“Oh my god,” Joe Madureira exclaims before pondering the unexpected question for a second. “We knew we wanted it to be some sort of RPG reference, since those are the kinds of games we wanted to work on.”
The co-founder of Airship Syndicate is recollecting the moment when his team hit upon a name for their independent outfit. The RPG inspiration is unsurprising (“Airship was something we loved — the visual image and the RPG flavor of it”), given how big a fan the comic book artist turned game creator is of the genre. Perfect example: upon leaving Marvel Comics in 1997 to co-found comics imprint Cliffhanger, his creator-owned debut Battle Chasers wore its fantasy RPG influences proudly.
It’s a series and world he left — on a cliffhanger, no less — in 2001. He’d be the first to tell you he wasn’t expecting to return to it 15 years later through the lens of interactive entertainment. “I kind of had the feeling we should be doing something new,” he reminisces. There was a flirtation with doing a Metroidvania side-scroller at first, but ultimately Airship Syndicate settled on an RPG for its first project. Yet the “where” was a lot harder to choose than the “what.”
There are odd parallels between Madureira’s two careers. Just as he shifted from one of the biggest comic book companies in the world to co-found his own label, so too did he create a smaller development studio with fellow Vigil Games ex-staffers after it shuttered due to publisher THQ’s liquidation.
The 12-strong team (backed by a dozen remote contractors) are housed in a small studio. Work’s fluid, creative checks a matter of looking over a monitor and offering input rather than waiting for weekly meetings (“I can literally see you doing it right there. It’s instant,” Joe says input opportunities). Everybody “wears many hats”, and the unofficial mission statement seemingly boils down to “if an idea’s awesome, we’ll implement it, irrespective of who came up with it.”
The title’s pencilled in for a summer 2017 release (“Right now we’ve got all the systems working. It’s just really building content at this point”) and the game’s design reflects the era it’s launching in. Two decades ago it’d have been easy to imagine the finished product being an ode to Diablo hot wired to turn-based battles a la Final Fantasy. Inspirations that admittedly are still coded into the game’s DNA today: gameplay emphasis is on dungeon-crawling and a chess-like combat system.
But you also note more current trends. Dungeons are randomly-generated, and different difficulty-based runs call into mind everything from Spelunky and other roguelikes to high score-chasing mobile titles. Thankfully altering difficulties isn’t a case of yanking enemy HP sliders up and friendly health bars down; enemy attacks will differ, dungeon layout will alter, treasure chests will drop randomized loot. Certain bosses only appear on certain star ratings. Re-roll, replay.
Klik om te vergroten...
