Information Book on the Making of Jagged Alliance 2 Published, Excerpt Available

[Crooked Bee]

Tags: Chris Camfield; Darius Kazemi; Ian Currie; Jagged Alliance 2; SirTech

SirTech's strategy-meets-RPG Jagged Alliance 2 gets a lot of love here on the Codex, so some of you may be interested to know that one Darius Kazemi has just published a short book about how the game came to be ($14.95 paperback, $4.95 ebook).

The turn-based tactical role playing series Jagged Alliance has been sequeled, expanded, modded, optioned, multiplayered, and kickstarted, but the series’ many fans usually point to Jagged Alliance 2 as the high water mark, and one of the finest turn-based video games of all time.

Jagged Alliance 2 brings to the table a wicked sense of humor, simulation-driven character design, a combination of strategic overworld and tactical battles reminiscent of the X-COM series, and a surprisingly deep open-world RPG experience reminiscent of the Ultima or Elder Scrolls games.

Focusing on JA2′s development history and basing his book largely on new personal interviews with the game’s developers, game designer and web technology developer Darius Kazemi delves deep into the legacy of a game that still has much to teach gamers and game-makers 14 years after its release.​

There's also a fairly lengthy excerpt available online, from which I'll only quote a short part here, having to do with Ian Currie's lack of RPG experience as contrasted with the game's programmer Chris Camfield's love for PnP RPGs and how that influenced JA2's gun design:

Ian Currie, Co-Designer: "For some reason, and I don’t know why, I sort of latched on to a more military type of situation. I didn’t think of the fantasy thing where you can have magic and the various classes. I think that was my lack of experience, to be honest. I hadn’t played that many RPGs. I’d only played Eye of the Beholder at this time. But I remember thinking, you’ll have grenades for your spells, and you’ll have ranged [attacks], and some melee stuff."

After JA1 was released, the team realized very quickly that the game they had built appealed to a core audience of gun enthusiasts and self-styled survivalists. In the development of JA2, they tried to appeal to this audience by populating the world with a massive roster of “realistically” modeled guns. Programmer Chris Camfield was in charge of implementing the tactical layer battle mechanics. A lifelong player of pencil-and-paper role-playing games as well as strategy board games, Camfield instinctively turned to RPG sourcebooks (tomes of information compiled to assist role players in creating more vibrant worlds) for more detail, taking advantage of the meticulous research published by other designers.

Chris Camfield. Programmer (JA2): "There was a difference between the fan culture and the developer culture. When Shaun and Ian and Alex made JA1, they didn't know a lot about guns. That said, neither did I—just some things I'd read in books. I remember looking at the JA1 code and the way that the gun damage was defined was your basic gun did 10 damage, the next gun did 12, then 14, 16, 18, 20 and so on. [...] Ian and Shaun were really approaching it more from the point of view of trying to translate the experience of an 80s action movie into computer game format.

I used a couple of pen-and-paper RPG books about different guns to make it more realistic: Palladium Books’ The Compendium of Contemporary Weapons [by Maryann Siembieda], and the other one was from R. Talsorian games, called Compendium of Modern Firearms [by Kevin Dockery]. Now that I think about it, there may have been numbers in there that listed rate of fire, cartridge type, and bullet grams. I think I tried initially to estimate the damage value of a gun based on the listed muzzle velocity of the gun and the weight of the bullet. [Compendium of Modern Firearms] also has all these different ranges of probabilities of hitting a target of a certain size or how wide the spread would be for bullets for a particular gun. That probably got factored into accuracy values. But those numbers still had to go through kind of a pass to make the progression better."​

The excerpt as a whole "focuses on the curious relationship between semi-fictional mercenary culture, 'macho adventure' magazine Soldier of Fortune, and gun-toting video games." Read it in full here.

 

[Amasius]

"We’d get mail from people saying, “Oh man, I loved your game,” and there’d be a photo of the guy’s computer with a .45 caliber handgun leaning up against the keyboard. We realized that we had all these gun enthusiasts who loved our game, which was so ironic because none of us had ever even touched a gun!"

 

[MurkyShadow]

I really like the tone of the excerpts. The book could be an interesting read. Although, with the unhealthy
amounts of replaying JA1 and JA2, I don't know if reading a book about it won't trigger that
old addiction again. I think I've made my first six months without at least installing and
fiddling with 1.13 patch.

 

[felipepepe]

I bought the Chrono Trigger book of this series out of curiosity, and found it horribly disappointing.

First, I'm obviously biased on books on games (as I'm working on my own), but I have a strong conviction that they are a audio-visual media, and a book about a game without a single picture is IMHO obviously lacking. Not a single image, concept art or even illustration to the characters being mentioned sucks. I have a good memory, but I had to google some things the book mentioned about, just to recall it and understand his point, as he never even bothers to introduce characters and locations.

Second, I expected deep analysis about the game and its mechanics, together with facts about its creation, dev interviews and so forth... but the book is really just a gonzo rant, with a lot of the already few pages (that have a fucking HUGE font) wasted on the author rambling about the nature of life, gaming as a metaphor, college-level "Journey of the Hero" analysis and A LOT of nonsense philosophy of the "deep meaning of the game".

The only interesting info the entire book contains are interviews with both the game's translator (SNES and DS version), that are the highlight of the book. The rest is mostly childhood memories, dreams and feelings of the author while thinking about the game... Perhaps the worst offender is that the longest chapter of the book (there are only 10) is entirely about race & sex representation, with excerpts such as:

Playing through the DS version of Chrono Trigger, I counted 425 human characters Of these, only 154 (35%) are female, while a whopping 266 (61%) are male—and for those of you counting along, the missing five are children from prehistory and from 2300 AD, whose gender is up for debate. Examining these numbers across the major eras during gameplay, prehistory is the most gender-balanced society, with 1.6 men for every woman.

He goes on and on to debate why he excluded monsters, saying that defining a monster gender is complicated, tells how he felt like minority for the first time when visiting Japan, etc... it's like "Roguey does Chrono Trigger", but managing to be even more autistic.

I honestly thought it was a shitty read, waste of my money. The average PRIMA game guide is 10x more interesting and full of insights. I weep to think that I payed almost the same as I payed for the Mother 3 Handbook. I won't even mention the freely-available Fallout Bible.

As a disclaimer, each book is written by a different author, so the Jagged Alliance book may be completely different... but I was really disappointed that the guys behind the whole project felt that the Chrono Trigger book was worthy. It felt more like a collection of rants and reused blog posts about the game than a actual book.

 

[Bubbles]

The only good "making of" book ever made will be The Making of Grimoire. This is just boring fluff.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

I bought the Chrono Trigger book of this series out of curiosity, and found it horribly disappointing.

First, I'm obviously biased on books on games (as I'm working on my own), but I have a strong conviction that they are a audio-visual media, and a book about a game without a single picture is IMHO obviously lacking. Not a single image, concept art or even illustration to the characters being mentioned sucks. I have a good memory, but I had to google some things the book mentioned about, just to recall it and understand his point, as he never even bothers to introduce characters and locations.

Second, I expected deep analysis about the game and its mechanics, together with facts about its creation, dev interviews and so forth... but the book is really just a gonzo rant, with a lot of the already few pages (that have a fucking HUGE font) wasted on the author rambling about the nature of life, gaming as a metaphor, college-level "Journey of the Hero" analysis and A LOT of nonsense philosophy of the "deep meaning of the game".

The only interesting info the entire book contains are interviews with both the game's translator (SNES and DS version), that are the highlight of the book. The rest is mostly childhood memories, dreams and feelings of the author while thinking about the game... Perhaps the worst offender is that the longest chapter of the book (there are only 10) is entirely about race & sex representation, with excerpts such as:

Playing through the DS version of Chrono Trigger, I counted 425 human characters Of these, only 154 (35%) are female, while a whopping 266 (61%) are male—and for those of you counting along, the missing five are children from prehistory and from 2300 AD, whose gender is up for debate. Examining these numbers across the major eras during gameplay, prehistory is the most gender-balanced society, with 1.6 men for every woman.

He goes on and on to debate why he excluded monsters, saying that defining a monster gender is complicated, tells how he felt like minority for the first time when visiting Japan, etc... it's like "Roguey does Chrono Trigger", but managing to be even more autistic.

I honestly thought it was a shitty read, waste of my money. The average PRIMA game guide is 10x more interesting and full of insights. I weep to think that I payed almost the same as I payed for the Mother 3 Handbook. I won't even mention the freely-available Fallout Bible.

As a disclaimer, each book is written by a different author, so the Jagged Alliance book may be completely different... but I was really disappointed that the guys behind the whole project felt that the Chrono Trigger book was worthy. It felt more like a collection of rants and reused blog posts about the game than a actual book.

Unless these making of guys can speak japanese, a making of chrono trigger book was doomed from the word go

 

[Roguey]

Roguey does Chrono Trigger for real: I enjoyed it when I was young, I probably wouldn't like it at all now. I wonder if that guy counted Flea as male.

Not surprised JA contains plenty cult of cargo, it definitely shows.

 

[felipepepe]

I wonder if that guy counted Flea as male.

You don't get the level we are speaking about here... he doesn't simply mention Flea, there are TWO AND A HALF FUCKING PAGES about he/she/it:

Spoiler

Although a minor character and a boss as annoying as his bloodsucking namesake, Magus’s general Flea is the most overt representation of alternate sexual identity in Chrono Trigger. Although Flea looks female, he identifies as male. Nevertheless, Flea is keenly aware of his ambiguous sexuality and his queer anthem is potent—“Male or female, what difference does it make? Power is beautiful, and I’ve got the power.”

As a boss, Flea flits about the battle screen dramatically under his billowing cape, stopping sometimes to laugh exaggeratedly, to strike a pose, or to emit a little pink anime heart. Besides voguing, Flea uses hands-off status-affecting attacks—one blows a kiss. Much as his alternate take on gender roles baffles the party, Flea can literally confuse our characters during battle, causing them to attack each other. Just as with a few of Ayla’s techs, heart symbols are embedded in some of Flea’s attack names. And if Ayla uses her Charm ability on Flea later on in the game, she can steal the Flea Vest, an item more accurately translated in the DS version as the “Flea Bustier.” Yup, he’s wearing a bra. And if you find this item in Chrono Cross, only male characters can equip it.

BradyGames’s strategy guide for Chrono Trigger insists on appending a half-assed interrobang each and every time the masculine pronoun is used in reference to Flea: “[H]it him(!?) with your best magic and away he(!?) goes.” On the Japanese side, the guide Chrono Trigger: the Complete warns the reader: “You must not be fooled by appearances. It’s actually a man!” The more recent Japanese guide Chrono Trigger: Ultimania describes Flea as “on first sight a beautiful female human, but is a respected Mystic man.” In the Japanese version of the game, Flea uses the personal pronoun atai, a colloquial feminine pronoun that strongly contrasts with Frog’s rough masculine pronoun ore—in Japanese, by the way, there are at least a dozen ways to say “I,” depending on one’s gender, age, situation, or preference. Atai is not an everyday pronoun either. It is a variant of the pronoun atashi, a term I often heard used performatively by gay men. While Flea may be a man playing at womanhood, he is not exactly an authentic representation of transgender identity or even of drag performance.

Flea might be much better described as an okama, but even this term is fraught. Okama is not always a derogatory word for gay men, but it’s not flattering either. It’s innocuous enough, however, to appear in strategy guide Chrono Trigger: the Perfect—who names these things, anyway?—which tells the player that Flea will “berate you using okama language.” Well, that’s pretty direct. Okama can mean anything from a careless synonym for “gay,” to a man in women’s clothing exhibiting stereotypically effeminate mannerisms. Often these two concepts are conflated, and as sociologist James Valentine puts it, “n media portrayals okama look like fakes, trying to be women but noticeably failing.” Indeed, that spectacular failure might explain why these okama characters are often featured on comedy shows on Japanese television. Flea, on the other hand, succeeds extremely well at “passing” for female.

While Flea is largely an inconsequential character, his attack strategy reflects some real-world truths about nontraditional genderings. Some people turn a blind eye to them, while others become confused and enraged. The biggest threat to our well-being doesn’t come from people like Flea, but rather from our reactions to them.

Jokes aside, this is probably the most in-depth he goes about ANY character, with the possible exception of Frog. Magus and Lavos have less book-time.

And yes, that little text, smaller than the average post on the PoE/W2 threads, is equivalent to 2.5 pages of the book. It's like 2% of the entire book. Seriously, the Xulima preview I did with Bee is probably longer and more in-depth than this book.

 

[CyberP]

I bought the Chrono Trigger book of this series out of curiosity, and found it horribly disappointing.

First, I'm obviously biased on books on games (as I'm working on my own), but I have a strong conviction that they are a audio-visual media, and a book about a game without a single picture is IMHO obviously lacking. Not a single image, concept art or even illustration to the characters being mentioned sucks. I have a good memory, but I had to google some things the book mentioned about, just to recall it and understand his point, as he never even bothers to introduce characters and locations.

Second, I expected deep analysis about the game and its mechanics, together with facts about its creation, dev interviews and so forth... but the book is really just a gonzo rant, with a lot of the already few pages (that have a fucking HUGE font) wasted on the author rambling about the nature of life, gaming as a metaphor, college-level "Journey of the Hero" analysis and A LOT of nonsense philosophy of the "deep meaning of the game".

The only interesting info the entire book contains are interviews with both the game's translator (SNES and DS version), that are the highlight of the book. The rest is mostly childhood memories, dreams and feelings of the author while thinking about the game... Perhaps the worst offender is that the longest chapter of the book (there are only 10) is entirely about race & sex representation, with excerpts such as:

Playing through the DS version of Chrono Trigger, I counted 425 human characters Of these, only 154 (35%) are female, while a whopping 266 (61%) are male—and for those of you counting along, the missing five are children from prehistory and from 2300 AD, whose gender is up for debate. Examining these numbers across the major eras during gameplay, prehistory is the most gender-balanced society, with 1.6 men for every woman.

He goes on and on to debate why he excluded monsters, saying that defining a monster gender is complicated, tells how he felt like minority for the first time when visiting Japan, etc... it's like "Roguey does Chrono Trigger", but managing to be even more autistic.

I honestly thought it was a shitty read, waste of my money. The average PRIMA game guide is 10x more interesting and full of insights. I weep to think that I payed almost the same as I payed for the Mother 3 Handbook. I won't even mention the freely-available Fallout Bible.

As a disclaimer, each book is written by a different author, so the Jagged Alliance book may be completely different... but I was really disappointed that the guys behind the whole project felt that the Chrono Trigger book was worthy. It felt more like a collection of rants and reused blog posts about the game than a actual book.

Some people should just stay the fuck away from games.

That said, I played CT in 2011 and found it to be rather disappointing. The story was great, music exceptional, art design charming...but the gameplay, well this is a JRPG on the SNES we are talking about, but it's cousin Final Fantasy 6 featured far better gameplay in addition to what CT had, so I think CT is more than a little overrated.

 

[Bubbles]

but it's cousin Final Fantasy 6 featured far better gameplay in addition to what CT had, so I think CT is more than a little overrated.

That's like saying Mask of the Betrayer is overrated because PS:T has better writing.

 

[felipepepe]

I disagree. CT is my favorite 16-bit RPG, the gameplay is solid. Stuff like enemies that you can see & evade, combo attacks, time-traveling to solve quests, the little bits of C&C, the multiple endings, the secret weapons... FF6 has a better story, but Chrono is IMHO the better game.

 

[Roguey]

FF6 had several mechanics that deliberately encouraged grinding which makes it ftl.

Also lol http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Evade_Bug

 

[Bubbles]

Also lol http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Evade_Bug

Long since patched out.

 

[Roguey]

Long since patched out.

This info certainly doesn't help 90s Roguey who played a console game that couldn't be patched.

 

[Bubbles]

Long since patched out.

This info certainly doesn't help 90s Roguey who played a console game that couldn't be patched.

PC master race.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Looks great. I'll buy it when I'll have money.

 

[CyberP]

I disagree. CT is my favorite 16-bit RPG, the gameplay is solid. Stuff like enemies that you can see & evade, combo attacks, time-traveling to solve quests, the little bits of C&C, the multiple endings, the secret weapons... FF6 has a better story, but Chrono is IMHO the better game.

The gameplay was incredibly linear in RPG systems/progression & level & overworld design. I wanted to bang my head on a wall because the only influence I had on the strength and tactics of my party was how much I grinded, which of course was not at all.

That's like saying Mask of the Betrayer is overrated because PS:T has better writing.

No it's not. PS:T doesn't do gameplay. I'm saying of these two somewhat similar JRPGs that do a lot right, one of them is better because it had more far enjoyable gameplay in addition to everything else that the other did. I feel it offers a higher degree of entertainment value and the other is overrated in comparison. I was very disappointed after all the hype the internet gives it. There was C&C in the story, but not in the gameplay. The gameplay was mindless. Why even have RPG systems when the player has no influence over them whatsoever? It may as well have been a point and click adventure game focused solely on story, oh, with the occasional silly mini games it featured that I suppose at least mixed things up a bit.

 

[felipepepe]

The gameplay was incredibly linear in RPG systems/progression & level & overworld design. I wanted to bang my head on a wall because the only influence I had on the strength and tactics of my party was how much I grinded, which of course was not at all.

True, the character/item progression is linear, but party composition gave you some very interesting choices. It's even one of the rare JRPGs where you can ditch the main character.

And calling the gameplay mindless is bullshit. Some battles are very challenging, especially depending on your party composition or the order you're doing them.

 

[CyberP]

There's TTRPG-inspired rules but you don't interact with them in any way...aside from equipment, a system which is also lacking and given to you in a very linear manner also.

 

[CyberP]

Some battles are very challenging.

Just choosing the correct sequence of commands, adjusting based on the AI randomly generated attack sequences. Something that is very difficult to screw up due to the simplicity of the commands, lack of commands and even the lack of trash options.

 

[felipepepe]

Just choosing the correct sequence of commands, adjusting based on the AI randomly generated attack sequences. Something that is very difficult to screw up due to the simplicity of the commands, lack of commands and even the lack of trash options.

One could easily translate this to "I DON'T LIKE JRPGS!", but you defended FF6 ITT, so I have no idea of what drugs you're on.

If anything, CT's combat system has more depth than most 16-bit JRPGs, since you can combine character's abilities for stronger attacks & effects, but need to sync their turns and do only one action instead of 2 or 3.

 

[CyberP]

One could easily translate this to "I DON'T LIKE JRPGS!", but you defended FF6 ITT, so I have no idea of what drugs you're on..

I haven't played as many JRPGs as I have Western, but I know 90's era FF, Vagrant Story, Castlevania: SOTN, Dark Souls and some others have interactive & complex enough TTRPG systems similar to western RPGs that allow for strategy, C&C and more involving gameplay. Fantastic stuff and worthy of halls of fame. So no drugs, I just don't like RPGs that may as well cut the BS mindless battles and be point & click games instead.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Another Jagged Alliance thread spoiled by nerds raving over Final Fantasy.

 

[CyberP]

Jagged Alliance & Final Fantasy Tactics: which is better and why?

 

[Morkar Left]

Another Jagged Alliance thread spoiled by nerds raving over Final Fantasy.

Yeah, I can't believe it. I expected a 12 pages thread about the book by today considering it's about JA2. Instead it's about Jrpgs



Anyway, I'm not a die-hard-fan of JA2 but definitely a fan of it and I bought the book since it's 5$ and I thought, yeah why not. Still waiting for the download link... Will tell you guys if it's a scam or bad...


EDIT:
Downloaded. It's 126 pages, 1 page around 226 words, no table of contents.
Just overflew some sections; writing is ok what I saw. Felipepe is right about the pictures; I instantly missed them. Seriously, even if it isn't needed, at least some pics would be good when you talk about a visible medium.
I guess I won't regret buying the book.

Table of Content:
Foreword -- 4 pages
Inroduction -- 1-5
History of Sirtech -- 7-15
The Genesis of Jagged Alliance -- 17-33
Making Jagged Alliance 2 -- 35-45
Character and Story -- 47-56
Mercenaries, Gun Culture and Realism -- 57-68
The Unseen -- 69-82
The Code -- 83-108 (yes, it's about the actual game code, not code of conduct or something)
Jagged Alliance 2 Release and Beyond -- 109-123
Acknowledgements -- 126-126
Special Thanks
Also from Bossfight books