The Long, Strange Journey of the Penny Arcade Game

IGN has a preview/interview feature with the two developers behind Zeboyd, which covers their Penny Arcade games, including the newly announced Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness IV. Apparently the team’s ambition is to top Chrono Trigger as “best 16-bit-style RPG”.

Here’s a snip:

IGN: Why the decision to change the art style and the mechanics?

Robert Boyd: Zeboyd Games is a two-man operation and the 3D cel-shaded look that the first two games had is way out of our budget. But beyond that, we’re huge fans of some of the beautiful 2D art that was created in the 16-bit era of gaming. With each of our games, we’ve tried to take our art even further and it is our hope that eventually we’ll be creating games with art that’s still in that 16-bit style but is far beyond anything that could have actually been created at that time.

As for the mechanic change, we had some ideas we wanted to play around with and Penny Arcade told us to go for them.

Bill Stiernberg: I handle all of our games’ art assets. We aren’t a large operation and we don’t have the resources to build a massive 3D game, nor do we have the team size to produce a great deal of 3D assets. We started this company on the notion that we’d be building mostly 2D RPGs and keeping our team lean and our business efficient. I am constantly working to learn and improve my art skills and to become more efficient at creating game assets so that we can continue to build more visually attractive, varied, and interesting games, and I think people will see a noticeable boost in Rain-Slick 4’s visuals compared to our previous games as a result of my efforts on that front. At least I hope so! Building an entire RPG world and all of its maps, sprites, effects, UI elements and miscellaneous art and animations is a fairly large undertaking for one person, I think, especially on a fairly tight development schedule. But I have so much fun doing it, I really can’t wait to see everyone’s reaction to this game’s maps and characters.

IGN: What fan feedback did you take from the third game and implement in the finale?

Robert Boyd: Many fans complained that they felt that the third game was too linear. Because of this, we’ve added more optional areas in the fourth game and have tried to add more secrets and secondary routes to the main dungeons.

The other major feedback we’ve tried to take into account for the fourth game was the complaint that it was too easy to find a winning strategy early on in the game and then use that strategy with few adjustments throughout the entire game. We’ve made a number of adjustments, both small and not so small, to try to encourage the player to play around with a number of different setups and strategies as the game progresses.

Bill Stiernberg: We are also addressing linearity by providing a freely explorable overworld. Rain-Slick 3 took place entirely in one city, but Rain-Slick 4 takes place in an entirely new world, essentially. That gives us the freedom to really open up the game to a large and varied environment and let players explore. Secondly, I’m building the maps with a more open and interesting structure than I did in Rain-Slick 3. Our original Rain-Slick 3 game design called specifically for somewhat linear maps, and later when we revised the engine I was able to open the maps up a bit more. I don’t want to produce convoluted, confusing maps either; so with Rain-Slick 4, I think I’ve found a good middle ground that allows players to explore a bit without getting confused. Combined with the free, open overworld and optional stuff we’re putting into the game world, I think it’ll feel much less linear.