Fantastic Pixel Castle is Planning More Ghost Playtests, Talking Blue Zones and Testing Various Mechanics

The latest Fantastic Pixel Castle podcast episode features Graham, the principal designer on the MMORPG project currently known as Ghost to talk blue zones, design philosophy, and what's ahead.

Graham spent a decade working at Blizzard, including about 8 years on World of Warcraft as a systems designer, and was the design lead for the dracthyr Evoker. When it comes to hopping to a new studio in FPC and a new project, the freedom of trying something new is one key difference. The MMO genre has things one might expect but there's also room to take what works and try to evolve it, which is what they’re working to do with Ghost.

Indeed, the use of procedural generation offers both design challenges and opportunities with the potential for creating  more personalized experiences for the player. Greg Street talks about how even the idea of blue zones have changed since their initial concepts due to playtests. For now, they work as more of a session-based feature which takes about 45 minutes or so to complete. We may see another playtest by a month from now.

They have been changing blue zones as they're working on difficulty scaling and pacing changes via adjusting stuff like environmental details. The goal is to move everyone forward, so the ability to revisit these zones will be limited.

FPC has been testing mechanics like stealth and to explore how to add more dynamic interactions, like those  stealth mechanics and distracting the enemy AI, but then acknowledging “MMOs have a really hard time doing stealth”. In other words, there's definitely a little ‘throw something at the wall and see what sticks’ in game development. 

When it comes to design philosophy, they discuss level scaling like ESO or the soft reset model of games like World of Warcraft, there's more to come on all of that. Hit play for the rest of the in-depth conversation. This particular episode is very rich in development processes and details to nerd out on and catch up on what they’ve been throwing at that wall.