Unsung Story - Christophe Boelinger Interview

Playdek has posted the next update for their funded kickstarter game Unsung Story: Tale of the Guardians with a new interview with Game Designer Christophe Boelinger.

Interview with Christophe Boelinger

Hello everyone!

As promised, here are the answers to the questions you asked Christophe Boelinger!  So without further delay, here you are!

Q. How do you create tactical decisions in the game mechanics that are fun instead of mundane (i.e. why bother using a sword over a mace)? 

A. Generally when I design a game system or game mechanics my base rule of work is to try to respect every aspect of real life (if we can talk about real life for an Heroic Fantasy world). ;) 

Meaning I’m trying to translate into the game mechanics every rule and possibility that real life normally offers. It has very often proven to be efficient, I guess because life is naturally balanced and offers nice challenges. 

Q. What are the differences between balancing a turn-based tactical game vs. this game (more RTS as far as I understand)? 

A. I’m not sure I got your question right, but I’ll try to answer from what I think I understood anyway. I have worked mainly on board games so far. So to me, designing a turn based video game is like designing a real table top board game or miniature game. Not many things change. Even better, I could say that the computer brings many advantages like: 

• No rulebook to read for the player, meaning more freedom of richness hidden under the hood of the machine. 
• More freedom of terrain, multiple levels (or floors), and various ground types. This richness is almost impossible to access on a board game because you would need to add so many pieces in the box that at some point the game would become too expensive. 
•  Visual representation from various angles, sound effects, and stats appearing when you pass over the units instead of having a counter with multiple numbers and stats on it. All those technical features helps having a game that looks more simple even though it can be tactically very challenging because of all the parameters we can implement in the units and for the terrains and types of floors. 

Balancing such a game will of course be very demanding, because of all those various professions, classes and subclasses, and the freedom of evolution that we want to leave to every player. But hey, I guess that’s the price to pay for a maximum freedom of choice given to the players! ;)