GamesBeat: How do you go about doing this?
Vogel: It’s a lot of rebuilding forts. A lot of times when you—there’s a lot of dungeons. A lot of dungeons in this game full of monsters and bandits and brigands and people to talk to and people to bother. Often the reward—there’s always treasure, because there’s gotta be treasure, but most of the dungeons, the reward is resources. In addition to a nice new sword, you might get a new source of iron or quicksilver and such. Then you can take that to your towns and say, okay, rebuild those buildings. I want an alchemist in that building. And then all of a sudden you can get better potions.
Learning the craft
Above: In this case, “Lumber Liquidators” has a different context …
GamesBeat: This is different for you. I don’t remember doing any of that in your past games.
Vogel: It’s completely new. I’m not an expert on the role-playing scene. I used to be, but I’m not anymore. I’m sure there have been games done in this way. But in this game your main source of loot and your main source of power increase is industry. By building forts and building shops, building smithies, building woodworks, building guard posts, that’s your main source of advancing your character. It’s a new thing. I don’t know how much people are going to like it. I know I get a huge kick out of it. I get my own little power fantasy from moving across the board and saying, put a building there, poof, there’s a building, walk inside. This place is going to have a barracks. Poof, there’s this little cloud of smoke effects, and then there’s a barracks there with guards standing there all of a sudden, and now you’re more powerful in this way or that way. I get a big kick out of it.
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I like that most of our best loot upgrades, you’re going to make them yourself by building up your empire to the point where you can make the awesome sword or the awesome plate mail. You don’t just have to—there are really cool treasures in the dungeons, but when you get the really good suit of armor, it’s not some dingy bloodstained thing you found under a dragon’s butt. You made it yourself.
GamesBeat: Like crafting pieces in an action-RPG game.
Vogel: Yeah, exactly, except that I don’t like persnickety crafting systems where you have to gather 3 blocks of iron and 2 phoenix feathers and 4 catapults and three pieces of tungsten and 5 gallons of salt water.
That always gets on my nerves. More of it’s like—a lot of it is handled for you, because you have employees. You have generals and chiefs and servants. A lot of the persnickety details of running things, you have staff. You have folks for that. You say there’s a shop there and poof. You don’t research the new set of plate mail yourself. You walk to the show and say, whaddaya got for me this week? And they say, thanks to beating the dragons over in Poughkeepsie, now we’re getting iron, and because of that now you can buy the nice chain mail. Gimme a suit of the nice chain mail! Boom, you have chain mail.
GamesBeat: This is kind of like “Fantasy CEO.”
Vogel: Yeah, yeah. Including limitations to research. There are brigands. There’s theft. There are various events that can happen during the game where your supplies can be—like, you build a shop and then there’s an upkeep cost for that. People get angry and all of a sudden there’s rebellion where your stone is coming from. All of a sudden your upkeep costs aren’t being kept, and that tips into your goals. A lot of that kicks in at higher difficulty levels. I’ve really tried, with this game—I’ve had lots of complaints that higher difficulty levels are too easy before. Nobody is going to complain about that this time.
GamesBeat: When it comes to the brigands and other people who are trying to stop you, are you able to buy them out? Can you just pay them off?
Vogel: There’s a lot of stuff you can do. There’s guard posts. There’s barracks. Sometimes the reward for a mission is just that the people like you more, and so your stuff stops falling off the back of the truck. It’s not a super complicated faction system, but the faction system really makes a difference quickly. If you improve your faction you get more stuff. If you do nice things for rich people you get more stuff. There may be a moral stain attached to that, because it’s not one of my games if you don’t get to be a bad guy sometimes.
GamesBeat: It’s party-based, correct?
Vogel: Yeah. You always have to travel with—you’re royal, a prince or princess, who has special abilities and stuff like that, but then you have a roster of characters. You can travel with up to four people out of town. As you advance into other countries, you can recruit people from those countries, who’ll add their own special abilities.
GamesBeat: But it’s not a tight-knit RPG party. These are your workers?
Vogel: Yep. The three people who travel with you, I don’t want—they don’t have personalities. They don’t have romances. They’re your employees. You can hire and fire them at will. You can start with three people, but holy crud, the people from the Yukon have great abilities, I’ll start hiring a couple of them. That’s good, but I have a fort in the Vall, I can start recruiting them and they have a different skill set. I’ve really tried to make it so that there’s an advantage to swapping your group’s abilities in and out when you’re going into different countries and going after different foes.
GamesBeat: When you’re tinkering with these systems for crafting, how long did it take you to get to a point where you said, I like this, we’re going to stick with it.
Vogel: Years. I had the initial idea for this game about five years ago. I started dickering around with graph paper for this game years ago. I feel like I’ve been working on this game forever. The combat system, the crafting system, the industry, how you’re going to put these forts together, what’s the story going to be, what are the different factions going to be—the story, for example, I wanted to have enough factions that you really feel like you’re traveling and encountering different people and having lots of choices. But small enough that it would fit in the player’s brain. In our previous game series, Avadon, the countries just had too many factions. I just got in a rabbit hole of, well, there’s these guys and these guys and these guys. It was hard to keep track of that. I tried to tighten it down to a small number of really interesting nations with their own weird personalities and quirks, so that I could try to bring it to life. But I feel like I’ve been planning this game forever.
GamesBeat: With your last series, Avadon, did you try to get any crafting into it and just say, OK, it’s not going to work?
Vogel: I tend—there’s so many things to put in an RPG. I tend to like to swap in and out. I’m not a gigantic fan of two things in computer games: crafting and fishing. Avadon I don’t think had any—every once in a while I’ll put in a really stripped down crafting system, where there’s a few items you can gather, and if you do, you can get some really nice high end gear. But I don’t like just doing lots of crafting where I have to keep track of ingredients. I don’t want the player to have to keep track of lots of ingredients. That’s the key thing. I don’t like that kind of—I know a lot of people do like it and that’s great. It’s just not the sort of thing I enjoy writing. So Avadon didn’t have a lot of crafting. With Avadon, I really wanted to have a lot of story focus. There was a lot of cool story stuff in that. There were some of things about the game engine that I really wish I could go back in time and tell myself to do differently, but maybe I’ll just remaster that in 15 years.
GamesBeat: That kind of model works well for you.
Vogel: Once a game is 15-20 years old, if it’s any good, it should be remastered. It’s new to most people. The next thing I’m going to do is start remastering the Geneforge games, which were really terrific games.
GamesBeat: That was a fantastic series. That was the first series of yours I came across.
Vogel: It’s really cool beans. But the first Geneforge game will have come out 20 years—when I release the remaster the previous one will have come out 20 years ago. It runs on an 800 by 600 pixel screen. I’ve learned 900,000 things about how to design a game since then. I’m really looking forward to this remaster. It’s going to be really neat, and I’m going to do my best to leave alone all the stuff that people liked, but there’s a lot of stuff in it that’s kind of wonky, that I don’t think works very well. I want to turn it into something a lot more interesting on the game end of it. I like to do new game, old game, new game, old game. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. Burnout is always an imminent threat. I have to change what I’m doing a lot to maintain my sanity. And so for Queen’s Wish, what I decided to do was pick a job that was way too big for me and drive myself mad.
Get your motor runnin’
Above: Of course Queen’s take a stroll outside.
GamesBeat: I talked to you when you first started Avadon. You talked about how you, again, picked a job that was way too big for you. Is that becoming a theme?
Vogel: It’s the new engine part. I really hope to do Queen’s Wish 2 and 3. If I do, they will be way easier, because Queen’s Wish, I had to do the engine too. When you’re doing the engine from scratch, all bets are off. You have to re-figure out every single little thing. I had to figure out how to program in a new engine. I had to figure out a whole new interface. The graphics are different. It’s a straight-on, more old-school JRPG square-space look. Part of the reason I did that is because people have been asking for it for years. A lot of people really miss that retro look. Part of it is because it’ll make it easier—I’ll be able to write the game on the iPhone. Square spaces are much easier—people have asked me why square spaces, and part of the reason is, on the iPhone it’s far easier to target your finger at a square than a diamond. It’s far easier to get the square to the right size so your finger can hit it easily. Now that I’ve done that, as soon as the game comes out I’m going to write it for the iPhone, and I’m super excited about that. I don’t know if anyone will care, but I will find it incredibly enchanting to have my game running on a tiny little phone in your pocket. I think that’s going to be neat.
GamesBeat: And with Apple Arcade coming out I think a lot of people are going to want their games on the phone.
Vogel: I would love to talk to Apple Arcade. I think I’m too small for them to be into it, but I should try to get in contact with them. It’s for premium games, which is exactly what I’m doing. I should really talk to them and see if I can get an email about that. But I’m just so overwhelmed by every other little thing that I’m not doing the business stuff that a real grownup would do.
GamesBeat: How does Queen’s Wish showcase what you’ve learned about making games for 25 years?
Vogel: The immediate answer that comes up is everything. I’ve changed every single thing based on mistakes I’ve made and things I’ve learned and things to tweak. A million things. But I will give one specific example. One of the things that I really like in a turn-based RPG for creating suspense is just how your—your character leaves home and gets in a bunch of fights. How your character gets weaker as that happens—when you go on an adventure in Queen’s Wish, you go in a dungeon and have a series of fights and encounters. Some of them are optional and some of them are necessary. If you do the optional ones you get more stuff. But the basic idea behind it is, as you’re doing these fights, you’re weakening. You leave each fight a little more wounded, a little less energy than each fight before. My goal for this game is to create a feeling of suspense.
When you fight the final boss, you feel like you’re out of gas. I’m out of energy. I’m wounded. My potions are all drunk. But I’m going to do this final blow and bam, I killed the boss, I won. And you’re like, hooray, I don’t know how I pulled that out, but now I can go home and I managed to do it. I feel really smart. I’m super-hard from day one on balance and how this game system works to create these really suspenseful adventures. We played it a lot and we tinkered with it a lot and we’ve worked with testers a lot. I think we’ve got it. I think it really works. If you’re playing at an appropriate difficulty level for you — and the difficulty levels play very differently – but if you’re playing on the right difficulty level, there’s a real edge of your seat feeling to these adventures and fights. While at the same time, it’s fair, and you know what’s going on. You can really feel that you’re earning your progress. It’s really neat. I have a lot of fun playing this game. People out there, if you try this game and you don’t like it, that’s fair. There’s a lot of games. But I’ve played it, and I like it. I really think this game is fun.
GamesBeat: It’s coming out some time over the summer, correct?
Vogel: My plan is September. I really think we can make that. I have it broken down and it gives us some room for me to get the flu or whatever. The main world is four weeks from being done, and then there’s just a few things left to do with the engine, the Windows port and a bunch of testing and whatnot. But I think early September is going to be it. It’s nice. We Kickstarted it. The Kickstarter went really well. I want to show that computer game people, you can Kickstart and really deliver.
This story originally appeared on Www.youtube.com. Copyright 2019
