Why Is Project Bobtail?

Loving games as an art form is a relatively new phenomenon, and still has a lot of growing to do. We're still figuring out how to tweak certain features to provide the optimal experience to players, or even provide a completely new experience. No artist, be it painter, writer, or game developer, creates their art in a vacuum. Some of the most iconic art was made as a response to something that the creator didn't like about the status quo.

When I first came up with the idea for Project Bobtail, it was just a nagging craving for a game that I could just sit back and play in bed. I reminisced about the nights that I used to sit in bed with my gameboy advance and play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. So, my brain wandered, imagining how many ways I could make a new version of that game. As I went back and played the game, I noticed a lot of things that just felt clunky after so much time. That's when I changed my approach. How could I give people an experience that was new and exciting, but would carry forward the elements that I enjoyed so much?

What I found is that I really liked the combat and how well themed it was. Every time I won a fight without getting hit, or executed a cool synergy with abilities, it always felt so good. But there was more to it than that. I could just pick the game up after not playing it for years, and just play. Not only were the controls intuitive, but all of the information you needed was right at your fingertips without sifting through menus.

Though the games were incredible at the time, some of the mechanics in these older tactics games didn’t age particularly well. They also conflicted with the experience I had in mind. Since I am most familiar with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and its sequel, they will be the point of reference for this post.

A lot of the critique I have for tactics games comes down to how the RPG elements are handled, but some of these decisions do affect other areas. The depth of the Final Fantasy Tactics series (I’ll call it FFT from now on) comes from the job system, which gives you access to different abilities based on the job you use. This is good, because it limits the abilities for the sake of balance, but it has a huge drawback in the way they implemented it.

As a unit levels up, their stats increase based on the job they had at the time and that isn’t communicated to the player. These stat changes would be great if job progression were more linear, and the player was locked into a choice early on. The first problem is that the player can change to any job they have unlocked for that unit outside of combat, punishing the player for trying new things by giving them less optimal stats. The second issue piles onto the first, because certain jobs require abilities from other jobs to be unlocked.

I am not the first person to try and correct this issue though. Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark (FS:AM) was very reminiscent of the older tactics games, but made some improvements to solve the problems that the FFT series had. FS:AM addressed the issue of suboptimal stats by allowing the player to reset units to level one without losing any abilities. This mechanic solves the issue of stats being irreversibly changed by experimentation, but it makes for way more grinding levels, and certain units falling behind.

Units falling behind wasn’t only an issue for FS:AM, FFT also had that problem. There are a couple issues with this that neither game addresses, and one where FS:AM came up with a good solution. In both series, experience is gained by using abilities on targets. This creates an issue where if a unit is knocked out, they immediately start falling behind if you can’t resurrect them, and once they are behind they start to get weaker, pushing them further behind.

Another mechanic that ended up making both of these things worse is having the maximum unit count per battle change. Once a player sees that one of their units is falling behind, and they can select fewer units than normal, the weaker units aren’t going to be selected as often.

FS:AM did make a really good change to the format to fix this issue though. Instead of having the encounters scale off of the main character’s level (like FFT), they had different sections of the map have different level ranges. This does allow the player to get lower level units up to the level that they should be, but it’s at the cost of more time spent grinding.

Speaking of grinding units to catch up, the experience system in both of these games had a faster way to get characters to catch up, but that method felt cheesy and unrewarding. You could take your high level units, and put them in the same encounter as a lower level unit, then have your lower level unit gain experience very quickly by attacking their own party. This mechanic really broke immersion in the games, and led to a worse experience.

The mechanics in these games do have an impact on the narrative, but I wouldn’t consider the narrative a strong proponent of what makes these games good. These issues with the format are addressed a bit in other games like Fire Emblem, where each unit is their own character, and if a unit dies, that character is gone forever. In both FFT and FS:AM, there are a few main characters that get special treatment, but the rest are just generic units. Instead of making each battle tense because you don’t want a character to die, the battles have lower stakes. It can start to feel like the main characters and their cannon fodder are going into battle.

As I thought more about these issues I began to realize that the leveling and stat systems both caused issues that were more difficult to mitigate than it seemed. So I started looking at it from a different angle. What style of a stats system would work for a game with grid based combat?

The solution came to me in a way that you wouldn’t quite expect. I was playing Factorio with a friend and listening to video essays on YouTube, when an H. Bomberguy video about Fallout and Fallout 2 started playing. I listened to the video and reminisced about how much I enjoyed those games, but didn’t think anything of it. The next day it hit me: I could use a GURPs like system to calculate stats, just like the isometric fallout games.

The system also fit my initial plan of having a tactics game where combat could happen anywhere, so I started thinking about what I would integrate from that. In the H. Bomberguy video, he brought up why he thought Fallout was an amazing game, and a lot of it stuck with me. Fallout still manages to hold up today, after almost 25 years, because of how it immersed you in a world, rather than just got you to follow a story quest. NPC’s had clear motivations of their own, and felt like real people acting in the world, rather than just set dressing. Your actions had a feeling of consequence, because you had to evaluate whether what an NPC is doing is good or evil instead of a blue prompt flashing for good and red for evil. Your character would also get different dialogue skills based on their stats that could get you some valuable information you couldn’t get otherwise. And information was very valuable in Fallout, because you didn’t have quest markers to guide you around. People would just tell you details that they knew, and you had to play detective to find your goal.

Not only did my revelation inform how I wanted to handle what happens outside of combat, it gave me a starting point to create a new system that used both tactics and RPG style gameplay.

First, I decided that I would have a party of main characters that the player would control throughout the adventure. Since the party would almost always be together, it would make it much harder for a character to fall behind. This approach would give the characters more individual personality above their class. Imagine, instead of making a healing unit, making a bodybuilding plague doctor with severe myopia! A character’s stats should influence the choices of class a player would make more than the choice of class influencing the character.

I also decided to keep a class system, but it would only influence what abilities you could have. This would allow the player to have more freedom to choose not only their playstyle, but what they feel the characters would do as they went through their journey.

“But what if the player made a mistake and chose the wrong ability?” I thought of this, and plan to add ability modules later in the game that can store all of the abilities a character has learned and allow them to swap them out with other modules that they create. Obviously this would be later in the game and would cost a fair amount, but it would allow the player to try new things that they couldn’t in other similar games.

To put this all in context, I wanted to show the thought process that I went through while designing all of these systems, and how I was responding to my own criticisms of other games. My criticisms made me realize that there is a gap in the market where I could make something that gave a tactics game a new look and feel. This process has really helped me get perspective on how difficult designing more than a simple gameplay loop is. There are so many factors that you have to account for, and sometimes you just don’t have the resources to account for them all. And who knows, at the end of the day, the mechanics that I view as clunky and frustrating might have been technical limitations or part of the vision that the developers had for their game's experience.

I’m going to try and update this blog whenever I find something that I want to say about my development process that I didn’t know and find important.

See you all in the next post!

Zac