So this post is one that is long overdue, and one that is a little out of the intended order, but here nonetheless.

A couple weeks before the studio officially formed, Joe had approached me to see if I would be interested in creating a fantasy world for a game – one of my choosing, with magic, weird creatures, the works – and naturally I said “oh sweet lord almighty yes.”

World building the world of Attiras for Forged of Blood was perhaps one of the most fun aspects of the development phase so far – to me anyway – and I went in with a ton of ideas as to the world I wanted to make – some grandiose, some totally weird, and some that actually went into the world. My biggest challenge for the world, was balancing my desires as a writer with the limitations that will come with translating this imaginary world into a game we can actually produce within our modest budget, but let’s start from the beginning.

First, I outlined the broad goals that I wanted to have in the world – knowing from the start that I wanted the player character to be something other than human and to explore the intricacies of a multi species society. That means creating or borrowing from the other traditional fantasy races like elves and dwarves, and extrapolating where the big points of contention might be in a world where these races lived together. I also knew that I wanted to set the game at a point in time after some sort of world shattering event that had created a new balance of power. Whether through a natural disaster, orchestrated genocide, or great war, I wanted this event to be a defining moment in the history of this world where an entire race is supplanted by another.

With the goals set, I went back to the team and discussed how we want to approach the characters and combat. Are we playing heroes or soldiers? Do we want the player to feel powerful, weak, or on par with the enemies? And on what scale do we want the player’s actions to impact? After some back and forth, we ultimately decided on the idea of powerful heroes: characters who exhibit physical and other powers beyond that of a human being and in doing so allow the player to feel powerful. We also loved the idea of “kingmaking” but wanted the setting to be more a struggle to power over just kingdom management.

Back at the drawing board (well Google Doc actually), I went with making the future player’s character race one a hybrid humanoid who shares some of the natural enhancements of an ancient race and highly superior physical attributes. This inherently led to me conceptualizing a new race with unique physical characteristics, which I called the the Volgisi as a baseline and an exploration what the rules of “magic” might be in this setting.

To keep this post from being a runaway wall of text, it will suffice to say that I set up a world in which a race of hive-minded, matriarchal elf-like creatures called the Volgisi found and managed to harness magical powers from stones found inside strange creatures called the Bracati that seemingly appear out of another dimension. (Yup – that mouthful…)

Using that as a rough foundation, I then went on to go about creating the 4000 year chronicle of the world that traced the first formations of civilizations of the Volgisi, the first appearance of the creatures, the discovery of magic, and finally the expansion of the Volgissian Empire that soon brought into the fold humans and dwarves to co-exist. As the races mingled, human-volgisi hybrids began to emerge as a species of their own called the Neshalan, and soon they began to have their own ambitions of rule as they exhibit both a natural affinity to magic and greater physical attributes. Again, without giving too much away, what followed was the expected eventuality of a physically – and in this case, magically –  superior race supplanting the Volgisi as the dominant race and driving other species to extinction. So that’s where the events to be portrayed in Forged of Blood picks up, and there we have our player character’s race.

Attiras at the start of our game is a world that had enjoyed a relative peace of a few hundred years, wherein a vast human population has been subject to the rule of a small ruling minority of humanoid hybrids. This is a world where strange creatures can appear out of thin air, carrying within them the only known source of magic – and arguably the keys to the power in this world – and this is the world that has been and will continue to be forged of blood.

While we have most of the history, rules, and plotlines established in the world, the process of world creation has not stopped. As the game mechanics evolve and solidify, so do certain aspects of world and vice versa. For instance, one of the biggest shifts in the world and story was the shift from a full scale kingdom management scenario, to that of brothers looking to reclaim a throne. This came from the our need to pare down on the number of assets and features across our game’s multiple layers. Our focus on the tactical gameplay meant smaller unit tactics, and invariably a focus one or two key characters for the story, leading to a shift in the world creation to focus on creating memorable and heroic character histories as a opposed to large scale engagements.

My creative process for world building in our game is a bit like… hmm. Well I’d like to quote Luke Sullivan, an old mentor from my advertising days, who said it best as:

“…  creativity is exactly like washing a pig. Because it’s messy. It has no rules. No clear beginning, middle, or end. It’s kind of a pain in the ass, and when you’re done you’re not sure if the pig is really clean or even why you were washing a pig in the first place.”

Try as I might to outline, plan out, and have my own misguided notions as to what a world can, could, or should be… I found that once you start, once you have enough traction in creating this new world, it just sort of unravels itself. The empty page was jarring and unavoidably terrifying, but the “rules” and “histories” of the world I was attempting to create needed to be written down – somewhere. It was just a matter of summoning enough courage to try. I just had to start writing it out and soon the entire histories of a world basically wrote itself for me. Also, while this has been a very… particularly first-person blog post, what is perhaps one of the most important things that I had during the process are the two uber-nerds I’m proud to call my partners in crime. Joe and Milo kept me grounded in the world, always there to remind me when certain details simply didn’t fit the world, or when my fantastical notions of politics just didn’t make sense. What they saw and drew from the histories I wrote, helped to mold the world to something that began to make more sense as we went along. Together, we managed to find the stories worth telling in Attiras, even figured out an interesting way to implement a magic system that is interesting as a gameplay mechanic, and fitting for the fantasy RPG we’re shooting for.

OK – I may have gone into a bit of a rant there, but that is perhaps the best way to end this post. A reminder that world creation – especially in the context of a game’s development, is something that is created out of more than just one mind. It’s something that once seeded, simply grew on it’s own through the collective effort of everyone working to create a game within this world. While this post is heavy on the “hopes and dreams” part of the process, next time, we’ll showcase some of the artwork that came out of it once we got our ridiculously talented artist Ken on board.

Cheers and thanks for reading!
– Igor

We’ve been a little lapse with our updates lately as production has been ramping up at the studio, but we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress. For context, Joe has created this visualization of our game’s progress from data taken directly from our source control using Gource.

What we have here is the main project branch of Forged of Blood as the team have created and added to over past months. You can see how we started with just three programmers zipping around creating branches and setting the foundations for our game. Over time, our tree grew to reflect the growing team here at the studio, whose work can be most notably seen in the first big “explosion” we see around the 50 second mark as we integrated their assets.

Every new branch bursting out of the tree reflects what is often days of discussion, iteration and asset creation before being pulled into the stream for integration. It’s one thing to test out the game on our weekly builds, but it’s quite another to see all that work visualized from our source.

That said, we’re also pretty excited to show off a couple of the environments the team has put together for the tactical combat – don’t forget to hit those arrow buttons.

That’s it for this week – I’ll be back soon with another look.

– Igor

Well, I can’t believe we just celebrated our first six months as studio. We went from a few guys shooting the breeze about the game we wish we could make, to the small team we have now. With all the pizza, soda, and DOTA celebrations done, I thought it’d be nice to reflect back on the progress we’ve made as a studio.

Since our Week 1 prototype, we’ve incorporated most of our combat mechanics, destructible cover mechanics, and new environmental and character models (see above). We’ve also made great strides in setting up our the strategic map layer (pictured below) and our game database framework that will serve as the basis for our story event mechanics and procedural content generation moving forward.

Anywhoo… We still have a long road ahead of us, with many more milestones and hurdles to face – Kickstarter, Greenlight, and additional funding to name a few – but I’d like to think that we’ve got the perfect team for the job. Working on Forged of Blood has been a rush so far, and boy, do we have some cool things to show off for the future; but on this quiet lazy afternoon, we all deserve a small pat on the back.

The Forge team, sans a few of our shyer members.

Cheers,
Igor

In game dev it’s easy to say, “we want to make our game fun.” However to do that, we really ought to address the real question: what makes a game fun?

Well, here’s one way to look at it. In his seminal book Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster argued that:

“Fun is all about our brains feeling good – the release of endorphins into our system… One of the subtlest releases of chemicals is at the moment of triumph when we learn something or master a task”.

In other words, learning is fun.

To put it in a less nerdy context, let’s think about the games we’ve played growing up. It’s probably safe to say that we all played Tic-Tac-Toe as children but quickly outgrew the game once we’ve figured out the dominant strategy. The thing is, as soon we’ve discovered the “trick” to winning a game consistently we tend to stop playing because the pleasure found in winning has been greatly diminished.

When you take into consideration a game like Chess or Go and compare it to Tic-Tac-Toe, the difference in depth is obvious – and people can play these games over and over again throughout their entire lives. However, most people will only play Chess or Go continuously when there are enough players at their relative skill levels to play with. These games become increasingly less fun for both parties as the skill gap increases, and for the obvious reasons: The better player will invariably be bored by the absence of a challenge, and the less versed player will be irate that the prospect of losing.

So what does that mean? When a game is too easy and the “jig is up,” we get bored. When a game is too hard and we can’t win, it’s just frustrating. The concept of “fun,” we can then argue, is found in the challenges we face at the very margins of our ability.

This roughly translates into balancing the line between Depth and Accessibility as our second design pillar for our game.

 

For game designers, there are many ways to achieve this. Some games, like Tetris, adds more challenge by speeding up the game as you progress. This forces you to think and execute faster as your skill advances in the game. Other games could increase the complexity of the mechanics involved or add larger numbers of opponents or obstacles for the player to face. Now before we meander too much, let’s go back to our game: Forged of Blood.

If we accept the above premise as the definition of “fun,” then the lesson to draw on would be to have sufficient depth so that the player can always be challenged by something new, either through new mechanics or through different layered gameplay that unlocks as the player progresses.

For example, our game will have two main gameplay modes: the Tactical Layer and the Strategic Layer, in addition to our CYOA-like narrative element. Our plan is to familiarize the player with the complexities and challenges present in the Tactical Layer during Act I. Then we will open up additional responsibilities and challenges for the player in Act II with our Strategic Layer, thereby compounding upon the experience of the player as their skill progresses in the game.

Another approach we are taking is the idea of a “Layered Challenge” in which we allow different players to take on the challenges they want and reward them appropriately. This is a fairly popular approach in a lot of games and can be showcased in different ways. For example, missions in a game can be given a 1-3 star rating and while the mission can be completed in various ways for a 1 star rating, a 3 star rating would carry with it a few challenging caveats. Now, the average gamer might be content with a 1 Star rating that would allow them to progress to the next mission, while more hardcore players might go for the 3 Star rating for a completionist run.

In the context of Forged of Blood, we are thinking of something very similar with primary and secondary objectives. While we will probably forego the “rating” system, we would like to reward players for approaching the game tactically and completing the side objectives. For example: in a mission where the primary objective is to escape an ambush, the player could easily complete the mission by reaching the escape point with only one unit left alive. However, for the tactically sound and challenge oriented, secondary objectives like keeping all of their units alive or preventing the enemy from escaping and warning others would be available. Completing the theoretically more challenging objectives will earn hardcore players rewards, with anything from loot and resources to having multiple effects on the story of strategic layers.

The idea is to have enough depth that a strategically minded and tactically savvy player will have enough meat to digest, but at the same time, be approachable to newer players. That said, we will have an extensive tutorial and sensible default templates for those who don’t want to mess with the finer details in addition to the various layers of complexity we will have for the more hardcore players among us.

Anyway, that’s it for now, I will let our lead game designer to discuss more about the specific of our game system, but this should give you a good sense of the direction we are going to.

Thanks,
-Joe

“Kingmaker” – as the project was codenamed in our formative days – was my idea for bringing to life a childhood dream game. It would, in theory, be the amalgamation of the most cherished gameplay elements I’ve enjoyed since childhood. Growing up, I was always fond of the strategy and thinking involved in chess, the feeling progression and achievement in RPG games, and the agency you get in those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.

Games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, and XCom had satisfied my strategic and RPG cravings for awhile, while I relied on Telltale’s stellar line up for when I’m looking for a solid Choose Your own Adventure game. While each of them are great games in their own right, nothing I’ve played has quite delivered a combination of all three in one game and I set out to do exactly that with Kingmaker.

First day at the studio.

As my game-dev friends and I started to see the Kingmaker project take shape and turn into a group venture, we needed to get the ball rolling quickly. I decided to set up shop with a small team of six: three programmers and three game designers – all of whom I’ve worked with in the industry before – and get a prototype going.

Yes, this is work.

Being indie and working with an invariable dearth of resources means that our prototyping phase has to be fast and effective. For the designers, we needed to create and test out the core tactical game loop as fast as possible while the programmers work with the Advanced Turn Based Toolkit for UE4 to get a prototype build going.

As designers, the first challenge was to create a new combat and progression system that is inspired by the familiar D20 rules but uniquely built for our vision of the game. Using a battlemap and whiteboard, we were to play out a variation of rules before implementing them as code in the prototype.

Explaining character stats and basic rules for the prototype.

In the first ten days, the programmers were able to get a prototype build out and implement the first rulesets we created. From there, the six of us continued iterating the prototype until we had something that was reasonably fun to play with. We can liken the process to finding a diamond in the rough. Once we have something that resembles a gem, we can work on polishing it to the best of our abilities to let it shine.

Our very first build.

From here we added a concept artist to the team, followed by a modeler about a month later. With them on board we were able to set a visual direction and get to the work on some basic assets for the game and the studio ready for production. As of now, we’ve added another modeler and an animator to the team, effectively bringing the studio to full strength and I supposed I’ll let them show off their awesome rock when they introduce themselves later.

That’s it for this week, I’ll give a more detailed post regarding our design pillars next time.

Thanks,
Joe

Hello everyone,

I’m here to welcome you readers, browsers, and tactical enthusiasts to the Forged of Blood website and blog. Here you’ll find all the things you expect from a video game site: game info, development updates, screenshots, along with the on-going account of the bunch of guys and gals who have really taken to heart the idea of “doing what you love” for a living.

Since we’re introducing ourselves: Forged of Blood is a Fantasy Turn-Based Tactical RPG – or to put it more succinctly: a “fantactical RPG.”

It is a passion project that grew into an indie-studio built with friends and like-minded gamers, and we really hope that it’ll excite you as much as it excites us to be working on this every day.

OK, enough excitement for one post. We’ve got a long road ahead and it’s going to be an awesome trip!

Cheers,

Igor