For lovers of innovative pixel art, tactical space combat, and adventures through sci-fi imperialism,
Alt Shift flexes impressive muscle, taking influence from Dune/Foundation and FTL with its project
Crying Suns, working toward a story-driven experience incorporating battleships and squadron fleets. I spoke with Frédéric Lopez (Art Director) and Julien Cotret (Game Producer and Co-writer) to get their takes on the game’s varied tools and overall aesthetic.
Erik Meyer: You’re creating a tactical rogue-lite in which gamers take the role of a space fleet commander traversing the galaxy, so can you speak to the challenge of combining features like starship combat and exploration with the overall narrative and molding a smooth player experience? Which parts of the project came together first, and as you progress through development, what have you held as your mantra?
Julien Cotret: Our very first idea was to add to the FTL gameplay/formula a sense of scale and a feeling of high stakes. We wanted to focus on macro rather than micro management. We wanted the player to feel that they weren’t just leading a few people on a small ship but a huge battleship with hundreds of crew members trying to save humankind no less! Our first focus was the setup. We toyed for a time with putting the player inside a pirate galleon or a huge mecha, but the scale wasn’t big enough for us. It didn’t feel right. Our first epiphany came when we told ourselves, “Let’s be honest. What we really want is the player to act like Admiral Adama in Battlestar Galactica”. That was it for the setup. Then we iterated over this gameplay idea for about 6 months.
Given the rogue-lite structure of the game, with its inherent constraints, constructing the narrative was a real challenge. We found ourselves facing a lot of questions early on like, how can you write a story that makes sense if the player is constantly dying and starting over again? How does a story like this progress? Or, even, can it progress? Should we focus on a main character? If so, how? And how should the NPCs react if they’ve already seen you, and, in many cases, if they’ve already killed you?
Very early we discovered that these constraints could actually become the story’s strengths, its focal points. We saw that they could actually drive the story as opposed to being something that we would try to avoid or cover up.. So we decided that the player would be the center of a plan to save humankind. And that he would die, often and horrifically, yes, but that he would essentially live on through other clones which would be sent out into our universe over and over trying to save humankind.. Also, regarding the NPCs, we decided, that, unlike in other rogue-lite games, they would actually remember having encountered the player (or having killed the player before). It seemed like a fun, interesting idea to play with, one that was, in a way, a more realistic experience than in other rogue-lites, where, when you run into an NPC, it’s like the first time every time. Altogether, these ideas, we believe, help create a complex yet smooth gamer experience.
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