Last year, indie studio Stoic Games burst onto the scene with the crowdfunded and beautifully animated strategy RPG title The Banner Saga – a game built on the developer's own tech.
In the time since, a similar title has emerged from developer Skyshine. Bedlam's themes, visual style and some of its turn-based mechanics may differ from The Banner Saga's, but the same technology is in fact ticking away behind the scenes.
We caught up with John Watson, technical director of Stoic Games (pictured), to find out why his studio decided to share its proprietary game engine, and whether he is open to more indies developing games based on The Banner Saga's technology.
Why decide to give other indies access to Stoic’s technology/engine?
John Mueller of Skyshine has been a longtime friend of [Stoic art director] Arnie Jorgensen, both of them great artists with a comics background. Sometime after the launch of The Banner Saga, John Mueller approached us with a game idea for Bedlam, with game mechanics that were in many ways isomorphic with the game mechanics of the Banner Saga, and hence with the feature set of the engine.
Our engine was always made with the single purpose of making Banner Saga and its peculiar systems, so my default position on sharing the engine would be one of reticence, as any deviation from the supported feature set would require programming effort. However, the similarities between the two games made technology sharing imminently feasible. [...]
