A Conversation on The Broken Hourglass
Brian 'Dhruin' Turner, 2006-06-01

If you are fan of the Infinity Engine games such as Baldur's Gate, you may have encountered Jason Compton and Westley Weimer in the form of their well-respected mods at the Pocket Plane Group and Weidu.org. With the classic party-based cRPG having long passed out of favour among mainstream game developers, Planewalker Games was formed to take the leap well beyond modding and create the sort of story-based party cRPG many players still long for. We had the opportunity to ask some questions about their first title, The Broken Hourglass - here is the result.

RPGDot: Please introduce yourself and tell us about Planewalker Games.

Jason Compton: I am Jason Compton, managing member of Planewalker Games LLC (PWG). PWG is an independent game development studio formed specifically to create and publish The Broken Hourglass (TBH). I act as the producer of the game. Jumping in with a couple of answers will be Westley Weimer, my business partner in PWG and developer of the WeiNGINE software we use to create the game.

RPGDot: Please introduce The Broken Hourglass and the gameplay it will offer.

Jason Compton: Mechanically, The Broken Hourglass is an isometric 2D CRPG in a sword-and-sorcery setting, the Tolmiran Empire. Players will create a single protagonist character and assemble a party from characters in the gameworld. Together they will face down enemies, seek obscure artifacts of legend, mingle with townspeople, fight, lose, win, love, laugh, die.

RPGDot: You are well known as very experienced modders of the Infinity Engine games, such as Baldur's Gate 2. Is it fair to think you are looking to recreate the sort of gameplay that BG2 represents? If so, what are the characteristics you are trying to capture - and what are you seeking to change or improve?

Jason Compton: It's certainly fair to say that we enjoy the style of gameplay that BG2 represents and think it's a valuable building block, yes. That would include aspects such as a character and party-focused story, a pace that encourages considered decisions (i.e., we're not producing a "twitch" game), real-time combat with auto- and manual pause events, and interaction with the gameworld aside from simply killing its inhabitants. That includes weaving romance into the game as well-many of the mods we developed were largely concerned with adding or expanding romances to BG2, and we think the presence of romance in that game has been a major part of its enduring success and popularity. So it's only natural that we would bring that forward into an original title as well.

Since many of us have spent an awful lot of time "studying" BG2 and its close relatives over the years. Many of the changes compared to a game like BG2 are at a technical or mechanical level-inventory management is somewhat streamlined, for example, keying on a combined bulk-weight concept rather than implementing a finite number of gear slots. And under the hood there are a number of enhancements which largely reflect "wouldn't it be great if?" discussions we've had over the years.

RPGDot: What can you tell us about the story and setting?

Jason Compton: Part of the fun of the game will be in discovering precisely what is going on and what to do about it, but we can reveal this much. A few weeks before the game begins, an unknown power took over the capitol building of Mal Nassrin, erecting a magical shield that prevents anyone from entering or exiting. A short time later, an entire neighborhood simply imploded in a massive explosion of unknown origin. And shortly after that, a magical dome appeared around the entire city perimeter. Everyone inside the city is trapped, and local authorities are at a loss to do much about the situation. To make matters worse, people have begun to see shadows of the past appear in the city, and reportedly their touch is deadly.

The protagonist, who has lived a generally "everyday" life until now, was gravely wounded in the explosion which shattered the neighborhood now known simply as the Wasteland, losing his/her home, worldly possessions, any close family he/she might have had, and so forth. The protagonist ends up in the care of a group who plan to take action and put the city to rights, having gathered up enough intelligence to at least begin to understand the core of the crisis, if not exactly what to do about it. And so the story begins…

Our setting is the world of the Tolmiran Empire, a land based loosely on the Byzantine Empire around the turn of the second millennium. Humans dominate the land and political structure these days, but they were once merely slaves to the Ilvari--a race now more commonly referred to as "elves." The elves were eventually overrun and their society has fractured into three distinct communities-the Cella, a nomadic people; the Verai, a rigidly controlled militaristic society; and those "assimilated" elves who have joined modern human society. Humans and elves have been known to crossbreed, but the offspring, the Feyborn, are almost to a one a violent, unpredictable sort.

The Empire's other major sentient race is the Illuminated, a curious group of traders and diplomats who simply appeared 100 years ago. Named for their glowing skin, it has been generally surmised that the Illuminated are a manufactured people, but by whom or for what purpose, nobody knows.

Player characters (and joinable NPCs) are either human, Feyborn, Illuminated, or members of one of the three Elven societies.

RPGDot: So, the city of Mal Nassrin is in decline, which sounds like it might present some interesting opportunities for both the story and quests - does this tangibly affect the gameplay is it simply background lore?

Jason Compton: Right. To recap, Mal Nassrin was once a wealthy and powerful independent city-state, but worn down by invasions from multiple fronts, it eventually fell and was assimilated into the growing Tolmiran Empire hundreds of years before the game begins. At the time the game takes place, it acts as the regional capital of Narimir province, a region with a modest agrarian economy and a lot of spent mines.

Mal Nassrin isn't a city brimming over with men of action and dashing heroines and so forth. It's not where you'd expect the beginning of the end of the world to start, and as such nobody's particularly prepared for the eventuality.

The Tolmiran Empire setting at this time in its history is also somewhat lighter on "monsters" than many other popular CRPG settings are. This has a number of implications, including the fact that "adventurer" is not the dime-a-dozen career choice you see in many fantasy settings. "Humanity is the enemy" is the slogan the world designers tried to adhere to when specifying the scenario's threats. So hordes of kobolds won't be burrowing into town any time soon--and if they did, there wouldn't be 20 adventuring parties spilling out of the town's taverns to intercept them. It's just not that kind of world.

That will manifest itself in how the player experiences the world and how the characters around the PC deal with the crisis.

RPGDot: How is the gameworld organised and can you give us a feel for the size? Is it one continuous world or individual maps/areas? The game starts with the player trapped in Mal Nassrin - is the game set entirely within the city? What sort of locations will players encounter?

Jason Compton: The game takes place entirely within Mal Nassrin's walls, yes, although the events of the prologue have caused some interesting shifts in architecture in a couple of locations. The game is laid out in a number of city zones, which in turn have a number of interiors-individual maps, not a continuously panning world. All told there will be several dozen unique maps.

Players will explore slums and halls of government, meager peasant homes and opulent mansions, forgotten tombs and even a sampling of alien architecture. (Alien in the sense that it is not quite of this world, not in the sense that it is from outer space.)

RPGDot: The Broken Hourglass is party-based, with the player creating a single protagonist and adding additional party-members as they go. Given your background, should players expect a distinct emphasis on party interaction? Please detail the party dynamics and what form the interactions will take.

Jason Compton: (Note that when I refer to "NPC", I specifically mean a joinable party member who is not the player character protagonist created by the person at the keyboard at the beginning of the game. When I discuss the people in the game world who ask you to perform quests or complain about the weather when you click on them or whatever, I refer to them as "scenery characters" or "quest characters." "NPC" presents an unfortunate lingo problem for these types of games…)

Yes indeed, players should expect a distinct emphasis on party interaction, both between the NPCs and the PC and among the NPCs. NPCs will strike up conversations with each other and the player, and interrupt and interject their thoughts in the middle of discussions or quests when it strikes their fancy. There will also be the prospect of romance between the PC and some of our NPCs, depending on the temperament of the PC and the level of interest on the part of the player, of course.

Some NPCs will get along relatively better than others. A couple won't be terribly popular with anybody in particular. Some will mix like oil and water, although we have made a conscious decision to avoid any "come-to-blows/he-goes-or-I-go" incompatibilities this time out.

In addition, our engine allows us to easily track the qualities of PC actions or words. One NPC may greatly disapprove of actions or words spoken in anger, for instance, while another may applaud the application of rational thought. This will affect their degree of commitment to the PC's leadership, and the PC's ability to influence their power development.

RPGDot: Briefly, while we are discussing parties, why do you think game producers have moved away from party-based cRPGs despite the obvious popularity of things like the Baldur's Gate series?

Jason Compton: It's something of a mystery. It would be easier to understand if someone had gone out on the wave of BG2, published a title that took the best aspects of that game and expanded upon them, and it turned out to be a financial disaster. But we're five years past the release of the Throne of Bhaal expansion and still nobody has done quite that type of game since, let alone failed at it! The Knights of the Old Republic games are generally considered to be the closest spiritual successors in that they did emphasize party and party development and romance and so forth-and they've won dozens of GOTY awards and presumably made more than a respectable amount of money. So that's a mark in favor, and still the new games in this vein have not come.

Then again, Diablo II vastly outsold any Infinity Engine title, and there's no real risk of shipping a game with a buggy romance and broken banter and whatnot if you just want to make another Diablo II. So it may be a simple matter of publishers deciding that they'd rather aim for the apparently lower-hanging fruit. In my view, that leaves a substantial market woefully under-served, which is why we've gone ahead with Broken Hourglass's production.

RPGDot: The FAQ briefly describes a skill-based character system with optional class-templates. Can you expand on this system? What are the main attributes and what sorts of skills or feats are available?

Jason Compton: At its core, the WRPG system is a free point-buy affair-you earn experience points for defeating enemies and exploring territory and engaging in dialogue and completing quests, and then you allocate them as you see fit to your primary or secondary abilities, or your health, or whatever you wish. This free-point buy system appeals to a lot of players.

However, it does not appeal to everyone. Particularly in a new system, in a new game, I have found that there's a certain level of "analysis paralysis" that can creep up when faced with a big list of skills and abilities, and you're not especially sure which if any are going to be important to completing the game. So to that end, we have also introduced a "level path" system which provides a number of templates which automatically spend those points along paths which roughly translate into "class" concepts in other systems. So someone taking the "archer" path would end up with the lion's share of his points invested in agility and ranged weapon proficiencies. Someone taking the "barfighter" path would put the lion's share of her points into health, toughness, and brawling skill. Paths will spend less than 100% of all available points, giving the player a chance to tweak some values or spend points on traits, such as a one-time bonus to all magic skills, or special damage resistance versus cold or fire, or the ability to use your own encumbrance to do more melee damage to opponents by putting more momentum behind your swing.

The player will be able to choose free-spend or pathing for the PC, and all paths will be available. NPCs must follow path tracks, because the NPCs have certain opinions about who they are and how they wish to use their abilities-you can't just take the gladiator into your party and then immediately insist that he study magic, it's not who he is. However, PCs who are generally well-liked by an NPC will in some cases have a chance to encourage the NPC to explore new possibilities, which will in turn "unlock the path" for that NPC.

As for primary abilities, the primary stats in the WRPG system are: Strength, Agility, Toughness, and Judgment. (There is also Luck, a sort of generic bonus to all random events, which could arguably considered a primary ability.) Once it became clear that we would not be able to use the "big six" ability scores and the ruleset that goes with them, my directive for our new, original gaming system was this-to use as few primary abilities as possible. I've seen far too many RPG systems with 10 or more primary abilities, and even the most well-written rulebook will not make me feel very good at all about the difference between "Speed", "Dexterity", and "Quickness."

See above about "analysis paralysis" - I feel it should be very easy to glance at a character's primary abilities and get at least a vague idea, power-wise, what this person is about. Some people love a long list of primary abilities because it's more specific, and yes, it's true, having a low Judgment score in this system doesn't immediately make it clear if someone is genuinely unintelligent, mule-headed, or simply not very scholastically inclined. Fortunately, we're making a game that isn't shy about expressing characters through more than stat blocks, so I don't anticipate this will really be a problem.

RPGDot: How important are non-combat skills to the gameplay? Are there any speech or diplomacy skills, for example?

Jason Compton: Non-combat skills have their role as well. On the purely interactive side, we offer Haggling (affects store prices and can play a role in quest rewards as well), Diplomacy, and Manipulation-the "truthful" and "misleading" sides of the same coin. Stealth, carrying capacity, perception, lock and trap manipulation, and so forth are also available skills, derived from governing primary abilities as well as points spent directly. We support pickpocketing as well.

There will be rewards for characters and parties who choose to invest in these abilities. They are also among the abilities in the game which are "Group" skills-meaning that the party's total proficiency is a weighted sum of each character's point value in that skill. So you needn't necessarily max out one character in order to get a benefit-you can add someone who is good at diplomacy and benefit from their experience as well.

RPGDot: What sort of NPC interactions will players experience? How does the dialogue system work? Are skill- or stat-checks used at all?

Jason Compton: NPCs as in joinable characters will banter with the PC and with one another-meaning they will strike up uninvited conversations about whatever happens to be on their mind. There will be some provision for the player to initiate conversations as well by "click-talking" their own party members. And some NPCs will make romantic overtures to the PC as well.

As for scenery/quest characters, some will approach the party and strike up conversations, others must be approached. Dialogue uses a multiple-choice system-the speaker's line is presented, and a list of possible responses presented to the player-which will be very familiar to players of BG, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, etc.

Yes, some dialogue options will be stat-dependent, in that some may not appear if you lack enough skill to "think of them," while others may be presented in all cases but the outcome of choosing that line will vary based on your group's Diplomacy value, or on the presence or absence of a certain party member, or so forth. We are not using a "thick-talk" system-you won't see "Me go, you stay, ugh" on the screen if you don't have any Einsteins in the party, for instance.

RPGDot: Are there any joinable factions in the game and, if so, how does this impact the gameplay?

Jason Compton: Not in the sense of "Join the Jets and get a bonus to your missile attacks, join the Sharks and get free ice cream every Wednesday," no. There are certainly different power groups within the city who both have an interest in getting to the bottom of the crisis as a matter of self-preservation as well as taking advantage of the situation to consolidate their own power, and interacting and in some cases aiding them will be a necessity. Organizing disparate groups toward a common goal will also be important. But there will not be a "club membership" faction system in this story.

RPGDot: Questing typically forms the backbone of story-based cRPGs. How complex - or simple - are the quests and do they have multiple solutions or approaches? Looking at the overall structure, are you seeking to provide a linear narrative or non-linear gameplay?

Jason Compton: This is a question far better answered by players than developers. How complex or simple the quests are and how linear or not the gameplay turns out to be is almost inevitably different than what the developers intended. So it's probably best to leave this judgment to others. That said, I can make clear some things that the game is and isn't. It is finite, it is not a "sandbox RPG"--if you wander around aimlessly you're going to run out of things to do. There are quests which lead to minor gratification and there are quests which lead to the endgame and we strongly suggest that you carry them out.

There are a series of "major" or "prerequisite" quests which lead to the endgame and eventual resolution. In theory these can be performed in any order-whether or not there's an "optimum" order will in part be determined by our balancing efforts and, again, partly by what the players experience.

Because the scenario involves a clear and present danger, the wisdom of following every single sidequest opportunity of the game can and should be debated, and it's not for us to decide how people should make their way to the endgame. That said, some of those sidequests will affect the story's epilogue, and the future of the characters in the game, in subtle or possibly major ways.

RPGDot: Combat is real-time with pause. Why did you decide on a realtime system and what are the pros and cons as you see them? What will you be doing to make combat interesting? Are there any tactical elements?

Jason Compton: "Why" is that, simply put, it seems to work pretty well for a pretty substantial segment of the player base. I'm not religious about real-time combat nor am I looking to demythologize turn-based CRPG combat. We simply looked at a structure that we felt worked quite well to convey epic action while still preserving hands-on options for the player, and said "Yes, let's do that."

So to use the structure of the question, the pros are that it works well, we understand it, and we feel it makes good use of the medium. The cons are that it can be somewhat overwhelming for first-time players when a dozen characters start flying around the screen swinging their swords and you have to decide what your party's going to do about it, and we don't sell any games to people who have sworn they will never buy another CRPG until they get something with turn-based combat.

Again, whether combat is interesting is largely a matter of player experience and taste, but I can do my best here. Fans of Wes Weimer's tactical mods for BG2 should know what he's capable of using a more limited combat AI system, and of course he's building the combat capabilities of our new engine to reflect the kind of capabilities he would like to see AI take advantage of. The realtime nature means that the situation can be viewed as fluid, letting you reorient your party just in time to drop a foe. Enemies will have sophisticated ways to evaluate party threats, so their tactics won't simply be "bash the nearest person." The Tactics skill is used by the group to provide bonuses to allies within a certain range. The skill system provides a number of defensive abilities, so you can build a character's defense on more than just slapping heavy armor on them-someone can be a parry master, or a dodging expert. We have a "dropped guard" concept that opens a character up to free attacks when taking certain types of actions, such as casting a spell or activating an item. There should be plenty of on-screen action and underlying mechanics to keep tactical masters engaged and interested.

As for spellcasting tactics, the way our mana system treats instantaneous spells means that mages can spend most of their time actually casting spells, not chugging mana potions or casting a few memorized spells and then being reduced to inefficient archers.

I asked Wes to chime in with a few other remarks here. This is what he had to say:

"This isn't a first-person shooter or a solo adventure: much of the excitement and challenge in combat comes from coordinating the actions of your party members. Motion is important -- TBH combat should not be a "diabolic" click-fest. Weapons have varying ranges, trying to walk past an armed enemy is dangerous, and surrounding a foe forces her to divide her defensive energies. The game features both open amphitheatres and narrow tunnels: chokepoints and protecting your weak party members both matter. Sneak attacks are deadly.

Some similar games favor degenerate "all around the mullberry bush" tactics in which seemingly-mindless enemies chase faster-moving heroes in circles while ignoring the archers that are peppering them from the sidelines: not so in TBH.

Beyond that, tactical diversity springs from multiple possible actions during combat. As discussed elsewhere, mages will be able to choose whether to focus their attention on dealing damage, buffing party members, or casting disabling or summoning spells. We also take a fairly broad view of switching items during combat (pretty much anything that is not a suit of armor can be juggled), allowing players to define various gear configurations. This is particularly useful for warriors, who can switch from the "ice sword with the ring of fire resistance" when fighting fire elementals to the "penetrating axe and inertial shield" when fighting sturdy golems.

We're not claiming that Thundarr the Barbarian will have twenty different melee choices when facing a new foe, but there will be more going on than "everybody pile on the bad guy".

RPGDot: Moving on to magic, your FAQ describes a system where one-off, instantaneous spells (the example used is a Lightning Bolt) consume no mana while spells with duration do - this seems almost the opposite of common systems where, for example, buffs would typically have a low cost but damage spells are often more expensive. Would you detail the magic system and the reason you made these choices? Does this tilt the game in favour of magic use?

Jason Compton: Wes is much more eloquent about our magic system than I am, so here's what he has to say about it.

"Think of magic-users in TBH as being able to pay attention to two things at once, sort of like a competent office worker who can file papers and answer budget questions at the same time.

A fire mage could use half of her attention to maintain a fiery shield around her person and the other half to throw firebolts. Or she could devote her entire attention to throwing firebolts -- and thus throw bigger ones. Or she could use it all to maintain a fiery shield around herself and around another harried party member. A mage essentially has a maximum "potential for manipulating reality" (based on skills and traits and experience and background) that can be divided up to perform arcane feats. Magical talent is more like a garden hose than a wallet full of money -- you can only apply it so fast, but if you use some now there will be just as much there the next round.

One reason we made this choice was to avoid a classic imbalance between warriors and mages in "spells per day" systems. In such systems the party must either rest frequently (which can break game-world immersion) or have mages stand idle (or make ineffectual melee attacks) much of the time. The most common alternate approach is to give mages "regenerating mana" that comes back slowly but does not require explicit rest. We avoided that approach because we don't ever want to waste our players' time -- such a system invariably requires the player to manage downtime and sit around watching the mages "catch their breath".

In many fantasy games the mages are like reserve artillery: they have one or two big bombs, but after they cast those they are relegated to the back lines. We wanted to put mages on a more even footing with fencers and archers: just as an archer can shoot arrows over and over, so can a winter mage shoot ice bolts.

With regards to expense, of our spells scale depending on the amount of power or focus applied to them. A mage that spends twice as much on a fireball can expect to do more damage than another similar mage. It is a matter of game balance whether "spending 10 on a firebolt" does as much as "spending 10 on fire resistance". An encounter in which offense is always more efficient than defense leads to a feeling of dramatic tension in which valued characters become more and more injured. An encounter in which defense trumps offense leads to a feeling of heroic high fantasy. Both have their place.

Does the game favor magic use? Magic is but one possible path for character advancement and for overcoming game challenges. A character designed for and specializing in casting water bolts should be roughly equivalent in terms of damage dealt at range to a specialized mundane archer. Those characters would have different synergies, however: the sharp-eyed archer may be better suited to branching out into scouting and trap detection, while the quick-witted mage may make a more persuasive diplomat. The archer might support the front lines by dropping her bow and drawing her sword; the mage might support the front lines with strength-enhancing buffs. The game mechanics do not favor magic so much as they make magecraft more generally applicable."

RPGDot: The FAQ also mentions spells may be "dynamically created based on Earth, Fire, Air, Water, and Physical magic"- what does this mean?

Jason Compton: Casters specialize in one (or more) elements to build their spells upon: earth, air, fire, water, or physical energy. Fire mages, naturally, find it easier to do fire damage, and fire magic is the magic type associated with Strength-affecting spells as well.

Most spells can be expressed as one or more effects-a partial list would be "heal this person once," "heal this person over time (regeneration)," "grant this person an armor bonus", "hit this person with an attribute penalty", "cause damage once", "cause damage repeatedly", and "summon a creature to fight for me." So while there will be a spellbook of "pre-baked" spells, players can craft a spell at any time by specifying an elemental source, specifying one or more spell effects, selecting a target type (one person, the entire party, all enemies, or a sphere/ball region), specifying an amount of mana to invest, and clicking to cast it. So if you really need to build a Water-based spell that causes repeated damage and a stat loss all at the same time and you only have 14 mana left to invest in it, you can build precisely that spell on the fly.

RPGDot: What is the balance between combat and exploration or NPC interaction? Which aspect of gameplay is the focus?

Jason Compton: Again, this is a question which I think is best answered by players. By its nature it is a constrained world and by design there are not three dozen wilderness zones to putter around looking for a hole in the ground containing a diamond-it's just not that kind of game. That said, I certainly hope there will be joy to be found in exploring the city's neighborhoods, meeting the inhabitants, finding out how they feel about the Umbrella, and so forth, while their NPC companions chatter.

But make no mistake-combat encounters will be a necessary portion of acquiring goods and knowledge and advancing the plot.

RPGDot: Can you tell us about equipment and items in the game, such as weapons and armour? Is there anything like a crafting system? What about Alchemy?

Jason Compton: An inventory list probably won't make scintillating reading, but to quickly summarize, characters have a choice of armor (including shields and helmets), weaponry from the bow, hafted (clubs, etc.), polearm, and sword families. Miscellaneous magic enhancement items (rings, etc.) are on the menu as well.

We do not have player crafting or alchemy, but there may be shopkeepers or specialists who will do special purpose creation or enhancement.

RPGDot: I believe you are using an in-house 2D engine that was developed for a previous project. Tell us a little about the engine and what are the pros and cons of using a 2D engine?

Jason Compton: No, the engine is brand-new and specifically designed to create this game. It reflects both careful observation of what "works well" for games of this type, in terms of how characters are ordered, how parties are managed, and so forth, along with support for modern filetypes and an eye towards using some of the capabilities of modern PCs. For instance, the engine natively uses PNG and JPEG graphics and Ogg audio and it sports a particle system for visuals such as spell effects. Currently, our UI doesn't have a ton of frilly decorations around the edges so we have a freely-resizeable interface, meaning you can play it in any size window you find appropriate to your desktop, or switch to full-screen mode. That freedom may change before release, we'll see.

Under the hood, WeiNGINE has a very flexible event-driven scripting language and uses virtually no binary filetypes-almost everything is in human-readable XML files, although some map data will ship pre-processed into a binary filetype for faster loading.

As to the pros and cons--If you have a business partner who says "If you want a 2D engine, I will code one for you, but if you want a 3D engine you have to get somebody else" then a 2D engine is a tremendous pro!

More seriously, a 2D engine offers us a chance to put extremely crisp and detailed visuals up on the screen-as fast as high-end CPUs and GPUs are, there's always the potential to show something more detailed if you spend all night rendering it rather than rendering it in realtime, and we are doing our best to take advantage of that capability. It also helps us create a more predictable gameplay experience, in that the player should see exactly what we see, no matter what graphics architecture they bring to the table. There are still some older or lower-end GPU architectures, such as integrated motherboard graphics, which struggle with some of the effects and memory optimizations supported by the engine, but we're doing our best to identify and account for these.

We did look at some 3D and hybrid 2D/3D engines when we started out, including a couple that are already "rigged and ready to go" for CRPG play, but we either couldn't afford to license them, or couldn't afford the outside programming talent it would have taken to beat something like Torque or Crystalspace or whatever into what we needed. Again, I was lucky enough to have access to an extremely talented programmer telling me he'd do a 2D engine, so I wasn't about to pass that up for a more expensive unknown.

There are some challenges posed by 2D engines, of course, which the evolution of the PC hasn't catered to very well. In a 3D world your biggest concerns, generally speaking, are CPU and GPU power-3D engines take a relatively small amount of texture data, wrap it around a relatively small amount of model data, and then perform zillions of calculations to generate a realtime image. 2D engines take an enormous amount of "texture" data (in our case, background paintings and sprite frames) and then flip through them to generate the image. This makes available RAM your biggest concern, and median/average free system RAM hasn't scaled upward nearly as reliably and quickly as CPU/GPU power over the past several years. When we started the project we considered working to a considerably larger sprite scale than the Infinity games of yore did, but when we started doing the math I didn't like what I saw, so we pulled back. (Our scale is still slightly larger than theirs was-but not as big as it would have been if I believed that the median PC has 2 gigs of RAM.)

The other significant challenge was finding qualified-yet-affordable sprite artists to work with us and produce character graphics. Sprite work at this level of detail is really not in much demand these days-sure, you have people doing NES Zelda-type graphics for some PDA and mobile phone projects, but that's not appropriate to our needs. And on the other end of the spectrum you have extremely experienced artists with 10+ years of industry experience who honed their abilities years ago when sprites were The Way Things Were Done. Their experience is unimpeachable, but with that experience comes a premium price that we simply couldn't think about paying. And many of those "old-timers" are in management now, or have moved on to other fields entirely. There are not skilled sprite artists hanging around every corner.

And there is certainly not a steady supply of fresh sprite talent being turned out by the Full Sails or even the four-year computer arts degree programs of your choice-those people are learning how to work in a modern 3D assembly line studio setting, not to do top-to-bottom sprite work. Various respondents to our contract opportunity postings were eager to provide me with a 3D object file that I couldn't do a thing with, since all I wanted from them was a big stack of PNG frames. We spoke to a lot of people who said, "No, I don't do that, I only animate" or "I only model" or "I only texture" and a number who simply said, "…you want *what*?!?" because they didn't really understand the nature of the beast. So although I did in the end find sprite artists whose work I am happy with, it was harder than I anticipated.

Interestingly, finding artists who understood the nuances of the 2D area art requirements, and the various markup files that need to be generated in order to obtain information about "what is a floor vs. what is a wall" and "when should a sprite be obscured by this object?" was comparatively easier. I'm not sure why that is.

RPGDot: What is the current status of development and when is your anticipated release date? Despite some high profile successes among indie and amateur teams, I think many gamers tend to initial cynicism about these projects - how realistic are your goals?

Jason Compton: :As for a release date… my current favorite joke about this process is that the game is taking longer than I expected--which is about what I expected. The pessimist and optimist angels each sit on a shoulder and bark out their predictions. We'll get there. The optimist wanted us to be done by now, but even the pessimist knows that we're actually making good progress, all things considered.

To put it another way-we certainly have enough material that I load up our alpha builds every so often and remark to anybody who will listen that, "My God! This actually looks like a game!" However, there is not nearly enough content implemented at this point that any paying customers would agree with me yet.

As for the goals… well. There's any number of reasons this could be seen as a bad idea. Certainly the mainstream publishers don't think this kind of game is a very good idea or they'd be funding them. We've crossed some pretty major hurdles already-it may not seem reasonable or sensible these days for one person to write a complex game engine and novel CRPG ruleset on his own, for instance, but Wes has done it.

Our goals are to make a CRPG of enjoyable length, with attractive but not "GPU-breaking" visuals, and bring it to market at a modest price. We are not operating under the delusion that we are creating "Baldur's Gate 3" here - we simply don't have the resources to do that. But making The Broken Hourglass, that I believe we can do. I've committed my own money and a lot of other people's time to that, and I expect we will see it through. What happens after that is up to the market.

I think one of the major marks in our favor is that we largely constrained the project to something we know very well-for better or worse, most of us involved in the game have been "studying" games of this type for a number of years, and we've field-tested our ability to create engaging content in that setting. I've had to learn some new skills along the way, such as how to act as a de facto, better-than-nothing art director, and that's certainly come with its share of pitfalls and false starts. These are things people with a proper budget don't have to deal with, of course.

Another mark in our favor is that most of the people being counted on to make this game happen are adult professionals in other fields-they understand from experience what committing to do something and getting it done means. Of course, on the flip side, I'm not paying them enough to quit their day jobs, and that means if I don't get the three lovetalks I was expecting from a writer on Monday night, that's just too bad for me. But I know I'll get them.

RPGDot: Is there anything you'd like to add in closing?

Jason Compton: Just that I'm gratified that there are people still interested in this style of gameplay, and that I hope we'll deliver to everybody's expectations.

We'd like to thank Jason and Wes for their excellent answers and wish them luck with the development. We'll be keeping an eye on The Broken Hourglass and we'll certainly keep readers updated.