This was originally a Twitter thread, but Twitter threads are no substitute for actual essays, so I'm putting it all here for posterity, with a little extra editing, a few additional notes, and a lot less exclamation points.
I can't for the life of me even remember what this was subtweeting at this point, but it doesn't matter, it could apply to a billion things from the past year and you'll probably see it come up again next week: "A problem that comes up when you're developing a game based off a specific reference point or genre is that it can be hard to talk about the work in a way that both communicates your respect for it, while also expressing that your love is a well-thought out and critical one." I mean, it's sort of obvious stuff for actual criticism, everyone knows that, but I think it's especially hard for game designers because they forget that people outside of GDC lectures expect the marketing voice from them, not the critical one. Not that everyone is coming from a place of good faith, but I think it's generally the most common—when people make things inspired by others, it's usually because they wanted to share the joy they felt while playing it. But it's understandable how in this context, the impulse "well, I wouldn't to include elements into my game that I haven't thought through just because another game has them" can come across as being smugly above it.
Personally this is why I decided instead to make my own game be inspired by Final Fantasy XIII, which is perfect and has no flaws, thus eliding the problem entirely.
I mean, this sounds like a joke, but it's genuinely not. I want to make a game inspired by a particular JRPG because I loved it, and therefore want to show WHY I loved it. Get in the Car, Loser! is basically a persuasive essay on why I think FFXIII rules. That means figuring out what decisions are part of what I loved, which ones aren't, and what context informed both! My goal is to make that love as accessible as possible, and to work with my own strengths, of course. A lot of the time I'm thinking along the lines of "how do I convey the feeling I got, within my own toolset?" But you gotta first understand why they made the decisions they did in order to even start.
An example: the stagger meter is the core of both FFXIII and GITCL's battle system! It sits in the corner, and once it's been filled, it gives you a temporary damage multiplier to your attacks until it finishes ticking down.
But what’s the FEELING of stagger, and what purpose does it actually serve?
- It gives you a short term goal to work towards.
- It feels extra satisfying when you can suddenly do a huge burst of damage.
- It rewards momentum: if you have things under control, you can focus on offensive, which ends the battle faster.
I haven't seen any design interviews about the stagger system in FFXIII, but the Final Fantasy 7 Remake has a similar system, and co-director Naoki Hamaguchi has discussed his vision with that game's version of it. FF7R’s stagger system is extremely different from FFXIII’s and is less emphasized (it’s incredibly short, only Tifa can manipulate the multiplier) but here’s how he describes it in an interview with Unrealengine.com, so you can see what some of his goals were—specifically, making battles feel less homogeneous.
Hamaguchi: Simple mechanics would allow for many people to jump in and would facilitate ease of gameplay, but on the flip side, if it’s too simple, considering just how often you go into combat, it inevitably would become repetitive, and players could tire of it easily. So, we carefully selected and implemented elements that would provide depth, without being too complex based on two major pillars: action and strategy.
The Stagger system, for example, was implemented to avoid repetitive gameplay, where the player would spam high-damage commands when trying to defeat an enemy. You might want to rush your enemy with commands that would Stagger them quicker; or if the enemy’s health is low, it may be better to attack them with high-damage commands, rather than aiming to Stagger them; or you might want to hit them with commands that would halt them in their tracks in preparation to stagger them – many different options could potentially stem from the commands you choose, and we’ve designed it so that those would link to the element of strategy.
In fact, this has always been a goal of Final Fantasy’s battles. When Active Time Battle—a system that rewards you for knowing your gameplan ahead of time—was invented for FF4, they expected players to be overwhelmed and just reflexively mash. So the very first boss fight teaches you to vary your plan, by having a counter-attack state. If you mash Fight when the Mist Dragon is in mist form, you'll get hit hard!
Here’s the page from Final Fantasy IV's original pitch doc (recreated in Final Fantasy Ultimania Archive Volume 2) explaining a little more about what the idea behind ATB was. It seems obvious and intuitive now, and FFIV feels kinda simple overall after years of playing games iterating on ATB, but the shift from turn-based to active time clearly had huge design implications.
- New Battle Scene System: Active Time Battle (ATB)
ATB is a new battle format eliminating turns and using the natural flow of time.
In traditional command-based RPGs, the party inputs commands according to party order, and battle begins once all inputs are complete. With ATB, commands are input in order of character speed, and characters will begin to execute actions as soon as the player moves on to input the next command.
Of course, this system applies to monsters as well. Enemies will not wait for the player's command inputs, and will press the attack regardless. But do not think of this as a real time strategy game. In real-time games speed is the key, but with FFIV's ATB system, enemy movements and adapting to changes are the keys to victory.
In battles with special enemies, you must grasp the flow of time. For example, in battles with monsters that change shape, you cannot win by attacking again and again. Instead you must calculate the timing of your attacks in order to inflict damage. If a monster has erected a barrier, you must focus on defense and powering up rather than attacking. Once the barrier goes down, take the offensive and attack all at once. You must always choose the commands that best suit the situation.
Fighting while understanding the concept of time will be to your advantage. For enemies like the Bomb that self-destructs when damaged, there is now a gap between the time it takes damage and the time it explodes. By casting magic that slows its movements, you can attack again before it explodes and defeat it without taking damage.
Let's explain how magic works. All magic will incorporate the concept of time. As such, magic is not cast immediately upon input, but only after the character has completed the incantation needed to cast it. Said time will vary depending on the magic being cast. (Incidentally, characters will display a chant animation during the casting of magic.) The magic selection includes time spells to slow enemy attack cycles (Slow), to speed up ally attack cycles (Haste), or to halt enemy movement for a set time (Stop). Even supplemental magic that only changed the number of hits in previous titles will now become useful magic under the ATB system.
When you encounter several different types of monsters, the order in which you defeat them influences the battle's difficulty. This is only possible with the ATB system. For example, say you encounter two types of monsters: Type A and Type B. Type A will cast Haste on Type B, so ignoring A will only make B stronger. Players will become desperate to defeat A. We've seen scenarios like this in other FF games, but things get trickier with ATB. There may be cases where players decide that defeating A will stop B from powering up, so they change up the attack pattern they've been using. In doing so, they will take an unexpected amount of damage. This is why considering attack patterns with respect to enemy combinations is a vital part of fighting under ATB.
Through ATB, you proceed by changing up your style of fighting, making it a system that rewards experimentation. This is different from the past, where relying on the strongest weapons and most powerful magic would ensure a win.
Thank you for reading our simple explanation of the Active Time Battle system.
Wow! This is an amazing document, isn't it? They've completely outlined the core of what makes ATB interesting with absolute clarity, basically the vision was perfectly formed from the start—it took them years upon years of iterating on the system starting from FFIV to make it feel complex and satisfying and fun, but literally all the building blocks were there from the start. This one simple concept leads to such a rich space that you can build on it for years.
By the time they got to FFXIII, ATB was still at the core, but with some extra ideas built on top of it that emphasize some of these goals, and deemphasize others. That's iteration! So let's bring this back to stagger specifically.
In FFXIII, the stagger amount (represented as a %) constantly ticks down unless you maintain it with damage. Since its ATB system deemphasizes timing and is instead all about queueing long attack strings at once while your AI companions fight in the background, it’s easy to have a steady flow of damage to keep the bar consistently going up.
But GITCL has characters attack instantly when you press a button, followed by a cooldown timer, so damage is more “lumpy.” So stagger length, and how much the bar is increased by, has to be tuned to allow for smaller numbers of bigger attacks.
Because of that lumpiness, it wouldn't make sense to be a DPS check like it is in FFXIII. And if it's not about DPS, it meant we could make the Sword of Fate super ability sometimes even insta-stagger, because big bursts aren't out of place. To compensate for this and to emphasize the timing element, once an enemy is staggered, you need to take advantage fast, or it'll have been wasted.
As a result, even though the numbers are radically different, it still leads to the same feeling: having to think reactively, and building your gameplans around relying on the big damage you get during the stagger! And if I’ve pulled it off, it'll be just as satisfying, I hope!
That was the original thread. But I think there's a pretty obvious follow-up question that requires digging deeper: why did FFXIII make that change in emphasis in the first place? The FFIV design doc's description of ATB is all about precise timing, but long attack strings are surely contrary to the idea of "understanding the flow of time," right? What made them decide to change emphasis like this? Well, here's how Battle Planning Director Yuji Abe described what they call the "Command Synergy Battle" system.
When Final Fantasy XIII entered development, the console-generation of the PlayStation was new and fresh. We tried to work with the power of the new technology and the pure, classic style was not possible. We wanted a system that lived up to the graphics and smooth animation of the characters. A static battle-system like the ATB was not the best solution, but we tried it at the beginning.
If that's your goal, long strings of attacks make a lot of sense. You pick tactics, and watch your characters carry them out. The focus is on the cool animations possible on next generation hardware, so you want to show a lot of those animations in a row without the player getting distracted by inputs.
In contrast, GITCL doesn't keep this element and hews a little closer to traditional ATB. Here's what our battle UI looks like—you'll note that at the top of the screen, each character has exactly one action assigned to a unique button for them, and you have to switch which action is available all at once. This is pretty different from how you select discrete paradigms, then just hit "auto" in the menu in between Paradigm Shifts.
Long attack strings work really well in FFXIII, because they can make a LOT of different animations that are characteristic of each party member, vary them up, have the camera move to show things from different angles, and even build long unique special attacks for every single character. They're right, smooth animation is their strong suit!
But GITCL is a 2D game, so camera control is out. Our animations are really good, but we also have a very small budget, so we need to really make what limited ones we have count. Long strings would therefore look repetitive, so clearly, we need to prefer shorter attack strings so that stands out less.
What does "shorter strings" actually mean, though? Well, if an attack string is very short, they could even be on a single button press. Valkyrie Profile was an obvious inspiration, which assigns each face button to a character. Pressing a button means you get action instantly—it's satisfying!
That instant response hopefully means you feel a little less distance from each character—this is something FFXIII's designers worried about too. Here's Yuji Abe again in an interview with IGN, discussing changes being made between FFXIII and Lightning Returns, discussing the concept of that "distance."
From the perspective of having a system where the player has a specific intention of what they want to achieve in battle and controlling multiple characters in real-time in order to control the outcome of the encounter I think that using this system was essentially the correct choice.
However, on the other hand I feel that by relying on setting AIs and switching between different pre-set combinations it creates a distance and makes it much less accessible for everyone to get into the system. Another point that I feel might be a weakness of this system is that it dilutes the feeling of immersion by not having one specific character for the player to inhabit, something that many players want from RPGs.
Personally, I love the core of Paradigm Shift and the feeling it provides, but I can't deny that the distancing effect he describes is very real. And while I love the approach they ultimately ended up taking in Lightning Returns, where combat sets are tied to specific outfits that you change on the fly—it's not something that would make sense for our type of game.
So I tried to come at it from another angle to come up a system that might instead provide both these feelings at the same time. From there, the concept of boards emerged. If it's one button per ability, then how do get the feeling of "change tactics by changing character classes" that Paradigm Shift gives you? Well, character classes are really just different abilities, right? So you change ability sets.
So this ends up looking very different (short strings, lots of jumping in and out), has a very different interaction (immediate response on button press, lumpy damage)... but hopefully ends up giving a similar sort of FEELING to a good strategic use of Paradigm Shifts.
If this sounds interesting to you, Get in the Car, Loser! is currently available on Steam and Itch. And if you have played it already, well, Final Fantasy XIII is also on Steam and hopefully my game has served as a successfully argument in favour of how great that one is. I wouldn't have made my own game inspired by it if I wasn't thinking about it constantly!
