Clandestine Gamescom Presentation

At Gamescom I talked to Alex Mintsioulis from Logic Artists about Expeditions: Conquistador, their new game Clandestine and a yet unannounced game they are working on.

Logic Artists has been established in 2011 by three founders and now, three years later there are 12 full-time developers and three freelance workers. Things are going very well for them at this point in time And the sales of their first game, Expeditions:Conquistador, helped in achieving that success.

Talking about Expeditions: Conquistador, Alex mentioned that some people were super aggressive towards them for using the setting of Expeditions:Conquistador even though these people did not play the game. Those who did play it, saw that the game had freedom of behavior allowing you to be good, bad or something in between. The idea that they were trying to show in Expeditions: Conquistador is that people are people. No one is really evil or really good. People behave in ways that benefit themselves and sometimes behave in ways that are benevolent and kind. The conquistadors did some really nasty things in the past, but probably felt their intentions were in the right place. They just came from the wrong time, a time in which such a behavior was acceptable. The ignorance of a culture lends to behaviors when we meet new cultures, which influences history often in a negative way.
When playing an RPG with a semi-historical background, that has to be prevalent in the experience, otherwise you don't really feel free.

Alex explained they thought about this before releasing the game to the public and that it might stir up a bit of controversy, but he was surprised as he thought that people who were so critical would also have played the game, which turned out to be incorrect. People who did play the game found out that when they did something bad it was really dragged out how bad it was. The moral implications of your behavior are fleshed out for you, giving feedback on how awful things become when you take that path.

What they found out was that people who played the game started to change history and do good, to do it different and not like the way it was done in the past as it made them feel too dirty. People who didn't play it, never had that experience.

Clandestine is a different beast. It is not even a RPG, it is an action-stealth game, a spy thriller set in the nineties. It has two playing modes, a single player and a two player asymmetrical co-op mode, in which the first player will play as a female spy in the traditional third person view of an action stealth game. She can move and take cover, climb over obstacles, and use weapons and gadgets. The second player will play in a 2D interface as a male hacker who is supporting the spy player. Alex mentioned movies, such as Sneakers and Mission: Impossible as references. I personally would compare it to the actions in the TV-show Nikita, with the nerd Birkhoff, but as this game is set in the late nineties it would probably be the older show, La Femme Nikita, without the organization.

As Alex explains they want the players to have the experience of being the spy and having a supportive actor, the communication between them, the comradery and the negotiation of actions. As the spy you always have someone in your earpiece consulting and helping you in achieving the goals. The hacker communicates the information about the level to the spy, like a map, where the enemies are and how many, pick an electronic lock for you and if needed get someone on the inside to drop something for you, like a med-kit or explosives.

With Clandestine they want to go back to the roots of the Stealth system, where the core element of the gameplay is to not be found and to take enemies by surprise quickly and quietly and they also want the players to experience the different interfaces and playing styles of the spy and the hacker.

When you play alone there are two options. The first is that the player plays as the spy and is able to swap to the hacker view, essentially being both characters. The second option is that you play as the spy and you have a request menu where you can target objects or items interactively and choose what you want to be done with it and the AI will expedite the actions of the hacker for you. There will be no hacker only game, so you will always be playing as a spy.

So why this game and not a successor to Expeditions: Conquistador, I asked. Alex responded that in their core, Logic Artists are turn-based RPG lovers, but they are also an indie game developer and as such can follow various passions and have much more freedom to create games to cater to these passions, but they will return to making turn-based RPGs again. For now they wanted to try something different and the beauty of them working on Clandestine is that they learned a lot on different levels of game development that will find its way back with their next turn-based RPG. They feel that when they would have continued with a successor to Expeditions: Conquistador they would still have some blinders. In this way, by taking some time to start on their next RPG, they feel their perspective will improve and result in a better game. Besides that they just wanted to make a game like Clandestine.

During development they also thought about having male and female characters for both the spy and hacker, but given the size of their team and the required increase of development time, they decided to go with what they have now.

The number of different types of weapons in the game are limited. The spy only has access to small weapons as those fit a stealth type of game. They have focused on a variety of pistols with an occasional grenade, which you can use when you are in trouble to create chaos allowing you to escape or to just finish off the last people that are still standing.

The guns can use lethal and non-lethal ammunition. These types of ammunition can also both be used at the same time. You could have a gun with non-lethal ammunition, chamber it, so it has a single non-lethal bullet in the chamber and replace the clip with lethal ammunition. In that way you can first try to use the non-lethal ammunition to take a person out and if that doesn't work your gun is immediately ready to kill that person.

The hacker has a series of different windows in 2D that do different things, such as a network view that shows the virtual world of the network you are accessing. You can gain control of a node in this network that allows you to have access to other nodes in the neighborhood. There is a camera feed that shows the feed of security cameras or the camera view of the spy (who is carrying one). Then there is a tactical map on which the hacker can mark enemies for the spy to see on her HUD and it also shows things such as locations of cameras and security doors.
There is a console that shows the log of the game, which provides details of the various actions performed by the hacker. And there are a bunch of applications the hacker can use with the option to buy new applications while playing the game with the funding received of completed missions, or upgrade existing applications. That same money can also be used to upgrade the weapons of the spy or for local assets. With the local asset menu the hacker can manipulate things by having the local asset bribe guards in the area, which is quite expensive though. The local asset also controls dead drops for ammunition and health kits. The spy can signal the need for either of them and the hacker will contact his local asset who will arrange for a package to be dropped that the spy can pick up, which obviously will also cost money.

They are planning to release it on PC, either at the end of the year or Q1 next year.

You can check out the next video which contains the currently available footage of the game.

In the intro I've mentioned that there is also a future game planned. A game they showed me some things about, but asked me not to tell. So I'll just leave you with that...