The Broken Hourglass Interview

While today’s action-focused RPGs might cost tens of millions of dollars to produce, the end result isn’t always what long-time role-playing fans are looking for. Enter independent developers – small studios diligently working to fill in niches that AAA developers have seemingly long forgotten. One such indie developer is Planewalker Games, where a small but talented team is busy creating The Broken Hourglass, a party-based cRPG that shares many similarities with Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn. To get a better idea of what we can expect from the game and where the team currently stands in development, we chatted with the game’s producer, Jason Compton.

GB: Bring us up to speed on where you currently stand with the development of The Broken Hourglass. Have your recently reached any major milestones or ran into any unforeseen issues? Any idea what the release date might be yet?

Jason: Aside from a few rough edges remaining on the engine, it’s all about implementing playable content at this stage. Milestone-wise, I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made on critical path implementation (much of “the stuff you have to do to win the game” is in place now).

All of our issues were fairly well foreseen, but we ran into them anyway–mostly a matter of “boy, this is taking longer and costing more money than I would have liked” with a dash of “what, you mean it’s hard finding people out there who know how to make this kind of game and will work for indie prices?” That’s not to say we haven’t had a number of fine contributors working with us, but, as ever, better-faster-and-cheaper would be nice.

Believe it or not, we’ve actually started to be affected by the declining dollar. One of our overseas contractors recently raised his rates, as the dollar has depreciated about 20% against his home currency since we started working together a few years ago. In theory we’ll make up ground later when selling our game, of course, as whatever we charge will look like pocket change to Euro-holders, but for the time being it’s certainly annoying.

And I’m not talking about the release date anymore. There is little more I hate than being wrong, and I’m always wrong when I open my mouth about it, so…

GB: Run us through creating a character from start to finish. How many different attributes, skills, traits, and spells will we have access to initially and how many more (if any) will become available during the game?

Jason: What a perfect time to be answering this question, as we recently revamped the character creation wizard.

The character creation process starts with portrait selection: we have a sizable selection of predefined portraits, which have associated sprites and sprite colors defined for them. Players are welcome to add their own by simply dropping a JPEG or PNG into the right directory–predefining color and animation settings takes a tiny bit of extra work in XML, but that step isn’t necessary as you’re able to select and customize the animation/color settings later in the process.

From there, you pick a name, gender, and soundset. The first “game mechanics” pick is the race selection, from the six sentient strains in Tolmira: humans, Illuminated, the three Ilvari cultures, and finally the Feyborn, the human/Ilvari half-breeds. Each has different starting bonuses and penalties. The warlike, regimented Verai elves have a number of bonuses which reflect their military upbringing, but suffer from poor social skills and magical aptitude. The mysterious Illuminated all start with extra Mana, Judgment, and rudimentary ability with Water Magic, but they are not particularly strong and their glowing, pulsating skin gives them a huge disadvantage to Stealth. The Illuminated also innately possess the Pacifist trait, which gives them a penalty to most attack rolls.

The next step is the level path–roughly speaking, the “class”. By default this is set to the Freeform Development path, meaning you will be able to spend all of your starting character points by hand. If you would rather use the level path system to give your character a head-start, you can select one of the paths in the wizard. On average, paths spend about 70% of your points for you. We haven’t finalized the path list yet, but I expect it to be somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty. More, if we have sudden bursts of insight and cleverness.

Advancing through the path step spends the starting experience for that path (unless you select Freeform Development, in which case none of your points are spent without your explicit say-so.) Here, you are able to buy character traits, both positive and negative. There are several dozen traits, some granted automatically by races, others which are mutually exclusive (you cannot have both the Thick Blooded trait which enhances the effect of healing magic on your character, and the Thin Blooded trait which diminishes healing). Next is the character interface screen, and the 35 primary and secondary character attributes.

Because virtually all of the secondary attributes inherit from one or two of the four primary attributes (Strength, Agility, Toughness, and Judgment), it will be a pretty rare thing for a character to be interested in spending points in all 35 attributes–rather, a character not likely to be a very avid archer may never put any points into Bow Proficiency, and simply rely on the underlying Judgment and Agility bonuses if he or she has to pick up a crossbow in a pinch.

The major exceptions are Stealth and the five magical skills, which do not inherit from any primary attribute. That means if you want your character to be stealthy, or have the ability to cast spells, you need to explicitly purchase points in those disciplines (or pick a level path which will do it for you, such as the Rogue or Water Mage class). You are able to flip back and forth between the attribute and trait purchase screens without starting over, so if you have leftover points and wish to buy a trait, or want to add a negative trait in order to gain more points for additional attributes, that’s easy to do.

Once you’re satisfied with the stats, you move on to the wrapup stage, where you can customize the sprite animation and color choices for your character.

That was an awful lot of documentation for something as straightforward as a character wizard. It’ll be quicker to use than it was to read about it, trust me.

If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also commissioned a flexible little outside character conversion tool. Right now it only supports a few games, and makes only a tentative effort to really balance the resulting characters, but it was just too tempting. The tool is cross-platform and the conversion scripts are written in Python, so if we do go ahead with releasing it, it should be fairly easy for a sufficiently dedicated enthusiast to whip up importers for Wizardry or Dink Smallwood or Zelda or… just about anything, really. The free point-buy system makes this less than truly necessary, of course, but again–it just seemed like it would be a lot of fun.

Jason: The game is designed for a party of five (one player-defined character and four joined NPCs.) There are nine joinable characters in the game. We do not plan to directly support starting the game with more than one player-defined character, but as many of TBH’s developers are experienced character modders, it would be silly of me not to point out that changing the starting limit and/or adding more joinable characters to the game is going to be fairly easy to do…

GB: Give us a few examples of party interactions. Will members of our party periodically begin talking amongst themselves as in Baldur’s Gate II or will such dialogue only occur during specific trigger events?

Jason: We do indeed have a BG2-esque “random banter” system that will offer up interactions between your joined NPCs at various intervals, and you will also hear from your characters in circumstances where their expertise (or big mouth) comes into play. I feel good about the interplay potential between our nine characters–nobody has a relationship which feels forced or tacked-on to me, for instance.

All of the characters are “compatible” in that we don’t have any pairs who refuse to work together, but there are certainly some clear affinity teams. Then again, a lot pivots around the way the PC is built. A physical, healer mage may not see much reason to travel with either Sanelon or Tuhan, while a big bruiser may not see any point in taking Nekos along. And we can never discount the challenge gamers who want to play all-mage, no-mage, etc., so we certainly can’t assume any particular party configurations. Everybody will have plenty to talk about with everybody else.

For instance, one character blames another for the death of her family–with some good reason. A career criminal and master blackmailer, and a career government official and master economist, find that they have a surprising amount in common. And one character explains to another how he starts barroom brawls as a scientific exercise.

In addition, we’re designing four different character romances–two with male NPCs, two with female NPCs.

There is a pair of characters who meet but can never truly banter, but you’ll find out more about that when you play…

GB: Will NPC dialogue change as the game progresses and certain events have occurred? For example, will some of our previous actions be referenced during conversations with NPCs?

Jason: NPCs keep track of how you resolve situations and deal with people, and that factors into their (under-the-hood) “approval score”. Some quest resolutions won’t be palatable to certain NPCs. And we’re watching, and what you do has an impact on the tone of the endgame, and what Mal Nassrin will look like when it’s all over…

GB: Will any important world events occur in real-time, despite what our party might be doing at the moment?

Jason: A few things do require the passage of time outside the PC’s watchful eye, yes.

GB: What can we expect from the game’s combat system? Will it be turn-based, real-time with pause, or something else entirely?

Jason: Our combat system is real-time with pause. I’ve said before and I’ll say again–I’m not religious about it, but I am comfortable designing for it. I’m one of the bigger Laser Squad enthusiasts I know (I’ve even got it installed on my Sansa MP3 player, thanks to Rockbox, and it’s really not an exaggeration to say that I bought that particular MP3 player *because I knew I could install Laser Squad on it*) but I think our team is better at RTWP encounter design than we would be at trying to make like the Gollops.

With a wide range of equipment, our easy system for building multiple itemsets, and the relative ease with which a character can be both a fighter and have at least some rudimentary magical ability, I think players can expect to have a good, engaging range of options every time the combat music kicks in.

GB: How many types of weapons and armor will we have access to in The Broken Hourglass? Are items going to be hand-crafted with static locations or is there some sort of random element to their stats and/or locations?

Jason: Our equipment list is quite extensive–there are dozens of mundane weapons, seven basic shield grades, seven basic armors, various different types of clothing (most doesn’t provide much in the way of protection, but it helps your non-armor-wearing characters look distinct!) Plus, of course, lots of enhanced and magical variations on those items.

Fundamentally, all weapons come down to one of five proficiency types: Bow, Sword, Polearm, Hafted, or Brawling (usually your fist, but there are a few items which are still considered Brawling weapons). Armor and shields don’t require a specific proficiency to use, but they do require a higher carrying capacity in order to use them without penalty. See the question about inventory management for more about that.

In addition, there is a range of miscellaneous magic available. Unlike other games which employ a body-slot system, we don’t have a hard limit on, say, the number of magic rings you can wear. Rather, that is governed by the mana you must give up to equip and wield the item. If you have more mana to spend, you can put it on. (Natch, you still can’t put on two pairs of boots, etc.)

Primarily, we are working with static placement of designer-defined items. The variable here is what the Infinite Dungeon mode ends up bringing us–the capabilities of that play mode are still unfinished, but we may gain a robust random-item generator which could help flesh out some locations in the game. That’s not to be confused with the ability to put random *pre-defined* items in a given container or inventory, which we can and to a limited extent already do.

Jason: Yes, and no. Most items in the game have a bulk-weight (a figure which combines “how heavy is it?” and “how difficult is it to carry?”). Some items, like pieces of paper and so forth, have no bulk-weight.

Each character has a personal inventory, but every party in the game, including the player party, also has an inventory. Items carried in a personal inventory count against the comfortable carrying capacity of a character, but items stored in party inventory don’t count against anybody–they’re your quantum stash of goods, so to speak. The downside is that you cannot access the party inventory while in combat mode.

When your encumbrance goes over your comfortable carrying capacity, two things happen–you slow down, and you start suffering attack and defense penalties. You can get better at lugging things around by boosting your Carrying attribute, either by spending points in it directly, or by buying more Toughness and Strength, which both feed into Carrying. There are some traits which also make certain categories of items “lighter for you”–like armor. (And some which make items heavier. Joinable NPC Ruvanet suffers from the Lame Arm trait, which makes two-handed weapons and shields a major inconvenience.)

It’s worth pointing out that in this system, it’s not necessarily a “failure” on the part of the player if a character is getting Carrying-related penalties. If you slap full plate mail, a huge shield, and a heavy estoc in your hero’s hand, there’s virtually no way he’s not going to be above his Carrying limit. But you might do that if, say, you felt confident that the high damage resistance and big Deflect bonus he will get from the armor and shield, respectively, outweigh the other penalties, allowing him to stand in front and deal more abuse.

GB: Will there be a genuine economy, fluctuating according to the amount of goods bought and sold or by the ease of access on the roads?

Jason: I may have an econ degree, but we are not simulating a real economy. Storekeepers have a bank which governs how much they can buy from you, but with a few exceptions owing to the difficulties of the siege-state Mal Nassrin, we don’t make you worry about what the Federal Reserve is doing while you’re out saving the city.

GB: Will we be able to join guilds, factions, or other types of societies? If so, how many at one time? What effects will such a membership have?

Jason: The player will have to interface with various power groups in the city in order to bring Mal Nassrin out of its troubles, but it’s not so much about joining as it is about coercing, nudging, and pleading with them to do what needs to be done to save Mal Nassrin while your attentions are drawn elsewhere.

Really, the implication of the PC’s role as Impromptu Vigilante Hero is that none of the other power groups are willing or able to solve the crisis, so we would rather let the player party operate a level above them, so to speak.

GB: Tell us about the game’s “infinite dungeon” and “arena play” modes. Are these entirely separate from the game’s main campaign?

Jason: Yes, they are completely different play modes. You can start an Infinite Dungeon or Arena game with the same character you started a Broken Hourglass game with, or define new characters just for those game sessions.

Arena mode is a simple “Can my guys beat up your guys?” test of power and skill. You must start an Arena game with at least one character, but from the Arena screen you can add characters and creatures from the game to your team, and build an opposing team from the same list. You are dropped into a special combat zone, given a gaggle of equipment in party inventory, and then combat begins. Simple stuff, really, but it seemed like a fun way to blow off steam.

The Arena poses an interesting design question for us because of that list of characters and creatures, which is of course chock full of spoiler potential. If this was a console game, I know exactly what would happen. Console games love rewards and “unlocking” content, so we would pop up a big screen saying “You’ve been playing The Broken Hourglass for one hour! We’ve unlocked the Vlastos Elite Guard for Arena mode!” or “You just won your 10th battle! We’ve unlocked the Greater Amoeba for Arena mode!”

For whatever reason, though, on a computer that sort of thing feels dreadfully out of place. But at the same time, I really don’t particularly want to spoil the game’s challenges for you if you happen to stumble into the Arena interface and just click on everything. I haven’t come up with a solution that both respects the player’s natural sentiment of “this is my game and my computer, dammit, so show me the goods!” and our natural desire to encourage players to encounter combat challenges in the narrative first before hammering at them in Arena mode.

Infinite Dungeon mode is a little different, although like Arena mode it’s basically just an excuse to have a lot of combat challenges. The premise for ID mode is taken from old roguelikes and their early PC offshoots like Sword of Fargoal you are after the Object of Great Desire and, after you hack your way through X number of maps consisting of increasing levels of difficulty, you may find it and win the game. The maps are simply taken from The Broken Hourglass, but rather than leading to city neighborhoods, they are connected with one another in completely random fashion, and instead of being populated with our carefully-crafted townspeople and guards and dancers and so forth, are instead full of hostiles, as well as randomly placed traps and loot. As mentioned, there’s still a little finishing work to be done on ID mode, but that’s the upshot.

Thanks for your time, Jason!