Interview: Nic Tringali of The Banished Vault (Part Two)

In part two of our conversation with Nic Tringali, we go deeper into their development process. Design and prototyping, testing, setting victory conditions, and the delightful old-school addition to the game: the manual.

00:00:00 - Theme - how did the look come together? Concept of cathedrals stretching through time.

00:04:20 - Worldbuilding, problems with history

00:07:00 - Dramatic play, victory conditions. Surviving to tell a story, rather than survival as an inherently interesting goal.

00:17:40 - Development: transitioning from John Wick: Hex and Arcsmith, managing stress.

00:26:17 - Design and prototyping, planning features, play testing, development timeline

00:41:10 - The manual: The Banished Vault has an accompanying manual in the old style, the kind that used to ship with every game. What was the thinking behind this?

00:51:48 - Where to find Nic

Nic Tringali - The Banished Vault

Nic Tringali is a game designer for Bithell Games. Their recent release The Banished Vault (published by Bithell Games’ Lunar Division) is a gothic space-faring exploration and survival game, released on July 25th to very positive reviews. We talk with Nic about their early gaming inspirations, before getting into the gameplay mechanics of The Banished Vault.



00:00:00 - Introduction - Life post-launch, how did you get into games
00:04:00 - Influential early games - Morrowind, Stuntman
00:09:20 - Board games and their cross-pollenation with video games
00:14:57 - Complexity and planning in The Banished Vault: space mechanics
00:32:21 - Complexity budget: how did Nic decide which choices were interesting for the player, and where to put the complexity?
00:37:30 - What kind of player did they have in mind?
00:39:40 - The aesthetics of The Banished Vault: art and sound
00:47:01 - Where to find Nic

Josh Sawyer of Obsidian Entertainment has one of the more robust CVs in game design: Iceland Dale 1 and 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 and most recently, the highly-praised historical role-playing game Pentiment.

We focus on various aspects of the production of Pentiment: avoiding burnout, drawing from meticulously-researched historical material, dealing with religion (both as a nexus of temporal power and a daily spiritual presence in peoples lives), as well as covering gameplay and narrative aspects.

00:00:00 - Introduction

00:01:00 - Life post-Pentiment, comparison with the aftermath of Pillars of Eternity: Deadfire

00:04:20 - Managing production stress and preventing burnout, for individuals and for teams

00:06:50 - Balancing personal vision, and the requirements of publishers. For their next project, team morale will be the number one priority.

00:08:30 - Allowing team members to play to their strengths.

00:11:30 - Dealing with history and religion as opposed to fantasy worlds. Engaging with "microhistory" as opposed to top-down, ruler-first historiography; examining the daily lives of the people of an era.

00:16:56 - The difference between taking inspiration from history and literature, as opposed to games that draw primarily on other games.

00:21:26 - Religion in Pentiment: "I consider myself an atheist but, like, who cares." The personal nature of characters’ engagements with God, the Devil, spirituality, and the church as a political entity.

00:31:41 - The politics of power in Pentiment

00:43:02 - Gameplay and narrative consequences in Pentiment - major (plot-altering) and minor (aesthetic, dramatic, personal)

00:50:50 - Contrasting this kind of design in Pentiment with consequences in the final act of Deadfire

00:51:50 - Dramatic immersion in Pentiment: keeping the dramatic intimacy through rituals and role-playing mini-games.

Tim and Joel return after a hiatus for the first episode of 2023. We talk about the future direction of the podcast - which, now that Tim’s own game development projects are picking up steam - will involve a more design-focussed approach to looking at games.

With this in mind, we go into the differences between three games: The Wolf Among Us (2013), Disco Elysium (2019) and Pentiment (2022). All these games have strong narratives and great writing, but the latter two incorporate these elements into gameplay in a way that Wolf doesn’t.

Tim goes into his adventures in solo game development, making a working orbital model in C++.

00:00 Intro to new season

01:50 Games purely as entertainment vs Games criticism bearing the weight of other media

00:04:48 What have we been playing?

00:06:00 Steam Deck for traveling and multiplayer

00:10:40 The Wolf Among Us

00:18:14 Disco Elysium on Steam Deck

00:21:09 Which games have affected you?

00:26:39 Venue

00:30:00 Pentiment / Disco Elysium

01:14:03 Godot game dev: C++ and orbital mechanics

01:24:53 GPT-4 and the benefits of AI for the lone dev

01:35:25 Kerbal Space Program and the challenge of making complex problems fun for the user

01:42:27 Narrative elements express themselves out of the mechanics that are happening

01:48:22 Socials

Part two of our conversation goes deeper into the mechanics, narrative and design of Hardspace: Shipbreaker, from its genesis as the winner of an internal company game jam, to early access on Steam, to its full release last year.

Elliot talks about wanting to explore the idea of “dangerous labor”, to immerse the player in a blue collar experience, to “honor the work” - the skill, the camaraderie, the consequences and the tensions between workers and bosses.

Elliot Hudson is the game director for Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and was a senior designer for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. In part one of our two-part conversation, he talks about his beginnings in gaming, from sketching Mario Bros 2 levels out on paper, to making flash games while studying film, to switching to studying game design full time, and finally getting a job at Blackbird - first as a programmer and later as a designer.

He talks about the his journey with Blackbird from working on the canceled project Hardware, to Deserts of Kharak, Blackbird’s entry into the much beloved Homeworld Series, and finally to the conceptually and narratively unique Hardspace: Shipbreaker - one of our favorite games of 2022.

There’s no one quite like Rami Ismail: game developer, pilot, industry ambassador, consultant. Any one of these could be a full career and somehow Rami does them all. Formerly one half of hit indie studio Vlambeer, he has used his success to advocate for change in the industry for the last decade, traveling the world with a focus on advancing game development in countries where the gaming industry doesn’t have the same foothold.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we talk about his experiences with these communities and the specific challenges they face - cultural, economic, linguistic - and the wealth of story and experience that goes unheeded as a result. We also talk about game engines, changes in the industry, and (inevitably) the problems of late-stage capitalism.

“Imagine you’re writing a book and occasionally, when someone turns the page, all the letters fall off the page.”

Tim and Joel interview Stephen Danton, who developed the excellent Unto the End with his wife Sara.

Stephen talks about his career, and the range of experience he brought to bear in the making of his first big game. We cover various aspects of video game development.

• Unto the End
• Dark Souls
• Guacamelee
• Stray
• Dead Cells
• Mark of the Ninja
• Another World
• Flashback
• Below
• Rainworld
• Highfleet
• Thief
• God of War
• Miasmata
• Death Stranding
• Somerville

Tim and Joel look again at Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, a game whose complexity allows for a more nuanced set of mechanics which make it a more “honest” city-building experience, as opposed to the sanitized colonialist and capitalist assumptions of many recent offerings in the genre.

• Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic
• Sim City 2000
• Cities: Skylines
• Anno 1800
• Factorio

Tim and Joel look at the delightful Unto the End, an action-adventure game made by the small team at 2 Ton Studios. It is a masterclass in minimalist game design - art, sound, narrative and gameplay mechanics.

We give particular attention to the combat mechanics - which are some of the best we've encountered in any game - scrappy and tactical, consistently challenging. We look at why the challenges here are so much more compelling to us than the popular Dark Souls series - which has been much lauded for its combat mechanics.

Games mentioned:

• Unto the End
• Dark Souls
• Sekiro
• Chivalry 2
• Assassin’s Creed
• Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order
• Lonely Mountains: Downhill
• Nidhogg