, the “Nest” would refer to a pirate base hidden inside a large asteroid, and “Crow” would be the pirate villain in question who owned that base.
I’ll fully admit that I didn’t finish a book, didn’t finish a game, and am now starting another game, but bear in mind that I saw writing the book as just killing time while unemployed. The first game was killing time in between studying. With the current game, I’ve formed RetroNeo Games as a company. This is now my job, and that’s a hell of a difference. I also now have the skills to make a game (or at least prototype it) by myself, without just being in a position where I’m giving ideas to other people. I have the time, ability, and drive to deliver Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.
The Future of Sons of Sol
I plan to release in early 2017. This will then be the first Sons of Sol product to exist, almost five years after I first created the universe. I hope people will like it!
I could take the same game and abandon the Sons of Sol name. It’ll make no difference to the players. They don’t know what Sons of Sol is! But I’ve a whole universe worth of stories to tell and why shouldn’t I make the game a Sons of Sol title? It fits. It works. But what if it’s bad and I wreck the name before I even begin?
Well, then I released a bad game, I guess. That’s the risk with any creative work. And it’s still better than releasing no game at all and Sons of Sol never getting its chance in the public domain. But I’ve worked too hard for years for no reward to approach this half-assed. Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is going to be my absolute best effort, and nobody can ask fairer than that. I’ll be a very proud daddy the day I finally release the game. And who knows, maybe I’ll get to those other story lines some day, either through game sequels, or finishing the novel. The novel was only a couple of chapters in, though, when I last left it. If that were to be finished now I’d be better off having a different writer do it while I make a game. And I could only do that if a Sons of Sol game were wildly successful and there was the interest in a book.
That’s extremely unlikely, I know, but it doesn’t bother me either way. I feel that if I can release one Sons of Sol title at this stage, I’ll be happy and it will all have been worth the effort.
Is he done yet?!
If you read this far, well done, and thanks very sincerely for your interest! Especially if you read all 4 parts. Sorry for the lack of images today, also. I’ve really got no pictures of this topic, though. Next week we’re back to non-Crow’s Nest gaming topics for the blog.
Hi! This is Part 3 of me offering some insight into the development of my game, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest.
In Part 1 I explained my pitch “Asteroids meets Total War”. Last week in Part 2 I talked about the games that are influencing the design of Crow’s Nest. This week I want to talk about one particular design challenge I’m facing: Meaningful Character Death.
Crow’s Nest is a space combat game meets a strategy game. You fly missions like Wing Commander or X-Wing missions (but in 2D) and then go back to a strategy map like XCOM or Total War. I spoke last week about how I’m very fond of the attachment to your soldiers that XCOM can create for the player. It adds a real tension and a greater range of emotions for the player when a soldier dies or barely escapes.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Not Billy-Bob!
The Problem
I decided very early on that I wanted meaningful character death in my game. So I thought “fine, I’ll have you play as one character, and you have wingmen. Those characters can live or die or get captured by the enemy. After that they could stay captured or you could rescue them”.
That sounds reasonable enough, but there was something that I didn’t take into account. In my game’s battles, you control one character directly. You can give orders to your other wingmen but you have very little control over what they do beyond that. In XCOM, you’re the commander. You’re not on the field. You control every one of your soldiers individually, one at a time. You are responsible for everything that they do. Therefore, the consequences are yours alone to deal with. You can’t blame the game or the AI for making your beloved soldier do something stupid (usually) and getting themselves killed.
I only realised the full importance of this distinction when I watched the following interview. In it, Adam Sessler brings together Jake Solomon (lead designer on 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown and 2016’s XCOM 2) and Julian Gollop, the designer of the original XCOM from 1994. The whole interview is very interesting, but if you don’t want to watch it all, skip to 12:32 and watch for about two minutes.
Jake Solomon made the point that without turn-based gameplay you can’t have meaningful character death. I saw this and I thought “oh crap! He’s completely right”! If the player isn’t directly accountable for the decision that led to a soldier dying, then they won’t feel survivor’s guilt, or the guilt of having ordered somebody to their death. They’ll probably feel nothing, or worse, they’ll blame the game for the consequence. If that happens, the system may as well not be in the game. As I said, I think it’s a very powerful feature of XCOM that I want to try and emulate insofar as possible, so I have a problem.
Now, I haven’t built the system into the game yet, so it hasn’t been play-tested, but I am at the design stage for it, and I’m left considering what I can do for the best results.
Poking a hole in that theory
If I’m to bother implementing meaningful character death into Crow’s Nest (a real-time game), I need Solomon and Gollop to be (at least somewhat) incorrect. They’re far better game designers than me, so maybe it’s not possible, but if I could poke a breathing hole in the design-bag they’ve placed over my head, then I might be okay.
My starting point for designing around the problem is this: We know that we can develop strong emotional ties to fictional characters. This is why we can cry when Bambi’s mother dies or celebrate when Luke blows up the Death Star. Empathy is real, even if the character isn’t. Game of Thrones in particular proves that the unpredictability of death can have a great impact on fans and really raise the tension.
Real-life battles happen in real time (obviously, hence the word “real”), and while the commander’s soldiers will have been trained, they operate of their own volition. A commander doesn’t control them with their mind, or decide whether they run left around a barrel instead of right. But the tension they feel at ordering their troops into danger is no less real for the lack of direct control.
Perhaps, then, you don’t need total control over your units in a game in order to feel something for them. They are your team mates, after all, whether they’re AI or not. Maybe it’s possible to bring the emotions of XCOM to a real-time game, then. Maybe meaningful character death for Crow’s Nest is possible.
How?
XCOM lets you make an awful lot of decisions, and it gives you the time to make them so that you’ll feel (if it goes wrong) that you didn’t think the problem through well-enough. You’ll feel that it was your fault!
If XCOM shows us a formula for meaningful character death, then, it might look like this:
Quantity of player decisions + Time to make them = Meaningful Character Death
Time to make them
Let’s look at this part first. A real-time game doesn’t really offer you time, typically. But it can! Many RPGs will let you paused the action to give orders and then resume it to see them play out in real time. There’s an option! The problem with this is that is interrupts the action, and in Crow’s Nest, if you spend too long paused, you might forget that you were literally a half a second away from smashing into an asteroid before you paused.
So how about a compromise? The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (2013) was a real-time cover-based third-person shooter that tried to implement meaningful character death. It utterly failed because it was so story-driven that the main character (you) couldn’t die. If you did, you just went back to a checkpoint. Your squad mates could die, permanently, but if they did you could just get yourself killed, reload the checkpoint to before they were hit, and everybody’s happy again. That’s what they did wrong.
What they did right was their ‘pause’ system. Like the RPG system I mentioned, you could pause the action and issue orders, but it wasn’t really paused. Time was still moving, albeit very slowly. You had more time to make decisions, but the tension remained as you saw an enemy moving (very slowly) to flank your sniper and you tried to decide whether to order your him to move back or to take a headshot on the enemy before it was too late! That’s one way I could buy the player the “time” part of the formula.
I could just acknowledge that in real time you have to make quick decisions and just live with that, however, this will then allow the player to make far less decisions in the same amount of (game) time and so the formula is less healthy looking.
Quantity of Player Decisions
There’s a lot that I could do to give the player more decisions. In the combat demo I have currently available (see video above) there’s a lot that will be changed. In this demo you have infinite fuel, infinite (bullet) ammo, and recharging health. The enemies also come in equal waves each time.
First off, I intend that when you encounter the first enemies of a battle, they’ll call reinforcements, who’ll take a certain amount of time to get there, but who will be stronger that the first group. Think of it as a wave system, but where you don’t have to beat one to spawn the next one. It’s a truer reinforcement system. You want to deal with one problem before the next arrives.
Of course, different mission types could have different rules and spies might disable enemy communications, etc, but imagine that some missions as they go on get harder and harder, to the point that waves will spawn that you couldn’t possibly beat. This is one option that opens a lot of doors.
This set up would force you to chose to flee at some point. That choice alone means that if you or your allies die, you know you stayed one wave too long.
If I then make ammo, fuel, and health limited, then you have to choose if you and each of your wingmen have enough of those three resources left to take on the next set of reinforcements, or just run whenever you get the chance. That’s at least three choices that you make for each of three (or more) craft, every couple of minutes. That’s a lot of opportunity for the player to start blaming themselves if something goes wrong.
Other decisions would have been made before the battle. Do you take the more experienced pilots or train up rookies? Do you arm missiles, or save the weight to make the craft more agile? Did you invest in an armour upgrade last month or did that money go to set up a spy drone in an asteroid field where you suspect the enemy to be?
I could go on, but you can see that quantity of decisions shouldn’t be a problem, even in a real-time game.
The Real Trick; AI
Can I make you care about these guys?
Assuming we can get the formula balanced correctly, the whole thing hinges on whether or not the player will accept that, if a wing mate dies, the fault lay with their decisions. According to Gollop and Solomon, the player would blame the AI. I think that the more you stack decisions and input from the player, within an interface that allows them to make decisions in good time, the greater the chance you have of the player accepting the consequences of those decisions and arriving at our goal of meaningful character death.
Balancing the AI is the key ingredient, and this is where so many games have failed in the past. I may well fail here, too, but I don’t plan to make meaningful character death my game’s only selling point, so it wouldn’t be a fatal failure.
Your wing mates have to be good enough that they can survive on their own for a while against reasonable odds, but they can’t be so good that you can just let them beat the whole mission for you.
In the demo at the moment, because the Arrow Fighters are harder to hit, turn faster, and have recharging health, they’re actually capable of taking all of the kills if you do nothing. There aren’t enough enemies on the map at once to stop them, usually. This is an unbalanced demo, however.
The AI will run if they’re damaged, usually saving their lives. They’ll call to you for help, and if you don’t give it, the enemy might just catch up and kill your ally. This is already more intelligent behaviour than many games would bother giving to computer-controlled characters, and it’s essential to meaningful character death in a real-time game, but it’s not nearly enough.
Alien Isolation is known for its brilliant AI.
To be honest, I haven’t figured out the balance yet, and it will require a lot of play testing.
I’d like to caveat that all of the above is assuming that you actually do things to give those wing mates a personality. They have to have a face, a voice, a backstory that you are spoon fed during quieter moments, as well as skills, abilities, a record of confirmed kills, and a rank that progresses as they gain experience. They have to taunt the enemy when they get a kill. They have to call you for help. They even have to react to incoming enemies believably; either with confidence, or the realisation that they’re truly outmatched.
Some of those latter points are observable in the demo already, but most have yet to be implemented, and I only have one voice pack so far.
What say you?
This is an open problem, not a post-mortem. Moreso than with any other blog that I’ve posted, I’d really appreciate your opinions in the comments below. What do you think of my problem? What do you think of my proposed solutions? Have you anything you might recommend as other player decisions or wing mate behaviours? What pitfalls should I avoid? Are there games I should be looking at to see how they handled this problem? Thank you in advance.
Next week is the last of these posts focussing on Crow’s Nest (for now). I’ll be talking about what Sons of Sol and Crow’s Nest actually are (fictionally speaking) and how they came to be.
This week I’ll be basically talking about some of the games that are having a big influence on the development of Crow’s Nest. If you’re a space and/or strategy game fan, this may be of interest to you. Fair warning; there’s going to be a lot of Star Wars games in here!
These aren’t “games that are similar to my game”, but instead they make up more of a history of the games that I have personally played that influence Crow’s Nest in some way.
First up..
Asteroids (1979)
Last week I talked a bit about this and Total War as influences so I’ll be brief. Here is one of the very original space shooters, and a classic game. There’s the three-life formula with a single hit and you’re dead. There’s extra lives, speed, intensity, high scores, and great use of limited technology to deliver imaginative graphics. The key ingredient to itss addictiveness is the quick restart. You can instantly hop back in for another round to try and beat your previous high score. It’s a simple, but proven method of keeping players pumping in quarters (or nowadays, playing and seeing advertising).
The computer room in my school when I was a kid had this on some machines so I’d race through our typing lessons so that I could play. In years since I see it every now and again as a web link and I always click in for a few rounds. The thrill of dodging through asteroids at high speeds and evading incoming laser shots never gets old, and it’s a mechanic that I’m endeavouring to capture in Crow’s Nest.
Total War series
Shogun: Total War (2000)
Again, I talked about Shogun specifically last week, but to reiterate, I loved the two-sided approach to a strategy game. Until Shogun, I’d only played strategy games like Command & Conquer (C&C) where you fight one battle at a time and it never influenced the next battle. It didn’t matter how many losses you took in exchange for victory, and if you lost you would just restart the level. In Total War, you finally could say “we may have lost this battle, but we’ll win the war” and it would mean something.
At the time, I was unaware that XCOM had been doing this since 1994, and there were probably several other games too, but this was my first and the experience of playing Shogun for the first time shaped how I would view games forever more. Now, as a designer, the strategic depth of Total War and games like it is something I want to incorporate into my games whenever possible.
I also liked how special units could affect the war. Diplomacy and assassinations could drastically change the course of the war. I’ve always kept in mind the influence that special units could and (I think) should have on a strategy game.
There were a whole bunch of XCOM games starting with 1994’s original, but the series wasn’t well managed, wasn’t always in the hands of the original creators, and really took a dive until the 2012 remake by Firaxis and 2K, ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’. When the latter was announced, it was the first time I really noticed the series. I’d never played it. I picked up the original before the release of the remake, and played both games in 2012. My world changed!
I’d always avoided turn-based strategy games. I just had never liked the few examples I’d played. I thought they were too unrealistic because you wind up with two soldier just looking at each other instead of fighting. What I didn’t appreciate was that in the moments between the action, when you’re making your decisions like in a chess match (ironically, I loved chess), you’re getting a whole different type of gameplay. Instead of trying to simply react quickly like in an RTS, you’re really trying to solve a problem in the most efficient way possible (like a puzzle game) but with the added element of random chance getting in the way of your best laid plans. RTS games have this plus speed, but turn based games forego the speed in favour of really making you think about the consequences of your actions.
I’ll be talking next week about a design challenge that this posed to my game. The turn-based element buys you gravitas insofar as the player has made every move and so they have nobody to blame for the consequences. In any real-time game where you have allies, they’ll likely by controlled by the AI, and if they die you may be inclined to blame the designer or the AI, and not your own command skills.
Chances are they’re not all coming back!
What I love about XCOM is the same thing that I love about Total War: persistence! The game allows you to fail and recover, not just restart. What XCOM does that Total War doesn’t really do is make you care about individual soldiers. In dealing with small squads over dozens of missions (and especially if you choose to name and customise them yourself) you get to form relationships with individual soldiers. Sending your best veteran sniper into a risky situation to try and rescue your best medic is a weighty decision that C&C or Total War can’t really deliver. The tension is immense because the consequences are permanent. That means that success is vastly more rewarding here than in normal games. You’re always glad to see troops come home alive. The range of emotions you can evoke in the player is what earns the XCOM series such devoted fans.
I also loved the base management, particularly in the original game (or the fan-made Xenonauts (2014)). Having to actually buy replacement rockets, bullets, grenades, and med packs may have been too heavy on the micromanagement side, but then again, a shortage of finances really affected your tactical options when you went into battle. You might fire a rocket to keep your troops safe from an ambush, but you wince as you see thousands of credits go up in smoke! Also in those games I loved that your home base could be attacked, but may not be. 2012’s XCOM and its expansion Enemy Within didn’t have this. EW had one mandatory base attack mission. In the other games you could attack enemy bases or leave them be, and they could do the same to you. Each side could have more than one base, but they were expensive to run. The decision was up to you!
I haven’t decided how many of these design influences will appear in the strategy layer of Crow’s Nest, but some of them definitely will.
Star Wars: X-Wing series (1993-1999)
Now we get to the combat influences! I’ve said before on this blog that 1993’s X-Wing was my first ever game. I played the hell out of it! Its sequels TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance were also hugely influential for me.
I must acknowledge that, like many of the Star Wars games, these were cashing in on the popularity of other games. Wing Commander (1990) paved the way for X-Wing. Lucasarts said “we could do that, but with iconic Star Wars ships, music, and sound. People will go insane for it!” So my influence’s influence was really Wing Commander, but I never actually played any of them until I backed Star Citizen and started looking up Chris Roberts’ older games.
Tragically, X-Wing Alliance (1999) remains the last game in this series, but it’s one of my favourite games of all time. The series centred around dogfighting in the Star Wars ships, exclusively in space. Alliance was the first one where you could fly bigger ships like the Millennium Falcon, jump sectors in hyperspace during a mission, or dock with craft to rearm or “board” them (you just sat in the turret while other people on your ship supposedly did the boarding, but it was still cool).
X-Wing Alliance (1999). Fly the Millennium Falcon against the second Death Star !
It had over 50 missions and (what I thought) was a great story set alongside the events of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, culminating in you (changing characters to Lando) flying the Millennium Falcon in the Battle of Endor, all the way inside the second Death Star!
Wing mates would take your orders, get chatty with you, call for help, and taunt the enemy! That’s not unique to this game, or anything, but it adds greatly to the atmosphere and it’s in Crow’s Nest too!
The briefings, the mission types, the dramatic set-pieces, the in-game reinforcements and dramatic turnings of the tide of battle are all fresh in my memory and are heavily influencing the way I’m designing the combat missions of Crow’s Nest. While Alliance was a linear game, and mine is more dynamic, I feel I can still deliver a lot of the same drama, action and intensity but with the added benefits of the tension gained from the possibility of loss.
The one major thing I wanted to change is that in 3D space you see very little of the battle. When an enemy goes past you you lose sight of them. When a big ship explodes spectacularly, you may not be looking in the right direction at the right time to see it. I wanted to take 3D space combat games and put them in 2D so you have greater situational awareness and can see more of the action! That’s my big departure, but otherwise, the combat in Crow’s Nest is heavily influenced by the X-Wing games; far more so than it is by your average top-down space shooter.
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998)
The original was out on the N64, and later the PC. Two sequels came out on the Gamecube too. These were also 3D Star Wars ship combat games, but now mostly focussed on planetary combat, against TIE Fighters & ground units, instead of TIE Fighters & Star Destroyers.
If you played these games and the current Crow’s Nest demo, my big take-away from Rogue Squadron should be obvious: The orders system.
You have two wing mates with you most of the time and they can largely take care of themselves, but you can give them a few orders on the D-pad. D-up is to “Form Up” and they increase your overall fire power by flying on your wing and shooting when you shoot. I’ve used this order directly (it’s not stealing if you declare the influence, right?) as well as the ability to keep your wing mates safe by telling them to retreat. Beyond that, the orders system starts to differ, but feeling like you’re not alone is important to a game where you play a fighter squadron, and Rogue Squadron handled it well!
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014)
Can anyone have played this game and not loved the nemesis system? This Lord of the Rings game has you play a human Ranger & elven ghost (sharing the same body) and travel around Mordor… eh, doing things.. revenge, mostly. It played a bit like the Batman Arkham games in the fighting systems and like many open world games otherwise, but the nemesis system stood it apart, and it even won a few Game Of The Year Awards.
In the picture above, you can see one of dozens of enemy commanders. These exist in a ranking hierarchy. You can “ally” with some of them and assist their rise to power in order to get rid of certain other nemeses in the game.
Each nemesis (as long as they’re alive, anyway) will remember having met and fought you, and they’ll comment on the result of that battle. As seen above, they all have different strengths and weaknesses. At first, these are unknown to you but you can interrogate underlings and rivals (forgive me if I’m not exactly right, there) to learn these traits. For example, a nemesis might have beaten you down the first three times you tried to fight him, then you learn he’s afraid of a ‘caragor’, so you show up riding on the back of one and he’ll flee with his tail between his legs! Another nemesis might hate caragors, and so this same tactic would only enrage him, boosting his stats!
This latter part of the system is something I’m interested in implementing into Crow’s Nest. You will benefit from spying on enemies by learning things about their movements, or what types of ships they favour using. You could just approach the battles blind, but intel gathering will pay off.
I don’t necessarily plan to have you ally with factions or control pirate groups, but I’m at least taking inspiration from the nemesis system insofar as learning about your enemy and having them remember you goes.
Honorable Mentions
Star Wars: Empire At War (2006)
This is one of my favourite strategy games ever, especially the two player competitive campaign, but there’s not so much I’m taking from it that I didn’t already credit Total War for.
Your armies persist across a galaxy map, space map, AND individual planetary maps. It’s very unlike Empire at War, though, because you control fewer units. The loss of the only Star Destroyer you may have in your fleet really hurts, even if you win the battle. You can steamroll the enemy for a while, but you’re taking losses as you go and will run out of steam, thus having less units left to defend your new territories from counter-attack.
The land maps also host buildings like Ion Cannons or Hypervelocity Guns which can be used by the defending team in the space battle above that planet. If you are wise, you might raid the planet with a small force (small raid forces can bypass the space battle) with the sole aim of destroying that one building before launching your space battle. If you hold the space above the planet, you can hit the land battle with bombing runs and orbital strikes. This interplay of systems is another great example of what multi-layered games can achieve.
X-COM: Interceptor (1998)
I only played this for the first time in 2015, and development on Crow’s Nest was already well underway. It’s not far off what I’m doing, as it turns out, but nobody thought this game was all that it could be either.
You command a base on a strategy map and manage its resources, as with other XCOM games, but instead of the turn-based battles you have a fighter ship battle. The problem is that these battles were nearly all the same and they got very repetitive.
The only influence I’m taking from this game is in what not to do. I need to ensure missions in Crow’s Nest are varied enough, and that there are real characters and stories playing out during the campaign. To what extent, I don’t yet know, but this is a good example of a game relying 100% on its systems producing all the gameplay.
Star Citizen (20??)
How can I make a space game in 2015 and not be influenced by Star Citizen/Squadron 42? That said, my game is a single-player war game, not a multiplayer space-everything game. I’m very excited for Star Citizen, but even moreso for the single-player side, ‘Squadron 42’. If we get to play S42 early next year I imagine it might influence Crow’s Nest somewhat, but probably not in many ways that X-Wing and Wing Commander haven’t already. If the game takes longer than that to come out, Crow’s Nest may already have been released. Time will tell.
So!
I could also mention FTL for its art style, actually, but the art in Crow’s Nest so far is just my placeholder stuff and I don’t believe that I can draw. I certainly won’t be the final artist, so it’s not worth mentioning visual influences at this stage, really.
I’ve found that when making a game, a lot of people will come and say “oh, you must have been influenced by this” or “have you played that”? There are so many games out there that chances are the answer will be “no, actually. I haven’t heard of that one”. I’ve listed my main influences here, and very few of them are actually 2D space games.
If there’s anything you think I should check out, either because it’s similar to what I’m doing or just because it rocks, please let me know!
Next week I’ll be focussing on a design challenge posed by trying to do some of what XCOM does in a real-time action game. If that sounds interesting to you, please subscribe to the RetroNeo Games Facebook or Twitter accounts (link icons at the top and bottom of this page).
I’ll be away over the next few weeks so I’ve decided to do a four-parter and schedule it to post at my normal times so my one-a-week blog goal remains unbroken. I’ve been going now for over 6 months now and wanted to at least see out the end of 2015 with an ‘undefeated streak’.
To that end, I’ll be turning the blog’s focus a little more inward and talking about how my game in development (Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest) came to be, what its influences are, the features of the game and certain design challenges that I’m facing. As it’s still in development and still just me on the team, this is all still in motion, but there should be good insights and new information for anyone who’s interested in reading. It will be interesting to compare these posts with a post-mortem for the game once it’s finally out, too.
So, with that out of the way..
What is Crow’s Nest?
I won’t wax lyrical here, you can check out the game’s page yourself, and either play the demo or watch the gameplay footage. Briefly, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is an upcoming tactical space shooter with a strategy layer. I’ve described it as “Asteroids meets Total War”.
You can see some gameplay from the playable PC demo below. It’s early in development and due out in Q1 2017.
How Does Asteroids meet Total War, exactly?
So my pitch for Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest is that it’s “Asteroids meets Total War” and I’ve found that this can get people interested quite effectively. How does a top-down space shooter from the 1970s tie in with one of the largest, most successful strategy game series in the world; one which, until Total War: Warhammer was announced, was set exclusively in historical Earth periods with swords and spears and massive armies?
To be fair I could also describe the game as “Wing Commander meets Xcom”, but a pitch has to be as catchy as possible, n’est pas?
The similarities between Asteroids and Crow’s Nest are pretty plain to see. They both have a small, triangular space fighter flying around an asteroid field, and, quite importantly, the ships are driven by Newtonian physics, meaning if you stop accelerating you will keep drifting. There’s no drag in space so you can turn on the spot and shoot backwards, and to slow down you have to turn around and thrust in the opposite direction.
The similarities really end there, though. In Crow’s Nest the goal is not to kill asteroids for points, the screen isn’t locked in position, and both you and the asteroids can take more than one hit.
Then from here I started building up more of a squadron-based thing, adding wing mates, squad orders, and reasonably intelligent enemies, as well as the ability to communicate with your fleet for reinforcements. Here, I was taking inspiration from Star Wars games like Rogue Squadron and X-Wing. I’ll talk about games that influenced Crow’s Nest in a follow-up part.
The important take-away is that Crow’s Nest has an action/combat layer presented in a classic arcade-like style.
The trailer above is for Shogun, the first Total War game in 2000. I haven’t played them all, but I beat this one so I know it represents some of the ideas I’m going for. You command your chosen family dynasty in feudal Japan during the Sengoku Jidai period of history. It’s a game of two halves. There’s the tactical combat side where you command individual army units in a single battle. This half of the game is represented in Crow’s Nest as the ‘Asteroids’ part.
The other side of the game is the strategy layer, where you have a map of all of Japan and time passes months at a time. You move your armies around the country to reinforce or attack territories (Risk style) and then fight the tactical battles for those areas using only the units you brought with you. No Command & Conquer-style building during a battle! But in addition to this, you could send spies, assassins and emissaries around the world. You could negotiate for peace or assassinate an opposing general the night before a battle, weakening his forces when you face them in the tactical layer.
You could also bring your own character (the Daimyo) into battle for big morale bonuses, but if you died in battle, you were dead. If you didn’t have an adult male heir, it was game over! If you did, you basically had an ‘extra life’. Similarly, if you won a battle but lost all of your cavalry, they were gone! You no longer had them to move around the strategy layer. This interplay leant real gravitas to every little decision, and to every death. I love these mechanics and knew I wanted them for Crow’s Nest.
An early prototype for the strategy map in Crow’s Nest.
My original idea was that you would control several fleets (as many as you could build/afford) in Crow’s Nest and defend a territory from pirate marauders. You would also send spies on missions to gather intel and attempt assassinations or to sabotage the enemy. When a tactical battle occurred, the losses and gains would persist back to the strategy layer. This is why I chose “Total War” as a suitable descriptor for my pitch.
As development went on, I decided that it might be better for you to control just a single fleet. This would make your flagship all the more precious to you, and prevent you from using steamroll tactics to the same extent. This way, even in the late game, battles would stay tense for the player. It would also limit the amount of pilots you have to dozens, not hundreds, and make their lives and progression matter more to you. This means that Xcom might be a better descriptor than Total War now, but as the strategy side in Crow’s Nest is still very early in development and prone to change, I haven’t decided whether to change the pitch yet.
Obviously, those four words aren’t my whole pitch, but they’re the short version.
What do you think of the pitch? Have you any experience pitching? Any advice? Would saying “Xcom” be better than “Total War”? Both franchises are currently doing well and get the point across to anyone who knows games.
Next Sunday, I’ll be posting Part 2, where I talk about the other games that have influenced the development of Crow’s Nest in a mini-review sort of way.
