CJHey! I’m CJ. I’m the main programmer and game designer here at Pine Drake! I’ll probably focus more about the design stuff in my posts, talkin about why we make the decisions we do for our games. Also, any grammatical errors that have ever been in our games have been my fault, so – you’ve been warned.
If you ask anyone I know, they’ll tell you my favorite game is Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. It was one of my first games as a kid, and it’s a game I come back to and replay at least once a year, if not more. As for Claire, her favorite game series is Pokémon. So when we formed Pine Drake, we knew that at some point we wanted to make a game that combined those two ideas together. After a lot of back and forth, workshopping some ideas, we finally arrived at The Phantom Keeper. One of the big focuses when designing this game was how to merge the two ideas together, trying to keep the best of both of them, and then giving them our own twist.
From Paper Mario, our favorite aspects were definitely the combat and the dialogue. The combat is a pretty straightforward turn-based setup with a few twists that made it really compelling. The big things that we wanted to maintain was the idea of using smaller numbers, and the action commands.
By using smaller numbers for things like damage, health, etc., there’s a level of clarity that allows you to strategize even more. You can know that an attack will do exactly 4 damage, and that the opponent has exactly 6 health, and plan around that. In contrast, a lot of other RPG’s have what I call “Magic Numbers” – various stats for attack and defense that aren’t super clear how they calculate damage, how they stack up against your opponents, what’s a lot and what’s a little. That clarity from smaller numbers is one of my favorite parts of the combat. It means that you can plan out your moves much more easily without needing to pull out a calculator.
As for the action commands, they are a great way to make the combat more engaging. I find that in a lot of RPG’s, at least in the battles against common enemies, you can just button mash for the regular attack until the battle is done. Action commands give you something to do with every battle, and added chance for success or failure that you can control. It also feels a bit more immersive, like you’re the one attacking that enemy, instead of just giving the order.
From Pokémon, the main bits that we wanted to keep was the monster collection – and all the aspects associated with it. By naming and training the creatures you capture, it forms an extra bond that a lot of people clearly enjoy. Sure, being able to pick who fights for you is fun, but it’s also important that you can pick their moves, give them items to buff them, and name them after various types of cheese.
We also love the idea of type matchups. At it’s base, it’s just a game of rock paper scissors, but it adds this reward for knowledge, both for which types are good against which other types, and what type is associated with a creature. It also encourages having more than just one partner for the entire game and to catch and train new friends (or feel extra pride at beating scissors with only paper!).
So, with all those things listed, we got to work on how to combine these ideas, and what we could add to it. That’s a lot of the work we are doing right now; finding a way to join these ideas together, and presenting them in a way that feels both nostalgic and brand new. One of the big things that we are trying to make entirely different from these games is the setting – but how we settled on the setting is probably worth another blog post on its own! (Maybe my next post, who knows)
So yeah! That’s a very long-winded explanation of the two main sources of inspiration for our game, why we liked them, and what parts of them we want to preserve. We’re very excited to make our own version of our favorite games, and we hope that others are too 🙂