Today, FTL: Faster than light is recognized as one of the most influential games in the indie sector. next The Binding of Isaac and Spelunkyit was part of a holy trinity of games that popularized the roguelite genre in the early ’10s.
But before it was a hit, FTL was just a humble idea shared by Matthew Davis and Justin Ma, two developers who work at 2K’s Shanghai office. The studio wasn’t a bad place to work according to their accounts, but they just weren’t making the kind of games they were interested in. So Davis and Ma left the company on a big budget and started a hobby project to keep them busy while looking for a new job.
“The original intent, at least from my perspective, was that” [FTL] was only intended as a hobby project or prototype,” Davis tells Ars. “It was something in between jobs to build a resume that we could use to land a job at a studio where we worked on projects that we were more excited about. But we ran into something that became much bigger than what we wanted to do.”
Getting inspired
When they wanted to create a new kind of indie game, Ma and Davis say they were inspired by the strategic board games that filled their spare time while living in Shanghai. “Games like the Battlestar Galactica board game, and there was a submarine game called November Red that allowed for a lot of crew management and cooperative play, which we really enjoyed,” recalls Davis.
Before getting into serious development, Davis and Ma jotted down some of the mechanics they wanted to take from those kinds of games to include in their prototype. They also wrote down what kind of feelings they hoped to give the player, getting into an angle that was fairly unique to video games at the time.
“We wanted to put the player in the captain’s shoes rather than the pilot in a spaceship,” explains Davis. “Most games at the time were focused on fighter pilots and air combat in space. We wanted to give you more of that Picard feel of moving power and protecting your shields and repairing damage and stuff like that.
“We wanted them to struggle with the management of the ship’s systems and feel the pain of losing a crew member because of their poor decision-making,” adds Ma.
In trying to instill that kind of player feeling, Ma remembers being inspired by the random situations and permanent death of roguelike games. At the time, those kinds of design elements expanded from traditional turn-based adventures to other types of gameplay.
“I’ve played a lot of traditional roguelikes over the years, but it was alone” Spelunky Classic that made me think about how the principles of roguelikes could apply to other genres,” Ma recalls.
That said, many of the decisions to include similar mechanics were practical ones. “For example, we wanted you to be forced to live with the consequences of your decisions, so a run-based game with permadeath just made sense,” Ma said. “We wanted you to feel like you were exploring an unfamiliar world, so random text events with different outcomes sounded like the easiest way to create that. We were also a bit masochistic and enjoyed failing in the game, so of course it became quite a challenge.”
