GB Feature: The Broken Hourglass Interview

[GameBanshee News]

Planewalker Games' Jason Compton took the time to sit down and chat with us about the independent studio's upcoming party-based cRPG, The Broken Hourglass. Lots of detail within:

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.

In addition, four exclusive screenshots accompany the interview.

[fable]

So in brief:

No release date. Doesn't even sound like 2008.

Party of five, one player-created character, nine joinable characters in the world.

Interparty banter, and comments in situations. No clue as to whether party NPCs will "take control" at certain points, as happens on at least 3 notable occasions in BG2 by Minsc or Korgan. (EDIT: See my exchange with JCompton about this, below.)

NPCs will not make regular reference to or notice things you've done.

The world will mostly stay the same, whatever you do. Don't expect major sweeping changes.

Combat is realtime with pause, as it is in the BG series.

Party and personal inventory, only the latter accessible during combat.

Some traits affect the handling of weight.

No economic effects at merchants from your trade, outside attacks, freed up parties, etc.

No joinable guilds or factions.

[Tricky]

So in brief:

Baldur's Gate.

[dragon wench]

Originally Posted by Tricky

So in brief:

Baldur's Gate.

None too surprising if you consider that Compton is/was a major mod creator for BG2. I'm fairly certain quite a few other people involved with TBH come from the BG2 culture as well.


Sorry Tricky, that EDIT button is far too close to the QUOTE button

[Tricky]

Well, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

[jcompton]

Originally Posted by fable

NPCs will not make regular reference to or notice things you've done.

I may not have been clear enough in my answer if this is the impression you got.

In my answer, I was trying to avoid promising something like this:

"All of your characters will keep track of whether you went to the mall, the supermarket, or the coal mine first, and in which order you did the rest, and then routinely start dialogs thanking you for first buying them a Slurpee, then refining the iron ore, then buying the deli tray for the Superbowl. If you do these things in a different order, then you get a totally different dialogue."

We're definitely not doing that.

We do certainly have quest reactions from your own party, and winning an ally in a seemingly minor affair can have a helpful side-effect later on. For instance, going with the screenshot example--if you can't or won't get the gsumina from Rajani, there is a second character in the game who has a supply, but hers is only available if you were extra-special helpful in a quest earlier on.

No economic effects at merchants from your trade, outside attacks, freed up parties, etc.

Again, I may have been too terse. There are merchant effects--people who will "unlock" their stores once you've solved a particular problem, or extend discounts after you've accomplished something else. But there's no sense of "I'd better buy these Sympathetic Bracers while I'm here, lest some AI-controlled NPC come along and buy them while I'm sleeping!", because that won't be happening. There is no economy that operates outside of the player's actions might be a better way for me to express what's going on.

I might consider something like a semi-random store resupply system in a game which wasn't about a city in a siege state, but as it is, Mal Nassrin's crisis mostly precludes that kind of thing.

[fable]

Thanks for your expanations, JCompton.

Will any of the party NPCs take control of your group, at any time? For example, from a game we both know and love (and this is SPOILER content, folks): there's an inn where a group of four antagonistic mercenaries (plus a familiar) hang around upstairs. You can back off from a confrontation, if you don't have Korgan. He will force an encounter. Or again: at one point in the Eyeless Cult quest, you must answer three riddles. If Minsc is with you, he will jump to take a guess--and he will be wrong. You will end up zapped by a nice, fat bolt of lightning. I laughed my enchanted robed butt off when that first happened. More recently, I've seen one particular NPC mod (Valen) that did an excellent implementation of this, forcing your party down evil paths.

So will you have anything along these lines? It's not vital, but I'm curious. It would be a nice addition to the roleplaying experience, from my perspective.

[jcompton]

Originally Posted by fable

Will any of the party NPCs take control of your group, at any time?

These sorts of unprompted cut-ins happen occasionally--not with the frequency you would find with a character like Weimer's BG2 Valen. A couple of examples: there is a quest involving a potential quarantine breach where Nekos steps up to quiet the mob, and another where Redethe flashes her credentials to get past an obstinate functionary.

I see it as a very delicate balance, though--if we ask you to define your own PC, then we must make sure that your PC has enough "opportunities to shine" without the NPCs taking over situation after situation.

(For the record, I thought Wes's decisions with Valen were generally good ideas, to reflect the consequences of "Well, what did you think traveling with an evil vampire would be like?", but I didn't think a character with quite that much of an irresistible cruel streak would be a good fit for what we're doing with TBH.)

[fable]

Thanks for the reply. I agree, Valen was more appropriate for a mod, the kind of thing you would try after only after you'd run through the game and pretty much had your own way. But it's good to see that some of your possible NPCs will still take control of things from time to time.

Can you let us know if 2008 is a good possibility for a release date? Or is it too early to make such a statement?

[Gilliatt]

It's fun to see in-game screenshots. I had lost almost all interest in this game before I red this interview, because most of the updates before were about the background. I was wondering if they were actually working on the game or only on the background. When I heared only about the background, I started wondering if they were talking about a real game or just about a plan they had of doing one. Now that I see that the game is taking form, my interest is back.

@jcompton, thanks for doing a game inspired by BG. That will change us of the Diablo inspired ones we see every other month.