The Banner Saga Reddit AMA Q&A
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The folks at Stoic have recently fielded fan questions on Reddit, with composer Austin Wintory and some of the musicians that collaborated on the soundtrack also chiming in. Reddit formatting being what it is, my excerpt will be a little more substantial than usual:
What's the biggest thing that changed between your original concept in the kickstarter 2 years ago and the final game?
Alex: Wow, that's a loaded question. I'd have to say there's almost nothing left of the original concept, especially in terms of scope and design, and I mean that in a good way. The story has gone through at least 5 major revisions, the combat and usability has had major changes over a dozen times. Travel gameplay has changed significantly. I guess the important thing is that design is a pretty iterative process. If you sit down and write a design doc for the game and think you're done, you're going to have a crappy game. It's a good start, then you implement the systems, play them, and change them over and over until they all work together harmoniously. In that regard the most valuable thing Kickstarter allowed us to do was a ton of iterations, instead of having to settle on the first thing we thought of. Specifically, I'd say we went from a game that would have had maybe 8-10 different
characters, been 5-6 hours long and would have been more about your caravan in general to a game with 25+ characters, 12+ hours long and a hell of a lot of character development and branching decisions.
Arnie: Hrm.would take a long time to answer this correctly. In short the game is just far, far larger than what we originally planned. Much in the story changed as well once we started implementing, all for the better. The game that will soon be in your hands is worlds larger/more polished/better than what we pitched on the KS video. In fact, go watch that video, look at the combat shots, then go look at what we have now. Night and day. I must add, none of this would have been possible without the backers and we've always felt the pressure to raise the bar to match the level of support we received. All went into the game and we've had to support ourselves for a year longer than we expected to from our own savings.so we're really happy to be launching in a few days.
Thanks for the detailed answers guys. (I didn't mean to ask a loaded question) I love all the design docs you've written in the kickstarter upates about the changes you've made to the game. It's amazing to think of all the features you've added in the last year and a half. Good luck with the release on Tuesday, I can't wait!
Alex: Heh, no worries, I didn't mean "loaded" so much as a question with a lot of history to it. No apologies necessary!
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My question probably will be a little importunate due to you probably being all in the now moment, but here it is - what are your future plans the trilogy (being Ch2 and Ch3) and, especially, Factions? Particularly interesting points here are - the scope, approx. ETA, connections between chapters, connections between Saga and Factions, Factions "reviving" program etc.
Alex: Hi Net! Well, assuming there's a big enough demand we'll be moving ahead on the 2nd and 3rd games of the trilogy in order and updating Factions in between. Now that we've got the foundation of the game in place and are really familiar with the tools it should be pretty smooth sailing. I see the scope as being roughly the same but I'm sure we'll want to add unique features to each game. As for giving out an ETA, we've learned our lesson on that one...
Arnie: We've been wicked, wicked busy, Net. Sorry for missing all the chat, you know I used to live there! I'll be back in saying stupid stuff soon enough, right after we release.
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Without giving any spoilers - who is everyone's favorite characters and why?
John: Tryggvi - because he is nuts and has an awesome necklace worthy of a parade.
Alex: I'm biased because I wrote all of them, but my personal favorite to write is Krumr. He's one of the oldest varl in the world and he's gotten to that old-person age when you don't care what others think of you.
Arnie: I like Krumr. There's a particular scene that really shows haw badass that character is. (just saw Alex said the same thing)
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Austin: * How did you end up working with Stoic?
- Are your ensemble members friends of yours or hired?
- Do you have a degree?
Any advice for someone who wants to get into composing?
Thank you for your work, you've become one of my favorite composers!
I love your username! :)
The soloists (Taylor Davis, Peter Hollens, Malukah) have become dear friends, yes. But when we first got started I didn't know them at all. I met Taylor after she did a JOURNEY cover (which is absolutely breathtaking). I reached out to all 3 and felt very lucky that they said yes! In the case of Malukah, after I reached out to her, but before TBS was finished, another project came up that we did together: a beautiful short film called THE FORGE. You can download the music here, free: http://austinwintory.bandcamp.com/album/the-forge
As for the orchestra, the Dallas Winds, I'd never worked with them before. Long story but they were equally brilliant. The other soloists (bukkehorn player named Noah, percussionist, etc) were folks I've worked with many times.
Yes I have a degree from USC in classical Composition. I also did USC graduate program called "Scoring for Motion Picture and Television."
Email me so we can talk specifics. I don't want to offer generic advice like "never give up!" Also if you 'like' my facebook page, I have begun having Google Hangouts with composers and musicians to talk about that sort of thing. I like to get into real depth and hear what peoples' goals are, etc :)
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Battle AI -- Did you build it from scratch? Where did you draw inspiration from? How competent would you say it is? Can it stand a chance against seasoned Factions players?
John: The AI was built from scratch, and I really enjoyed making it.
I drew quite a bit of inspiration and experience from Factions itself, and the AI plays in many ways like I would play .. no surprise, since I trained it.
The AI was deliberately made to be mostly deterministic. There is some randomness involved in how and when they choose to use their abilities. But regardless of what they choose to do, they always choose what they see as their best possible option.
Although the AI is largely deterministic, the number of factors that they consider makes it very complex, so you won't necessarily be able to figure out exactly what a given AI will do, but you should be able to develop a feel for the types of moves they will make. So in that sense it should be somewhat like playing another human.
Some of the factors that go into the AIs decisions are:
- how much damage will I do
- will i be in a position to make a killing blow next turn
- what is the total amount of damage threat can I project from tile
- what is the total amount of damage threat projected toward me at a tile
- will my attack put my enemy within range of being killed with one more hit
- how close will i remain to my allies, and will i be isolated and cut off
Everything has an internal weighting that is then used to compute the best possible move. Given a move+action combination, we can compute a weighting using, for example, this partial list of weights:
- str damage
- armor damage
- stars used
- projected threat
- danger to self
- kill enemy now
- delta difference in enemy threat
- put enemy within one-shot range
- positioning relative to allies
- etc...
Aside from that, certain abilities (AOEs, buffs, auras, etc...) have special targeting and positing rules and weights that the AI tries to optimize.
Since we added the Training Tent to Camp, you can play scrimmages against fighters from your own caravan as often as you like. In that way you can really practice and get to know the AI.
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I think the banner saga is easily the most beautiful game I've seen in a while, and I'm still kicking myself for missing the kickstarter. How did you come to decide on the hand drawn animation style? Was it a goal from the start to be so visually different from most games?
Heya! Arnie here.we had some snafu's trying to get on. When we set out to find a style for this game I showed the guys the old Eyvind Earle 'Sleeping Beauty' by Disney. They loved it and we thought the friendly and attractive style would fit the more serious, adult storyline.
Now the trick was then to try and pull it off.Eyvind Earle, who I consider an American Master, had a deceptively 'simple' style. It's actually extremely detail oriented with strong graphic qualities. This style took me a LOOoooonnngg time do over the course of the game and almost drove me mad. :)
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Hey guys, really looking forward to the game! Back when you put up the PAX demo, you said that the cost of fully voicing the dialogue would've been astronomical, but in Factions, the initial cutscene is fully voiced. I'm wondering how much of the game is fully voiced, whether you've saved that bit of your budget for certain cutscenes or if you've just done minimal work for the most part in this area. I really hope this game does well, and I'm sure it's going to be epic to play!
Alex: We decided that recording some narration would really help fill out the world. When you're traveling you'll hear a short line or two from the leader of that party. If we had tried to record every line of dialogue in the game it would have been nearly insurmountable. We took a little more "Bastion" approach to it, and I think it's really helped the overall experience.
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How big a hit do you think you took in PR from releasing factions? (if there was any)
The reason I ask is because lots of people seemed to be confused and upset about its release calling it pay to win (even though it's obviously not even remotely ptw) and were under the impression that it was the full release (even though it was made clear that it wasn't).
Also, when are you updating factions with the new unit types and such? will that come with the single player release?
Alex: Our launch of Factions could have been more clear, that's for sure, and it didn't help that we were trying to do "Early Access" just a couple months before Steam instituted Early Access, so people didn't know what to make of the game. At this point though, things have definitely settled, and Factions is going to be a great platform to keep putting out new content between major releases. I'm paraphrasing, but I recall an article where Riot said something like "If we don't make at least one major mistake a year we're not doing it right...".
Despite the early confusion, Factions has been an enormous boon. We had over 200k people come through the game who had never heard of TBS before, and the great improvements to combat for the Saga were almost entirely because of our active tester community.
After the Saga releases and we come back from break, we'll be making some pretty major updates to Factions. Looking forward to talking details on that a little later!
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Thus far, what has been your favorite part of The Banner Saga to work on?
Alex: I think this is something of a secret of game development, but making a game is rarely fun until you get to the last 10%. Before that it's terrifying, and it's an unholy grind. You don't even know if it's going to turn out fun but here you are scraping away at it for 15 hours a day. That's not just The Banner Saga, but every project I've ever worked on. That's not to say there aren't fun parts along the way when you add a neat feature or see something big come together, but for me? The absolute best part is the last three weeks when everything is getting down to being final and you can look at the whole picture and put the final polish on. You'd be surprised at how much better the game gets at the very last minute.
To be specific, the most fun I've had with the game is when new abilities go into combat. That's when unpredictable and awesome things start happening. While I love writing and I take a lot of satisfaction from it, it often feels more like wrestling an ape into submission.
AWintory: Speaking for myself, figuring out the score during the travel sequences was a blast because it was truly unlike any other game work I've done. It's a mechanic just so unlike most games (and honestly OREGON TRAIL is like the only comparison I can think of). Huge huge huge challenge but so fun ... but all the music was fun to work on, plus working with Stoic is a dream.
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I look at the AAA gaming industry right now and my 'theory' is that publishers are partly, if not mostly, to blame for much of the sod we now see. So I must ask, is Stoic planning on going under a publisher to fund your future products?
Alex: Oh ho ho, you asked something I'm more than happy to talk about.
The games industry really has an interesting relationship with publishers. And yes, a publisher can take things too far trying to maximize their short-term profits, burning out developers and players with low-effort sequels, etc. But in the bigger picture, publishers aren't really the problem. They're not "forcing" anything on the public- quite to the contrary they spend all their time, money and effort trying to figure out exactly what the public wants. That's no easy task, but the unfortunate truth is that the more successful a publisher is the better they are at giving people what they want. It's the same with the film industry. Tired of seeing the same dumbed-down repetitive dreck? You have to stop buying it, and convince everyone else to stop too. It's practically the democratization of entertainment, and in most cases the majority wins.
In my opinion what's great about this point in time is that indie devs can make a damn good living for themselves with all the creative freedom in the world and AAA publishers can look at those successes and make something like it with a multi-million dollar budget. I can't say whether Everquest Next is going to be a huge success but I'm really hoping that it turns out great. That game would have never happened without Minecraft.
Kickstarter is an extraordinary tool for making bigger and better original games. In my opinion the only thing that's going to hold back Kickstarter is the backers themselves, who moan and threaten to sue every project that doesn't do exactly what they expected, or projects that don't pan out. That's going to happen, it's part of the risk. It happens to publishers all the time. The value isn't in getting "that one game" you wanted, but elevating the entire games industry. You gotta have a long view of the whole process.
Right now we're working with a team called Versus who are helping us with marketing and promotion and it's been absolutely great. They've taken so many time-consuming and frankly unappealing tasks off of us so we can focus on game development, and they don't have any influence on the game. Smaller, boutique publishers are becoming a real thing just like the indie developer scene. On that topic, I don't see us ever taking money from a publisher to develop a game, or giving up the IP rights. Unless you're desperate to have a $50 million budget, it's just not necessary.
John: We started this studio to be independent, and to make the game we wanted to make. That won't change. It has been extremely positive to have just the 3 of us totally in charge of the direction and vision of the game.
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Rewind & Restart -- If you were suddenly back in 2012, what would you have done differently and what would you have done the same? I know it's a long question, but you could just point out some obvious mistakes and some "strong move" you made along the way.
John: From a technical perspective.
Creating an automated continuously-integrating build system from the beginning was a huge advantage that helped for the entire project. It was extremely time consuming, though, even with the generous volunteer help we received on it. It would have been well worth it to contract a professional build engineer for a few weeks to get it perfected, rather than burning alot of my time on something that is not my expertise.
Building the entire game in a test-first manner using Test Driven Development (TDD) was a huge win. Unfortunately, halfway through the project, and Adobe update broke our entire test running framework, so we were only able to enjoy the benefits of TDD for the first half of the project. That was of course a very formative part of the project, so it was a win.
Using Heroku for the Factions servers was a huge time saver.
I've burned a lot of time developing metrics and analytics both for Factions, and The Banner Saga. Althoough it is a fascinating subject, it is not my expertise and it cost me alot of time. It may have been worth contracting some help there, and I expect that I will try to find an analytics expert for guidance to help us for a few weeks in a the future.
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What has been the most fun class to play for you guys?
Alex: For me, probably a toss-up between Spearman and Mender. The spearman might have the most options of any combat class in the game, making it always fun to use him. The thing I like about the Mender is that he'll fry your own units if you don't get good about positioning, but if you make the effort to learn how to make his abilities work he's far and away the most devastating unit in battle.
Arnie: I like Rook (Hunter) a lot. Oddly enough I don't often use his overpowered ability too often, I use him to break. He can attain a natural 3 break + 3 for a rank 5 item + 3 willpower.9 break in one round. Love it! Aside from that his ability is a blast to line up trying to maximize the amount of units that will respond to his Mark prey.
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Are you gonna be doing anything special for the Faction's 1-year anniversary date (Feb 25th)?
Has there been any feedback you've taken from (p)reviews that you've used to change from the preview build because of it?
How are the preorder sales looking so far? Have they been enough to consider making chapter 2?
John: 1. Take a vacation and sleep in 2. Yes, absolutely. In particular we increased and improved the tutorialization, and tuned the difficulty curve for the battles during the first hour or so of play. We added the 'Training Tent', a place in Camp where you can do training battles against your allies as often as you like. 3. Looking good. I can only think about chapter 1 right now :)
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I've heard that your journey continues even if you lose a battle. Could you successfully complete the game even if you lose every battle? Is a perfect/near perfect record required for the "best" endings?
Alex: A perfect run is by no means necessary for the "best" ending. We went out of our way to make sure there's no best way to play the game. In fact, the entire focus of the game is that we want the player to accept what happens as "their story" and keep going, which is why losing a fight doesn't end the story. In most cases it will result in some casualties, a loss of morale or supplies and, depending on the fight, might get someone in your party killed.
Arnie: Erm.to add.if you lose EVERY battle it's going to be really hard to win the game at all. There are some battles that will lose you the game (you'll know where they are) and if you lose every battle leading up to them your heroes will be pretty weak and it's going to be difficult. If you find the combat too difficult, set the difficulty to easy, then go on. You can change the difficulty on the fly and move it back to normal (HARD!?!) once you get the hang of the game.
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Arnie: Erm.to add.if you lose EVERY battle it's going to be really hard to win the game at all. There are some battles that will lose you the game (you'll know where they are) and if you lose every battle leading up to them your heroes will be pretty weak and it's going to be difficult. If you find the combat too difficult, set the difficulty to easy, then go on. You can change the difficulty on the fly and move it back to normal (HARD!?!) once you get the hang of the game.
John: For us, having only 3 people is a strength when it comes to actually making a game, but a weakness when it comes to dealing with the thousand other things required when promoting the game. We simply don't have personal bandwidth to make sure press has everything they need, to persue promotional opportunities, etc... So having an indie publisher working with us has really taken alot off of our plate and allowed us to focus on finishing the game. We are very pleased with how VE is helping us.
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I would like to stress that for the main part of The Banner Saga to be kept solely for single-player alone, but some Co-op elements would be nice.
I cannot speak for everyone but I find just fighting other players a bit boring. As for myself I usually enjoy fighting the computer AI and teaming up with my fellow Vikings.
Basically what I am wondering is if there is going to be any thought given to Co-op whatsoever in the future for Factions?
Alex: Co-op was in fact one of the first things we ever wanted to do with Factions and it's been unfortunate we haven't found the time before now. We even came up with a pretty compelling way to do it that wouldn't slow down the gameplay (allies would both move simultaneously, and would have to coordinate with each other on where to move/who to attack). We'll be looking into updating Factions again now that the single-player game is in the bag and hopefully this feature makes it in.
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What inspired you all to leave your steady jobs at Bioware and to try and make something of your own. Did any of your family/friends try to talk you away from running your own business and if so how have you handled their hesitations?
John: We all wanted to make something that we felt passionate about, and that was all ours. At a large company, you are making a game for lots of different people, and for lots of different reasons. A large company necessarily has to make a game that will sell to and appeal to a large audience. With just the 3 of us, we can simply make a game that we love, and hope that enough other people love it too!
John: Almost all of our friends and family were very supportive. Austin, TX has a great Indie game community, and there is plenty of support there. One of my family members, who suffered through the pre-war depression of the 20th century was quite appalled at the idea of walking away from a steady paycheck :)
Arnie: Good question, a really good one. What inspired me to leave my job was that I was increasingly seeing my life planned out long into the future. I was making good money and in x-# of years would pay off my house and send the kids to college and the retire when I was x-years old.etc. It frightened me. Along with this went the overwhelming desire to start designing and calling the shots on my *own games again. When I was in high school I'd design turn based games up in my room for hours and weekends on end. It was the most brilliant time, specially when I was grounded or something, I really looked forward to be "stuck" in my room, because then I would have the time to come up with designs/worlds. Once I started doing games professionally I realized it's big business. There are rooms of 8-10 people per meeting with marketing and business guys and.it's hardly about coming up with inventive new approaches to some thing you feel deeply about. You learn to gauge what these people are looking for, then provide them with it and that's how you get ahead and earn more money and whatnot. I felt like I was drying up and losing my first love of simply making fun games. To add, there's nothing wrong with what I said above, many people love to be in that situation of working on a large team and playing a part in a huge undertaking, it just wasn't for me. In a nerdy way I think of it in terms of a guild run.do you like going on dungeon crawls in games with 1 or 2 friends or do you like attacking a dragon with 40+ guild mates? Neither is better or worse, it's just what you're into. It took me some months to talk my wife into it and it's been a ton of work for her as well. In the past year she's basically kept the whole house together. Feeds us all, mows the lawn, cleans the pool, takes my sons to cub scouts.etc, everything. All of us at Stoic have poured everything we've got into this game, our time, our money, our energy and looking back (I think I talk for us all here) we wouldn't change a thing. Wow.sorry for the long post. I could actually write a lot more but will stop.
It's also worth noting that backers have received Steam keys for the title and the game is currently available for pre-loading on Steam, in preparation for its Tuesday release.
