How Television Changed The X-Tactics Developer’s Approach To Game Development

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Gamkin, the studio working on X-Tactics, consists of employees that have previously worked at Capcom, Square Enix and Sega. In part 2 of our interview with the game’s director, Robert Gould, we asked how the studio was formed and what else they get up to, outside of videogame development.

 

In case you missed part 1 of our interview, which is more about the game and how it draws inspiration from Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyria Chronicles, you can find it here.

 

Gamkin consists of employees that used to work with Capcom, Sega and Square Enix. How—and why—was the company formed?

 

Robert Gould, X-Tactics director: Many of our members have friendships that go back quite far, and extended outside of our respective companies. So getting together to start a company is actually something that many of us had been talking about for years. So it was mostly a matter of timing. We finally bit-the-bullet and founded Gamkin at the end of 2013 during the Tokyo Game Show, as a way to commemorate.

 

Of course the current industry’s situation that is currently dominated by expensive sequels and tricky micro-transaction schemes, played a part in our timing. But it was in greater part because after many years in the industry we felt we had accumulated lots of know-how, and that the it was time to experiment with new ideas and take certain freedoms and risks that we couldn’t responsibly take at larger companies.

 

So we decided to dedicate our selves to creating new forms of entertainment by combining our experience with other media. Right now besides games we’re working with interactive children television and game developer education. And we’re also doing research in Augmented Reality, alas Google Glass, other wearables, as well as fiddling with robotics, and generally trying to having fun looking for new ideas.

 

That is why even for games we have an internal goal to go beyond just making a game, and it’s the reason why for X-Tactics we wanted to experiment with new mechanics, and incorporate real-world data sources in an original real world like setting.

 

 

Aside from building games, you also work on interactive television in Japan. Does this influence the way you go about developing your games at all, or are the two completely segregated?

 

What we call Interactive television is something that is still in infancy, and there are very few examples, but we see it as very promising form of entertainment. Now we’re working on children television. It is something like a live digital puppet show, on TV.

 

The kids follow the plot and use their remote controls to fulfil collective goals—say collect 10,000 apples. Their input is then processed by the digital TV infrastructure, and based on the results, the show reacts in real time. When I say puppet show it is because there are actual humans behind the whole thing reacting to the situations appropriately, so it makes the whole experience something like being at a kids festival.

 

Development-wise they are mostly separate lines as the tech is quite unique, but we’re looking into ways to translate this to games and more partners to further merging games with television.

 

Nevertheless, it has had a large effect on us as game developers. Many of us watch anime and dramas, and this has influenced us, but working behind the scenes made us realize that TV is a very special format, where people invest 30min to an hour watching a program they like and then wait a week for the next chapter, but during the week there is this meta-entertainment, where people think about what happened and then talk about their theories of what will happen next with their friends. Trying to create this meta-entertainment, and is what actually sparked our interest in episodic content.

 

Now in the games market today, there are tons of games out there. And most are fighting to keep players attention for as long as they can. Some by providing endless gameplay in the form of grinding, or increasing replay-value by having players playing the same content over and over again with minor changes and different endings. Others go with a more interesting sports-based spin on multiplayer. And others with the method of gating how much you can play and monetizing based on play time—something we don’t really consider that totally different from arcades in a positive sense, but that can easily be abused and break gameplay.

 

But all these methods share one thing in common: they depend on the players constantly playing. And eventually cause play-fatigue.

 

Constant episodic on a weekly basis on the other hand is something that is engrained in our society, TV programs, manga and comics, all follow this weekly schedule for the most part. This pace seems to have reached a sweet spot that is not exhausting, and neither does it leave long blanks in-between where people forget about what was going on.

 

So, we’re trying to work out how a content schedule for X-Tactics, by having new episodic content every week, so we can keep our players interested and returning back for more, without having to design our games around endless grinding just to keep players from enjoying other games in-between, in fear of losing players. After all, most of us read many different comics and view many different TV shows every week, so we think there is no intrinsic need to try to waste player’s attention and time in treadmills, if you can provide the same sort of meta-entertainment that other weekly media does.

 

Something else Gamkin is involved in is collaborating with Japanese schools and text publishers to help educate people about game development. What does this involve?

 

Our company’s initial members are all in our 30s or early 40s, many with children. So we have a sort of inherent interest in education as a company, as it affects us first hand. So we try to keep in contact with schools and are looking for ways to do what we can. And more directly some of our members give regular game developer lectures at vocational schools here.

 

Also on a more philosophical level, Gamkin’s motto so to speak, in Japanese is “語作遊学” (Go-Saku-Yuu-Gaku), and it roughly translates to “Talking together, Creating Together, Playing Together and Learning Together”. We try to apply this both internally and externally, as we don’t really think its possible to come up with perfect ideas or solutions, but by following the “Go-Saku-Yuu-Gaku” motto it is possible to iterate and learn, making ideas and works better by combining minds.

 

So following that line of thought, it is important for us to maintain meaningful communication with younger generations, so we can better understand their needs and interests, after all the teens and tweens now a days live very different lives, in a very different world than we did when we were their age. It is simply not something you can just extrapolate, or you risk falling into the “when I was your age we played with joysticks” trap. Thus working with schools helps us understand things and trends we would likely miss if we just locked ourselves up into ivory game-development towers.

 

As you mentioned we’re also working on game development books, and hopefully this will become a series of books, that are targeted at teens, and other people with very little knowledge and resources. There are plenty of game-development books out there for developers, and for people that already have some knowledge like Indies, university students, or people that work in related fields like Design or Software development. But there is a hole for people with the interest and will, but no experience, and not knowing how to get started, normally teens.

 

The format we adopted is that in one book, the reader will create one actual game, from beginning to end, not several tech demos, or a series of flappy bird clones. We also try to go into the details behind the design and development of a game, and provide reasoning and the history behind why things are done as they are, and where the readers can look for more information.

 

We hope that by our activities in education we can inspire some more people to pursue game development as a career, or at least as a fulfilling hobby.


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Author
Ishaan Sahdev
Ishaan specializes in game design/sales analysis. He's the former managing editor of Siliconera and wrote the book "The Legend of Zelda - A Complete Development History". He also used to moonlight as a professional manga editor. These days, his day job has nothing to do with games, but the two inform each other nonetheless.