Friday diaries: Games that inspire us - Part 4

Hello, readers!

This week we will be wrapping up with our line of 'Games that inspire us'. There might still be one possible future recommendation after this, we'll see.

Honorable mentions

So, basically there are just way too many games for us to even count, which have inspired us during the years. I personally got my first computer in 1997, and during those first couple of years I played A LOT of games. I mean, I tried every possible demo and shareware I could get my hands on. Sports games, racing titles, boxing games, turn-based strategy games, you name it. Back then I was just so amazed by this new interactive medium (for me) that I wanted to try 'em all out.

A point worth mentioning is that we didn't have an internet connection when I started my gaming hobby. Nope, the games came on demo CDs, or on some friend's floppy disks. If I would've instantly had a decent internet connection, downloading and trying out games would've been so much easier. In my youth, we either bought magazines which had these CDs on them, or swapped existing ones around. So that way I never had this surplus of games, that the kids today have.

And also, at that time not every PC ran every PC title. Even if your computer was brand new. Our first computer had an integrated 2MB graphics chip, which didn't allow hardware acceleration. That would've required buying an extra graphics card, which we couldn't afford at the time. So, my first 3D shooters were all software rendered.

Quake II (1997) with software rendering VS. with hardware acceleration. 

1. id Software games

 

 Keen 4 on the left, and the first scene of Kalaban on the right.

At first I was going to mention Doom (1993), because that game has had such a huge impact on PC gaming in general. But come to think of it, most of the 90s id titles have inspired me as a game designer. You can look at the overworld screen in Keen 4 (1991) for example, and see that it looks similar to the overhead perspective in Kalaban. I used to play that game a lot with my big sister, and I think we once got the whole game beat. The game also had this open-ended Zelda style design, where you would unlock different parts of the map, or access them once you've acquired a certain item.

The influence of Quake (1996) also cannot be underestimated. The game has a very strong Lovecraftian horror theme, and the sound design is to this day nothing short of fantastic. The game takes place in alternate dimensions, which are really nightmarish and gave me night terrors for years. Gameplay-wise it's a classic old school shooter with highly tactical combat, and it really takes the players to their absolute limit. The opening area in Quake is also really clever, starting immediately ingame, and letting you choose your difficulty and episode while getting used to navigating the 3D world.

2. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995)

 

  Comparison of the horde in Warcraft II, and the one in Kalaban.

This one is a bit more specific. I first encountered Blizzard's Warcraft II on a demo disc, and I hadn't played the first one at that point. I had only seen the first one on my school's computer as a shareware. Some of the older boys from my school had installed it on the machine at the back of our classroom. We used to play Warcraft and other shareware titles in between classes on that computer.

But back to Warcraft II. I remember instantly falling in love with the hand-crafted animations in this game. The design on the characters and the world is masterfully done, and you can see that the developers clearly put a lot of time and effort into it. In my mind, the graphics still look pretty neat today. I think that the art style in this game has stood the test of time better than some of the more photorealistic titles of the same era. You really get the impression that you're controlling miniatures, which have come to life on a real-time battlefield.

Also, a thing worth mentioning is that when we began creating the character animations for Kalaban, this game was our main starting point with the look and the perspective. It's not a straight-up imitation of course, but something we drew inspiration from. Warcraft II has this slightly slanted topdown look, which isn't really isometric. Bonus mention goes to the wonderfully cheesy cutscenes, with some fantastically overdone voice-acting. Everything in these early Warcraft titles (and often Blizzard games in general) feels epic, and everything is so grand that even the voiceover feels in place. The story in itself is quite serious, but the game is filled with comedy.

 3. Blood (1997)

 

In comparison, neither one of the games shy away from gore and horror-themed settings.

To anyone who has seen Kalaban in motion, this is should not come as surprise. Cultists, masses of undead minions, a gothic-themed 1920s setting and of course, tons of gore. This classic horror shooter from Monolith Productions has it all. This game is personally one of my favorite FPS games of all time, and not just an inspiration for Kalaban. Growing up, this game was both haunting and exciting, but to be honest, it never got into my head like Quake did. I might've had dreams about it, but not nightmares. Maybe it's the more cartoony violence and sprite characters, but even as a kid I was perfectly able to distance Blood from reality.

I think the level design in the game is superb, and it was done with the same engine as Duke Nukem 3D (1996). The theme in this game is well-presented, and it's consistent, although the game makes many pop culture references, to both horror movies and written fiction. The easter eggs and secrets in the game are wonderful, and always a joy to find.

The protagonist in Blood, Caleb, is an undead gunslinger and without a doubt an antihero. We wanted the action to match the craziness which goes on in Blood, just from a topdown perspective. Storytelling-wise the games are quite different, as Blood is an old school shooter, and its levels are basically 3D monster mazes.

4. Diablo (1996)

 The first boss in Diablo, and the aftermath of a battle in Kalaban.

The loot, the monsters, the creepy and shadowy environments. Ah yes, where would we be without Diablo? Like Warcraft, this game was also developed by Blizzard Entertainment, but by another team called the Blizzard North. I do have to confess that Diablo II (2000) had a much larger impact on me than the first one, but it was a necessary step in evolution. The game still has a fantastic atmosphere, and I like that they've taken the hardcore idea of roguelikes and put it into a mainstream game.

The game was a modern, realtime take on the role-playing and dungeon crawling. There had been a few similar titles like it on the PC, such as the Ultima 8 (1994) from Origin, but none of those were done with the same level of quality. Diablo truly is a "gameplay first" type of game, where it lets you get right into action.

The game has a branching storyline, and when you start the game, you can never know which one the game is going to choose. In addition to that of course, the environments are procedurally generated. Advancing towards Diablo, the main antagonist in the game, is pretty straightforward, as you descend to the hellish dungeons beneath the cathedral. When you've reached a whole new area in the dungeon, an exit appears on the overworld, through which you can travel back to where you were.

Diablo really sticks to the wisdom that simple is beautiful, and it doesn't hold back important information from the player. Everything in the UI is simplistic and straightforward. The chance for a better loot drop makes you wanna replay the game, time after time.

The misconceptions

 

A lot of people have told us that Kalaban reminds them of Postal (1997). Maybe it's the art style, the perspective or that both of the games feature brown-coated men as protagonists. I don't know, to me it seems a bit weird. Sure, I have played Postal 1 and 2, but neither of those games have inspired me in creation of this title.

The abandoned gas station in Kalaban.

Kalaban is more of an open-ended story simulator, where Postal games are like Carmageddon: you can choose to complete the challenges, or play around killing NPCs for fun. They thrive on shock value, and that has not been our goal. Sure, our game has a lot of gore and horror elements, but it's all done in a story-oriented manner.

I think the closest analogy of our game would be topdown System Shock, with a retro alternate history theme. Sure, the gameplay is a bit different and our game has NPCs instead of emails and audio logs, but the goals are similar. The game has RPG style mechanics, but without leveling up and gathering experience. Some might call it "Metroidvania", others would compare it to Zelda, but the official genre of course is "action adventure".

Friday diaries: What inspires the writer

 

Hello people of the internet! 

I decided to give Harri a day off from these and ramble for a while about what inspired the writing and atmosphere of Kalaban and what I aim to show you in the game.

A small introduction. A Finn born and raised, I was told my name is Tuukka, but I adopted "Kaarlo" as my handle ages ago and tend to most go by it. It's a Finnish name still, I just like the ring of it better. I've been writing as a hobby for what feels like forever. My only published works are some handfuls of lyrics for a band called Syncfactory (Finnish electronic industrial band).

So what inspires me to write? Mostly games, actually! Them and Terry Pratchett. I'm not big on watching movies or series, I take my entertainment from books and games. Biggest influences in my writing for Kalaban would be older PC games. Story does have some Evil Dead in it, with all the  twinkle in the eye stuff and all, but my biggest inspiration is an older PC/Amiga game called DreamWeb (1994).

Sure we are not creating a cyberpunk world filled with corruption and mystery, but there you have it! Looks I definitely directed Harri to create in the way of Finnish games close to my heart (all of which are worlds apart from each other, naturally) called Notrium (2003), Tapan Kaikki (1995) and Driftmoon (2013). I highly encourage everyone enjoying survival games to check out Notrium and all that like Pratchett style writing and lighthearted humor in RPG games to check out Driftmoon.

I'd say "try Tapan Kaikki series" but... it may have not stood the test of time that well. But it's still worth a look. Other inspirations are too many to idly list here, but there is still one thing I shall shamelessly plug here! Gone with the Blastwave! http://www.blastwave-comic.com/  An awesome webcomic about life after apocalypse that does not take itself too seriously. Its style of writing and art direction have seeped into our little game thanks to me and that is no accident!

Most of the atmosphere is created in tandem with the rest of the team, with some ideas thrown in by our friends, the best of which we've implemented. Most important thing I wanna portray personally, is a world that is in a way believable, but also alien. I want to toy around with the Finnish tropes but not make the game too entrenched in Finnish culture, I want everyone to be able to enjoy the game as it is! I want it to be a dark, grim world you see, but with a healthy sense of "not taking itself TOO seriously"

 

 

And how I write? I write whenever, while having a late night walk, wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I'll just jot it down or actually get up and blast a full dialogue for a new character, why not! Since when inspiration strikes, you will have to write write write and get it out of your system, otherwise it'll be gone forever since I lead a busy life with many distractions. So the next time you'll pick up our game, you can be sure the dialogue came from heart, written when inspiration strikes and not just readymade fluff...

Even though the prose might not win any awards ;)


Written by: Tuukka K.

Friday diaries: Games that inspire us - Part 2

 
Hello again, readers!

This week we'll take another trip down the memory lane and talk about another game which has inspired us. These chosen few are not only games which have influenced the development of Kalaban, but our whole career as indie game developers.

" Enter Crimsonland " 

Over  fourteen years ago, when I first booted up the executable called "crimson.exe", I really had no idea what to expect. I had downloaded this freeware game, made by a couple of hobbyist game developers, from the Pelit magazine's gamedev forum. Pelit is a popular video game publication here in Finland, and around that time many young indie developers used to hang around those forums.

 
At first you're greeted with a topdown view of a featureless playfield. Then, little by little, gray alien creatures start to appear from the edge of the screen. You click on your left mouse button, and the virtual avatar fires a single shot from his pistol. Blood splurts from the enemy, and it falls over. Soon the whole screen is clogged up by slowly moving monsters, as you try to avoid them. Before long you get your first level up; a perk of your choosing. These range from weapons mastery, to regeneration, to faster movement and picking up objects from the distance with your mind.

The gameplay is simple, straightforward and fun. And I was instantly hooked to it. My fourteen-year-old self had found a game, which was exactly the kind of game I wanted to create at that time. Later, when the freeware Crimsonland evolved into the full version with multiple game modes and quests, I dreamed of creating a first person rendition of the same idea. Sadly, that concept never came to be.

Playing Crimsonland is like playing Doom (1993). Here's your gun, there's the monsters, no questions asked. The view is far enough from the player that you always have a clear vision of the battlefield. The weapon fx and bonus item effects still look great, thirteen years later. It takes courage and vision to hone the gameplay to such a pure and simplistic level that it just works. After that, you just add enough weapons, different foes and perks to keep it interesting.

The secret of Crimsonland is its spartan action, with everything useless removed from the UI and from the game itself. The idea is so simplistic that you can imagine any gun-wielding character in place of the player, blasting away endless foes. That is what drove me to vision my own version of it at the time. The exactly same gameplay would not work from a first person perspective however. If you have enemies approaching at you from 360 different angles, defending yourself becomes impossible. That's why you need some cover and structures at the playfield, to funnel those foes through.

When we began writing new combat system for Kalaban, I had this game in my mind. Attacking should feel intuitive and powerful. Enemies would occasionally drop loot and they would vary in speed, strength and style. Others would fire projectiles at your, others would be purely melee and others would blow up on touch. And attacks, blasts and damage would result in violent screenshake.

Recently, when we created the Shooter demo of Kalaban, we had these gameplay lessons in mind. We took the basic combat from the main game, and just added more spawning monsters and a high score which would rank up with every kill. We wanted to create a good view into the visual world of our game, without compromising the detail and depth of the actual game.

Who knows? Maybe we'll create a game purely built on combat in the future. In Kalaban we've wanted to make the experience atmospheric, filled with exploration, discovering story breadcrumbs and working with the NPCs to survive. And of course, there's plenty of combat...


You can download and test our shooter demo from below: 

Friday diaries #10: Games that inspire us

Good evening! It's already 11 P.M. here in Finland as I'm writing this, but we're still on Friday's side.

Me and the creative director, Tuukka Kuusisto, talked about doing a series of blog posts showcasing the games that've inspired us to create Kalaban. We thought this would give the readers a great insight into our minds, and also into gaming history.

The first game on our list is System Shock (1994). The reason I picked this one up first, was that I just recently finished the whole game for the first time in my life. And it's been one of my favorite games for almost ten years! It's amazing that I've never gotten into beating the game, although I've had such an admiration for it.

 Test screenshot of a more shooter-like UI for Kalaban.

The game was developed by the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios, which is famous for its groundbreaking and immersive story simulator games. They were so much ahead of their time with so many concepts, that I could talk about it for hours. But our subject of the night is this one game in particular.

System Shock begins with a relatively simple premise. You're a hacker, who's on a space station. You've been given military-grade neural implants in change of removing the ethical restraints of a powerful artificial intelligence. All has gone to hell on the as you wake up after the surgery, and pretty much everybody on the station has been turned into bloodthirsty mutants or cyborgs. Now it's your task to foil the AI's plans and make it out of this station alive.

The thing that you're immediately greeted with is the UI. The detailed user interface and the sheer amount of data on display may overwhelm you at first. Well, actually, most likely it will. I did my playthrough on the excellent Enhanced edition of the game, done by Nightdive Studios. It adds a mouselook to the game, which helps the experience immensely.

Our vision of Kalaban, mixed with the feel of System Shock.

Of course, with Kalaban we wanted the UI to feel as intuitive as possible, but also to have enough depth that it doesn't feel to arcade-like. Initially, we had the idea that you could touch everything and move every object around. There are a lot of "useless" items in System Shock, like paper tissues, soda cans and skulls. They have absolutely no value from the point of the gameplay, but add flavor and atmosphere to the game world. This is something that is still lacking from our game, which we want to fix.

The cyberpunk feeling and presence of technology is heavily felt with every step in the world of System Shock. As the developers have said, the game is closer to Star Trek than it is to Star Wars. The experience feels very nerdy and techy, from the UI to the way the people speak in the audio logs. The theme is consistent and the solid, which makes this design decision work. Although the UI and controls in Shock are complicated, the core gameplay loop doesn't change once you've gotten into the game.

The most direct correlation with System Shock and Kalaban is the way we want to handle the story. In Shock there are no alive humans on board Citadel Station, but in Kalaban's small town there are. What is similar though, is that you have to piece the story together from smaller bits in our game. At first, you are given almost no information about yourself or the world. Just the basic premise, but without heavy exposition or lengthy cinematics.

At first we wanted to follow the steps of Shock and do the game without any NPCs. This would have lead us to having things like journals, c-tapes or video cassettes which you could browse though. The audio logs already feel a bit cumbersome in Shock, so we didn't want to go in this direction. In System Shock 2 the audio logs are made easier to handle, when you can just push a button and the game will automatically play the newest log that you have.

The flashlight now has a visible charge on the hud.

One of the things in System Shock, which is still current today, is its story and the impressive simulations it handles. The story simulator games includes various different systems, like physics and AI, which may not be that complicated in themselves, but as they all work together it amounts to some really unique and memorable gameplay moments. The AI behavior in Shock inspired us to create the system where the werewolf monsters seek for food, if they're not busy trying to claw you to death.

And speaking of death, there's the combat. Amazingly enough, the fighting in System Shock never loses its tension and terrifying nature, not even at the game's finale. It's a survival horror game, and this is reflected on the resource management and scarcity of ammunition on the space station. Although the combat is real-time, it always feels tactical, because of your clumsy weapons handling and reloading. You try to carefully edge around to corner to have a peek at a robot. It sees you however, and now it starts to tear you to shreds with its machine gun. Hopefully you activated the respawning station, otherwise you're greeted with the familiar death cinematic and are thrown back to the main menu.

The familiar pub scene in our upcoming shooter-like demo for the game.

The sheer horror of facing against a horde of Autobombs in a tight corridor is one of the highlights in System Shock. I thought of our very own Blow-up mutants as I played through that bit. I feel that games should throw you in uncomfortable places, which are not fair at all. But once you get to know the rules of this world you can exploit them. If you're just advancing through one corridor after another, with tougher and tougher enemies, it's just not the same as exploring this hostile, alien world, where you start to feel like home, despite all of its horrors.

All in all, System Shock is a hugely atmospheric and tense experience, which is something that I especially want to replicate. Making games is a bit like film making: if your story loses its tension, it also loses the player's attention.