Hi, Josh here. I’m the other programmer for Shadows of Adam. Rather than bore everyone with more technical details, I’m going to discuss some project goals and inspirations. I will also attempt to break the world record for “most occurrences of the word jRPG in a single article.”

The RPG, Today

Let’s face it, RPGs are complicated. Both from a development and player’s perspective, RPGs are very content intensive. Playing a modern RPG is now a major commitment, with recently released popular RPG titles easily clocking in at the 100+ hour range.

Even the once linear jRPG format is beginning to shift towards an open world structure, with breathtaking scenery and choice-driven interaction adding significant amounts of playtime to an already long narrative. If you have a summer to yourself, like I did when I played through the excellent Xenoblade Chronicles, you will be rewarded greatly by indulging yourself in these modern marvels of gaming.

But conversely, if you’re working full time, and suffering from a decreasing attention span, you’ll feel like digging into the latest Final Fantasy is almost a job in and of itself. Still, sometimes you want to scratch the itch for questing, storylines, and monster-bashing all the same, in spite of a schedule constraints. Enter the indie gaming scene…

Simple, Done Well

“Simple, done well” has been the project mantra from day one. Like many indie game developers, we want to distill the essence of what makes our favorite childhood games so fun, while cutting out the anachronistic and excessive parts. From a playability standpoint, we want to create a more compact jRPG that offers immediate storytelling, as well as engaging gameplay systems that require little in terms of a learning curve. In a later post, I’ll discuss gameplay influences and decisions in more detail. But rest assured, we are cutting the common RPG filler, such as level grinding, backtracking, confusing subplots, and general lack of direction.

Proud to be an RPG

Having been a part of the game development community for awhile now, it’s been obvious that the retro jRPG format may not be appealing to most people. As a result, there is a tendency for indie jRPG’s to downplay the fact they are indeed full-blown jRPGs in a couple of ways. First, RPG developers will advertise game features in terms of what jRPG-isms they didn’t include rather than what features they actually bring to the table, e.g. “NO RANDOM BATTLES”, “NO GRINDING”, etc. The second is arguably more common: the game itself will be a self-referential parody of the jRPG format, lampshading the abundance of tropes that come with playing any jRPG. The result can be banal, or it can be used to great effect with good writing. See: Cthulhu Saves the World for an example of how to pull off the humorous side.

For Shadows of Adam, we want to play it straight. Not quite “80’s power ballad straight”, but also not a 4th-wall breaking irony explosion either. Rather than make concessions to the general public and apologize for being a jRPG, we are flying our jRPG flag high: we’re serving up airships, a fantasy world, elemental McGuffins to collect, and some scenarios that any RPG fan will find familiar and enjoy at the same time. Put simply, we want to collect as many cool parts as possible from early 90s SNES-era RPGs, while conveniently discarding the parts that were a drag.

The jRPG format is strange in that the whole is oftentimes greater than the sum of its parts. Fans of the format will oftentimes put up with questionable design choices to satiate their need for character progression and an engaging story line.

Wrapping it Up

Shadows of Adam was started by a team of lifelong RPG players. We know what we want and what we don’t want from an RPG at this point, and our hope is that our experience will allow us to create a lean, quality retro jRPG. Developing this game has been a joy, and playing through it will be sure to evoke past memories. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, after all. But we want to use nostalgia as a springboard, not as the endpoint. Check back next time, where I will be discussing what mechanics the game will include, as well as some classic (and not-so-classic) RPGs have been influential in developing Shadows of Adam.