An Aliens Fanboy Interviews Salvaged Developer Opposable Games

The British codesmiths over at Opposable Games are working on something pretty amazing in the game Salvaged. Over on Kickstarter, it's looking to raise some funds for the idea and it needs an almighty kick in its final week to get it over-the-line. Ask us, this is a forward-thinking and revolutionary way to have fun that definitely needs to be made. Plus, it's inspired by a single scene in James Cameron's sci-fi classic Aliens - the scene where Gorman and Ripley look at the small TVs in the command station as the bug-hunting marines get wiped out one-by-one. In Salvaged you command your troops in a similar way as they investigate wrecked vessels taken out in the far reaches of space by who knows what. You do this by simultaneously playing on a PC and mobile device, while Oculus Rift and Wii U will also be supported.

Our resident Aliens fanboy threw a few questions at Opposable Games' design director James Parker to find out more about this great concept:

In your elevator pitch for Salvaged you mention an iconic scene from Aliens. First of all, great idea – great scene. Secondly, the grunts in that scene were just as much responsible for that defeat as their commander. Will Salvaged’s mechanics put the onus on the player training the proper cockiness and zeal levels into their NPC troops – or will the player character commander need to grind their leadership skills to earn the respect, and therefore increased effectiveness, of their unit?

We're really trying to keep the player as themselves, so their "levelling-up" will come from their real-life learning more about the game and the interface, what tactics do and don't work, and establishing their own play style. In parallel to that, their RISC members will also level-up through experience, so if they end up using a weapon a lot, that will become their specialty, rather than you picking a class per se for each character and them sticking with it through the game.

Speaking of Aliens, do you have any plans to mess with the troops armaments? One of the iconic exchanges is the moment when Gorman vetos the use of heavy arms due to environmental restraints (thermonuclear reactor blasts). Are you looking at this as a mechanic? Perhaps forward-thinking players could be rewarded by taking the time to study schematics pre-mission?

I think there's definite mileage in that, we're really keen to increase the range of different scenarios that the player encounters, and areas (or whole wrecks) that restrict the use of certain weapons would add a certain extra frisson of excitement and another choice for the player to have to make.

With regards to when the “crap hits the fan,” another key element in that scene is confusion and the subsequent friendly fire it created. Will this be explored in Salvaged’s combat?

If anything, at the moment they are a bit too keen to shoot regardless of what's in front of them! It's been toned down a lot recently, but it's still possible. We need to strike a balance between letting players learn that certain tactics are not going to work and the frustration of letting your team kill one another in the cross-fire!

We’re mad keen X-Com fans and love the smell of permadeath in the morning. What sort of saving options will you provide for people who love to mid-mission save like very pragmatic, well… cowards?

We'll be offering some kind of mid-mission save for all players - simply because we understand that sometimes people have to stop playing a game at short notice, and no one likes to leave their machine paused while they go out. There will be a gentler save system to ease people into the game overall, but so much of the game comes from the tension of knowing that every decision is critical that we're hoping most players will play the game as intended.

What sort of sci-fi are we talking here? The lo-fi “future according to the ‘80s” with bullets and grenades, or are you moving more toward photons and lasers aplenty? Also, when all ammo is depleted will our Marines resort to harsh language (if yes, insta-buy day one).

We were talking of the possibility of sending your team into the wrecks with no weapons just yesterday. We hadn't considered Harsh Language to be an actual weapon type, but it would make for a great Easter Egg! We're probably erring more on the side of the bullets and grenades stuff, but we make a few concessions to "real-world" future weapons like rail-guns, and everyone like a laser rifle, don't they?

This might be a long shot, but are you considering voice recognition for commands? We can only imagine how hard it’d be to keep our voice calm enough to say “lay down suppressing fire with the incendiary units and fall back” when all four quadrants of our screen are exploding with firefights.

Definitely considering, but it's a really hard thing to get right and can be very frustrating when it doesn't work - it may be something that we experiment with once the game is out there.

Obviously, no matter how addictive and engaging your level-to-level gameplay is, Salvaged would benefit greatly from an overarching narrative. How are you approaching that? Will it be a linear affair, or can player actions affect the final destiny of their salvage team?

We're giving the player a lot of the backstory, and we're creating what we call Story Stands. So players will start to encounter things through text and audio downloads that will lead them to explore specific ships or locations and gain more information about those stories. However these strands are going to be completely optional as we really want it to be the player telling their own story and that of their crew.

The idea of making a game that distances you from the action, rather than immerse you in it, is a fascinating concept. What do you feel are the key gameplay markers you have to hit to make it work?

The biggest issue is to do with how player's attention is used and managed. We find that when people start to play the game they are constantly looking at the tactical view and not really looking at the main screen where the action is happening. So as well as letting that stuff happen organically through a player becoming more familiar, we're adding stuff that draws the player's attention to the main screen or gives them incentives to do so. For in-house user testing, we've actually implemented face-tracking so we know which screen each player is looking at at any one time, and we can use that data to see what the impacts of our design decisions are.

Get over to the Kickstarter and help these guys out!

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