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Escape the Mad Empire – How the Concept Evolved Through Iterations

Escape the Mad Empire is an RPG that blends diverse systems from across genres. Developer Patrick Jacob of XperimentalZ Games tells us more.

After over 4 years in development, we recently, officially announced Escape the Mad Empire for Steam.

The concept behind Escape the Mad Empire is a bit hard to explain, because it contains systems and gameplay that can usually be found across multiple established genres like roguelikes, classic tactical CRPG (both real-time and turn-based), base-building RPG and even action-RPG, with each aspect of the game working in concert to support the others.

How it got there was even more convoluted. The concept started as a base-building-RPG, turned to a simple arcade game, then a turn-based party-based roguelike, then a real-time party-based roguelike, and finally back to a base-building-RPG. … Yeah.

But how did it evolve to that final form?

The Seed is Planted

The root of the idea probably goes back to the first Final Fantasy, which I played on the NES when I was young. The game was a pure joy to play and it blew my mind on so many levels. I think it was the first party-based RPG I had ever played, and after beating the game, I was left with the following questions: what if I had chosen a different party? How different would the game have felt?

The next question was natural: what about a game that encourages trying out different party variations all the time? Obviously you can do it with traditional RPG games, that is, replaying the story with different characters and classes. However, this quickly creates replayability issues when the replay is exactly the same. The solution to this problem screams roguelike! And so, the seed was planted.

XperimentalZ Games and Fast Forward RPG

Shortly after founding XperimentalZ Games in 2010, I revisited that idea and came up with the concept of Fast Forward RPG. It consisted of managing a large crew of adventurers, developing your headquarters and sending teams of adventurers on quests across a map. The player would not directly control the team, but would be able to watch and the adventures and fast-forward them.

I think the concept was pretty neat 12 years ago, but it felt a bit too big to take on as a first project, so we got sidetracked on smaller projects for years. When we could finally get back to it 5 years ago, the market had evolved and the idea did not feel as original as it once had been. We also thought it was better to re-center the game around direct control of the party.

In the meantime I had discovered and been infatuated with roguelikes, so when we came back to the root of the idea, dungeon-crawling kind of set the background for a prototyping phase that lasted about 9 months. Fortunately, the iterative process we had developed over the years would become essential to move toward the final state of the game. 

After wandering in the desert for a short period with an arcade prototype where the party would auto-follow the leader and auto-shoot enemies, we came back to our senses and prototyped the second version: a turn-based party-based dungeon-crawling experience.

It was okay, but a bit sluggish, and the battles were tactical, but quite long. I’m sure that we could have made it a lot better, but I was playing a lot of Enter the Gungeon at the time and our impression was that the game would benefit from injecting a greater sense of pace and action. 

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Escape the Mad Empire

Being a big fan of the old Baldur’s Gate games, I knew that what I wanted could be accomplished by switching to real-time combat. But at the same time, I also was a huge fan of the Divinity games and the depth and precision of their tactical battle systems.

So we kept the real-time aspect, but enforced actions-on-pause that would be executed instantly (instead of having to wait for a casting delay). This gave a huge level of control back to the player because at any time, the player could press pause and unleash a series of perfectly executed actions that were pretty satisfactory.

At that moment, the game started to feel like a fast-paced turn-based tactical RPG and I knew we had struck something.

So by then we had roughly determined our core gameplay and general trajectory, which led to the completion of our first milestone. Over the next few years we’d reach Milestone 7 through the endless addition of features and polish: visuals, the combat system, the skills system, items, enemies, bosses, resources management, special mechanics, surface effects, statuses, etc. etc. 

Emergent Gameplay and Base-Building

At that point, the game was pretty solid as a party-based tactical roguelike and we had reached a point where the diversity of mechanics was enough to produce emergent gameplay. We’d find creative solutions to intense battle situations that were not specifically designed or planned for, which was a good sign.

The games were so dramatically intense and epic, that we felt compelled to tell each other stories of our adventures, like how we saved our party with a last-chance decision or how things spiraled out of control in a fun way. Our games were generating stories by themselves.

The only things we were concerned about at that point were the duration of adventures (a victory could take about 4 hours) and the sense of progression.

We were already planning to add a late-game base-building/management layer during Early Access so we decided to go all-in and introduce those features immediately through a campaign mode. This new game mode (keeping the old way to play as an ‘Epic Run’ mode) made the game much closer to Darkest Dungeon than I originally anticipated. 

So that’s where we’re at! We’re also pushing hard to add interesting story content but that’s another… story!

You can find XperimentalZ Games at their official website and on Twitter. You can find Escape the Mad Empire on Steam here – consider adding it to your wishlist to help boost the game’s visibility!

For more previews hosted on Into Indie Games, check out the Previews section here!