Once Upon A Time

The Indie Spotlight returns with a look at an original fairy tale modicum in the form of Waking Games’ Once Upon A Time. It’s a competitive multiplayer experience that puts players in control of one of four fairy tale inspired characters, including a Wolf, a Princess, a Prince and a Witch. Each character has their own abilities and special attributes, including the Wolf’s sense of smell used to track the other characters. The Prince can parry during combat and the Witch has projectiles. The Princess, however, steals the show with a host of special skills to defend herself, including an angry little Gingerbread Man. We chat it up with Stephane Conde and Justin McGuire from Waking Games regarding this alternative multiplayer fairy tale title, as well as some of the things happening within the independent gaming industry.

VG Core: How did you come up with a game of this kind, and was it always intended to be a multiplayer competitive/deathmatch game?

J. McGuire: We had wanted to create something small and simple. A game that could be made in a short amount of time to prove that we as a team were competent enough to make games, and that we could work together to pull something off. We wanted, however, something that wouldn't just be some run-of-the-mill FPS mod, so some sort of unique gameplay was a huge must for us.

The concept was initially derived from us playing Battlefield 1942 without enough players to compete normally. When there were 3 or 4 of us, we would alter our own objectives to play an intense form of 'hide and seek', where a person would use planes, jetpacks and parachutes to escape while the three others would hunt them down. We liked the idea of 'classes' and thus
wanted each player to have their own play style and so the Hunting Senses and Combat abilities were added to provide a variety of play styles, looking to some of the concepts used in Alien VS Predator for hunting sense inspiration and Super Smash Brothers: Melee to make the combat more enjoyable and less 'FPS' like.

It was always intended to be competitive, but the original idea focused quite heavily on the hunting and hiding aspects of the game. We found the game somewhat tedious however, players rarely met, and the levels were far too large to fill with interesting content considering our small
team size. So we condensed the game to provide more focus on the player-to-player interaction and give a more competitive pace. More intense battles, narrow escapes and quicker resolutions tightened the game up and made the game much more enjoyable.

VG Core: With each character having specialty functions and abilities, how did you decide which character would best benefit from what special skill/action? Also, how did you decide what would work as a good balance for the characters, without one character having a greater or lesser advantage with one ability over another character?

J. McGuire: The Hunting Senses were chosen from the start, giving each character a unique way to find the Princess that related to their character. Though the exact mechanics were only more thoroughly ironed out after testing, this gave us a sense for the basis of the game and how to structure our skills.

Originally we had looked at each character honing strengths in a specific element of the game. One would be best at hunting, one best at combat and one best at carrying. But for obvious reasons, this quickly backfired and we chose to statistically 'even-out' the abilities of the
characters in each field of the game, but still allow for each character to have a specific game-play style.

The abilities themselves were chosen based on the character archetype and the play-style of that character class, then balanced to try and become a skill-based tool of the character and not simply a dominant trait. The Prince, for example, being a master of his 'Mighty Sword' would be able to block attacks (this eventually became a counter-attack) and hurl his weapon, as he was slow and had no range and would need to be strong up close, and have a manner of competing with characters who could outrun or keep distance from him. Once the abilities were decided on, damage values, execution/cool-down speeds or stun times were tweaked to balance the
abilities.

The Princess abilities were what the game revolved around and were decided back upon the initial conception of the hunting senses as a way to deter the Hunters from being able to track her. The Gingerbread man's exploding was added to give his decoying ability a little more chaotic spark and to let the Princess feel a little more aggressive. Only 4 of the initial spell conceptions made it into the game, due to time and resources. Transform was added later as a very powerful spell for the Princess that gave her more options. The effects of these spells were used to balance the other hunting senses of the game.

VG Core: Following up on the last question, was it difficult deciding which fairy tale characters to choose for the game's setting, or what sort of environments would make it into the game?

J. McGuire: The characters themselves came much before any specific game-play elements were derived. We had the basic objective settled and the fairy-tale theme spurred from it with the Princess at the center of the idea. We thought of the most common characters in fairy-tales that would want to capture the Princess and the main 3 became our archetypes.

With our small team size we wanted to keep the number of levels down for the sake of content creation, but specifically themed to each character. The environments arose from the need to fill two specific criteria: relationship to the character's home they represented and a specific visual
hindrance the Hunting Senses would need to work around. In the Forest, fog was the hindrance, darkness in the cave, the snowstorm of the ice level and the hedges themselves in the Prince's Garden.

The actual layout and content of the environments changed numerous times as we condensed the game into its more action-oriented state, but through rigorous whiteboard mapping we refined each level for gameplay elements and structure, and the four areas are what came out of those.

VG Core: The Torque Engine seems to be the perfect tool for creating 3D games in
the independent scene. Is it more convenient than other engines, or does it provide a better working environment for developing games with a small team?

J. McGuire: The Torque Engine is a powerful tool and, given our *cough* budget when beginning the project, seemed to have the highest potential for us. It is not without its troubles however, and I would warn anyone tempting to use it to be ready for a fight. Torque can be rather stubborn when doing things outside of its 'comfort zone'. Thankfully we had skilled enough programmers who were able to re-write (or write for the first time) elements of the engine to find solutions to the numerous troubles we encountered. Definitely great for small teams as far as 3D commercial ventures go, provided you have a programmer willing to put in the hours.

VG Core: Are there any plans to include added content, maps or characters, or is
this version of Once Upon Time the final version?

J. McGuire: Once Upon a Time is in its final version as per the design we set out to make. There have always been talks among our team of the additional characters we would like to add to the game, the extra game modes we might want to incorporate, other themed maps we would want to create, and the addition of the song feature that never made it into the game. so we may be working to add some extras for our players in the near future, but for now we're content to say it's officially done as we look on to creating the type of games we set out to make as a company.

VG Core: Some independent titles that branch out to great lengths in their originality don't always hit it off well with their audience. How do you ensure that a game that isn't quite a standard fare genre-specific title will appeal to the audience it's aiming for?

S. Conde: Well it's actually extremely easy: you don't aim for any particular audience. While the previous statement is partially true, we did make a bunch of considerations to help make Once Upon A Time appeal to ANY audience...

First, we made the interface and control mechanics as simple as we possibly could. Accessibility is always key. Continuous play-testing throughout development allowed us to find areas that were still too complex and make appropriate changes. One of our online publishers also came back to us with a bunch of interface suggestions to make things simpler.

Second, by having the focal-point of Once Upon A Time be a female character, we find that we are appealing to quite a few female gamers. Already we are seeing at least as many female buyers as male buyers which definitely pleasantly surprised us. Lastly, we tried to make the visuals of Once Upon A Time as appealing as we could. We tried to achieve this not through high-poly
realistically modeled characters and environments, but through very thoughtful use of hand-drawn and colored textures and lower-poly models that included lots of 'character'.

VG Core: It seems like the mainstream is going to be taking even less risks given the amount of money required for newer, bigger projects. Do you think this works in the favor of the indie scene, giving consumers a low-cost, intuitive alternative? Or does it make the job of an independent developer harder because the mainstream has a higher interest level from consumers
with bigger projects?

S. Conde: The mainstream games industry is slowly destroying itself. It is actually not unlike the microprocessor industry in that its sole goal is 'power'. The 'power' in the mainstream games industry is stunning graphics, not unlike the microprocessor industry's 'power': speed. Now notice that there are really only a handful of microprocessor companies in the world. The same is happening in the games industry: the size of games projects nowadays is forcing games companies to join forces or go the way of Acclaim. As all of these mainstream game companies grow and start making games with bigger and bigger budgets they also start to take fewer and fewer risks and charge more for their games. This is great for the independent games industry since mainstream games are all becoming expensive sequels, re-hashes and incremental changes! They could really not be doing anything better to help us indies.

As consumers realize that they are paying more money for the same game they played less than a year before there will slowly be a societal shift back to the early days of gaming where originality was paramount. This should hopefully be helped by many gamers continuing to play games as they get older and demanding new and innovative titles.

The independent games scene can then step in and show everyone that a game doesn't need 4 processors and a $500 video card to be fun and that it can also cost under $15.

Our thanks to Waking Games for taking time out to answer our questions. For more information regarding Once Upon A Time, be sure to visit the main website at: Onceuponatime.wakinggames.com And be sure to stay tuned in for more news and information regarding the latest mainstream and indie games, here at VG Core.

Article By: Cyguration