FATE: An Interview With Travis Baldree
Corwin, 2005-06-29

FATE could be described as the RPG you play when you're not playing an RPG. This little gem of a game has been attracting a great deal of attention lately and for good reason; it's relatively bug free, inexpensive, and heaps of FUN. It's also the brainchild of developer/designer Travis Baldree who was kind enough to answer some questions about the game for RPGDot.

RPGDot: Could you introduce yourself and give us some background information on yourself and your interests.

Travis: My name is Travis Baldree. I'm the developer/designer for FATE. Basically, I've worked on a lot of small games you've never heard of, and a lot of advertising tie-in games (racing mostly)

RPGDot: What motivated you to create FATE?

Travis: I love the Diablo series, and action-rpg's in general. But my time to play is limited these days, and many of these games are too involved to put down and pick up again a week later. After I lose the narrative thread, or forget where to go for quest X, I just end up dropping the games. I wanted something I could play in short bursts over a long period of time that had a lot of those same mechanics. I also wanted to bring back some of the classic tongue-in-cheek tone of older RPG's, and some of the mechanics of classics like Nethack and Telengard. Obviously, FATE doesn't aspire to the complexity of Nethack just yet - but I hope you can see some influence.

RPGDot: What specifically did you want to achieve when you developed the concepts behind the game? Do you think you've met these goals?

Travis: The main goals were to make a fun game that was easily accessible, replayable, and surprisingly deep (for my market) in under 6 months. I also wanted to push as far beyond the expectations for a 20 dollar downloadable game as possible, to see if I could make it really stand out. I think we hit the mark - so far the response has been great. Players have been having fun, and are replaying the game, and we even have a little mod community springing up.

RPGDot: Why the deliberate choice not to include any real story in the game?

Travis: Partly it's just time and budget. With limited time and money, I like to spend most of the effort on raw gameplay and playability. In the case of FATE, I think this ended up working to the advantage of the pick-up-and-play style, and I can pretend that it was my plan all along. Since the quests are all randomly generated, and cookie cutter as a result, I basically just focused on streamlining that aspect of play, rather than trying to dress it up. Since you don't have any narrative thread to follow, you don't have to try and pick it back up when you come back to play a week later - you're back up to speed almost immediately.

RPGDot: Did you ever consider making it a party based game?

Travis: Not really. The focus was always on building an individual character, and the idea of having a descendant was always tied to that. The Pet and Summoned creatures are my nod to party-based mechanics.

RPGDot: Where did the idea of not only a Pet come from, but having a Pet that could morph into other creatures?

Travis: The Pet is taken unapologetically from Nethack. Polymorphing your pet in Nethack was always fun. Originally, I was going to have magic fountains with random effects, and you'd be able to bottle the water to feed to your pet. But at one point, when I had fish swimming around in the dungeon pools, I sort of stumbled across the idea of having fishing as an ingame mechanic, and then it just seemed natural that you'd want to feed them to your pet. So I suppose that's how the final state of polymorphing came about for FATE.

RPGDot: Fishing is one of the really novel design aspects of the game. What was your inspiration for this and how pleased are you with the way it's working?

Travis: Well, I accidentally sort of answered that in the previous question. I always liked ingame fishing. I spent way too much time doing it in the Ocarina of Time. Obviously, it's nothing as involved here - but I think it's a fun diversion. Basically it amounts to a slot machine with a little bit of reflex action. I like the basic mechanic, and how it works into gameplay, but I would have liked to have added more depth, with upgradeable poles, bait, and a fishing skill. Maybe in version 2?

RPGDot: What do you see as the main benefits of the randomisation system the game uses? Are there any drawbacks, or problems this has created?

Travis: The primary benefit of randomisation is replayability. The secondary benefit is development time. If you don't have to manually build all the levels, you can focus on the rules that build them - and that requires a lot less dev time up-front. The drawbacks are a feeling of 'sameness' that you get. Randomized levels never really have the feeling of life you get in precreated ones. You can also end up with lots of unexpected situations (fishing holes in solid ground, for example) that tend to crop up, and must be dealt with individually. I love randomized gameplay elements, though. I think they keep the game fresh and fun, and there's an element of 'hey, what did you see in YOUR play-through?'. Everybody has a slightly different experience.

RPGDot: There's been a great deal of fan feedback on the official forums. What impact has this had on both you and the game?

Travis: It's been really rewarding. I love to talk to people about gameplay elements, I love to get their feedback, and it's important to me to incorporate as much as I reasonably can. Obviously, I can't implement every request, but the ones I can't do now, I keep filed for later. I've already released several patches for the game. Some were to fix bugs that we ended up discovering after ship, but I also managed to squeeze in a ream of player-requested tweaks and additions - and they've all made the game better. So a big thank you to everyone who has written!

RPGDot: There is no SAVE and CONTINUE option in the game. Was this a deliberate design decision and if so, why was it made?

Travis: It was deliberate. Since many of the gameplay elements and outcomes are randomized, I wanted to avoid the case of saving/performing event/getting reward/loading/repeating. I think it's boring, and one of my goals for the game was to have people constantly playing, and almost never reloading. I end up doing it myself if it is easily available ( in Baldur's Gate, I used to save before every levelup, and reload until I got maxed stats. What can I say? I'm weak. )
You CAN actually do this in the game, but it's a little more tedious to do. And hopefully that time barrier is just enough to avoid the dreaded quicksave/quickload gameplay, but still allow players to play the way they want to, if they really want to obsess over that sort of thing.

RPGDot: Most of the negative feedback I've read on the forums seems to be about people's dislike of Wild Tangent and their particular marketing scheme. Why did you link up with them? Are there any comments you would like to make about the general concerns people are voicing about this issue? (I'll understand if you can't, but this does seem to be a major issue for a LOT of people and I'd like to give you the opportunity to address it)

Travis: Well, to clear things up a little, I actually WORK for WildTangent. WildTangent has a couple of internal divisions - I am in the Content Development division. So there you go.

WildTangent HAS been listening to the complaints and concerns of users. And I think FATE provided a good conduit for that to get back to WildTangent in a meaningful way. I think it is safe to say that you will see substantial changes in the very near future as far as resident processes, better installation process, and the addressing of some of the DRM concerns that people have.

RPGDot: What plans do you have for the future? What next for FATE? A sequel, something totally different? Do you plan to stay with WT, stay independent, join a different company, etc.

Travis: FATE should be going out to other distribution partners in the near future, so you'll see it popping up in new places. I think it should also be on next month's PC Gamer CD, with a review in the magazine as well. I'm staying at WT, gathering suggestions, ideas, and features for a possible sequel, although there will probably be some shorter-term project in between. And I want to keep active in the little community that is springing up around FATE

RPGDot: Do you have any humorous stories from your work on the game you could share with us?

Travis: Most of them revolve around some very unfortunate names generated by the random name generator. Let's just say that they weren't terribly PC.

There are a lot of little in-jokes in the game.
If you've seen Napoleon Dynamite, you'll note that the Bass turns your pet into a Unicorn. Even if you've SEEN the film, you still might not get it. Peronto's Cheesehead of the Emerald Bay is an item that you can fish for, named after our company president - he's a big Packers fan. My daughter's name is Zoey, and if you look hard enough, you'll probably eventually find Zoey's rattle.

RPGDot: Are there any other comments you would like to make either about the game or yourself?

Travis: I hope people enjoy it! I hope I get to make a sequel! I hope to see some cool new mods that allow me to play the game and see new content that I didn't put in myself :)

RPGDot: Thank you very much Travis for taking the time to answer these questions. We here at RPGDot wish you well with FATE and any future games.