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.
More information.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.
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