Expeditions: Conquistador Interview
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Gamers: Could you please introduce Logic Artists to our readers? And what is your task within the team?
Logic Artists: Logic Artists is a sort of medium-sized indie studio in Copenhagen, Denmark. We're all recent graduates from the IT University of Copenhagen or the Viborg Animation Workshop, and Expeditions: Conquistador is the first commercial game any of us is working on. It's been in development for just short of a year, and we're really proud of how much we've achieved in that time.
As the lead designer on the project, I do a bit of everything, including level design, programming, system design, and so on, but my main task is to write all the events, which is a pretty monumental task!
Gamers: That's a truly interesting setting you chose there. Were you fed up with the classical fantasy setting, orcs, elves, etc.?
Logic Artists: Sort of fed up with it, yes! There are many great games made in fantasy or science fiction settings every year, so it's difficult to stand out with that kind of setting. We wanted to make a very exploration-focused roleplaying game, and probably the single greatest task of exploration in recent history is the European colonization of the Americas. This period in time typically only appears as the age of pike and muskets in grand strategy games, so we thought it would be really interesting to make an RPG in that time period, focusing on the Spanish conquistadors in Central America and Mexico.
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Gamers: Are there games, which you consider as a source of inspiration for "Expeditions: Conquistator"? If yes, which games would that be?
Logic Artists: In terms of the overall structure of the game, we've taken a lot of inspiration from King's Bounty that style of riding around a miniaturized world map in real-time and then loading up a smaller battlefield divided into a hex grid whenever there's combat, which in turn was taken from the Heroes of Might & Magic series, that's obviously something we've used.
The combat itself is more like a traditional turn-based RPG though, like you'd find in the two original Fallout games for example. We've also used certain elements from Dungeons & Dragons, such as the relationship between movement and actions or concepts like attacks of opportunity. Finally, we have the roster of troops that you select from when you go into battle, which can get permanent injuries if they're knocked out, which is inspired either by the original Rainbow Six or the original X-COM, depending on how you look at it.
