Forged of Blood Interview
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The Critical Forge team spent over three years working on their turn-based tactical RPG Forged of Blood, and now that the game is finally released, one of the developers had a chat with RPG Watch as part of their “Indie Showcase” feature. If you're interested in this game, its turbulent road to release, the inspirations behind it, and its various gameplay elements, you should read the resulting interview. A couple of sample questions:
RPGWatch: Forged of Blood was a failed Kickstarter. What inspired you to continue despite that disappointment? What would you have done differently if the Kickstarter had been successful?
An old mentor of mine once said to me: "the only way out is through." Those words stuck with me and have been my guiding mantra for whenever things just start to feel too much. For us, failure and shutting down was just not an option, we had invested too much time and effort into the project that the only way out was indeed getting through to the launch. So we took the Kickstarter failure and planned around it.
Going into Kickstarter we had a few big goals. The first massive one was voice-acting. Right now Forged of Blood has 3 faction story arcs and something over 72 side quests, bringing all that to life with actors would have been an absolute dream for me. The funds from kickstarter would have also been used to increase the work into our visual effects, hire an additional writer, and pad out our programming power.
Had the campaign been successful, I would have liked to tick those boxes, and we wouldn't have had to carry on for the next couple years with a skeleton crew.
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RPGWatch: Obviously the focus in Forged of Blood is on the tactical combat. The game also has strategic elements. Does Forged in Blood feature any classic crpg elements such as choice and consequences, branching dialogue, in depth character development, or exploration?
Choice and consequence is a pretty big feature that we tout, and it permeates throughout the game. Permadeath and the insta-loss on the protagonist's death, means that character building is pretty darn important. In the game's narrative, we have branching dialogue and branching story arcs for each of the main factions, and the side quests can have standalone stories with particularly special rewards as well. In all, we have over 64 ending combinations that are derived from the player's choices in their campaign and are directly tied to the tri-axis philosophical index feature we have in Forged of Blood.
As for character development, your character Tavias will develop by your choices, and the world of Attiras will too as a direct result of your actions. The recruits you will hire and the special characters you will meet are yours to customize when you get them under your command as well.
In terms of exploration, there isn't the traditional exploration in this game as it's more about conquest, however going to the various regions will spawn various quests in the world and there are many standalone special quests hidden throughout the land.
