HINDSIGHT 20/20 - WRATH OF THE RAAKSHASA developer interview
BOLDED - Melody Werner, of Noteworthy Video Games
ITALICIZED - Hemanshu Chhabra, of Triple-I Games
1. What would you say is Hindsight's greatest hook?
Hindsight 20/20 - Wrath of the Raakshasa is an action RPG with morality decisions. This game lets you fix your mistakes from past playthroughs and relive your journey for vastly different gameplay and story experiences. Each new playthrough of the game provides handcrafted experiences and endings that are personalized and unique to your choices and your actions.
For example, you belong to a town that values peace and harmony; will you break the rules of this town and be ruthless in your actions for a potentially better cause, or will you respect the values of your town, no matter what? The sheriff of this town secretly killed your father. Will you murder him and violate the ethos of your people? Or will you spare his life and allow him to grow more powerful?
Questions with moral dilemmas like these are what this game presents to you. The decisions you make have real and meaningful consequences that allow you to discover the power of your own morality.
2. What are some of the biggest inspirations for Hindsight in terms of gameplay?
There is no single game in particular that is an inspiration for Hindsight 20/20. We’ve grown up on Zelda games such as Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask and the Devil May Cry series. Our team has a lot of experience with choice-based games: we are ex-Bioware and Sucker Punch veterans who have worked on some big, AAA, choice-based games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and inFAMOUS. We are making a game in which the treatment of your choices and actions and how it affects your gameplay, journey, story and endings is different. So while you may see some inspirations from these games and others, our goal has always been to make the game we believe in; one that serves our mission statement which is to create emotionally engaging interactive games that have an important philosophy. The same concept applies to our combat and other gameplay elements. We didn’t copy any other games. Instead, we’ve created something of our own that might have organic inspirations from these games we played while growing up.
3. And what are some of the biggest inspirations for Hindsight when it comes to the aesthetic?
Our team at Triple-I Games is passionate about stylized art. Hindsight 20/20 has a watercolor art style that aims to be both accessible and tragic at the same time. This is a tall order, as it is very easy for the game to feel “cartoony.” But we’ve worked hard on choosing the right color combinations so that the experience is always grounded in seriousness. Achieving a delicate balance between being inviting and serious/tragic at the same time has been one of our biggest challenges for the aesthetics of this game.
Speaking of stylized art, one of our favorite games that utilized a radically different art style in 3D is The Legend of Zelda - The Windwaker. We have taken some inspiration from that, especially when it comes to character design. Our artist, Paul Whitehead, has worked at Sucker Punch studios on the Sly Cooper series. He’s worked hard with the team to give this game a unique look that is both inviting and serious at the same time. Our goal is to engage players in meaningful ways, while ensuring they have fun!
4. Why did you choose the engine y'all did for Hindsight?
We’ve used Unity for rendering in Hindsight 20/20. We also built a gameplay middleware engine called the “Experience Engine” above Unity. We built this engine for multiple reasons, but our primary purpose was to serve the core pillar of Hindsight 20/20, which is player choice.
Hindsight 20/20 ‘s gameplay loop ensures that your choices and more importantly, the consequences of those choices matter, more than they do in most games. The choices and actions made by players can lead to butterfly effects in the story that the player may not have anticipated. This provides motivation for playing the game again and making different choices. Also, the choices presented to the player have nuances. There are many instances where there are no “right” or “wrong” choices. These nuances are what make the experiences more engaging, thought provoking, and meaningful.
A common complaint about games that advertise themselves as choice-based experiences is that the choices they offer to players really don’t seem to matter. There are several reasons for these complaints, and the fact that these complaints are rarely addressed is not a coincidence. One major reason players feel their choices don’t matter in most of those games is that the scope of their choices is extremely limited. If choices are limited in just one domain or system (such as conversation dialogues), it often makes players feel that they didn’t actually affect anything else but that one tiny area.
Another reason this is an issue is that the ending is pretty much the same, or when there are multiple endings, they are far too similar and predictable. One more reason is that often the choices are binary (AKA, black and white) in those games. If you know ahead of time that choosing a certain dialog or action is good or bad, then that choice loses all meaning. To make things worse, you are often rewarded “good” or “bad” points for the choice you make, leaving no room for doubt whatsoever on the quality of that choice. In Hindsight 20/20, we wish to respect the choices made by the player and we are doing that by not only making your choices matter but also exploring the morality of the player.
There is a reason why all of these problems have not been solved. The execution of multiple experiences that are tied together in such a way that they are meaningful and matter is a difficult problem. The problem lies in creating a ton of powerful content and then carefully connecting the several permutations of choices and consequences together. This is the problem we wanted to solve when creating Hindsight 20/20, and it is why we built the Experience Engine.
You may ask, how did the Experience Engine you built solve all these potential problems?
The biggest reason we built the Experience Engine is that without it, we could not possibly create a game with these many branching paths for both: story and gameplay, especially with a small team of just 4 developers. If we had used a traditional approach of just storing the player choice data in quest variables, we would be extremely limited in what the effects of your choices could branch to. It is precisely why for most choice-based games, one of the most common complaints players have is that their choices rarely matter, and if they matter, their scope is extremely limited. In order to effectively manage the choices and consequences in Hindsight 20/20, we built a gameplay middleware engine that did two things:
1. Allow for management of tons of choices and the permutations of those choices, their branching paths and the consequences they can have to several entities.
2. Record every choice and action made by the player and use that data to find which branching path to present and which consequences to execute on the relevant entities. All of your choices and consequences are carefully observed and recorded by the Experience Engine while you are playing the game. Thanks to this, every entity in Hindsight 20/20 is aware of your choices and actions and reacts to you accordingly. Some examples of these include:
A. NPC's: NPC's are aware of what you have been doing that is relevant to them, and in the larger context of the story as well. They react to your choices and actions in various ways. They can be afraid of you. They might attack you. They might beg you for mercy. They might offer you a truce. Or, they might just treat you unfairly. The choices that NPC's make are dependent on their character, the context of the story, and your choices and actions at that point in time.
B. Story: The story is a living and breathing entity in Hindsight 20/20. It is dynamically adapting itself to the choices and actions of the player. The ability to craft your own story and destiny is what sets Hindsight 20/20 apart from most adventure games.
C. Bosses: Bosses in Hindsight 20/20 have multiple traits to their personality. When you meet a boss, he or she may present only certain aspects of their character to you. The way they interact with you, both in story and gameplay, will be contingent on their own morality and values, the choices made by you, and the context of the story at that time. If players make different choices in the next playthrough, they will be surprised upon discovering things they did not know about those characters. Even in combat, a boss may choose to fight you very differently and apply entirely different strategies than what you had witnessed before. Just like in real-life, you are often surprised when you learn more about someone, even those you are close to. Hindsight 20/20 explores this feeling for many of its major characters.
D. Town: The town of Champaner is malleable in its form and function. It switches between its states depending on the choices and actions of the player and the context of the story at that time. Each state change can cause all of the townsfolk to react very differently to the player as well.
E. Endings: Hindsight 20/20 has a total of ten different endings. Four of these ten endings are very different and have absolutely no overlap. Each ending is carefully crafted so that it connects to all the choices and actions made in that playthrough. Also, there is no “perfect” ending. Just like the choices, there are no “good” or “bad” endings.
For a small indie team like ours with just 4 team members, crafting all of these branches, the permutations of their consequences and their endings was a difficult challenge. However, we feel that this was the only way for us to do full justice to our core pillar, which is player choice.
All the major game-systems in Hindsight 20/20 are able to respond to choices and actions made by the player. This is how the Experience Engine allows us to deliver an experience where player-choice is at the center of everything. We feel this way, we are respecting the choices made by players by letting them discover how they feel about a particular choice, as opposed to the game telling them ahead of time whether that choice is good or bad.
6. So one of the cool details regarding the playable character is the lack of one arm. Does that have any gameplay elements to it?
I am glad you noticed that he is missing an arm as most people don’t notice it at first glance!
This is something I had thought through right from the inception of Jehan’s character development. Jehan does his best to hide his disability and vulnerabilities. Even though he has his challenges, he is a badass warrior who is fully capable of holding his own in both styles of combat. People may perceive him to be weak due to his impediments but they would be making a mistake by underestimating his prowess.
Also, Jehan is self-critical to a fault. People who are hard on themselves and their mistakes will hopefully find him to be very relatable.
From a gameplay standpoint, this means Jehan can only equip one weapon at a time. He can use the sword and cut down his opponents, or use his stun-baton and show mercy by sparing their lives. These are two completely different ways to fight and you can switch between them at any time against any opponent. Some more info on these two fighting styles:
● The two combat fighting styles are called Ruthless and Merciful. Ruthless has Jehan using his sword to kill people or bloodthirsty beasts called Raakshasas. Merciful combat has him fight as a pacifist warrior who respects the lives of others.
● Ruthless combat has Jehan advance his combos in a typical hack-n-slash fashion up to 6 combos. The sixth hit is devastating and when it connects leading to death of a target, Shakti pickups are spawned. Once enough Shakti is collected, Jehan can perform devastating special moves.
● Merciful combat operates differently as the positions of his opponents matter immensely in this unique style of play. Combos are advanced by hitting the next unique target. The enemy hit by the third combo usually loses all of their morale. The sixth combo has Jehan perform a devastating AOE that drains Shakti from his opponents in the form of pickups. Merciful combat requires that you pay attention to the positions of your opponents, and then cycle through them to advance your combos and defeat them. Poking just one opponent doesn’t advance combos at all.
● Merciful combat has a higher learning curve than Ruthless. It’s still accessible, but it is harder to master than Ruthless and requires a little more patience in the beginning. Initially, many players will prefer ruthless combat. However, once they master merciful combat, our test results indicated they could end up preferring merciful combat over ruthless. Not that there is any reason to compare the two, they are just different. :)
● Opponents fight Jehan very differently in both modes.
○ Ruthless combat has opponents more guarded in their stance. Depending on their class, they can spawn grenades from far, perform melee attacks with caution, throw their weapon like a boomerang, throw or shoot projectiles at him etc. That being said, some enemies and bosses may be much more aggressive at Jehan if he is Ruthless in most of his journey.
○ Merciful combat has enemies charging at Jehan as they feel less threatened. They are much more confident in their attacks in general. This allows you to position Jehan in such a way that he can cycle through them while stunning them with his baton. However, several other classes of enemies fight from a distance as well making it harder for Jehan to defeat them.
● Both combat modes have their own progression. Also, both combat modes have their versions of Ranged Attacks, Focus Dash Attacks, and multiple Shakti Specials.
So Jehan's outlook is very "I can giveth, and I can taketh away".
7. What would you say is the most important thing when using this medium [video games] to try and tell a story? Just like when comic nerds have debates about how "writing matters more than art", I know that a lot of gaming enthusiasts will set gameplay against narrative. Personally, I can get along with games that are focused pretty much entirely on either, or games where the two work more in tandem.
I’m with you there. The biggest thing that matters to me is the soul of the game. For some games, that can be the gameplay and for others, it can be the story. The best games in my mind tend to balance the two really well and are designed with player flow in mind right from the beginning.
I do think games that tend to be very story-heavy end up feeling less like video games and more like interactive movies. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy those experiences as some of my favorite choice-based games were made by Telltale games and Quantic Dream. But that being said, I feel like grouping them in a different genre, due to their heavy focus on being more like a movie.
On the other hand, there are plenty of games that have a “paper-thin” storyline, and rely on gameplay being the #1 hook. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that in our minds. Games that force a story are much worse than those that stop pretending to care about the story.
Hindsight 20/20 - Wrath of the Raakshasa is very much a videogame that balances story and gameplay at all times in each journey. The story is important, and the choices you make shape and mold your story on the fly. At the same time, you will be playing an addictive and engaging action-adventure RPG that keeps you on your toes in every part of your journey. When it comes to balancing the two, we’ve ensured that the story serves as a vehicle for the gameplay on many occasions, and on some occasions, we’ve done the inverse as well. We aim to keep players engaged at all times, and we’ve done this in many different ways for each journey.
8. Loads of indie devs strike out on their own from major studios (I would say for good reason), and that can really result in some incredible games (FTL naturally springs to mind). In what ways do you think going independent may have helped make a better game*?
*(not necessarily asking you to slag off any studios you may have worked with or anything.)
One great thing about indie games is that it has allowed for games of all kinds, shapes and sizes to co-exist. We are now seeing videogames get bold and expressive in ways we had never imagined before. And the indie space is inspiring every game designer to start taking more risks and be more inventive.
Celeste is a great example of this. If any developer had pitched a game dealing with mental health issues with a female protagonist 10 years ago to a publisher, they would’ve been scoffed at and been shown the door. Heck, I doubt that the developers of Celeste thought they would’ve gotten as big as they did.
(Butting in to add that is not to mention, no publisher would've accepted a game with a trans lead then.)
Indie games have given developers the freedom to realize their dreams. And the metrics of success have changed. Success for a lot of indie developers now is to be able to realize their dreams and find people who share that dream with them. We wanted to make a game that spoke to our target audience, who are action gamers who want something more from a video game. We’ve made an addictive action RPG that deeply cares about player-choice. At the same time, we’ve tried to do something more, by incorporating a philosophy in this game.
This journey has already been successful for us in many ways. We won Best Action Adventure at DreamHack where we had the pleasure to showcase a demo of Hindsight 20/20 with a lot of players. We then were selected for PAX Rising at PAX East, where once again, we had the pleasure of meeting several gamers and journalists who had a great time with our game. Apart from having the pleasure to craft this game, we’ve also had the honor of meeting some amazing people along the way. And we are so grateful for every person who has been affected by our game already.
We will always cherish those experiences, and we are hopeful our launch will go well on September 9!
9. How long were you interested in going independent before you were able to make it happen?
We were interested in going independent for a while. We had considered doing so when the independent games movement was finding its footing with games such as Braid, Castle Crashers, and Limbo coming out shaking the foundations of how games were published and delivered to players. The biggest issue holding us back at the time was the fact that I wasn’t an American citizen yet. It is very difficult to start a business in the United States when you are on a temporary visa. You have to be very rich and start a big enough business to justify its existence. Those factors required us to be patient. A year after I acquired my permanent residence, we started Triple-I Games to make meaningful games that have a philosophy.
10. In the words of Tkay Maidza, last year was weird, to put it lightly. Ultimately, game delays are a good thing more than not, and obviously understandable as of late, but do you kinda wish you'd been able to get this released in 2020--just for the cheekiness [of having a game titled "Hindsight 20/20" drop in 2020]?
Our initial plans were to release in 2020, but we didn’t do so for multiple reasons! The pandemic did have an effect on our schedule, as like everyone else, we needed time to figure out how to cope with everything that was changing around us. The challenges we faced were like everyone else as our primary goal became that of survival. Thinking about how you are going to ship the game as a team and promote your game when all the systems around you are crumbling was probably one of the most difficult things we’ve faced as game developers.
That being said, there were other reasons that led to the delay as well. We were one of the few developers who were lucky to be granted PS5 and Xbox Series X devkits by Sony and Microsoft respectively. We decided to make the best use of this opportunity and put in a lot of effort to make Hindsight 20/20 run at 4K, 60 FPS on both those consoles. For the PS5, we also worked hard on the DualSense controllers haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. We make use of both of them during cinematics and combat to provide a more immersive experience. We also had mock reviews of our game and received more feedback from players to improve areas that we hadn’t found time for. So all in all, we are grateful for being where we are today. And we can’t wait to deliver Hindsight 20/20 to you and all our fans on September 9, 2021!
On a somewhat related note, thank you for following us from the day we made our first announcement about Hindsight 20/20! Curators like you are the lifeblood of indies, so we want you to know that we are grateful for your recommendation on Steam.
Thanks for the kind words, and I wish y'all a good launch!
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Hindsight 20/20 - Wrath of the Raakshasa is available on Steam and all major consoles for $14.99 USD. Review copy provided by developer.
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