An Interview with Craig Stern

Valenka talks to Craig Stern about Sinister Design's origins, development process, inspirations, multiplayer, and plans for Telepath Tactics and Sinister Design.

Valenka: Tell me about Sinister Design. How did the company start?

Craig: I began Sinister Design in 2007 with the release of my second game. I was partway through law school at the time, and it had become clear to me that I wasn't going to stop making games any time soon--starting a company seemed like the obvious choice.

Valenka: What are the goals of Sinister Design in the long run?

Craig: Long-term, I want to keep creating imaginative, elegantly designed role-playing and strategy games, and perhaps expand from working solo to collaborating with a small team on the regular.

Valenka: Let's talk about Telepath Tactics. How would you describe it to someone who's never heard of it?

Craig: It's a strategy RPG, which is a little like chess crossed with a good fantasy novel. You shepherd a band of unique characters through a story, fighting turn-based battles, managing supplies, and recruiting allies along the way. Mechanics are deterministic, you can shove enemies off cliffs or into water and lava, and death is permanent, with slain characters offering dramatic monologues as they die.

http://i.imgur.com/FLbscay....

Valenka: What was the development process like for Telepath Tactics?

Craig: I'm a solo developer, so I generally have a kind of an ad hoc approach to game development: I'll write up lists of things that I want to see in the game, sketching out characters and scenes and finding fun ways to interweave them. With Telepath Tactics, though, I actually started from scratch with a new engine, so I coded all of the core combat mechanics in and got the character classes differentiated and balanced before moving on to the story stuff.

So imagine all of that work, plus constantly emailing feedback to the composer and the half-dozen artists I'd contracted with to produce the game's pixel art, on top of throwing playtesting parties with friends to catch bugs every couple of months, then spending weeks fixing the bugs. That's pretty much what the development process was.

Valenka: Were there any special inspirations for Telepath Tactics?

Craig: As a matter of fact, there were! I originally conceived of Telepath Tactics after a few (okay, more than a few) hours of playing Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance by myself, alone in my apartment. I wanted to make something in that style, but local multiplayer so I could play with friends.

I can't stand competitive multiplayer games where chance plays a huge role, so I decided that the game would need to be mostly deterministic--and at the same time, that it would need a wide enough variety of mechanics that play would nonetheless remain unpredictable. This led me to snag mechanics from a huge number of strategy RPGs--including Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Eternal Poison--creating a system with all the "greatest hits."

Later, once I decided to create a single player campaign, all the design work I'd performed on local multiplayer would form the basis for single player play as well.

http://i.imgur.com/wu7yscK....

Valenka: Were there any significant challenges you had to overcome, either during development or in general as an indie developer?

Craig: Yes--perhaps the biggest of which were limited time and money. In terms of money, the game's budget was quite small in comparison to the large number of assets I needed to secure in order to pull it off; and in terms of time, developing the game solo while holding down a full-time job was intensely challenging.

Valenka: Can you talk a little about the local multiplayer feature in Telepath Tactics?

Craig: Sure! Telepath Tactics local multiplayer lets you go head-to-head with any combination of friends or computer-controlled opponents, each commanding your own army. It's like the best tactics board game you could imagine, but portable (all you need is a laptop) and fast (the game calculates all damage and effects automatically without you having to study a rulebook or do math).

The rules in local multiplayer are super customizable: you can play team matches, play with alternate win conditions, set different rules for army selection, impose turn time limits so people don't take forever, or even mod in entirely new units and rules.

Valenka: Could you shed some light on Telepath Tactics' game politics?

Craig: Yeah! Telepath Tactics breaks substantial new ground there. Instead of putting you in the shoes of yet another prince and playing through yet another war story, Telepath Tactics focuses on normal, lower class people, with a plot animated by their individual needs and desires. What's more, Telepath Tactics presents a story about women, with a predominantly female cast. The game turns all kinds of gender tropes on their heads, and it features what may be the first lesbian protagonist in a strategy RPG, including an actual romance plot line. (Unlike a certain game, you are not given the option to somehow drug her into becoming interested in men.)

http://i.imgur.com/CMEKuDJ....

Valenka: Do you have any plans to bring Telepath Tactics to consoles or mobile platforms?

Craig: Possibly consoles; mobile is unlikely, though, due to the scale and length of the game's battles. Telepath Tactics is deep and complex; not the sort of thing you play in 5-minute bursts between train stops.

Valenka: What's next for Sinister Design?

Craig: I have a number of exciting projects in the works!  I'm not ready to announce any of them just yet, but if you follow me on Twitter (@SinisterDesign) or Facebook, you're likely to hear about them as soon as they're announced.

Day 13 | Sinister Design