Iron Tower Studio Colony Ship Game Design Update #3

Iron Tower Studio’s leader Vince D. Weller has penned a new monthly forum update for the studio’s new and as of yet untitled CRPG, which will take place on a colony ship traveling in space. Based on the projections he makes, we will probably get a fair amount of these, as he’s expecting to be able to release the game in Early Access in 2019 and to get a full release in 2020:

2016 pre-production. The goal is to have all systems, quests, and locations designed and ready, so that we have a clear blueprint to follow. At the moment Nick, Ivan, and Oscar (programming, models & animations, level design & scripting) are working on the dungeon crawler, so they aren’t sitting around waiting for me. Mazin (art) is working on both the crawler and the CSG (colony ship game), with the crawler being a priority at the moment.

2017 laying the foundation. Once the crawler is released, we’ll focus on the CSG. The goal is to get to the content-building stage fast but that’s a long journey, requiring the following 3 steps:

• Engine familiarity and systems/tools porting IF using Unreal 4; at least 6 months
• All systems (character, crafting, inventory, dialogue, stealth, combat); probably a year
• Models and animations. AoD has over 500 unique animations, so it’s not as simple as it sounds, but we should be able to do it in a year.

So IF everything goes well, we’ll have everything we need by mid 2018 and start working on the content. That gives me 2.5 years to develop the setting, factions, quests, characters and party members, which is plenty of time. I’m already working on the main quest and it’s shaping up well (good range of choices plus a really great fork in the middle where you can disregard what you’ve been working on until now or continue if you still think it’s the best option and change the goal and the endgame scenario and endings). More on that in the future updates.

Our goal will be to deliver a 4-location demo by the end of 2018 and start gathering feedback and tweaking systems, which is a crucial step. I assume it would take us about 6 months to make changes based on the feedback, at which point we’ll be ready to move forward once again.

The next step is to get to the Early Access stage, which will require 50% of the content (it’s not an actual requirement but we don’t want to offer less). I’d say it would take us a year to get there, but if we can do it faster, it’s a bonus.

So, Early Access by the end of 2019, release by the end of 2020. So far it looks reasonable but it always does when the finish line is 5 years from now. Either way, we’ll keep you posted of our progress and since you now know what to expect and when, you’ll be able to tell the moment we get off schedule.

That’s not the only information contained in the update, however, as the developer also goes over the notable systemic differences between this title and The Age of Decadence. Don’t hold the developers to this, as usual, given the game is very far from entering production and changes happen all the time while a game is made. A couple of interesting ones:

Feats & Character Levels

Your characters will gain levels using experience points from quests. When you level up, you’ll select feats, unlocking or improving your abilities. The feats will be an important aspect of character development (i.e. they won’t give you minor bonuses but help you develop your characters along specific paths: lone wolf vs squad leader, offense vs defense, gunslinger vs sprayer or gadgeteer, melee vs ranged, which will go beyond which skill to develop, etc) and make as much of a difference as the skills levels.

I want the skills to determine your chance of success with certain tasks and the feats to define what you can do and how you can use these skills to maximum advantage. For example, not every guy with points in Pistol is a gunslinger, not every guy who travels alone is a Jeremiah Johnson when it comes to survival, etc. Basically, the feats will define your character much more than your skills.

Skills & Learn by Using

You will not gain XP for killing, talking, sneaking, picking locks, using computers, fixing mechanical things and such. You will not increase your skills manually. Instead your skills will be increased automatically based on their use.

Why?

• One of the most common complaints about AoD was meta-gaming, yet the problem wasn’t on the design end but on the player’s end. Basically, it was driven by the player’s desire to get more content in the course of one game. As that content required stats and skills, it forced some players to metagame, either to spread skill points in the most optimum manner or to hoard points and use them like currency to buy extra content. The ‘˜increase by use’ system eliminates this meta-gaming aspect as now there are no skill points to hoard or distribute. The content you get will be determined by your actions and choices (including which skills to use as your primary and secondary groups).
• The main problem with a party-based, skill-based (as of opposite to class-based) setup is that even with a 3-man party you can easily cover all skills you want to have. You’ll have a fighter/talker, fighter/thief, fighter/fixer, which is something we’d like to avoid. The ‘˜increase by use’ system solves this problem in the most natural and logical way possible. Your abilities reflect what you do, not how (usually arbitrary) you distribute your skill points.
• It reinforces the party-based design I talked about in the previous update. If you let one of the party members do all the repair work while you concentrate on other areas, losing this party member would hit you hard and you’d have to make sure (via choices made during quests) that he/she would stay with you no matter what.
• It rewards consistent gameplay. Let’s say you need to deal with a gang that stands between you and that door over there. If you kill them, everyone’s combat skills will improve a bit. If you talk your way through, only your dialogue skills will go up.
• We’re well aware of the possible exploits and want to reassure you that skill use will be a somewhat limited resource (no respawning enemies, silly things like greeting every NPC to increase your speech skills, spamming activities to max skills in 30 min, using faster weapons to level up skills faster, etc). Instead of counting how many times you did something, we’ll assign a certain value (let’s call it learning points) to each activity (attacking, killing, fixing, sneaking, convincing, lying, etc). So killing a tough enemy or repairing a reactor will net you more points than killing a weakling or fixing a toaster. Basically, it will work the same way as XP but go directly toward raising a skill that did all the work.