Article by: William Abner

I recently had a chance to chat with Alexandre Avenard, Producer at Brain Candy about the company's upcoming turn based tactical strategy game Fray, how Brain Candy was formed and how Frozen Synapse's success has affected Fray's development.

When we began the development on Fray, simultaneous turn-based was something very new to us as a game design choice, and researching the genre showed that very few games using this mechanic had been developed. Playing with our prototype, we knew we were onto something very fun, that could really please players, but we had no idea of how this type of game would be received. When Mode7 released their game, it was a relief, Frozen Synapse proved that players were still interested in turn based combat, and more importantly to us, the simultaneous aspect has been receiving very high praise. Frozen Synapse has proven that gamers are hungry for new gameplay, and it has definitely boosted our confidence in our game design choices.

David (lead game designer), Robert (technical director) and myself have known each other since high school, over 12 years ago, and we had been discussing making games together since then, but never really acted on it, and we all went to do our own thing for a while. A couple of years ago, I left Ubisoft and contacted them saying “now is the time, we're still young, energetic, let's do this!” We wanted to set up an indie company that would create games with original gameplay, which would be generally discarded by the mainstream industry. We had faith in our competence and we had the first ideas for Fray, so we decided to give it a shot.

We started working on a prototype, a business plan and sought out some investors. We met with Jean Jacques (our CEO), who believed in us and allowed us to set up the indie company we envisioned. Today, Brain Candy is 10 men and women strong and we are mighty proud of our team, as we all pour our heart and soul into Fray.

When designing Fray, the simultaneous turns solution was brought up, as you suggested, as a way to speed up the matches. But as we dug deeper and deeper, we realized that this design changed the way we played a turn based game. There is much more stress and stimulation when all the players act at the same time. You don't just react to your opponents’ decisions like in traditional turn based gameplay; you must anticipate them and even misdirect them. You have to put yourself in your enemy's shoes and analyze what course of action they might take.

The other great benefit of simultaneous turns is that it allows for some great action scenes! With “you go I go” design, your characters will just move to a static enemy and hit them, which is not very dynamic. With our system, you will be shooting at moving enemies, running to cover while an enemy detonates a mine next to you and witnessing scenes closer to what you would expect in an FPS or an action title, rather than in a turn based game.