There and almost certainly not back again: Adam Saltsman on Overland, a tactical game for everybody

By Owen Faraday 17 Feb 2015 0
To the Trace Italian. To the Trace Italian.


It is an undebateable fact that Adam Saltsman is one of the most influential game developers still above ground. The creator of Canabalt single-handedly invented the infinite runner, a genre that (for better or worse) grew like kudzu over the App Store. I still get three or four pitches a week for new Canabalt clones, six years on from its release. And we don't even cover infinite runners here -- imagine how many the TouchArcade guys get. Saltsman's big follow-up was producing the uniquely elegant Hundreds in 2013, which was probably the App Store's most religiously-played puzzler until the reign of Threes began.

Saltsman's been quiet for the past year or so, but not idle. He's been lurking behind the scenes, collecting his various games under the single roof of his new games imprint Finji. The label's first original production is planned to ship later this year; it's called Overland, and it's a turn-based tactical game that's packing a lot of new ideas.

After the jump, my conversation with Adam Saltsman and the very first publicly released screenshots and concept images of Overland, which will be playable at GDC this spring.



Like the fight scene at the end of Witness. Sort of. Like the fight scene at the end of Witness. Sort of.


Given Saltsman's usual work ethic, 2014 was an unusual year without a single shipped game. "Some gnarly stuff happened that we just want to get past," Saltsman told me last week. "Nothing I really want to get into. Now it's all about rebooting the crap out of Finji."

The label, which Saltsman founded with his wife and business partner Rebekah last year, will be the vehicle for future Saltsman-designed games, but also an imprint to publish titles from developers Saltsman considers kindred spirits, like Infinite Fall and their ambitious adventure Night in the Woods. "[My old company] Semisecret doesn't exist anymore," he says, "we had Finji acquire it, so there was a lot of paperwork around that. And a lot of contract projects to fund our new projects."

The first of those new projects to launch will be Panoramical, an ambitious interactive album of electronic music for PC, and Overland, a turn-based tactical game that grabbed me the instant Saltsman started to sketch it out for me.

Saltsman picks up an electric sort of vibe when he starts talking about Overland. "Overland came from one of those dumb late night ideas where I thought, 'there should be a game where you do this'?" This evolved into what a Pocket Tactics reader might consider a high-minded ideal: XCOM and FTL that anyone could play. A tactical game for the Everyman. A gospel for turn-based games that you can preach to the masses.

"I'm a huge fan of Final Fantasy Tactics and XCOM and I think there's a substantial audience of people who won't ever get into those games because there's a lot of menus and a lot of stats," says Saltsman -- entirely correctly. "That's not a knock, because I love those things, but my thought was: what if you took XCOM and made into something cozier?"
Panoramical, the other planned 2015 launch from Finji.

 

Saltsman's core idea for Overland is that "cozy tactics game" concept. It's not about stripping out complexity, says the noted Ascension fan, but it's about making choices and outcomes crystal clear -- a tactical game that anybody could look at and instantly grok, not just the die-hard grognard with the Vigilo Confido tattoo. "The cause and effect of everything is really clear because the interface is as simple as possible. It's like when you miss a point-blank shot against a pinned down alien in XCOM -- why does that happen? I think for a lot of other people it's super confusing, so I want to make something that preserves the planning and strategy but strips out confusing things like that.

"I had been looking for a reason to collaborate with my friend Shay Pierce," Saltsman says. "We hired him back in 2013 to create a prototype of Overland based on a pixel art sketch and some bad notes I'd thrown together. Shay had worked at Blizzard on the early Hearthstone prototypes and he's great at translating ideas into code fast.

"We started with a paper protype of the gameplay, and now Shay and I are sharing design responsibilities on the full 3D version. We've brought on LA-based Heather Penn who's an amazing all-around artist who worked on 868-HACK, with more clearly defined game mechanics? For example, in Overland there's no HP -- the people in your squad are either basically OK, almost dead, or dead. It's about having nice clean discrete states, and we've taken that across the whole design. A big touchstone for us is Sarah Northway's Rebuild. "

What hides in shadows The lonesome crowded west.


Overland is set in an alternate Earth that got derailed around the turn of the last century. Saltsman was cagey about sharing too many story details.  "One of the things I learned from Canabalt is that you can explain too much." In that game, there was only a hint of story happening (actually) in the background, which let you assemble your own narrative for what was happening and why.

"Your group of survivors starts on the east coast of the US and is headed west, for a variety of reasons." See? Cagey. "Something is wrong with the Earth. Something happened in the 1970s, something that is starting to create a feedback loop. There's no going back, so your quest isn't to save the world -- the world is unsaveable and it has been for a while. You're just trying to find a place in it."

That sounds bleak, I say. Saltsman laughs. "It does sound bleak! I watched The Road and I said, OK we can't go this bleak. The world might be unsaveable and it might be changed forever but we're going to go west and find something. One of the reasons we started working with Heather Penn is because she wanted to make the ruined world a place of strange beauty. You're not crossing Mordor in a station wagon."

And it does look beautiful. All of the visuals I've seen have a stark emptiness to them, scaled in a way to emphasize how small, unimportant, and (undoubtedly) frail your characters are. But there's a gracefulness to the world that seems to mirror the elegance of design that Saltsman and company are shooting for. Overland is a world that I want to find my place in, too.

Overland is planned to launch this summer for mobile devices, PCs, and other platforms to be announced. It will be publicly playable for the first time at the GDC Mild Rumpus in San Francisco in March.
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