Interview: Beacon Dev Team
As games in early release go, few have turned heads like Monothetic‘s frenetic sci-fi top-down roguelike, Beacon. Taking place on an alien world with an addictive play style, gamers dive into a CRISPR wet dream of DNA harvesting, with clones integrating and adapting enemy traits into upcoming incarnations of the protagonist. With a substantial content patch releasing this weekend, I chatted with Kiefen Zipf (CEO / 3d Art) and Taychin Dunnvatanachit (Creative Director) to get a behind-the-scenes view of the dev process. Special thanks to Joseph Russell for his coordinating efforts.
Erik Meyer: Beacon combines the stylings of a fast-paced top-down shooter with a DNA collection mechanic that incorporates enemy abilities into subsequent clones of the player, granting an evolving list of gifts and talents as the game progresses. Did the game’s genesis come from this mechanic on its own, or did you begin with the struggle to survive on the alien world and arrive at the mutation aspect via the development process? Additionally, as devs, how do build for an additive style of play balancing with the overall experience?
Kiefen: The idea for cloning came pretty immediately after we started development of the game. We knew we needed a unique mechanic to make Beacon unique compared to other roguelikes, and once we landed on the idea for the Clone Bay re-printing you after death, the mechanics of adding collected DNA to your genome and gaining mutations came to us pretty easily. The first DNA system started out very basic though, and as we’ve developed the game over the years, new layers like DNA mods and more unique mutation abilities have made the cloning process a much more important part of the game.
Tay: Yes, I believe Joe was the one who really put it all together for everyone to see in a document, and it was a real “Eureka!” moment, so to speak. The original concept was that you crash land on some sort of alien planet and have to figure out the mechanics of your new environs. What those mechanics were, and the nature of the planet itself, went through many iterations. Some examples would be having the planet be in a perpetual state of war between robots and a horde of primitive sentient aliens with tools like crossbows, spears, etc., or having it be a prison planet that hosted dubious characters from all over the universe. Traces of the latter definitely remained and became integrated into the idea of Prism (robot faction) and their purpose on the planet – warden to a collection of esoteric and often hostile alien lifeforms.
EM: The world may be randomly generated, but the universe isn’t, and world building is the kind of thing I’m a huge nerd for, so what can you reveal about the sci-fi continuum you’re working within? Obviously, Freja Akiyama comes from a space-faring people possessing high technology, but I’m curious about the goals of that civilization and the relative levels of technology therein. With a militaristic bent, what drives society, and what constitutes the backwaters of civilized space?
Tay: For Beacon, we went for something that is quite familiar with the tropes of science fiction: corrupt corporations, dystopian governments, and the unbridled wonder that comes with the discovery of a universe so brimming with enigmas. What distinguishes us a bit is probably the fact that all of this is very much in the background; what Freja is concerned with is merely survival and making it out alive. The ills and advancements of civilizations are dim and far away to her and the player. A lot of roguelikes seem to have narrative and lore as a bit of an afterthought, and I feel like that is a shame; I don’t think lore and gameplay should be an exclusive thing from each other.
I think this elegantly-summarized rendition of the game’s universe by our writer Joe from our narrative document will do a far better job of explaining the world of Beacon:
“It is a time of high technological advancement – interstellar space travel is possible, and humanity has colonised many worlds. In the Core worlds, a strong government holds sway with an impressive military presence, dissuading smugglers, bandits and outlaws from entering the controlled space. Outside of these select worlds, however, law is much harder to come by. In many sectors, populations of several solar systems have banded together to form a makeshift defence fleet to defend them from attackers – to varying success. Other sectors opt instead to enlist the services of private security corporations that come with a hefty price tag, but even heftier ordnance.
Outside of these groups are the fringe worlds – planets that have no central government, and swear no allegiances. These are still mostly peaceful planets – their remote locations and lack of trade means that they aren’t considered to be big targets of crime. Of course, with such far-reaching interstellar travel, aliens have been discovered and while integration between a human population an alien population is rare, it can happen through perseverance or necessity.
This is also a universe where the arcane, the occult and the mythological still thrive. Creatures once thought to be extinct, or to never truly exist in the first place, have been discovered amongst the explored planets, and potentially stranger creatures await discovery further out on the fringes of known space.”
EM: At least as a narrative concept, the regeneration of the main character via cloning reminds me of the Planescape: Torment protagonist, a warrior who cannot die and comes back to life each time he dies, occasionally gleaning insight from this abnormal state. In Beacon, the spawning of clones has been going on for some time, which means Kovus 18 is filled with the secrets of previous incarnations. From a writing standpoint, how does this aspect of the game open up rare possibilities that make sense at this place and time, and what does your pacing-of-information process look like as you build areas?
Kiefen: When your first clone is printed out the first time you hit New Game, it’s not meant to be the first clone that’s been on this planet. She’s already been trapped there for months or years, and past versions of herself have left logs and corpses of themselves all over the planet. She doesn’t completely remember everything each time she is re-cloned, especially if heavily mutated, and that sort of plays into how mementos and tutorialization of the game is presented to players as they find new logs left behind by previous clones.
Tay: I think it is one of those things that slowly sinks into your understanding over time, and the existential predicament that presents itself is nothing short of horrifying. In video games, we often treat death as something to be abhorred, or as a failure state – whereas in this instance, depending on how long you inferred she has been going for, final death is almost sought after and welcomed but always slightly out of reach. It is a rare fusion where narrative and gameplay meshes almost perfectly, with the mechanics of the roguelike genre feeding into the narrative loop. I think that is a rather neat bow, and it gives us a lot of confidence to push the rest of the game’s structure and tone atop this foundation.
EM: The game features a few boss battles, and I’m always curious about how you see these capping off longer stretches of play. What do you see as key to any boss, in terms of stimulating creativity and challenging the player? From a design standpoint, what do you see players experiencing in these moments that they haven’t already seen, and what differentiates a good boss from a great boss?
Kiefen: I’m not sure any of our boss fights are great yet, but for the 3 currently added, I don’t hate running into any of them specifically, which I guess means something. For a roguelike like Beacon, I think a good boss fight needs to be challenging no matter how good your run has been, but still beatable if you’ve had an unlucky run. If you barely have any items, it should be a fair challenge, and if you found 100% of the secrets and 20 items in Act 1, it shouldn’t be an immediate victory. Part of the balance in that is in the multi-stage designs of the bosses, and using periods where the boss burrows or is shielded to prevent a powerful build from killing the boss before they get a chance to go through their attack pattern.
Eventually, we’ll be adding a few variants to the current bosses, as well, so even if you find the Mega Spider Droid boss two times in a row, it could spawn as a Tesla variant or a Pyro variant with a new set of attacks and give a differently-themed piece of loot. Those kinds of variants should hopefully make repeated runs past level 3 more interesting.
EM: The game’s color template pops on low-poly assets that light up with battle; when it comes to art direction, consistency, and the need for an overall identifiable aesthetic, what philosophy guides your hand? In the visual world, what do you have as must-do elements, and where does look meet function in the flow of the levels?
Tay: When we started out, I was inspired a lot by cyberpunk, anime, Japanese model kits (like the ones from Tamiya), and clean minimalist aesthetic like The Silent Age or Thomas Danthony which I tried to replicate in game. If you haven’t heard already, we started out making the game in 2D, so I really went for this kind of flat look, which translated into low-poly quite well. In the end, the design tenets are not that dissimilar: strong silhouettes, bright accent colors, and less is more. I used to model in a more realistic pipeline, and ever since switching to low-poly, it really freed me to experiment with shapes and colors much faster, as the iterative process on a low-poly asset is quite short.
Color is a big part of Beacon’s aesthetic; I kept preset color codes to reference from, one for each faction or environment type, so that whenever they’re around, their presence is almost preempted by the colors. I also model with slightly more detail for all the assets than what you would maybe traditionally do when working with a low-poly aesthetic. I think this gives the objects a sort of subtle intricacy that is in this halfway mark between realistic and stylized. I especially enjoy hard surface modeling (I’m no good at organic things) and adding small decals and UI panels to give it a bit more life. There is no design bible for Beacon necessarily, since the team is so small, and I feel like the team has a very good grasp of what works within the framework of our aesthetic.
In terms of how all of this meets function, I think if Beacon was a non-stylized game, it would’ve been way too busy to see what was going on. Being more reductive with our assets helps the player process things a bit easier, and even now, I would say there are occasions where things can get quite hectic on screen.
EM: I tend to avoid stat questions and expected to see things like health and resistance, but I was curious about luck as an inclusion. Some games intend luck ratings as a path to Easter eggs, while others simply roll it into randomized weapon effects, so if there’s a spectrum with stats being only used for very literal, physical in-game actions at one end and hard-to-pin-down rewards (not to mention odd encounters or discoveries) at the other, where does luck fall?
Kiefen: To make Luck a desirable statistic compared to the others, it changes a few mechanics. The higher your luck is, the more often Rare and Legendary tier items will drop, more Stormcells will appear, and enemies will spawn with a champion mod more often. It’s meant to give you more favorable loot but also make the game a bit challenging in return.
EM: With scores of weapons, mutations, and items, what likely play styles do you see emerging, and how do you avoid ‘easiest way to win’ playthroughs? In the balance between speed and stamina, area attacks and close-range stopping power, how do you provide increasing variety while avoiding items that break the system?
Kiefen: A lot of the balance in preventing overpowered playthroughs comes from the variety of enemies and traps in the game. Almost every build will be strong to some enemies and attack types, but weak to others. The same is true of enemies armor statistics, so if you have a powerful set of tesla items and mutations, you’ll still be less useful when fighting in tesla-themed Prism arenas. The balance of the DNA systems is meant to give you a set of weaknesses, as well, so you’re rarely too strong. Most DNA types have positive and negative statistics, and many mutations have negative statistics or attributes, so your progression isn’t always upwards.
EM: With the game in Early Access, what does your current pipeline look like, and what eats up the majority of your time? Is it more about honing the project and making everything play nice, or are there still assets being integrated into the overall game? And as Beacon transitions to full release, how do you see your roles within the team changing?
Kiefen: Content creation will still be our main focus for the next few months. Along with adding improvements and tweaks to the game based on feedback, we have more content to add to the game before we consider it completed, including level 6. The closer we get to release, more of our roles will switch from creating the game to getting ready for final release and porting it to Xbox One.
Tay: We also see a lot of us transitioning into more troubleshooting/community management roles during Early Access as well, which I imagine will be more prevalent once the game fully ships. With a team this small, you have very interchangeable roles as necessities of game development crop up on you.
In case you missed it, here’s the trailer:
