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Jason Compton By Kristophe Listen to the interview (34 minutes 20 seconds): Windows Media Player (5 MB) Kristophe: I'm speaking today with Jason Compton, cofounder of Planewalker Games, who is presently in development working on a game called Broken Hourglass. Jason, first off, would you be kind enough to tell our readers a little bit about yourself, your background, the kind of games you've played, what games you found inspirational ... ? Jason Compton: I've been playing role-playing games for almost as long as I've been a computer user, which goes back to 1985. I've played games like Bard's Tale and Fantasy on the Commodore 64. More recently I've been playing games like the Baldur's Gate series, Icewind Dale–type games, Temple of Elemental Evil. As far as my personal background, the games I do for love—for money I'm a technology journalist mostly, in the business technology space, so there's not a lot of crossover there, but it's work that I also enjoy. It's just a different kind of writing, a different kind of expression, that also leaves me enough time previously to develop RPG mods and now to codevelop a brand-new RPG title. K: It sounds very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about The Broken Hourglass as far as its background, setting, etc., without giving too much away. JC: The game itself, mechanically, is a 2D isometric, orthographic type of game reminiscent of the Infinity Engine games of recent years. The setting of the game is the Tolmiran Empire, which is a world that's loosely based on the Byzantine Empire circa about the year 1000 AD. We're not attempting to do a historical recreation of Constantinople or anything like that, but that's where a lot of the concepts that the world designers took and ran with came from. Tolmiran Empire is primarily populated by humans, and the humans run the show, so to speak, but there are societies of elves who were formerly known as the Ilvari who used to rule the land and had humans as a slave race, but eventually the humans took over from the elves and now call the shots. In addition to the three elven communities, there is a half-elf, or Feyborn, how they're called in the game, group which are the offspring of humans and elves. Those Feyborn are sterile, they're very powerful magicians or sorcerers, but they also tend to have very unstable personalities, so they're definitely an undercaste for various reasons. Then the fourth sentient race in the world is the Illuminated, which is a race that just sort of appeared out of nowhere about a hundred years before the game begins. They tend to act as traders or diplomats; they have good people skills and they put those to good use, but they're kind of creepy—their skin glows and nobody really knows who they are or where they came from. It's kind of been surmised that somebody manufactured them and sent them to Tolmira for some purpose, but nobody knows who or why or what they're doing there—they just seem to go about their lives and run shops or hold minor political office or whatever. Nobody knows what the agenda is, but they're fairly sure there is one. As for the game itself, it takes place in Mal Nassrin, which is a kind of second-rate city in the Tolmiran Empire. It was once an independent city-state of some considerable power and wealth, but it was just too good a takeover target, so after decades and decades of repulsed invasions and attackers from different sides, it did eventually fall and was absorbed into the Tolmiran Empire. And now it's, you know, you kind of think about the cities in your state or even your country if your country is old enough that had capitals before their current capital and so well, the city used to be pretty important but now it's just kind of there ... I mean, people live there, some people live their whole lives there and have perfectly fulfilling lives, but it's not the center of attention, it's not London, Paris, or New York, it's more a Bonn, Germany, where its glory days might be a little bit behind it even though there's certainly culture and so forth, it's just no longer the hotspot that once it would have been. K: Actually, there are a lot of states that have had several capitals. JC: Right, it's like you read, so this used to be the capital, but you wouldn't know to look at it now. That's kind of what Mal Nassrin is. It's not a place where you'd expect a great, life-threatening adventure to get started, but that is in fact kind of what happens. About three weeks before the game begins, all hell breaks loose in the city. First, the capitol building is taken over by some mysterious force, and a magical shield goes up around the building and nobody can get in or out. Then an entire neighborhood explodes, and that's where our PC enters the game. He or she is on the outskirts when this happens and is gravely wounded and is in a coma and is kind of out of it for the next couple of weeks. And then the entire city gets sealed off by a magical shield, so now people are really wondering what's going on and also realizing that no help is going to be coming. And so with all this going on, and the fact that the local authorities don't seem to be able to do anything about the problem, a group of citizens band together and say, we think we've figured out at least the core of what the problem is and we're going to do something about it. And it just so happens that their leader is an old acquaintance of the player character and was taking care of him or her, kind of nursing him or her out of that coma state. So as the game begins, you've just woken up and here's a quick summary of what's happened and by the way over in the dining room we're going to try to figure out what to do about it. That's how the title gets started. K: That sounds very interesting. Of course, that answers my question about the game's main character being male or female—could be either one. JC: Yep. K: What kind of attacks, weapons, spells, and so forth do you hope to be incorporating into the game? JC: The mechanics of the game support different weapon proficiency types. You can put points into proficiency with different weapons based on either how you choose to allocate the points or, if you're using a level pathing system, they'll be invested for you. There's broader classes, there's swords, hafted weapons, which are like clubs or morning stars, you know, striking/swinging type weapons with a shaft and then a business end, there's pole arms, and then there's bows. And then within those subtypes, there are different weapons, so the bow group would include bows and crossbows, swords would include everything from a dagger up to a great sword. Then how good or what you choose to use in that group would have a lot to do with, okay, am I strong enough to wield the great sword or do I want to use a short sword and shield. It's going to depend on other factors about the character. Armor: there will be leather, chain, plate, shields, helmets. Magic: we use an elemental system, so magic is based on fire, air, earth, and water, and then there's also a fifth category of physical magic, which is sort of like force magic. So spells can be direct damage or repeated damage, so you think about that like a fire bolt, quick piece of damage, versus a smoldering fire you cast on somebody that would do damage over time. You could do ball effects or affect every enemy–type effects. There's summoning magic, and then you can also use magic to enhance your own abilities or those of your party and also to heal them, of course. The different elements feed into different types of magic, so if, for example, healing magic is associated with physical magic, so the mages that have the most physical magic proficiency are going to be most likely to cast healing spells, and so on. K: I see. Just pointing out a little fact my boss [laughs] made mention of during my queries of questions for you for this interview. She was wondering if there was going to be a choice to play as a fat woman. JC: We are going to try to do what we can with different body types in the sprite creation. To put it on the table, with a constrained budget, we are well motivated to put as many reusable sprite types as we can, so the technical limits are basically if we want to have people who are really fat or really tall, we can do some stretching in the engine, but if we want somebody to be sort of uniquely fat and move as a fat person would move, we have to commission a different line of sprites for that. We are trying to put as much variety in there as we can within those constraints. I did have it as something we definitely want to do, to represent a few different body types in there, but some of it's going to come down to what's practical, and we do still have some of the sprite work being done. So we're going to make a shot at it, but you'll kind of have to see what comes out in the final mix. K: That ought to be interesting. Jen was just commenting, well, I'll just quote ... "Tell him I think there should be a choice to play as a fat woman. I feel discriminated against! Video games never feature portly PCs! Unless they're aliens or animals or something." [laughs] JC: That's a good point, and there's [laughs] as I've kinda said to people—within the budget and what we are trying to do, there's only so much that we can afford to be iconoclasts, but we'll see what we can do. K: That's good. I'm interested too in this game engine. This is something that Westley Weimer developed? JC: Yeah, and all on his lonesome, really. Obviously he's building on open source libraries, so basically all of the libraries ... the underlying support code in the game is based on open source portable libraries, which has a lot of advantages including the fact that they're free. But yeah, aside from that, he [Westley Weimer] developed the engine entirely on his own. He's been working on it for about 18 months now, off and on, which is impressive in itself because he was doing a job search at the time, and then starting a new job and so forth, and he still found time to put together what is a remarkably well-working game engine just by himself. K: I suspect that if it works half as well as his Weidu installation system for the various Baldur's Gate mods—and Icewind Dale mods—it ought to be a pretty efficient, pretty good system. JC: Yeah. K: It's been awhile since I heard from him, so I was kind of surprised to hear that he's hooked up with you folks now. JC: Yeah, well, the conversation that got this started took place about 18 months ago. People who followed the Infinity Engine modding might remember the Icewind Gate project that Wes started right after Icewind Dale 2 came out because he saw the Icewind Dale 2 engine, which was a version of the Infinity Engine which implemented Third Edition D&D rules. And he really liked the use of the Third Edition D&D rules in the Infinity Engine context in that kind of game, but he wasn't really thrilled with the Icewind Dale 2 storyline, so he said, "well, wouldn't it be nice to be able to play Baldur's Gate 2, having this rich story, in a ruleset that made more sense like Third Edition D&D," and I remember we had a conversation about this, and he said, "well, I thought about it and I figured I could do one of two things: I could just write a new engine that would play Baldur's Gate 2 content but use a ruleset that I liked more, or I could just write something that would just port everything over to Icewind Dale 2." And he did some work on the project and it hit some roadblocks simply because the two editions of the engine were pretty different, so he put out the public beta and you can mess around with it, but it doesn't work 100%. So sometime after that had happened, we were talking and I had something in mind, but I said, "So Wes. You remember when you said that you thought about making your own engine to do this, but you decided to do the porting and figured that was the better move. Do you think you made the right decision?" And he said, "No, I think really with the amount of time and energy I put into it, I probably could have just written my own game engine." And I was like, "Well. Well now, if that's the case ... ," and so then I said, "well, why don't we do this? We're interested in this type of game. By and large, the game companies out there are not making this type of game anymore—they're really not." K: No, they are not. JC: There's the Knights of the Old Republic games, which are the closest spiritual successor, but even those aren't really quite the Infinity-type game style, so why don't we do this? If you can do the engine, I'll try to get some money, and we'll get the writing talent together and we'll get XYZ, and let's have a game. And, somehow, I talked him [Westley Weimer] into doing it, and so he has now written this engine for us. [Editor's note: This is known as the "WeiNGINE."] K: Yes. It's a real shame. I've noticed a growing, developing trend of North American game makers going more the MMORPG route and the quickie imitation route, and it seems like the only ones that are even staying, or trying to stay, with traditional RPGs and/or develop seem to be more the Eastern European new developers. JC: I don't have any strong feelings one way or the other about the multiplayer games. I don't play them—I've always been kind of afraid that I'd get sucked in and never see anybody again, so I've never played them. But the way I view really is, it's a different kind of game, so even though I know a lot of people who are friends of mine or whatever that I knew that played these games are now big World of Warcraft type of players, and that's fine—they've kind of punched themselves out on these other games because the content is static and there's only so much the mods are adding to it and so forth, but it seems to me that they'll come back for a different kind of experience. And it won't mean that they have to stop being World of Warcraft players just because they start becoming Broken Hourglass players—it's just a different sort of experience. Playing a multiplayer game is kind of like going out to a party, whereas playing a single-player RPG with a more elaborate storyline and developed characters and romance and so forth is more like staying at home and reading a book. Just because you read books doesn't mean you can't go out, it just means you might choose to stay home and read a book every once in a while. K: Or do like Funcom is doing with their Age of Conan. It's starting out as a full single-player RPG, and once you finish the game, you can step off into MMORPG land and continue play. It's a dual, it's a hybrid, and a very interesting concept too. You're not playing exactly as Conan, you're playing in that era and in that sort of background. That's precisely how their game is set up. Places like RPGDot have had a hell of a time—they're classifying it as an MMORPG, while over at the Four Fat Chicks, I'm classifying it as an RPG. [laughs] JC: Well, we'll keep it simpler because we are strictly single-player. We don't have an MMORPG aspect to it, and the engine doesn't have a multiplayer, LAN type, or internet connectivity mode—again not because we hate people who like that play that way, but it's just a question of do we have the time and resources to invest into doing this really well? Eh, probably not. Are there other people out there doing it much better? Yes. So let's just focus on delivering the best single-player experience that we can. K: Sure. And really that's where your expertise lies and so it's best to stay with your strengths, and your financial situation as well. Just a few more questions into the game itself. We're wondering, for a new developer and such, what are you planning on, if you are planning on, centering more of your efforts on, i.e., are you looking at a great story, or are you looking more at gameplay? JC: [sighs] K: Gameplay—in other words, are you going to have different levels, or is it going to be more or less pretty much, well, this is how you play—you don't have an easy, hard, difficult, or suicide or what mode. JC: Oh, you mean like a difficulty slider? K: Yes. JC: We do have concepts for managing difficulty—the game has a pretty good challenge rating type system in there, so some things will scale based on not just your party's ability, but your preferences—so we're going to do the best we can to cater to people who are interested in different levels of tactical threat in that sense, so yeah. K: That is a big help to me, because to be perfectly honest I suffer from acute peripheral neuropathy. What that means is I have very poor hand and eye coordination. My typing—I'm basically a one-finger typer anymore, and even then I have to proofread several times, and for handling a mouse it's difficult. More or less, in these games, I have to look for a point and click and put it on the very easy [setting] in order to get through a game. JC: Right. K: I just do not physically have the coordination. So knowing stuff like that is very helpful to me. Okay, let's see, one of the things that Jen was asking, and I'll just give a quote: "I'd like to hear the developer's thoughts on how he expects to balance story, characterization, gameplay, or if he even intends to try for balance, and if not, what aspects are more or less important." JC: What were my choices again? [laughs] K: First she'd like to hear your thoughts on how you intend to balance story, characterization, and gameplay, or even if you intend to try to do that. JC: Well, I could try to address the question. It just seems like the kind of thing that no matter what the developer thinks they're doing, it's really going to be decided in the court of public opinion. It's kind of the same thing almost like the difficulty level question, really. We can put things in there that we think make it easier or harder for people to manage the combats, but there will always be people who get so good at the tactical aspects that they say, well, even on the hardest setting this isn't a challenge, and there will always be people who don't have the aptitude for the tactical side who say even easy is too [difficult]. So far as the story and characterization aspect, I would say that yes, we're trying to balance those in the sense that we certainly developed the game story and the characters that will be playing the biggest role in the story all at the same time. It's not like we came at it saying, well, I've got this great idea for three NPCs—let's see if we can find a story to cram them into. We all got together, we had the setting first, we developed the story based on the settings and then the characters based on the story. So we're looking for types of characters that would be both well-suited to the situation or would offer a unique spin on the situation, give players a variety of different opinions or insights into just what's going on in the game. So in that sense, yes, I think it will be balanced, or at least it will fit together. If the question is, will we spend the right amount of time developing the broader story versus developing individual characters, again, I think that is something that people are just going to decide for themselves. Some people really don't like or don't enjoy interparty banter or romance as others, they want to get onto more plot development and really don't want to know what this character thinks about that character or what this character thinks of your character, they'd rather see the bigger plot unfold. Other people are less interested in the bigger plot, they're interested more in the people. So I'd like to think that we'll at least put out enough material there for both character and story to be served, but the balance is a question of taste. As far as gameplay goes, if that means the mechanics of, is there going to be too much fighting and locating and disarming traps compared to advancing the plot or building the character, certainly most of us are coming at this from a character writing perspective, so we're going to make sure the characters are not underserved while they're running around fighting and disarming traps and so on, again coming down to us not being iconoclasts here, fighting and disarming traps and unlocking doors is a big part of advancing the plot. You're not going to be able to finish the game without doing it, so that'll definitely be a big aspect as well. I wish I could guarantee that, yes, we're definitely going to strike the right balance for everybody, but I think that's very personal for everybody. That said, I think we're taking a healthy approach to it, an approach that has worked well for others, I feel. And maybe we're going to focus a little bit more on the character side than some others would simply because we think we've identified that that's really what makes games a lasting success, when you can come back and visit those characters again. But again, I don't think that will come at the expense of plot or gameplay, but we will have to see. K: In my humble opinion, that's an excellent answer. Quite frankly, being very familiar with the various mods and NPCs and the romantic banter mods that you've all made over there at the Pocket Plane group, quite frankly, I think you'd be very successful ... JC: I hope so ... K: Something that you all do as a team and you do it well. JC: Thank you. K: And quite frankly, I think a whole game developed by yourself, with all of those aspects in it would definitely be on my preorder purchase list ... [laughs] JC: Buy two! K: Very definitely. And that does bring us up to the point: I am assuming there will be romantic banter and such in your particular game ... JC: Yep. K: ... Just as has been more or less publicized and broadcast of course by the Escapist magazine article and by your own mods. JC: Yeah, we think it's, I'm not saying it's a required part of an RPG, I mean you can build an RPG in such a way that you've got characters that really are not interested in your character or each other, but we definitely wanted to build one that would have that prospect to it, so we have a total of nine joinable NPCs. Of those, four of them will at least have the potential to take a romantic interest in the PC. That'll play out depending on the character of the PC as well as the interest of the player. If the player is not interested, they can give the NPC the brush-off, or if the PC behaves in such a way that isn't terribly appealing to the NPCs in question, things may not progress very far. But we wanted to have that in there because, again, we think it was ... To believe the way that Bioware's kind of recapped it, it was sort of an accidental success for them, something they knew they wanted to have in there but certainly didn't spend the whole development cycle of Baldur's Gate 2 obsessing about, and then found out there was a pretty substantial portion of the player base that responded to it and griped or congratulated them or whatever, based on how they took it. They've taken that forward into most of their more recent games, and by and large other developers haven't, which I find kind of interesting. But yeah, that was something we definitely wanted to include in a new game and will be in there. K: I would have to concur with you. From everything I've seen in my reporting and such on the web, it does appear as though there is a very great interest there in the population for more interesting PCs and NPCs that you can actually develop and grow to, come to know, so to speak, to basically interact with. JC: Yeah, and the way that I look at it, and this was in the discussions that I had with the author of that Escapist article that didn't make it in there because I could have gone on forever, obviously. It was a short article in that sense, and I had other people to talk to. Some people said well, are you doing it like a dating sim? I don't really look at it in that way. I don't think that the romance content should really be a minigame in that players shouldn't be sitting there obsessing over, am I doing this right? Am I taking the right steps to get the optimum outcome? Because you can do a game that does that, but there're enough other game aspects of a game of this type that you shouldn't be obsessing about that. What we really want to do is let you play your character against this other character that is expressing this interest and if works out, then great, you get some more content and you get to know this character better, and if it doesn't, okay, then. That's how it goes between two people sometimes, and you go on and just finish the rest of the game. It's meant to be a diversion, it's meant to give the player more of a sense that their character really is important in the game world for reasons other than how many times they can swing a sword in six seconds or how much damage they can do with their fists or whatever. But it's not meant to be a skill challenge. K: Gotcha. JC: I think that's what keeps it fun and keeps it where I think it should be, which is as a welcome diversion rather than, oh god, here's the romance music, I've got to concentrate now, I've got to think of the right thing to say. K: [chuckles] Yes, and to be perfectly honest, at least for my personal taste, that's one thing that kind of kills a lot of games for me, is when they pack them with fifty million minigames that really have nothing to do with gameplay or the outcome. JC: Yeah, I know the minigame skill challenge is something that some people like, and that's fine. It's just not the way that we're implementing romance. K: Right. I'd like to hear more about the rule system that you're developing for this game, since I don't believe I read anything about your being able to afford to pick up the right to use the Wizards of the Coast and their rules. JC: Right. We did do some looking into that, actually, but the short answer was, "no, you can't." At the outset the idea was, let's do as much as we can with prior art. Again, we're not looking to be iconoclasts here. There's a lot of things out there which could lead to a good game. Let's see if we can piece them together. One of them was the D20 ruleset. So we're like, well, there's this ruleset out there, it seems to have this open game license attached to it, why don't we use that in a computer game? But the trick of the open game license is the way it's written, you can't use it in software. And I consulted a couple of lawyers about this, I consulted the guy who wrote the open game license, I called people at Wizards of the Coast and at Atari—Atari is the license holder for D20 system rules, which is a different way that they license those rules out. But the long answer was, you just can't. So ... K: So you've done like Bioware and you're developing your own. JC: Yeah, that was what it came down to. That's Wes as well really putting that together. I had some input, and he's like, well, I'll develop the system but what roughly do you want it to be like? I'm like, well, I wanted it to be reasonably accessible to people, I wanted it to have as few primary stats as possible. One of the things that is appealing about the D20 D&D system is that nowadays pretty much everybody knows what those six stats mean. People have a sense for what strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma mean. But okay, we can't use those, and what I've seen more often than not when people go away from those big six is that they end up with ten or more stats, and the last thing I want to do is have players wondering, well, what the hell is the difference between speed, agility, quickness, and dexterity? And some systems do that. It's like, no, knock it off! I don't want to obsess over this. So the system has just four primary attributes, strength, agility, toughness, and judgment. So from those, you get a whole host of derived secondary and tertiary abilities. But the idea is in those four stats ... it doesn't necessarily tell you if this character is a great guy or even necessarily if they're really smart—judgment can mean a lot of different things—but it's enough to get the sense for roughly what types of, in a tactical situation, power is this character going to have available. And then there's the secondary abilities which you can spend points on as well, there's haggling and diplomacy, there's the different weapon types, there's weapon speed, you can put points in a lot of defensive abilities, and so on and so forth. There's a lot of different stats to buy points in, but it all boils down to the four basic primary attributes. As far as the other details about the system, it's more math intensive than a lot of paper-and-pencil RPG systems would be in the sense that there are attack rolls and defense rolls and so on and so forth, and the reason for that is that computers are very good at math. You don't necessarily want to have those in a tabletop game, because then you're spending all your time rolling dice and adding things up and not actually having combat, but the computer does that behind the scenes for you so you don't have to care. There are a lot of factors that go in, both random and stat-based, so you wouldn't necessarily translate this system cleanly to a tabletop, but that's not our concern. We wanted a system that work well and entertainingly in a computing setting. We're not worried about how well it plays with miniatures and whatever on a Wednesday night. What else can I tell you about the mechanics? K: Well, I believe that pretty much covers it. And to be quite
honest, why don't we cut this right here for now ... |
