IGM Interviews – Phil Florio (Dark Empire)

On a fateful Thursday morning, I sat down and had a very enlightening discussion with Phil Florio about the blurred lines between good and evil, American Colonial history, and of course-Past to Future Games’ upcoming retro-RPG Dark Empire.

As of today, the game is now live on Kickstarterand looking for support. Phil is the Project Lead and Writer for the Dark Empire team , and in this interview he shed some more light on how exactly Dark Empire stands out in the RPG genre because of its battle system, its lore, and so much more.

IGM: How did you become involved in the games industry?

Phil Florio : I’ve been working in fantasy type things for a long time-I’ve been writing since I was a kid. And I’ve tried my hand at the fantasy genre as a writer several times, and also worked in the computer industry a lot. I majored in IT in college and I did computer repair as a job for several years. I’ve also tried doing video game design many times, and this is our first serious project, but we have experimented with a lot in the past. So you know you grow up playing video games, and we’re all huge video game fans, and eventually you just want to put your talents to work with what you’re passionate about.

IGM: Why did you choose to focus on an indie game?

Phil : This was our dream – to make something that is unique in the industry, or at least something people want to play, something we want to play. And we think that with how indie games have been rising lately, with the prevalence of Steam Greenlight, the humble bundle and humble store, we’ll still reach that audience we want to get. One of the great things about the system we’re using to make the game, which is Monogame, is that it’s designed to be easily ported to different systems. So while we’re going to be focusing on our PC launch to start with, there’s always the chance that we could put our title on different systems once we got the base systems down.

IGM: You’re currently deep in development with Dark Empire. Can you tell IGM readers a little bit about the game?

Phil : A lot of us are fans of classic RPGs – the ones where role playing actually made a difference, where you could make decisions and your character would develop based on the decisions you’ve made and the story would reflect those decisions as opposed to just running down a hallway. Dark Empire features a branching storyline system, where the player will get to pick his path through the story: Whether he sides with the Empire during the struggles, or the rebels, or if he just stays out of the conflict altogether, and there will be more branching paths as the story progresses.  And then also how well he treats his party, who he even chooses to bring with him, how he builds his skills – all have impact on how the story unfolds.

And that’s one of the things we’re really focusing on: Each person should get somewhat of a different experience. We’re also doing what we think is a unique take on the turn-based battle system, which is we’re trying to make you think a little bit about your moves as opposed to just clicking tap over and over again. So you’ll have to think about how your characters will play out when you’re designing your parties. As far as setting goes, it is colonial themed. Kind of like the American Revolution – you’ve got the rebels, and you’ve got the Empire, if you kind of think of the American Revolution except with a lot more magic, that’s a good overview of the settings. It’s a completely single player, story-based game.

IGM: You mentioned that players will have a choice as to how the story will unfold, and that decisions have a huge impact on that. Do we get to play as a main character or do we chose from a selection of characters?

Phil : You play as Maxum, he’s the protagonist and at the beginning of the story, he’s kind of brought to the rebel side because that’s kind of what his father did. He fought against the Empire and Maxum has this notion he was brought up with – the Empire’s bad, the Rebels are good. But he actually goes out into the world for the first time and he actually experiences things for the first time for himself as opposed to being told what’s what. He starts to realize that good and evil aren’t so black and white. The Empire has good parts to it, and the Rebels have bad parts to them, and he has to make these decisions as to who he’s going to support – or even if he wants to get involved in that at all.

IGM: Does Maxum interact with a lot of other characters along the way? On your website you’ve recently revealed Jasmine, and before that Aurelia and Lightning Blade.

Phil : Yeah, you’ll be able to interact with them as you go along – you’ll be able to pick them into your party. Based on the decisions you make, your party will generally gravitate toward that side. If you decide you’re going to side with the Imperials during the course of the main story, you’ll get imperial characters who join you like Jasmine, Jack – they will assist you as you go along. If you side with the rebels, you get Aurelia, and Opal – you can even choose to stay neutral in the war as the story progresses, in which case you get different characters who are neutral in the conflict. The idea of the first act of the game is to try to give you a good understanding of the world before you make your first major decision as to whether you’re going with the rebels or the Empire or staying out of it. You’re going to meet a lot of characters, you’re going to learn about the good and evil of each side, and you’re going to try and get an idea of what sort of consequences there will be based on your decisions.

IGM: You’ve mentioned Dark Empire is a turn-based tactical combat game, a genre which usually deals with a lot of strategy and defeating opponents in a limited number of moves. What do you mean when you say Dark Empire is taking a new spin on a classic formula?

Phil : So basically, moves take a certain amount of time to execute based on various characteristics like how fast your character is. If you’re just swinging your sword, it’s just based on your character’s speed. If you are attacking with magic then it’s a stat called mana flow. And when you choose your moves it goes into the resolution queue, so you have to make a decision between powerful moves that take a short amount of time to execute, or quicker moves that are weaker but will execute quicker. We’ve also got a lot of systems like magic mixing – which allows you to combine different arcane spells together, for melee characters we’ve got different stances they can go into when they fight different enemies. Then we’ve also got a wide variety of weapons all with different stats making them good for different kinds of encounters. So it’s never going to get boring.

We never want it to be just, you encounter an enemy and you just use an attack over and over again and they’re gone. We want to make sure that you’re thinking – what will they do? What stance will your melee characters be in? What kind of magic are you going to use? And so on. As a matter of fact, on the world map, we don’t have random encounters the way you would normally think of random encounters like in a dungeon. On the world map, an encounter is an event. You might get waylaid by bandits, you might come across a small cave you have to explore, and you might even run into some travelers who are getting attacked by a monster. You have all different things that may come up which will make it more interesting traveling around.

IGM: During those random events, say you don’t choose to help those characters. Will that affect your stance with a particular faction or perhaps your personal moral compass in the game?

Phil : We think that good and evil is more grey than just a straight bar, so it wouldn’t have an effect on your moral compass. But it might affect you if they remember that later. For example if you side with the rebels, and end up encountering the rebels in danger but choose to ignore them, they would probably be annoyed with you. If you choose to ignore the encounters where you’re clearing the caves, then you wouldn’t be able to give the hideout locations to the smugglers who would then upgrade the wares that they’re offering you. There are definitely consequences to saying “no” or “I’m just going to ignore that.”

IGM: Could you tell us more about the types of weaponry featured in Dark Empire ?

Phil : Our list of weapons is actually really long; I think it was something like eighty different types of weapons, and that’s just for the base weapons. Each have different strengths and weaknesses depending on what you’re going for, like If you’re going for quick speed or if you’re going for the ability to pierce enemy armor. Later on you can get upgraded forms of those weapons and they’ll bear a different make of the blacksmith of whoever forged them. You’ll start to see a pattern like these are the best blacksmiths, and their weapons are stronger than the blacksmiths of the tier below them. Even if you decide “I like longswords,” they do exactly what I want for my character, you can keep finding new longswords as the game progresses to upgrade your character with.

IGM: Is there a class-based system in place?

Phil : There isn’t really a class; different characters will specialize in different things, but the character building system is completely open. If say you want your melee character to know some magic, you can invest a couple of points when you level him up.