Behind The Scenes With Certain Affinity's Crimson Alliance

Author: by Staff

The November issue of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine is now available via subscription and digital purchase, and includes an exclusive, in-depth postmortem on Certain Affinity's action RPG Crimson Alliance, written by director of product development Phil Wattenbarger. Released on XBLA in September and published by Microsoft, Crimson Alliance is an isometric multiplayer title akin to the Gauntlet series, with players taking on classic fantasy-inspired roles to fight through hordes of unholy monsters. The game marked the second original outing for Certain Affinity, whose work includes Age of Booty, as well as content for the Halo series, Left 4 Dead, and more. In the postmortem, Wattenbarger reflects on Certain Affinity's experience working on Crimson Alliance, outlining various "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" highlights from throughout the game's development. Along the way, he reveals the reasoning behind the game's familiar fantasy themes, the struggles with working on an evolving engine, and how the game's messaging hurt its long-term success. The following are but a few highlights from the November 2011 issue of Game Developer magazine. Give 'Em What They Expect Visually, And They’ll Love It Crimson Alliance uses some classic fantasy tropes to define its visual style, from wizards to undead and beyond. Wattenbarger explains these traditional fictional elements helped the game resonate with an audience used to games of this nature. "We initially explored a variety of different art styles and sensibilities for the game, ranging from a more painterly style to some that felt more technical and realistic. Ultimately our palettes and slightly painted look ended up being a success. Particularly once we added a crack visual effects programmer to the team, our world began to come alive with an art style that felt familiar, and which could draw comparisons to retail games with far bigger budgets… By building a world that is familiar, rendered in a style that is evocative of other games in the space, we felt that players would feel an immediate connection to the game. They can imagine themselves and their friends battling through these spaces, because they’ve done it before…. The flip side to this is that a few folks have grumbled that the game feels like a fantasy cliche, in which a predictable trio of fantasy trope characters battle through well-worn spaces fighting enemies like skeletons, goblins, and zombies that they’ve seen in a hundred other titles. This is a fine line to walk. We sought to hew close to the 90/10 rule that suggests that a new IP needs to be 90 percent familiar, 10 percent fresh. Characters like our strange wights and levels such as 'sea of sand' provided fresh content, while the rest of the game tended to walk more familiar paths." Engine Troubles: Changing The Tires On A Moving Car One of the biggest problems the team encountered was working with unfinished tools. Wattenbarger explains that, unfortunately, these hiccups impacted the team's ability to generate content and further polish the game. "We developed our own engine, pipeline, and toolset for Crimson Alliance. Although its foundations were laid during our previous effort, Age of Booty, it was still nowhere near ready to create a third-person, isometric action RPG. The infancy of the toolset made early development difficult, and much of the burden was shouldered by overworked content creators. With unfinished tools, it took far longer to prototype new game mechanics than it should have. We suffered from this in the early days particularly, when getting new ideas on the screen could take days or weeks instead of hours, as we would have preferred. Many behaviors required custom scripting, which was slow going. We ended up dedicating one highly technical designer to building 'widget'-style tools for the others in order to speed up prototyping and iterating for the rest of the team. Had we used technology which was already mature, this redirected resource could have been devoted to building more content for the game or reaching a greater level of polish." We Failed To Properly Set Expectations While Certain Affinity tailored the game's art style to remind players of classic fantasy RPGs, this decision introduced a huge problem: players began judging Crimson Alliance against the standards set by the best in the genre. "Crimson Alliance is neither Diablo nor Torchlight. As discussed previously, we knew this from the onset, but we didn’t do a very good job of letting the world know about this before release. Because the in-game art style ended up being very much like Diablo, comparisons were inevitably drawn to this beacon of the genre (which always flattered us). Our fixed-perspective isometric camera and the fantasy tropes that we indulged further reinforced this impression. In fact, the game is much more similar to a modern version of Gauntlet than it is to a classic loot-based dungeon crawler. Monsters don't explode like pinatas when killed, and the character advancement is streamlined for fast-action and couch play. Unfortunately, Diablo and Torchlight have such a terrific following that many fans and reviewers felt betrayed when the RPG mechanics that they expected around loot and leveling turned out not to be a focus for Crimson Alliance. While many players and web sites have written that they love the game, others have panned us based on what the game is not. The amount of vengeful passion behind some of the more polarized scores and forum posts have led us to conclude that to many people, we've committed a nearly cardinal sin in the RPG world: We let them believe they were getting a 'real' RPG, when in fact, they were getting an action game with RPG trappings." Additional Info The full postmortem of Crimson Alliance explores even more "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" highlights from the game's development, showcasing the game's successes, its failures, and the team's lessons learned. In addition, the issue also includes an in depth feature from game developer Michael A. Carr-Robb-John on the history and implications of the game entity, and the third annual "Game Developer 50," which showcases the publication's list of the most influential developers in the industry. Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of November 2011's magazine as a single issue.