Tahira Interview

Welcome back everyone my next interview is with developer Peter Castle about his new TRPG game called Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire that just launched on Kickstarter.

Couchpotato: Welcome to RPGWatch can you introduce yourself?

Peter Castle: Hello! My name’s Peter Castle, I’m the writer and producer at Whale Hammer Games. We’re a three person indie developer working on our first game, Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire. I tend to introduce myself to people as a writer, but I’ve studied 3D animation and visual effects as well. I’ve been an avid gamer since I was a wee lad. I grew up playing PC games and Gameboy games, particularly RTS, RPG and turn-based tactics games. I also spent an altogether embarrassing amount of time reading fantasy and sci-fi novels.  Some favourites of mine include Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, Raymond E Feist’s Serpent War Saga and Paul Kearney’s The Monarchies of God. When I’m not working on a project I love to travel.

Couchpotato: How was Whale Hammer Games founded?

Peter Castle: I’d just returned to Australia after five months in Nepal and India in mid-2013 and got in touch with an old school friend Tom, who had just finished his software development degree. We’d always thought about making a game together. I also got in touch with Pete, a friend I’d made while we both studied animation. I pitched them the idea for Tahira, which at that point was a turn-based tactics game about a princess who returns to her kingdom to find it ravaged by a huge army. They liked it and that was it! We set up the business and have been working on it for the past year and a half.

Couchpotato:  What are your thoughts on the state of the gaming industry, and RPG?

Peter Castle: That’s an interesting one.

It blows my mind a bit to think about how many game developers there are now. The barrier to entry has become so low that we have hundreds of thousands of people creating games, many of which are an expression of their beliefs and emotions and I think that’s a really cool thing. The more avenues people have to express themselves and to connect with other people the better, as far as I’m concerned.

That said I do get a little bit sad when I see what’s happened to mobile gaming. The fact that Premium games have mostly gone by the wayside is bad. I find it a bit sickening that many mobile games are designed using analytics to track playing retention and other metrics now. It’s not what I like about the medium, but that’s the market I guess. I hope we’ll see a movement away from that in the next few years as people playing those games get bored and start looking for something more interesting.

Generally though, I don’t think there has been a better time to be a gamer and that applies to RPG lovers as well. I know when it comes to RPGs people like different things about them, but when I look around at what’s available now it seems like there are games that cater to most people. We have games like Project Eternity and Torment coming out, Bioware is still here, there’s Divinity Original Sin, Shadowrun, Telltale’s games and so many more. I just wish I had more time to play them all.
4. So as both a gamer and developer what are your favorite games you play in your spare time?

I play all sorts really. I love games that tell me a good story, grand strategy games and games that I can play with friends. I don’t have much of this fabled spare time you speak of at the moment, but when I do I’ve been enjoying some Hearthstone. I have Europa Universalis sitting on my Steam account waiting patiently for me to get a weekend to myself. The other game I picked up recently that I’m really looking forward to playing is Shadowrun: Dragonfall. I’ve also been thinking about playing This War of Mine.

Couchpotato:  Can you give a brief summary of Tahira: Echoes of the Astral?

Peter Castle: Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire is an episodic turn-based tactics RPG set on what was once a partially terraformed outpost world. After the collapse of space faring civilisation the descendants of the long-dead colony have been left to eke out an existence on a planet that is growing ever more inhospitable.

You are Princess Tahira of Avestan, a small kingdom to the west of humanity’s last great city, Babylon. The death of your brother has left you as the sole, unwilling heir to the Throne. After your anxiety over this burden sparked an argument with your father, you left Avestan to explore the lands that lie to the south.

A year later, a message arrives warning of a vast army intent on returning to the stars, crushing all who stand in its way, and begging you to return home.
In Tahira the story and combat are intrinsically tied together. Every battle you fight has different objectives, which are informed by the story. In one, you fight desperately to hold a town long enough for its citizens to flee. In another you ambush an enemy squadron, trying to rout them before they can make use of their superior numbers.

When you’re not fighting you’ll have the chance to walk around your surrounds, engage with your travelling companions, and learn more about the different cultures you’ll encounter as you travel on the road.

Couchpotato:  What inspired you guys you to make a game in this unique setting?

Peter Castle: As I mentioned earlier, I love to travel. I’ve spent time travelling across the Middle East (Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel) and more recently in Nepal and India. Both of those trips left a big impression on me and I wanted to take those experiences and use them to create something. Each of those countries has a really rich history, with historical artefacts and architecture littered all over the place. Sadly there is also rampant poverty and social unrest. The result is that some of the kindest and most generous people I’ve ever met have been caught up in a vicious civil war and condemned for just being born in the wrong place. We wanted our setting and story to deal honestly with those realities of life.

Couchpotato: Your lead character is called Tahira so who is she, and what is her in the story?

Peter Castle: As mentioned earlier, she’s the Princess of Avestan.  You play the game from her perspective, making some dialogue choices for her and controlling her as you walk around scenes. As you play, you’ll watch and help her grow from someone who is racked by anxiety at the idea being ruler, into the leader her people need. Tahira’s mental health has no bearing on the combat during fights, but it will influence the story. She’s also one of only a few Conduits. These are people who can use the technology left over from the Astral Empire. In Tahira’s case, she uses a staff, which has been handed down in her family for generations. Using the staff can have dire ramifications for her mental state and the story will explore the stress she’s feeling from the dual challenges of leading and using it as a weapon.

Couchpotato: You mentioned onour forums that each episode of Tahira: Echoes of the Astral will onlt be 4-5 hrs long as you want to focus on story. Can you elaborate on this?

Peter Castle: We want all the elements in Tahira, be they combat, conversation or upgrading your forces, to feel like a cohesive experience. In a lot of turn-based tactics games, there is a big disconnect between the battles you’re fighting and what’s happening in the story. They feel like two separate games, which only barely connect to each other. In Tahira that’s not the case. Each of our combat scenarios is unique and is defined by what’s happening in the story.
An example of the flow we are designing

(Minor Spoilers)

You’re travelling down the road, towards the burning city of Avestan (these scenes will have you travelling across a world map), so you can protect any civilians who are trying to escape. You encounter a drunken merchant with a broken wagon. You can help him or leave him. If you help him you risk causing the deaths of others because you weren’t there to protect them. You make your decision and then continue traveling down the road. The next scene you arrive in has some civilians hiding around the environment, with knights protecting them. An enemy captain is urging his men to hunt down any stragglers. Combat begins here and you have to race against the enemy to rescue the civilians first. Periodically after a certain number of turns are taken, more enemies will appear, as they have captured Avestan and are now moving onwards. Once you’ve rescued the civilians you need to kill the captain to break the enemy’s morale, which will allow you to make your escape. Then you’ll continue travelling until you reach the next scene, which has another combat scenario which will be completely different to the one you just fought.

We think designing the game like this makes for a much better story. But it’s much more time intensive to create and there are only three of us. That’s why we’ve scoped the first episode to be 4-5 hours, so we can execute this style of game without biting off more than we can chew.

Couchpotato: Could you share more details on the combat as it sounds interesting?

Peter Castle: We're still experimenting with the system, but the basic idea is to put rules in place that add realism to the combat. You can’t run past an enemy without giving them a chance to strike a blow. Each attack suffered by a unit reduces its defence, meaning that your force becomes exponentially more vulnerable as the battle wears on. Lots of little things like that.

We also have an upgrade system that takes a page from XCOM and Starcraft 2’s book. Rather than picking little stat boosts, we’re designing it so you have clear cut choices, which will change the way you fight. For instance, you might choose between making one of Tahira’s energy attacks do line of effect damage or having knockback. We’re also playing with passive abilities. Right now, The Claw, a master swordsman with a bit of a complex, has a passive ability called ‘Fragile Ego’. Each time he takes damage he loses willpower, which is what you use to jump the turn queue and to use your special abilities. But every time he kills a unit he gains willpower. We have lots of testing to do and we’re in the early stages of iterating on the skills, but that is kind of direction we would like to go in.

One of the coolest things we're playing with is having multiple combat grids in some of the biggest fights. Say you're defending a fort, you have combat grids on two sections of wall and at the gate. Each of those grids has its own turn queue, but all of those turn queues are synced to the game's internal time (so you can never get too far ahead in one section). You can reinforce units between the different grids, but it takes some time. The thing we're looking at now is how to manage how many turns you can take in one combat grid before you're forced to move over to another one. It really lets us increase the scale of the fights and makes you plan ahead a bit more than you'd have to otherwise.

Couchpotato:  Congratulations on launching your kickstarter this week, and I was wondering if $68,000 will be enough to make the first episode?

Peter Castle: Thank you! The answer is yes, absolutely.

As we’re fond of saying in the office, we did the math. When we came up with the $68,000 number, we budgeted our living costs for the next year, the costs of our sound designer and composer and then took out the cut that Kickstarter takes and all of our shipping costs. It actually gives us enough funding to delay the game by three months if we feel that we need to polish it more.                                  

Couchpotato:. Do you have an ETA for the next episodes of the game?

Peter Castle: We're tentatively aiming to release one episode a year after we release the first one. With all of the systems built and a core group of characters already animated, it will be a lot easier to build new episodes. With each episode the plan is to iterate on the mechanics, taking into account feedback, and we want to add three to four combat characters each episode. Characters are the biggest time sink as it takes about two months to go from a concept to having a character fully animated and in the game. Ultimately though, it will come down to how long it takes to get the story telling and combat scenarios to a quality bar we're happy with.

Couchpotato:  Thank you for answering my questions Peter Castle, and I hope your game gets funded. Do you have anything to add?

Peter Castle: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me! I really appreciate it.

Honestly, just that the three of us have been pouring everything we have into Tahira for the last 20 months and we’ll continue to do so up until release and beyond. If what I’ve described doesn’t sound like your kind of game, I totally understand! But if it does, I can tell you that we’re going to make the best game we’re capable of making.  Thanks again!

You can vist the games webpage with the following link.

Link - http://www.tahiragame.com/

And help fund the game on Kickstarter if you liked my interview.

Link - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/whalehammergames/tahira-echoes-of-the-astral-empire-turn-based-tact