What is Grey?

So, after the announcement, a question that I got asked was (obviously) “What is Grey?”.

Well, in a one-line kind of thing, Grey is a “an episodic RPG/RTS hybrid, set into a fantasy world”.

In Grey you control the titular Grey, a recently awaken dead person that quickly finds out that he is a “Life-Shaper”, a person (or in this case, an undead) that has the capability of creating life from nothing and control it. The player will be able to create different types of creatures, each with their own abilities, strengths and weaknesses and command them in battle.

So, the game is a kind of RPG/RTS hybrid. From the RPG, we took the heavy story-driven structure (albeit in an episodic fashion, but more on this below), the stat-building, leveling, questing and other paraphernalia associated with the genre. From the RTS we take the tactical nature of combat and the fact that we don’t depend only on our character for success, but rely on all the creatures that we create.

Life-Shaper

This is going a bit into the lore of Grey, but in overall terms, in this mythos, all magic depends on Life to be used. Mages, warlocks, wizards, sorceress, etc, all manipulate the life forces around them to do spells. But Grey is an undead, and as such he can’t do “normal” magic… Fortunately for him, he has the power to do something called “Life-Shaping”, which is not exactly magic (or more precisely, it’s something beyond magic, it’s the power of the gods themselves, which also aren’t technically alive…). Life-Shaping gives Grey the ability to use crystal shards, known as “Life-Matrixes” as a template to create living things. In theoretical terms, a powerful enough Life-Shaper (like a god) can also use the same concept to give sentience to the created creature, but Grey is not as powerful and he has to imprint his own will into the creatures he creates, effectively controlling them. The downside is that his will gets continuously sapped by the effort and when he reaches his limit, the creatures tend to go towards the more basic instincts, which usually means they’ll turn against their creator. Managing the creatures and willpower will be a cornerstone of the player’s adventures in the game.

One of the elements of progression in the game is the types of creatures that Grey can create. The player will be able to acquire Life-Matrixes throughout the game, either from the corpses of fallen powerful enemies, questing or by purchasing them from specialized vendors.

Episodic

One of the most difficult decisions so far in the design of this game was the choosing between creating a whole standalone project, or an episodic one. Both of these options have strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately we decided to go the episodic route.

Going standalone would allow us to build a more contained narrative, but it would take more resources than we have at our disposal… We hope that by going episodic and by creating the game content step by step we’ll be able to do four things:

1. Keep the interest in the game alive: loads of high-quality indie games tend to get little visibility, and one of the reasons is that they tend to get buried in the dozens of games released daily. Sometimes, it’s just bad luck that a another good title comes out at the same time, and what could have been a very good game (from a commercial standpoint) gets lost. By going episodic, we hope that we can keep the media attention going throughout the time we’re developing.
2. Keep our investment low: we don’t have loads of available resources for the development. We’re a small “company” and most of us work in our spare time on this. If we can get the ball rolling, and if interest is enough, we may be able to get enough funds and resources to keep developing the game into what we believe it is his full potential.
3. Get feedback from players: this will help us fix gameplay issues, balance the game, and keep our spirits up (hopefully)!
4. Build in a series of episodes a much bigger and impressive game than we would be able to any other way.

Of course, going episodic has also some drawbacks… Episodic games have a somewhat bad rep nowadays, because of the amount of games of this sort that came out and never got beyond episode one. They also don’t get as much media attention on the first installment as a standalone game. Storytelling is also more difficult (getting the player interested in a story that’s only 3 or 4 hours long, instead of the usual 20 or 30), and maintaining quality releases while constrained with a calendar (that you definitely don’t want to fail, since you risk losing player interest).

All of these are tricky subjects to tackle, but we think we made the right decision, at the current state of affairs.

Story

I don’t want to go much into the story, since half the fun in playing this kind of games is unraveling the story.

Grey starts with the player waking up, having been resurrected by a necromancer in a ritual in the graveyard where his body was laid to rest, in the fabled ruined city of Calabeth. The player has no memory about his prior life (as most undead usually don’t, since the trauma of death and resurrection is usually too much for them). He only has one hint on who he is: the crypt where he was belonged to the “Grey” family, a fact pointed out by the first person we meet in the game, an old mage that has mastered the art of Life-Shaping. He teaches us the basics of Life-Shaping, having noticed that we had the potential to wield that kind of power. In exchange he wants him to help him escape the city, a task that will involve destroying (or bypassing) an ancient evil that was responsible for the downfall of the city.

Yes, we’re aware we used the old “amnesia” trick in the storyline (which I admit isn’t terribly original), but that gimmick helps establishing the characters and the game world without overwhelming the player in information (don’t you hate it when games spend so much on the initial exposition that you’re just thinking: “Come on, let me play already!”). In any case, trust me when I say that  the “amnesia” really integrates itself well with the storyline of the game, turning the usual “hack-and-slash, grab the stone” storylines present in so many RPGs into a voyage of self-discovery.

Graphics

This was one of the questions most people asked (after the “What is Grey?”)…

For Grey, we’re using 3d graphics, in a view slightly reminiscent of old isometric RPGs. Although the game is not isometric in nature (you can control the camera freely, etc), it is akin to the camera system used in most RTS games (albeit a bit closer to the action than most, since we’re not controlling so many units at once).

We’re using our own engine, Spellbook, with the new graphics pipeline we’ve created for this, a deferred renderer (for those that like technical jargon)… We’re also developing an editor application that will allow us to produce episodes faster and in a more streamline manner.

I’ll do a post in the future with some more technical information.

So, I hope this was informative! Stay tuned to the blog for more in-depth posts on game design, technical and art issues, besides some more information on the game itself!