Sinister Soups Serving Musings On Game Development and Play

Designing S3: An Introduction

If you take a look at my About Me page, you'll see that one reason why this blog exists is to eventually serve as a design document for a game I've wanted to make for a long time now. I've been putting off this intro post, even as I develop drafts of actual design articles, but I think the time is right to start revealing information about what this game is and what my goals are in designing it.

The game I intend to someday make happen is called Setting Sun Saga, and it is a turn-based tactical RPG based closely on the model of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Why a FFT clone then, if we should call it that? Because FFT is one of my favorite games of all time; because I have many ideas about how to make my own game of this type, as well as a setting and the beginnings of a story I want to present with it; and because there are not many games of this type made anymore. What few tactical RPGs are released these days inevitably come out of Japan, don't take themselves seriously, and don't use FFT's unique approach to character classes or unit initiative, both of which I consider integral to the game's appeal.

In any case, though FFT will be the basic model for this game, which I will refer to as S3 from this point on to save on some otherwise tiresome typing anytime I wish to refer to it, below are some points I plan to emphasize in my design that will distance it from FFT and make it its own game.

• A completely custom setting, with a set of classes, abilities, and mechanics that hopefully feel new and different.
• More non-linear and player-driven narrative, taking cues from some of my other favorite games, like Planescape: Torment and the Fallout series, I hope to give this game a little bit of the freedom and meaningful choice that those classic western PC games offered.
• New and interesting battle mechanics, with a major goal being adding interesting new decisions while maintaining FFT's surface simplicity and making sure that the unit stats and combat results remain clearly understandable.
• More emphasis on custom units, one of my biggest problems with the original FFT is that you get a large roster of special story units as the game goes on, and these characters are clearly much better than any custom units you may have been cultivating. This is the opposite of what I want for S3, where I plan to keep the roster of special characters very small, and add depth and unique characteristics you can give your custom characters, to foster your connection with them and increase their utility.
• Greater control of unit development, I want to stay away from the trap a lot of Japanese RPGs fall into, where characters' stats develop arbitrarily because they happen to level up while in a specific class, for example, leading to arcane hacks like trying to de-level them or otherwise working around the game if you want your characters to develop in a specific way.
• Mechanics not limited by hardware, the Playstation, the original platform for FFT, didn't have an FPU. Consequently, all the formulae controlling the game are designed to work using only integer math, and while I definitely have no desire to fix things that are not broken, I will be reviewing systems to see if they can be made more robust on modern hardware.

So there you have it, hopefully now you have a clearer picture of the kind of game that S3 will be.

In the coming weeks, I will be posting articles about specific aspects of the game design, and I hope you will join me in discussing these deisgn decisions and provide your feedback on how to make Setting Sun Saga a success.