Grifford Academy Interview

Singapore-based LandShark Games’s Grifford Academy is a turn-based coming-of-age RPG which sees friends Erika, Viva, and Cap fall into the world of Caldria through a mystical book. RPGamer was given the opportunity to talk to developers Kim Naylor and Paul Naylor about the studio, the game’s creation, and what awaits players in its world of Caldria when the game releases for PC on Steam Early Access later this year. Responses have been slightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

Alex Fuller (RPGamer): Can you give an overview of the team at LandShark Games, your history, and choice to create an RPG?

Kim Naylor (LandShark Games): We’re a small team, we have about five full time staff and a few more who are outsourced writers. In a way, this has dictated the pace of the development of the game, which has been in development for about five years. It’s a passion project. We’ve been in business for about fifteen years now; our first game was Aviator, which was a strategy trading game on Facebook that is now defunct, which gained quite a big fan following. Then Zen Koi is our foray in the mobile space, which is kind of a relaxing game with no dialogue about collecting koi, the twist being that the koi can ascend into dragons based on the Asian myth about perseverance. After that, we thought our next game and wanted to go back to an Aviator-esque narrative-driven game and our storyteller roots, deciding that Grifford Academy is the kind of game we’re going to make.

Paul and I have been in the business for a long time and we both love games in general; I think my taste is a little different. Paul is basically the game master of Grifford Academy; I’m art and design/management, and Paul’s role is more developer, tech, and anything he wants to add to that.

Paul Naylor (LandShark Games): Kim touched on our history; she worked at EA, and I worked at Broderbund and Mindscape SSI, so we’ve both done the big company thing, but we’re really passionate game players and developers. A lot of us have played and enjoyed RPGs in our little company, so we did want to at least attempt an RPG, and it turned out to be a pretty massive undertaking for our small team. But the end’s in sight and we’re excited to get people playing it and sharing the experience.

RPGamer: What are the main inspirations and ideas that you are looking to bring into Grifford Academy?

Paul Naylor: I think the original inspiration was that I’ve long been a fan of role-playing games, both tabletop and digital. I’ve played a lot of D&D since I was a kid, and when I became a parent, I wanted to introduce my kids to D&D, but it was a bit complicated when they were in their pre-teens. So I created a simplified game that had a lot of the same feeling but without the complex mechanics. I ran that for my kids and their cousins, creating a world around that. A lot of the initial inspiration for Grifford Academy‘s world of Caldria, including some locations and characters, is from that setting I created.

Kim Naylor: From an art standpoint, our sensibility from being based in Singapore gives us a bit of a crossroads between Asian and western cultures. If you look at Zen Koi, it brings a blend of western and eastern. For the visualisation of Grifford Academy, we wanted a little bit of that sensibility in there too, and I think a lot of our inspiration stems from other JRPGs such as Ni no Kuni and films like the Ghibli films. Of course, we also love things like Gravity Falls and other games from the West so it was a good challenge to find a look that fits us as a studio.

RPGamer: Can you give us an introduction to the realm of Caldria and the roles players will take on within it?

Paul Naylor: Caldria is a fictional world that somehow comes into existence as a realm that the main characters from Grifford can travel to, and they know nothing about the world when they arrive. It wasn’t their choice to go there, so there’s a period of trying to get out of there, but as they spend longer in Caldria and realise there are more of them missing than they initially thought, there’s a process of needing to learn more about the world in order to rescue all of the other students and uncover what actually happened.

The setting is fairly typical fantasy; it’s a medieval-style world with magic based around spirits and artifacts, but it’s less important than the interactions between the characters themselves and how this world affects their situation and relationships. It’s really a character-based narrative; there’s a lot of dialogue and not so much narration.

RPGamer: Can you talk about the general flow of the game; how will players spend their time with it?

Paul Naylor: The two central pillars are the turn-based combat and the story. We’ve given them reasonably equal weight. There’s quite a lot of story to read through and decisions to make in the story, but the combat’s quite strategic, both in terms of tactical decisions made within combat and decisions you make in how you equip your characters. There’s a lot of pro-experimentation aspects, so there’s no penalty for selling items back to the shop and no penalty for respeccing your characters to reallocate points and trying different builds. We really tried to make it an accessible game that allows people to find what works for them. There are a variety of strategies that you can employ based on the items you choose for each of the characters. There’s almost always three characters in the party, taking inspiration from games like Mass Effect, and it allows for some dynamic combinations of abilities, but also some really good character interactions.

Not only do the missions involve combat and the related story; as the story progresses and the characters grow, their interactions yield personality growth traits that are determined by the decisions you make. Those traits lend combat bonuses, so there might be a permanent bump to a particular stat or a status buff at the beginning of combat.

RPGamer: Choice and dialogue flow are set to be important parts of the game; can you describe what sorts of impacts player choices will have in the immediate and long-term?

Paul Naylor: The two main impacts are on personality growth, as we mentioned, but also there are a few decisions that affect how the story progresses. One example is where you find a shop that is manned by a rather unusual shopkeeper, and the decision you make after discovering that determines whether the shop continues to exist or not. I guess you could say it’s a moral choice, but it’s a soft moral choice that allows you a little bit of power over your environment. The other is in chapter three, where you can make a choice about whether you stay to help a character having a bit of a crisis or whether you go off and do a fairly urgent mission for one the NPCs. The decision you make will affect the mission, as you will be down to two characters, but you’ll still come back and deal with the character’s crisis. The choice can affect the story in the moment, but also some of the story going forward.

RPGamer: Were you always planning on using turn-based combat? What drew you to it?

Paul Naylor: I think it really fits nicely with the idea of taking time and enjoying the story. I also love to read, and I know in our busy lives we don’t always get to make time for that. As Kim mentioned, we wanted to get back to our storytelling roots, and we felt like a story-rich game with an action combat system would feel like too much of a change of pace. We didn’t want to rush the characters through the story; we want players to read it, take their time, and understand what’s happening with the characters and then go into an experience that is a similar frame of mind, in that you get to look at the situation and make the best strategic decision at the time. A lot of the times when I’m playing a turn-based game, there are risk-reward decisions about whether to use a resource now — as its the powerful option — or whether it might be needed more later, or whether to take an enemy out knowing a different one will attack next. The fun is in the delicious agony of taking the time and figuring out what is the right move that isn’t going to result in me dying.

RPGamer: Are there any particular things you’ve looked to focus on in the combat?

Paul Naylor: Being a fantasy buff, I did want some sort of magic in there, but seeing as these characters don’t really belong in this world, it felt weird to give them magical powers. So we have this background of a magical force in the world that imbues objects with abilities they can release. Items are where a lot of their powers come from, so in combat there are items that can buff attacks, debuff enemy defences, as well as slowing enemies or putting them to sleep, which in turn makes players need to be careful about area-of-effect attacks to not wake them back up. You can stack layers of debuffs on enemies, but they can have effects that can clear those. There’s a lot of symmetry in the abilities enemies and players get.

Kim Naylor: At least from my play style, it feels like the game has more of that passive/defensive style of play. With a lot of turn-based games, especially nowadays, there are a lot of offensive quick attacks, but this game is interesting for me because there’s a lot of play from the defensiveness from it. Sure, you’ve got weapons that could attack, but there are a lot more items where it’s more interesting to me as a player where you play more of a defensive role in combat. It’s not as common, but to me, it lends itself for a bit more comfortable play where you can go, “if you attack me, you get punched in the face”. It’s a slightly different style of play.

Paul Naylor: One of the things that Kim’s referring to is the ability to retaliate or deflect, which will trigger when an enemy attacks one of your characters. Even a weapon that does a lot of damage on its own isn’t going to be a very effective tool at taking down an enemy lineup. You need to have stacks and effects on there for the weapon to have the most impact, and you also want to debilitate the enemy as much as possible in terms of their ability to extract health from your characters. It’s an interesting mix of things and allows for different strategies to emerge. Getting back to the experimentation, as you and the enemies level up, older items will become slowly less effective, so there’s a push for you to switch out items you might know and to try different things when you buy new items.

RPGamer: Will players be able to select different difficulty levels?

Paul Naylor: We have two. To try and be as accessible as possible, we take a lot of time and effort to teach people how the different effects work, but we have a story mode and a strategy mode. Story mode has all of the same fights, it’s just that they’re set at an easier level so you don’t have to understand all of the finer points and are pretty forgiving. Whereas the strategy setting is a little more rigorous in that if you let your gear get too old or you haven’t developed any strategy, you’re going to have a tough time. All of the battles should be winnable in a variety of ways. There’s no right answer that you have to chance upon, but you have to be a bit more on your game.

RPGamer: Can you talk a bit more about your release plans and what you plan to get out of the Early Access period?

Paul Naylor: The game is story-complete and feature-complete in term of the core features. There are some more experimental features that we’ve toyed with and will be selectively reviewing to try out during Early Access. Having an audience allows us to test out these ideas and to see if they are a good fit for the game. Even before we get to Early Access, we’re currently in closed beta and doing a lot of microrevisions based on feedback, with a lot of great ideas coming out of the closed beta testers that we are considering adding to the game.

RPGamer: Are you planning to release on additional platforms after the PC release?

Paul Naylor: I think even for mobile, it depends largely on how the PC launch goes. We want to launch on Steam and perfect it there through Early Access to make sure we’re hitting a very positive experience. Money would be nice, but it’s more important to me that we make a great game than sell a lot of copies on Steam. Once we’ve made a great game and people are really enjoying it, then we can look at other platforms, other languages, and things like voice acting and new content. The game’s built to be highly extensible, so that’s something we’d love to have the opportunity to do, but it really needs to be well received.

Kim Naylor: We did play the game on Steam Deck and it’s playable on there. It plays really well on Steam Deck, so that’ll be an easy Early Access to 1.0 step to bring it to Steam Deck. But with its format, bringing it to Switch or other consoles is something we’d love to look into.

RPGamer: Are you happy with how the response to the game has been during closed beta?

Paul Naylor: I think I am; it’s always tough because you put out this thing that you’ve been working on for so long, and then along come these hyperfocused players who can be immediately critical about so many aspects of the game. But if you see beyond that, you realise there’s a ton of great feedback in there. Some of the things we knew about and are in the process of addressing, but there are other really good ideas coming out that that we’re really excited about adding.

RPGamer: How long is the game?

Paul Naylor: I wouldn’t categorise it as a long game. To play through most, if not all, of the side quests is looking around fifteen hours. We were aiming for ten but overshot it a bit because we had a lot that we wanted to resolve and tie up, so the final chapter ended up being rather meaty.

Accessibility is a big thing for us in terms of making it open to people who may not have played RPGs before. They’re such a great way of telling a story in being interactive and immersing you in the world. If it’s a gateway RPG then that’s great. It’s a short game, so it’s not too onerous to play, not like the 300+ hours I’ve put into Baldur’s Gate III! With Zen Koi, we reached so many players because it’s super accessible, so we hope that some of the spirit of that can carry over.

RPGamer: Are there any aspects that you’re particularly proud of or surprised you with how they’ve come together or resonated?

Paul Naylor: I really love the look of the game and the characters. It’s a combination of the way the characters are presented and the way the writers have nurtured their personalities. We’ve got a couple of writers based in LA and they’ve been helping build our story out and develop the characters. It’s been really exciting seeing those characters’ story arcs develop through the five chapters of the game.

Kim Naylor: For myself, I’m really proud of the team for coming through. We’ve come from a 2D background; we moved slightly into 3D with Zen Koi a little bit in the end, but this is a full 3D game for us. To take on a 3D game with the assets, programming, shaders, and everything it multiplies. Even though it was a decision quite a while back, you can see it serves us well because of the way the characters look at each other and emote a little bit. Even though it was tough for us to get there, it gives life to the characters.

It’s something that we have achieved at our own pace in our own time. It’s a very easy-to-play game. We wanted that kind of cosiness and calmness to it, so I think the tone so far is what we set out to do and we’re really proud of. It’s been emotional for us, all of the work that we put into technical things and details, we wonder if that was useful.

Paul Naylor: I’m kind of proud of that too. One of the things that we always wanted to do in terms of storytelling is not just tell the story with words, but also have the characters’ emotions and the way they look at the other characters all come across on screen. We’ve always had this idea, built in at the core of the game, of a stage. Though we move the camera around a little bit, it’s within the audience view of the characters. You can pretty much always see their faces, expressions, and who they’re looking at when they deliver their lines, and I think that helps give it a more stage-style presentation.

Kim Naylor: I think another part of that equation is the script tool that we developed. It’s inspired by Inkle, which we used at the start, but then we created this scripting tool that lets us put any characters on stage and then streamline everything.

RPGamer would like to extend our thanks to Kim Naylor and Paul Naylor for taking the time to answer our questions. Grifford Academy will be available on Steam Early Access later this year.