The Sum of its Parts: How fusing game mechanics can create whole new genres

Kevin Chan, co-founder and technical director of Robot Circus, creators of Ticket to Earth.

Robot Circus is an independent games studio based in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded by a team of experienced developers who built their skills in the big studio system and now specialise in making highly-polished PC and mobile games. The team is defined by its drive to make engaging games that matter to people and have a positive social impact. Robot Circus has created games for a number of clients, including Disney Imagicademy and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Ticket to Earth is the studio's debut original, self-published title, released on iOS in March 2017 and just released on Steam for Windows and Mac.

If there is a single “holy grail” for game developers, it would have to be the desire to create something genuinely new. Our business is one where incremental improvement is the norm, and where powerful new technologies rarely result in brand new experiences, but usually finding more spectacular ways to present familiar genres. A lot of the great games we play today are conglomerations of existing ideas that have been assembled in interesting and compelling combinations.

As we discovered in creating Ticket to Earth, novelty can be found by mixing up styles and genres that have never been combined before, especially when those game types don’t intuitively fit together. Sometimes originality lies in taking two or three very different styles of game and blending them into a seamless whole.

Stream of consciousness

The seeds that would one day grow into Ticket to Earth were planted many years ago when I was working at Blue Tongue with my Robot Circus co-founder Nick Hagger. We were both avid fans of classic Square RPGs, and he recommended I try Final Fantasy Tactics on the original PlayStation, lending me a copy that he had imported back in the day. After a steep learning curve I became a fan, cementing my love of turn-based tactics.

Final Fantasy Tactics

After Blue Tongue was shut down, Nick and I moved on and founded our own independent studio Robot Circus. We shared a desire to make games that really matter to people, games that would touch people deeply and make them think. With that ambitious goal in mind, we got straight to work making life even harder for ourselves by designing weird game hybrids. One of our first was Q.E.D. Cosmo’s Casebook, an educational game for children about Roman history, but mashed-up with a Phoenix Wright style courtroom drama mechanic. Another was Gobbling Goblins, also for younger players, which fused match-three puzzles with mathematics and cookery.

One day we found ourselves in a short lull between projects, so we started thinking seriously about original games we could make. Working for third-party clients was good, but we were yearning to tell our own stories. I had gotten into puzzle-RPGs like Puzzle Quest on my phone during my daily commutes, and I discovered an obscure game that has since developed a bit of a cult following: Dungeon Raid.

It was a draw-a-path tile-matching game fused with a simple RPG. You would draw a meandering line though as many health potions as you could connect together to heal yourself up, connect monsters and swords to attack, collect shields to give yourself armour, and so on. It was coupled with a surprisingly deep character advancement and equipment system and a Rogue-like permadeath.

Dungeon Raid

It was while I was playing Dungeon Raid that I had my “eureka” moment: what would happen if the tile-matching grid and the tactical battlefield grid were the same grid? Could you overlay the battlefield over a matrix of coloured titles and somehow fuse the two, matching symbols while moving your characters around? I was overwhelmed by a flood of possibilities, and I immediately started writing them down.

Here was where I struck one of the problems inherent in making a genuinely new and original game: it came be very difficult to describe it to people. I spent an entire weekend writing pages and pages of notes, and when I brought them to Nick he was completely baffled. He called my notes a “disgorged stream of consciousness” and I struggled to communicate the exciting ideas in my head. Eventually Nick told me to just make a prototype. Since I couldn’t describe it in terms that made sense to him, he suggested I throw together a very basic demo that captured the gist of it.

The idea of moving on a grid seemed very constraining and digital to me, so my original concept was to explain this style of constrained movement as the rules of a Tron-like world where virtual characters are moving around inside a computer (also, my love of Rockman.EXE definitely came into play here). Initially it was a simple one-step movement: trace a path ending at an enemy to attack them, with a longer path doing more damage. It wasn’t even a game, really, but even in that primitive state it was already fun to play.

CodeRunner, the first prototype of what would eventually become Ticket to Earth

Tug of War

With the prototype in front of him, Nick began the appreciate the potential this idea had, and he started generating ideas of his own. He was the one who suggested a comic book style episodic storytelling style, comprising of short vignettes that are resolved by short battle sequences. He also thought ranged attacks would be a good idea, so the one-step attack became a two-step process: move to charge your abilities, then attack. The final shape of Ticket to Earth was slowly coming together.

Unfortunately, that was where we had to leave it. Paid work had come along again and we were too busy to spend time on our own projects. We knew we had something special that we were eager to develop, but it would be over a year before we could get back to it. Finally, almost eighteen months later, we had another quiet period between projects and we knew we had to move.

That initial prototype had been only a tiny fraction of what had been in my head. The game i’d imagined during that feverish weekend eighteen months earlier had a huge number of options and special attacks and different characters. It was Nick, the life-long Dungeons & Dragons player, who realised that I was talking about character classes, and told me about the four archetypal fantasy character classes: the front-line warrior, the more tactical rogue, the combat healer, and the glass-cannon magic user.

So, we had a tile-matching puzzle game with a turn-based tactical battlefield laid over it, and behind it all we had a customisable class-based RPG, all of which we wanted to be tied together by a cohesive story. We wanted each of those elements - puzzle, tactics, RPG, and story - to all be complete and compelling in their own right, but most importantly the overall blended experience needed to be great. This tension from the pieces of the game each pulling in different directions, was where a lot of our biggest design challenges came from, but it was also the source of a lot of what was interesting and unique about it.

The final shape of Ticket to Earth slowly coming together

One example is the grid itself. We wanted an in-game reason for the grid to exist, and that prompted us to create The Stellar Consciousness Movement, mostly referred to in-game as The Movement. This pseudo-religion trains people to tap into the energies around them, represented as a coloured grid. What was funny about that is how players actually become members of The Movement as they play. As they start to get a feel for the game and understand its patterns, they start to “look through” the grid, seeing larger strategies and opportunities instead of simple chains of coloured tiles.

The main game grid in Ticket to Earth, showing Rose tracing a path along yellow “Hand” tiles

To me that is really interesting, because that was when the game we had spent so much time working on for a long time actually transcend itself and becomes greater than the sum of its parts. That is a rare and magical feeling when you can point to the game you intended to make but find that something bigger and more complex has emerged from it.

Unlocking the fun

Something else we didn’t expect early on was how that satisfying complexity that emerged later made deliberate built-in complexity unnecessary. For instance, in our early designs the special attacks required multiple colours to be collected to power them up, a lot like Puzzle Quest. This caused many issues. One was simply displaying the abilities along with their power requirements and how much had been collected already. It just used too much of the screen, and we knew we had to simplify it.

Our solution was to make special abilities require only a single colour of tile, but to balance it out we gave them a much higher cost that would take several turns to build up. It made sense to us at the time, because we wanted special abilities to actually feel special, so we made players earn them. The problem was that it was taking far too long to charge them up, and players were waiting too long to pull off big, impressive effects. We were spending too much time just running around collecting tiles, so we reduced the cost of powers to a maximum six tiles. That left us with a game where there was always something cool you could do, instead of having to work so hard to unlock the fun.

Wolf launches a gas grenade at a group of enemies

Another important factor was the amount of time players would spend playing in a single session. We always intended Ticket to Earth to be a multi-platform game, but the initial version was always going to be on mobile. Nick and I are both older gamers with limited free time, but we both love highly-polished console RPGs, so that became the goal: make a console-quality RPG with an exciting story that could be played in short bursts on your phone. Once we stopped wasting the player’s time and made the fun more easily accessible, we had laid the foundation for a satisfying game experience a serious core gamer could enjoy during a half hour commute.

On that topic, Nick had a very strong indicator that we had made something that would hold players’ attention: he missed his stop on the train because he was so engrossed in playing. When he did it a second time, well, that was a very good sign!

Now that the PC edition is complete we’re throwing ourselves into getting Episode 2 finished. Unbelievably, we’ve made our job harder again by overlaying a completely new crafting system over the top of the existing RPG advancement mechanics. All of this work feels worthwhile to us, though. We’re coming closer and closer to capturing that mad idea that I tried to describe in that stream-of-consciousness design document years ago.