JA:Flashback - Interview @ RPS

Myrthos

Cave Canem
Administrator
Joined
August 30, 2006
Messages
11,223
With the alpha version of Jagged Alliance: Flashback becoming available today to backers, Rock Paper Shotgun took this opportunity to chat with Full Control's Thomas Lund.

RPS: Are there things that you thought would work, or that the Jag or Kickstarter community thought would work, that when you’ve prototyped them you’ve realised that they’re just not very enjoyable? There’s sometimes a danger of overcomplicating and veiling the core mechanics.

Lund: A lot of the things that we ended up not implementing have been on the plan since day one, since our aim was to take JA 2 as a baseline. We have the source code, as others do as well, and we’ve been fishing through to dig out the mechanics. Some things were a given, that we knew had to be the same way, and we haven’t diverted far at all. It was important to modernise without taking it too far from JA 2.

A lot of the modernisation is interface-based, so adding context-sensitive cursors and more information in the HUD. That explains some of the underlying mechanics and in JA 2 there were mechanics that were never explained – we talked to some of the original developers and dug through that source code, and found that there are a lot of things that have no explanation and no real impact.
So we had a discussion. Do we remove those things because they have no real impact? That’s the kind of thing we work out in prototypes.

Experimentation-wise, the changes we have made from our original plan is mostly on the story side. The original plan that we thought up and used on the Kickstarter is a Cold War setting, where we did have remnants of the Soviet Union and the US forces fighting on an island. The logo was the Hammer and Sickle. That has totally changed as we moved through the story planning.
More information.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
11,223
Graphics look very clean. I backed this, haven't heard anything yet about alpha demo.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
2,470
Location
USA
Graphics look very clean. I backed this, haven't heard anything yet about alpha demo.

Yeah me either, I'm backed at a fairly high level, too.

On a side note, I finally got around to playing BitComposer's JA: Back in Action, which I picked up for $10 on Steam a few weeks ago. I had avoided the game like the plague after hearing all the changes they made to the original system, which was inexcusable to JA fans (myself included). Anyway, the first few hours of BiA are pretty fun until you figure out just how much of a mess it is.

I really cannot wait for Flashback. It can save the franchise if they do it right.
 
Joined
Apr 5, 2011
Messages
1,748
Location
San Juan Islands, WA
Must correct myself: turns out you have to have backed at 250 MOTHERF*(&%! DOLLARS to get access to the Alpha. Gimme a break.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
2,470
Location
USA
Back
Top Bottom