Returning to the Edge: Part IV

The Vision

If this project had kicked off in a sensible way, I’d have begun by sharing an outline with you. Just a couple of pages of the general idea jotted down, then follow up with a high-level breakdown of all the core elements, and then at last I’d hammer out an exhaustive old fashioned design document with absolutely everything worked out in excruciating detail before I did anything else. That’s the right way to make a game…or at least the way I was taught way back in the golden age. What I’ve done instead is do everything out of order. I started with 3D models, began laying out a level and only now am I figuring out what the story is and what kinds of final features I intend to implement. This is completely and utterly not how you should do this — but it’s okay. Since I’m a one-man production team, I don’t have to communicate functionality to anyone else, and I’ve already got the original game as a conceptual proof of concept. But for you folks following my blog who can’t read my mind (you wouldn’t want to anyway), and since a few of you have begun paying for this content since I announced I’m working on this project, I should at the very least try to explain where I’m going with all of this.

The Basics

As with the original game, Planet’s Edge: Fractured Frontier (ooh, title reveal!) will be a hybrid between a top-down, party-based adventure RPG and a relatively simplistic space combat game. The player will explore different planets, establish alliances or rivalries with alien races, mine or trade for important resources, upgrade their characters and their ship, and do battle against the various forces who imperil humanity following a disastrous interdimensional event. My intent is that the new game will simply expand on what we did before with updated graphics, improved mechanics, a greatly improved UI, and generally more of everything.

From a big-picture perspective, the new game should conceptually feel like the original. You will have the same four main characters, the overall plot is mostly the same, and the core gameplay loop is practically identical, though I’ll be tweaking it to improve player choice and add depth to the narrative. As much as possible, I’m going to pepper in callbacks for the small audience of people who remember the original (you can grab copies of it off GOG.com).

A Few Thoughts On Scale & Scope

Whenever I attended the Adventure Game Fan Fair back in April, I was reminded powerfully of how much I missed the game industry of the late 80s and early 90s. Things were much, much simpler back in the day. At New World Computing, when we created the original Planet’s Edge, there were only three of us — Eric Hyman, me, and Kenneth Mayfield — who were involved in the day-to-day production of the game. Along the way we occasionally dragged in other people to assist us (primarily for art production), but all of the big decisions and tasks were handled between we three. It was honestly much easier to make a game with a tiny circle of people than a massive team.

My goal now is to get back to that development experience; a handmade, intimate game made with as few people involved as possible, made to please gamers like me first before worrying about whatever faddish thing the gaming market is chasing after at the moment. I expect I’ll be doing everything myself, from the design to the programming to the art to the original music. I’ve got experience with doing all of those things (with varying levels of competence), so I don’t actually need other people to do this. My guiding general rule of thumb will be, if I don’t know how to do it, then I’m going to teach myself how to do it. This is fundamental to my DNA. This is how I was raised. There was a time when being a so called “renaissance man” who can do everything — or at the very least try to do everything — was something valued by the world. That’s still the world I choose to live in. I’d rather acquire a new skill than try to raise money (which I hate doing beyond all measure) then hire someone else and try to explain what I’m trying to do and hope they’ll produce what I want. I don’t want to manage other people. I just want to make my game.

Taking the above into consideration, I’m not shooting to make a big game. Starfield and No Man’s Sky and Eve are all very cool, but games like those are not something a one-man team can realistically accomplish, at least not in a reasonable amount of time. The scale and the scope and the complexity will therefore be moderated by what I think I can handle on my own within the next couple of years. If I come up with a feature that I think is beyond what I’m capable of, I’ll stick it into a wishlist. If I can’t teach myself how to do it, I’ll either drop it, or I’ll consider bringing in a gunslinger who can do that one thing for me.

I would love to release the game all at once, but given the restrictions I’m imposing on myself, it is very probable that it will be a few years before I’ve created all the content. I might try to tackle the episodic concept that John Cutter and I attempted with our unreleased RPG Elysium (which unfortunately was one of the numerous amazing projects lost in the collapse of Cavedog Entertainment in the late 90s). Thanks to the way exploration was artificially divvied up Planet’s Edge, it wouldn’t be too difficult to hack it into “modules” or “seasons,” but I’d have to do a lot of planning to ensure that the game remained balanced as new tranches of content were released and integrated. For the moment this is a theoretical problem. I’ve got plenty of time to think about releases as I first concentrate on getting this game functional.

As with the original, the game will be a purely single player experience, and I have no plans or interest in trying to turn it into yet another e-sport deathmatching platform. That’s fine for folks who love that sort of thing, but it’s completely separate from the kinds of games that I enjoy.

What significant changes are being made?

I’ve actually got quite a long laundry list of things I intend to change, but here are the things that I’m most focused on for the immediate future.

• Graphical Upgrade - First and foremost, reinterpreting the game into 3D is at the top of my priority list. Even if I manage to change nothing else, creating something that is more visually appealing to a “contemporary” audience is absolutely essential. For the RPG portion of the game, I’m shooting for something that will look like an interstellar, futuristic Pillars of Eternity or something similar. As far as space flight and space combat goes, I’m still trying to work out what the look and feel of that experience will be like.

• UI - Going back and looking at the original game, the thing that’s aged worst about PE is its appallingly bad user interface. It seemed fun and quirky back in the day, but I can do so much better with it now. The challenge will in finding something that still has a hint of that old 90s vibe, but is modern enough that it’s easy to use by modern players.

• Story - I’ll be approaching the story of the original PE as a kind of jumping off place for the events in this game. A few things will be familiar, a lot will not. When you do see something from Point of No Return referenced in Fractured Frontier, you’re likely to see it from a different perspective the second time around.

• Dialogue - The dialogue was a fairly “one off” affair in the original game, and there was very little sense that talking to any character more than once had any value. The NPCs in PE:FF will have a lot more to say, and you’ll be able to develop continuing relationships with them over the course of the game. There will be a Betrayal at Krondor chapter-like system that will change what’s going on in different places in the eight sectors depending on actions that the players have (or have not) taken.

• Movement - The old, chunky tile by tile movement system is going bye bye in favor of the kinds of click-and-follow mechanics that are common to most isometric games today. When entering into combat, however, the game will shift into a hybrid turn-based mode with a pause option as in the original Baldur’s Gate games.

• Interstellar Travel - I’m going to be making a very big change in how ships travel between star systems, but I’ll address the specifics of that further on down the line. The dynamics of space travel are definitely going to be very different.

• Skills - The player’s going to have a lot more skillsets to choose from, and in particular there will be more skill options to do things that aren’t combat related. Expect that I’ll be building on adapting how skills were acquired, used and developed in Betrayal at Krondor.

• Puzzles - There were several puzzles in the original PE, but they were really limited in how we could present them back in the day. I’m brainstorming ways to expand on those old school adventure game mechanics. And yes, there will be some kind of Krondor-esque “puzzle chest” analog in PE.

• Building - One of the things that I loved doing in PE was building new stuff for ships. I definitely want to expand this idea so that there are lots of things we can build, modify, or generally tinker with. The real challenge is in finding a way to have a kind of “crafting” in the game which doesn’t turn into a time-wasting chore.

Next time around for paying patrons, I’ll have some juicy new footage of the holographic Alpha Centauri device being dropped into the game!