Welcome back. We haven’t had any 10 Turn Interviews in quite some time on Turn Based Lovers. Luckily, I have a whole series of them coming your way. I spent all four days at PAX playing new games and meeting some great people. It was a very busy event. However, I was still able to sit down with some developers so we could get the latest on each of their games.
First up is my interview with Steve Jimenez at Tic Toc Games. We talked about his love for pro wrestling and storytelling, and all about his upcoming game Wrestle Story.
If you aren’t familiar with Wrestle Story yet, it is a turn-based RPG in the world of pro wrestling. Something similar to Paper Mario and Expedition 33 with turn-based combat and real-time action-based inputs to execute your moves. Let’s jump on in and see what Steve has to say.
What are some of the games that inspired Wrestle Story and its art style?
We are inspired by games we grew up loving as kids, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy. We love just how vibrant those games are. There’s a lot of games in this world that people make that, I think, are great games, but they’re grim dark, right? You’ve got the gray-and-brown color palette. Which has its place.
Those games are great, but with our game, we really wanted to make sure that when people are playing it, they’ve constantly got something amazing to see, like bright visuals. When people walk by our game, they really notice it, and I feel like it’s truly a cartoon. I think when I look at our game, it tells that story immediately. It’s a cartoon world that you would want to live in, or I do, at least.
What made you decide to go with the wrestling theme? Are you a big pro wrestling fan yourself?
Great question. I grew up watching pro wrestling. I would go to wrestling shows with my mom back home, and I’ve always just been in love with the over-the-top nature. The long-term storytelling really drew me to it.
You could come back week after week, and these characters would evolve together, break up, and have drama. In many ways, it’s like a stage play, a Greek tragedy, or a soap opera.
The main reason I wanted to make this game is that when I played wrestling games on the N64 or PlayStation, they had character creators, and I would go in and make my character. I would spend hours making that character.
I would pour everything into them, almost to the point of being able to roleplay that character. Once I brought them into the ring, all I could do was kind of engage in a fighting game. It was fine, and probably more fun with friends, but it was never that experience of growing my wrestler.
Becoming a champion over time, like having those interpersonal dramas unfold with different characters. So, as a kid, my favorite games were Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy games. Those games had vast worlds and huge casts of characters, with these exact types of gigantic moves or big drama among them. So, I was like, it just makes sense that we mash those things up. That’s how Wrestle Story came to be.
Can you tell us a bit more about the real-time events in combat?
Yeah, for sure. So, one thing that’s really cool about our game is like in Paper Mario. If you’re a fan of Paper Mario, one thing I always loved about Paper Mario is that every single character expressed themselves differently within combat.
In our game, we have characters like Carlo, who is your best friend. He is a rockstar, charismatic character who spends his time hyping up the crowd before his attacks. He’ll jump up to the top rope, and you’ll hold down the A button so you can build up the crowd’s heat. You can see the crowd going nuts. Then, you release the A button at the perfect time, and you get extra damage. That’s mainly the goal of the game: to get the extra boosted damage.
You do your attack and you’re never going to get zero damage typically. We don’t want to punish the player, but we want to reward you if you time it perfectly.
Every new character you get will have a new move set to learn and get the timing down on. We like this idea of mastering new moves as you get them. Rather than just going into a menu and selecting a button. There’s no mastery there. We wanted to give players a bit of mastery so they could practice and get better at it. Then, you’ll find that once you get better at it, once you’ve practiced it a bunch, it becomes second nature. Almost like in a fighting game or in an action game.
What was the decision behind going with the real-time events? You kind of mentioned that a little bit, but are there accessibility options to slow it down for people who may not be able to do the quick reactions?
Absolutely! This was so important to us. We have three tiers of accessibility options for the input commands. We’ve got the default, so they’re just on. Then, we have assisted, or bigger windows for success. It’s not as strenuous or specific. Then we have automatic, which lets you play the game by just picking from a menu.
Some people have dexterity issues. Some people don’t want to engage with those things, but I still want them to enjoy the game. So, we’re meeting all kinds of players, and we’re really open to feedback from folks on what other options would help you as well. It is really important to us.
What is your favorite feature of the game?
Interesting. My favorite feature? Well, I would say the first thing a lot of people notice about the game, and a feature I really like, is the pinning system. It’s a wrestling game, so it’s not about beating someone up until they die like a normal video game thing or a turn-based thing.
In our game, you need to deplete someone’s stamina in order to pin them. But the cool thing is, you can pin them at any time. So, imagine in Pokémon where you throw a Poké Ball. If the Pokemon has full health, there’s a small chance you’ll catch them. If you do, great, but if you don’t, they’ll break out, and they’ll attack you. That’s exactly what our game is with pinning.
If you try to pin someone, technically you could pin a boss at full health and succeed. It could, but it’s a small chance and would be a really fun thing to do. If you don’t, then they’re going to come back, and they’re going to punish you with an extra hard hit right away. They’ll jump to the top of the turn order and really beat you up to punish you for trying to pin them. Which I love.
You’ll also get extra bonus items and XP depending on how much health the enemy has when you pin them. There is a bit of a risk-reward push-and-pull there. You can technically beat an enemy up so bad that they run away scared and never pin them, but you won’t get those XP bonuses from pinning. We really encourage players to take a chance on a pin. Just like you would take a chance on throwing a Poké Ball early.
What have some of the challenges been so far during development?
One major challenge for us right now is that we’re making a 3D game with a big 3D world. Our animations, when people see them, are “Whoa! Those are really cool animations.” And they are because we spend a lot of time on them. We really care about our animations.
Our team is super passionate. I’m super passionate about giving players those really amazing payoffs. We want to make sure that when someone does a power bomb, their big finishing move, it feels like one. In the vein of things like Final Fantasy summons and limit breaks.
To pay that off, we need to spend a lot of time. I think one of our biggest challenges is just the amount of content we need to make. It’s an RPG. We’re an indie studio. Being able to make enough content to satisfy what we want out of the game, which is really meaty. You’ll get 10 to 15 plus hours of experience. That’s been the biggest challenge.
How much does your gear affect your character’s stats and abilities?
There are several different things external to the character’s level. As your character levels up, they get stronger stats naturally. Everyone has their own natural leveling curves. Your character will also earn moves and stuff as they level up.
Then, you’ve got a gear system with five different gear slots: head, body, feet, and two accessory slots. All of that gear will affect not only your stats, but will also give you little perks and boosts as you go. Like being resistant to certain types of attacks would be a really basic one.
Then you have another system: our training points or perk system. Every time you level up, you get a training point. You can allocate it to a skill on the skill tree, and that’s where your character really changes.
For example, one of the base skills allows your character to get follow-up attacks. So, when you attack someone and you succeed at it, there’s a chance that you’ll do a follow-up attack. You can just chain a bunch of attacks together. That’s with the main character.
Finally, the bond system. As you wrestle together, you’ll unlock perks and benefits. One example of that would be in pro tag team wrestling: when one member of your attack team is getting pinned, a teammate will often run over and kick the opponent off them.
You can get a perk by working together where your friends will start to do that for you in the ring, which is really cool, very reminiscent of the Persona series.
You can unlock hot tagging, where you can tap a button to spend some of your heat resource to pass the turn to your other teammate. Finally, the biggest thing you get from the bond system is tag team moves. You unlock tag team moves between each of the different members of your team.
Can you tell us more about the tag-team and bonding system in the game and how you addressed lower-level characters falling behind more played characters in XP?
We will have a rubber-banding system for that. Typically, when you fight higher-level enemies, you’ll get more XP by defeating them. You can quickly catch people up naturally. It’ll be the same thing with the bond points.
As you work together in the ring, you’ll also earn bond points with the people you’re working with, which will then increase as they’re fighting higher-level enemies. You can also earn bond points through certain conversations, but the way we adjust for that is literally by doing it through combat.
What is one thing that you are really looking forward to people experiencing when they play the game for the first time here at PAX?
For wrestling fans, there are a lot of really great references that aren’t pandering. We are truly wrestling fans. When you play our game, you will see characters talking like wrestlers. Saying things that are true to wrestling. Seeing moves that are very true to wrestling. They’re named correctly. To what you would expect in wrestling. I love when people are really charmed by all the wrestling nods they see in our game.
Then, when people really see it. When people see the finishers and the animations that we have the big payoffs for. The work that they’ve done in beating up these characters in the ring. That’s my favorite thing because everyone’s always charmed by the first big move they see, and then by the big tag team moves at the end of the demo.
Lastly, when can we expect the Wrestle Story Kickstarter?
Our Kickstarter is currently in pre-release. You can search Wrestle Story on Kickstarter. You can go to our pre-release page and follow us if you’re interested in the game and think it looks cool. We’ll send you emails as the Kickstarter goes live.
We’re going to put up the demo on Steam so you guys can play it and decide if you really want to back it. We’ve got a really hefty demo, and we want people to see it. Once that Kickstarter goes live, we’re gonna send that out to everybody so they can play it. That should be within the next couple of months, but right now we’re in the pre-release phase. We’re just trying to get eyes on it. Get as many people as possible to follow us for a successful campaign.
Final Thoughts – This game is called Wrestle Story, but it’s very heavy on the word story. Some people aren’t wrestling fans, so they don’t know whether they’ll like this game.
My answer to them is that this is a game about characters who are wrestlers, not a game about wrestling. The world is wrestling-themed, and the characters wrestle, but at the end of the day, they are human beings in this world.
I think that anyone would understand the drama and would be interested in the game. The wrestling theme is just a massive bonus for the folks that love wrestling. It’s going to be true to wrestling, but anyone can get into this game. I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ve convinced people who are not wrestling fans to play it, and they love it.
Well, that concludes our first interview of this PAX West 10 Turns Interview Series. Thank you for sticking around with us, and I hope you come back for the next one.
You can definitely count me in as one of those people who isn’t the biggest pro wrestling fan, but I still loved everything about this game. I am definitely looking forward to playing it more in the future. You can check out the Wrestle Story Steam page for more info on the game. Don’t be afraid to check out their Kickstarter page if you want to show the developers even more love.
