BRAVERY NETWORK ONLINE

Indie Game Spotlight: Bravery Network Online

Think you got what it takes? This week’s Indie Game Spotlight, Bravery Network Online @braverynetworkonline, is a game in which you coach a team of fighters to victory in the future sport of Bravery. Winning a game of Bravery means making your foes give up by either beating them up, being really nice to them, or blowing them up with digital magic. Ka-boom.

We got the chance to speak with Damian Sommer (writer, lead designer, backup programmer, and handler of most of the boring stuff) and Min-Taylor Bai-Woo (creative director, art director, lead programmer, keeper of the wheels in motion) about the post-apocalyptic game. Ready to go? Let’s do this!

You said something about digital magic earlier?

Yeah. The game takes place several thousands of years into the future, and technology has evolved to the point in which it’s indistinguishable from magic. The main technology the characters use, Fire, is a kind of advanced internet, which is always present and affects all your senses. There are weird glitches folks can exploit to hurt others, which is usually frowned upon, but in a Bravery match it’s anything goes. There’s lots of implications of an always-on, augmented reality internet, and something we like to play around with in developing the game’s world.

What are some major influences to the game?

The biggest influence, and something a lot of folks picked up on when we released our first trailer was Pokémon. We really like Pokémon’s battle systems, and wanted to have an alternative take on the genre. Other games have tried to riff off of Pokémon’s “catch em’ all” formula and stick pretty close to it. Our main goal is to, instead, take Pokémon’s battle system and run with it in a completely different direction.

Our other big game influences are Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Android: Netrunner, Ragnarok Online, and the unofficial battle sim Pokémon Showdown, which we love and still play from time to time in the office.

Funnily enough, another influence on the game is actually our very own character artist Guillaume Singelin (@blackyjunkgallery), who’s done a whole bunch of amazing character art. Min actually has a copy of his book Junky in her desk that she uses for inspiration here and there.

We pull inspiration from all over the place though, with shows like Mob Psycho 100 and Avatar: The Last Airbender, to books like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, to just our experiences with friends and family. We’re putting a lot of ourselves and our influences into this game, and hopefully, people are into that!

Bravery Network Online is described as taking place in a post-post-apocalyptic world. What does that mean?

This is our shorthand for “things were really bad, but they’re sorta fixed now.” Lots of pretty nasty stuff happened in the game world’s past (environmental collapse, nuclear war, meteor impacts, and more!) to get the world to the point that it is in BNO, but people are largely in a stable environment, and lots of those problems have been solved or at least mitigated.

When coming up with lore for the game, we didn’t want to play off of the super common tropes in games, like the gritty cyberpunk dystopia, the generic fantasy setting, or the typical post-apocalyptic wasteland. Something we wanted to explore was what a utopia in games would look like, and how that would operate. Pretty quickly, in needing to create some sort of conflict for players to solve, that utopic vision cracked, which created what we like to call a questionable utopia. The game’s world is in some ways better than our own, or at least easier to live in, but it’s certainly not objectively nicer. There’s a reason that in our first trailer and all our screenshots feature snow outside the window.

How does the game allow you to connect with others online?

While Bravery Network Online will have a decent-sized single-player component, a good chunk of the content we’re working on is dedicated to building up your teams for Bravery matches versus other players. There’ll be ranks and matchmaking and all that standard stuff, but we’re also adding in a few twists to really make it our own.

One kind of weird thing we’re doing is adding in something we call the “Rival System.” It allows you to mark different players you play against as rivals—basically strangers whose progress you follow, see when they’re online, and easily challenge them. If you win against a rival, once a day, you get little goodies. The longer you’re a rival with someone, the bigger the goodies. Hopefully, this gets this friendly competition going on where you’re like “Oh yeah! Gerald94 is online! Hope they’re up for a fight, because I think I’ve finally figured them out.”

We’re currently working on a few little systems like that, but they all need a bunch of testing, as is the nature of online games! Above is just a taste of what to expect.

Where can we purchase the game? What platforms is it available on?

It’s not out yet! We’re working hard to get it out late 2019 for PC and Mac. If you want to be sure you don’t miss it, you can wishlist it on Steam!