The Indie Fix: Interview with Frayed Knights ... - Bits 'n' Bytes Gaming

Posted by Armand K. on Friday, September 16, 2011 ? Leave a Comment?

This week I had the pleasure of speaking with Jay Barnson, AKA the Rampant Coyote about PC gaming, role playing games, and most importantly, his upcoming, tongue-in-cheek indie RPG Frayed Knights: The Skull of S?makh-Daon. Frayed Knights is a throwback to the classic computer RPGs of the 90?s that promises geeky humor, 30+ hours of classic RPG gameplay, and plenty of spells, feats, monsters, and dungeon exploration. The game should hopefully release within the next couple of months, but in the meantime, check out what Jay has to say about it!

BnB: You have a remarkably refreshing approach to discussions about gaming and RPGs in your blog. Instead of threading a careful, diplomatic line, you express your thoughts clearly and with little censorship, stating exactly what you like, don?t like, and want more of in modern RPGs. Though I can imagine this helps you with the core audience, do you ever find it getting you in trouble with a more mainstream market or industry?

JB: Especially when said developer I might be talking about comes to visit! Talk about awkward!

Honestly, I really don?t know how much trouble it gets me into. I have a lot of friends who are still in the mainstream games biz, and I don?t think my views are always too far out-of-line with their own. A lot of mainstream developers and designers get frustrated working on Sequel #7 of Best-Selling Franchise or its clone, and have a lot of ideas of what games ought to be like that are nothing like their assigned project. But you are being paid to make a particularly product, not your own game.

Ken Rolston recently spoke of the equivalent of a ?closet drama? for games? things he would love to take the time to design just for the joy of doing so, but which he harbors no hope whatsoever of getting funded or produced. That?s the joy of being indie ? you can work on those ?closet dramas.? Sure, they may be completely nonviable as a multi-million dollar project. And they may not even be commercially viable as a low-budget indie game. But as an indie, your small size can work to your advantage creatively. Maybe something doesn?t have an audience of a million customers. But it doesn?t need to.

I?m more concerned with honking off my own audience when I complain about something one week, and then turning around and do it myself a week later, simply because it?s easier. So sometimes I?m the target of my own rants!

BnB: You?ve commented regularly about the recent indie gaming surge. For those who may not follow your blog, what are your thoughts on the success of games like Minecraft, Braid, World of Goo, and Limbo. Any games your particularly looking forward to in the near future?

JB: It?s really amazing to me. It wasn?t too long ago when I was acting like an indie evangelist, trying to ?spread the word? about this incredible body of work out there that ? for me at least ? made gaming fresh and new again. Then over the course of a year or so, everybody was talking about ?indie,? even if they didn?t understand what it meant. But even now, there are still a ton of games coming out ? more than ever! ? that people haven?t heard about. The ones you mention are great, and I?m a fan, but the indie games I?m most excited about are still under the radar.

I have to be careful talking about upcoming indie games, as so many indie projects die without ever seeing the light of day, but two indie RPGs I?m really looking forward to are?Age of Decadence and Dead State. Age of Decadence, by Iron Tower, is set in sort of an alternate-history Roman empire setting, with lots of meaningful decisions that really alter the plot. Dead State, by industry vets Brian and Annie Mitsoda at Doublebear, ?is a hardcore post-zombie-apocalypse game that?s really taking something of a harsh simulationist approach to the genre. It sounds awesome.

I?m looking forward to Positech?s Gratuitous Tank Battles. I enjoyed Gratuitous Space Battles, and hope the mecha-stomping follow-up is even more fun.

Currently, I?ve had some great fun playing Jamestown ? a really well-done bullet-hell shooter in an alternate-history 1600s involving aircars on Mars. Another favorite of mine is Dejobaan Games? AaaaAaaAAaAAAa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. ?It?s wildly fun abstract 3D game where you BASE jump from floating cities miles up in the sky, flipping off protesters and falling as dangerously close to stuff as you can without wiping out before pulling your chute.

BnB: Moving onto your upcoming game Frayed Knights: The Skull of S?mack-Daon, can you tell us a little about the development process? How long have you been working on the game? Is it just you, or are others helping with art, sound, writing, programming and so on?

JB: I?m a little embarrassed about this ? I?ve been working on this thing for over four years now. It was supposed to be a ?quick and dirty? project that I could complete as a part-time effort in under two years. I seem to have underestimated a little bit. Some of it was excusable, as I was back to working in the mainstream games biz and was in perma-crunch for the better part of a year, and so Frayed Knights development slowed to a trickle. It was tough getting that initial momentum back.

Much of the time, it?s just been me, but I?ve been very fortunate in being able to work with several others people on different parts of the game, particularly with the art and music. It was mainly an outsourcing thing, but these people really put a lot of effort into it and took some ownership of the piece of the game they were involved in. I couldn?t have done it without them. So I can?t really say I had a team, but I rarely had to go at it completely alone.

BnB: You?ve mentioned Wizardry 7 (a personal favorite) as a large influence in the early parts of Frayed Knights? development, and maybe Wizardry 8 as a later influence when you decided to go for a more 3D approach. Could you briefly tell us of other games that influenced your design and development? Yeah, basically fan-service for the classics to make us old-time gamers feel warm and fuzzy inside.

JB: While it?s not exactly that style of game, my personal biggest RPG influence was the Ultima series. And there are some nods ? well, jokes ? in that direction that you?ll find in Frayed Knights. Might & Magic is another obvious spiritual ancestor. Ditto for the old ?Gold Box? D&D games, particularly Pool of Radiance.

But the other big influence is dice-and-paper gaming. I really wanted to try and capture a bunch of those feelings from the old days ? playing an Ultima for the first time, or playing D&D around a table in those wild geeky days. I don?t know if that?s achievable, as it was probably pretty personal, but that?s been something of a guiding star for me in development.

BnB: Perhaps the most interesting game mechanic in Frayed Knights is the use of drama stars. From what I understand, they add a fun new element to overcoming game challenges and replace the save/reload approach so many of us have come to rely on in PC gaming. Could you just give us a quick run down of how drama stars work, and why they are so important to the game?

JB: For me, a big part of the ?feel? of RPGs is the randomness ? and managing the risk of failure. A big part of the skill of playing these games ? especially dice & paper ? is like that Kenny Rogers song, ?The Gambler:? You gotta know when to hold ?em, fold ?em, walk away, run. ?But in CRPGs, the availability of save-and-restore anywhere means that players can pretty much force the outcome. I?ve done it myself, many times, restoring my saved game and re-opening a box of random treasure until something good comes out, or restoring through dozens of deaths until I manage to get a lucky blow in on the boss and win the combat.

One way to prevent that ?save-scumming? approach to play is to limit saves to particular locations. But I hate that. I don?t have time or inclination to keep re-playing through long sequences to survive to the next save spot ? especially when console developers love to put save spots so far apart that anybody with a job or family can only play on three-day weekends.

So the ?Drama Star? idea allows plain ol? save-scumming just fine, but rewards you if you don?t. You get points when dramatic things happen, or you do something risky (like just opening a door, or getting into a fight, or talking to an NPC for the first time). Including bad things, like having a character get incapacitated. These points build up, filling in stars at the top of the screen. When you have stars filled in, you can spend them on special actions that are kind of like spells, but aren?t really character powers ? they are player powers to alter the game. You can make a character get a huge bonus on their next couple of actions ? all but automatic success. Or restore fatigue and exhaustion. Or even bring back characters who have been incapacitated.

The trick is that you lose these points in your saved games. ?Every time you start a new session ? including reloading in mid-game ? your drama points drop back down to nothing. So if you are a chonic save-scummer, you won?t be able to play with drama stars very often. But if you aren?t, you won?t be at a huge disadvantage to someone who does, because you?ll have access to abilities that will help even things out and help you recover from any setbacks you may have encountered.

One exception is quit-and-continue. If you quit the game and then ?continue? exactly where you last left off, you get the drama stars back. So folks like me who can only play for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time won?t lose out too much.

BnB: You?ve previously mentioned implementing adventure game elements into Frayed Knights as well as what sounds like a deep and complex RPG aspect. My question to you would be, ?Are you mad, sir?!? Or more specifically, how do you see the adventure game elements as helping your game?

JB: If I was completely sane, I probably wouldn?t have even started this project.

Some of it is the old-school feel. Back in the day, there wasn?t quite the clear delineation between the adventure game and RPG genres. It was all fuzzy, and you had a lot of adventure-game style puzzles mixed into your RPGs. And I have to admit, there are a couple of titles out there that I never completed on account of getting stymied by one of those puzzles and losing interest by the time the Internet made those obstacles easy to overcome.

We still have those today, but it seems that more of the time they?ve been supplanted by ?quests? ? often of the ?kill ten rats and bring me their tails? variety. While Frayed Knights has a little of that kind of thing too, and adventure-game style puzzles aren?t a huge part of the game, I really prefer it when the ?quests? are really more organic, evolving from a need to overcome an obstacle.

But sometimes I allow you an out, too. There?s one guardian in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S?makh-Daon that kicks off a whole quest line back in town just to get this one item. It?s pretty funny and not particularly difficult, and some players have already solved the quest except for the final stage before they meet the guardian. But because it involved back-tracking back to town, I left in an option to just say ?screw it!? and attack the guardian, skipping the whole quest line and moving on. ?Assuming you survive. An option for the impatient?

BnB: How much diversity can players expect to see in the game, be it in environments, monsters, spells/skills, and so on?

JB: Way more than I?d ever planned when I first started. I went way overboard on spells, hearkening back to older games. While there are some duplicates or near-duplicates between the four categories of magic (like the healing spells cast by all three priest spell categories), at last count we had well over 100 spells in the game, most of which can be modified by spellcasting feats for several hundred variants. So you not only have spells like ?Incendiary Crackleball,? but ?Massive Incendiary Crackleball? and ?Hellacious Incendiary Crackleball.? Perhaps not the most interesting variants of all time,, but it?s proven a lot of fun to play around to find the optimal variants to use at any one level against whatever opponents.

Enemies ? we?ve got over sixty enemies, though they don?t all have unique visuals. But even monsters of the same basic race may have a lot of differences in terms of their skills, special abilities, armor, spells, and so forth.

Locations ? we have five outdoor locations, and sixteen ?dungeons? ? basically indoor locations with threats. In practice, that?s been a little over thirty hours of play for the testers.

Skills ? the game has over eighty ?feats? which players can buy as their characters advance. These really allow a ton of customization, giving any character spellcasting abilities or advanced fighting skills, special combat actions, and so forth.

BnB: Will the game have much focus on quests, NPCs, non-combat areas, and the general exploring-a-town sort of vibe? Or is it more of a dungeon exploration/combat based game?

JB: There?s a little bit of all of that in there, but it?s solidly in the old-school dungeon exploration / combat camp.

BnB: Seeing as you are such a champion of the classic 90?s CRPG, any plans to create a manual or similar documentation for Frayed Knights, even in a digital format, akin to the kind of loot we?d find in the boxed RPGs of previous times?

JB: Yep, the game is shipping with manual (PDF) of non-trivial size. I don?t think you need it to play the game, and a lot of the material is repeated in in-game help, but it includes a bunch of rules details not explained in the game, and includes a little bit of additional backstory. There?s also a strategy guide available.

BnB: I am of course hoping your game is a massive success, and ushers in a new era of classic CRPG style games. Supposing however that sales don?t go as well as you?d like them too, will you continue developing the next two games in the series, or are you depending on the initial success of this one to continue production?

JB: My wife was asking me a question about this last night. ?If you don?t make any money on this thing, will it have been worth it?? ?It?d be depressing, but the answer was still yes. The game is not perfect, but it?s been a great personal success. In the words of Malcom Reynolds in Serentiy, ?We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.?

If the game totally tanks, it?s going to be hard justifying pouring thousands more dollars out of my pocket into two more games that will likely do no better. That?s money that would be better put into my daughters? educations while I make smaller, cheaper games. But so long as the first one hasn?t just proven to be an expensive hobby I can ill-afford to continue, I?m planning to keep on trucking. We?ve already done some initial work on the sequels, anyway.

And hey, if the game is a phenomenal success, maybe I can afford to go full time, bring a couple of the guys on as employees instead of contractors, and focus on making these games much, much faster.

BnB: Aside from making the game available on your own site, do you hope to try to get it on Steam and other digital distribution sites? If not, what are the reasons?

JB: Sure, I?ll be happy to go with whatever other distribution venues become available. Even a box at Wal-Mart, if that makes sense business-wise. But most of these platforms ? especially Steam ? are not open platforms. An indie just can?t ?make their game available on Steam.? That?s Steam?s decision, and they reject far more games than they accept. So initially, I?m focusing on what I can control, and exploring other options from there.

BnB: What would you consider are your guilty pleasures in modern, ?AAA? RPGs? What games do you find you really enjoy?

Earlier this year, Fallout: New Vegas was probably to blame for development slowdown. ?I want to make sure Frayed Knights: The Skull of S?makh-Daon ships well in advance of Skyrim, as I expect that one to command my attention pretty well, too.

BnB: Finally, you host a number of other games on your site that people can purchase. Any you think gamers should be particularly aware of, or games that haven?t received the attention you think they deserve?

JB: I want to say, ?All of them!? But there are some that are particularly interesting in one way or another and really didn?t seem to get much by way of sales.

The Three Musketeers is one that I thought had a fascinating premise and a ton of variety, and also ? obviously ? deviated from the standard Tolkienesque fantasy setting.

Depths of Peril is one of my favorite indie RPGs, but perhaps messed with the formula a little too much for many gamers. Imagine a Diablo-type game, but with a really dynamic world and competing factions of adventurers. Leave a quest undone, and maybe another faction will do it for you, gaining the prestige and loyalty of the town. Or if left undone by everyone, things get worse? as the bad guy succeeds in his plan and takes it to the next level. This latter mechanic was used quite well in the studio?s later game, Din?s Curse, but I really liked the strategy element of the earlier game with the other factions (which often got violent?)

[editor's note: check out my review of Din's Curse here, a fun game for fans of Diablo like hack and slash games.]

Planet Stronghold is a story- and character-heavy RPG that?s part visual novel and part RPG. And it?s a sci-fi setting, for even more fun!

BnB: Thanks for taking the time to speak to me Jay, and best of luck with your upcoming release.

Visit Frayed Knights? development blog here where you can get the latest info on the game, plus Jay?s discussions on all things gaming.

And check out the game?s page on Jay?s site with links to discussion forums, FAQs and more.

Filed under Featured Articles, News, PC, Previews, Retro, The Indie Fix, Uncategorized ? Tagged with CRPG, Frayed Knights, indie games, Rampant Coyote, The Indie Fix

Source: http://bnbgaming.com/2011/09/16/the-indie-fix-interview-with-frayed-knights-developer-jay-barnson/

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