Tradewinds Legends is a fascinating game that takes gamers to the high-seas. The game features a handful of various characters with comically entertaining missions, and a wide variety of interactive trading, ship building, and finance management. The game has fun themes and an engaging, family-friendly art-style. Creative Director of Sandlot Games, Andrew Megowan, who’s career has spanned the likes of games like No One Lives Forever, and the 2001 RPG known as Anachronix (for which programming began in 1998), gave Game Tunnel some insight into Tradewinds Legends. Check out the Q&A below.


[William Usher] - What prompted the idea to have the game take place in the given era of Tradewinds Legends with Middle and Far East cultures?

[Andrew Megowan] -After having the original game take place in a fictitious Far East, we moved to the more historically accurate Caribbean for “Tradewinds 2�. From there, we decided that it was time for a fictitious world once more, and our fans were very receptive to the idea of delving deeper into adventure and fantasy.

One of the three contenders for a new game was the world of “1,001 Arabian Nights�. Many of us have grown up exposed to American films and European fairytales based on the stories and traditions of these lands, and find them magical and comforting. I went back to these stories and found a natural fit for all the things that made the “Tradewinds� games great; eccentric characters, epic conflicts, fantastical locations, nautical adventures, trade and combat among numerous small empires, and a near endless supply of spells and enchanted items.

At the time that we picked our new world, Sandlot Games entered into an agreement with a talented new studio in India who showed us a portfolio that included a dramatic, colorful, exotic landscape. As soon as we saw that, we knew that we had found the right locale, and the right people to breathe life into it.

The other two possible themes that we considered have not been abandoned, though! We all liked them a great deal, and found new games that give us the opportunity to take you to those other worlds. You will see one of them—the Wild West—very soon!

[William Usher] - Do you visit real life locations based on the fantasy oriented landscapes developed in Sandlot games? Or do you rely on research, media and other mediums to help cultivate the sort of atmosphere you’d like to bring to life in a game?

[Andrew Megowan] - Our teams may hail from distant locales such as India and Russia, and that may have some influence on the art and atmosphere in our games. But it is not our primary resource material. Whenever we embark on a new title, Art Director Israel Evans and I collect a small hoard of relevant games, films, books, websites and other media. Our music department (Dan Bernstein, who is also the CEO) collects a library of sounds and musical samples. We put together an online repository for all of this material for everyone to share and add to.

From this mountain of material we extract common themes and the essences of the environments that we want to create. The ideal fantasy environment is an even mixture of the comfortable familiarity, the exotic, and wishful thinking; look at the worlds of "Harry Potter", "Star Wars", and "The Lord of the Rings" to see this blend done masterfully. We go through the same process while coming up with unique environments and also entertaining gameplay elements and narratives. Our customers will only see the tips of the icebergs, but they will sense the depth behind everything we do, and hopefully look forward to additional forays into our fantasy worlds.

[William Usher] - Where did the original concept for Tradewinds come from? And how did the idea come about to involve sea and port battles, trading, and classic adventuring, combining them all into one game?

[Andrew Megowan] -At one point, during the first few months of the existence of Sandlot Games, I was casting about for new ideas while exploring old, classic games from the 70’s and 80’s. I came across “Tai Pan�, a game that I had first seen as a child, but which I had ignored in favor of more colorful reflex games. But I found that as an adult, the simple gameplay was elegant and engaging, with an addictive quality of quietly challenging the player to do better, play longer.

The game was based upon the amazing novel “Tai Pan� by James Clavell, which I found absolutely inspiring. With two decades of advances in game development technology, I saw that this concept of trading and fighting on the open seas could be made into a much richer experience.

Towards the end of development on “Tradewinds�, I realized that giving the player a choice of characters to play would allow more possibilities about how the world would react to them, as well as how people might choose to play. So player characters were introduced at the eleventh hour, and were absolutely the right design choice! We realized that we had barely scratched the surface about what character driven gameplay meant in this world, and wanted to do more with it.

At the same time, I wanted to find ways to encourage players to learn about and apply different methods to play. I created a system where characters could send the player off to do errands and perform feats that they might not otherwise attempt, in exchange for riches and powerful artifacts. When we had a system at our disposal that could tell character based stories while bequeathing tasks and gracefully interacting with trade and combat, Tradewinds became a truly unique form of adventure game.

While fine tuning combat, we started to get tired of having all fights take place with a limited number of ships and an unchanging ocean. Israel, our Art Director, painted some coastal scenery to draw on the horizon, and I added a few new types of ships to the game. The ships didn’t move at all, and looked just like fortresses and towers. Sneaky, huh?

[William Usher] - Yeah...what a clever concept (grins). It’s sort of like a video game version of Robert Rodriguez’ directing style: using low-cost, effective tactics to convey quality elements of depth. Have you considered, though, adding a battle scheme for Tradewinds games that might include on-foot encounters?

[Andrew Megowan] - We have a design philosophy that we follow very strictly, and it has served us well: our games must be fun and accessible to the widest crowd imaginable. We steered clear of more personal forms of combat in order to avoid dealing with more graphic and participatory violence. One of the inferred consequences of sinking an enemy ship is that the sailors swam to your ships, surrendered, and were dropped off at the next port. It's the best explanation of how a defeated enemy could talk to you and surrender loot after a victorious battle, don't you think?

In addition to skirting issues of death and violence in videogames, we also opted to focus our attention on refining a single type of combat, and opted for the most epic form of conflict resolution we could, namely with fleets of ships hurling destruction and magic at one another. However, there was a console game called "Pirates: The Legend of Black Kat" (Westwood Studios) that came out for consoles several years ago that showcased both ship to ship and hand to hand combat. That game was very influential to our thinking about pirate action adventures, and so we know that it can be done, and done well. The question that we are asking ourselves as we work on the next "Tradewinds" game in the series is, "How can we do it well for our universe and our audience?"

[William Usher] - What was it like coming up with a battle system that was easy to use (involving fleets of ships), yet dynamic enough to be fun throughout the entire game?

[Andrew Megowan] -Designing the battle system was like climbing a slippery mountain slope with a small team of other climbers while you are all blindfolded. You know the mountain has a top, but you can’t see it, you don’t know how to get there, and you don’t know which way to go. But you have to get there, because there are a hundred thousand people waiting for you get to the top, then come back with whatever treasure you found up there.

The battle systems are positively the most challenging part of the game’s design. Just look at how much they changed in each game! As a designer with a solid (if distant) background in mathematical modeling, I knew that I could make systems that adjusted their difficulty to always give the player a fair and satisfying fight. The true challenge lay in finding out how much control to give the player. Too much to do, and the combat would be tedious micromanagement. Too little, and players would lose investment in the battle. We strove to create an experience where the fleets would do what seemed sensible when left to their own devices, but where intelligent tactical moves by the player could spell the difference between defeat and victory.

[William Usher] - I must readily admit that Tradewinds: Legends battle encounters are equally engaging each time around. How many different battle schemes did you originally go through before settling with the one that was used in the game?

[Andrew Megowan] - Each "Tradewinds" game has a slightly different battle system built from scratch, and so "Legends" is our third system. This time around, the most dramatic change was that brought back fleet to fleet warfare from the original "Tradewinds". We couldn't afford to bog players down with issuing orders to every ship in their growing fleets, especially in real time with the clock ticking and the enemy already firing on you!

While we were happy with our design from the beginning, it took lots of tries to find that sweet spot that balances how much control the player had, and how much thinking the ships could do on their own. If need be, players can issue orders for an individual ship to fire on a specific target or flee the battle, but most of the work is in sending orders to the entire fleet, and hurling magic attacks at the enemies. It's very satisfying to unleash complete chaos and pandemonium on your enemies.

[William Usher] - The inclusion of flying ships added an extra flair of fantasy and originality to the gameplay. Were the flying ships originally part of the design? Or were they later added to give players a bit more of a fantasy feel to some of the other fantasy related elements within the game world?

[Andrew Megowan] - The flying ships were always a part of the design for “Tradewinds Legends�. In addition to fitting the mythos of the Middle and Far East, they accomplished two very specific goals that I had when laying out the world of the Ten Kingdoms. First, I wanted to present the player with an obstacle that they could very clearly see from the very beginning of the game, but which they would have to work long and hard to eventually overcome. Sailing over the mountains for the first time, and reaching a magical city high in the clouds is a sweet victory for the player.

The second goal was to have the new access and ability make the game fresh. When you switch from sailing to flying, the rules change. Your badass armed ships? You have to sell them and buy weakly armored Zeppelins to take to the skies! Your priorities change, your strategies change. Congratulations, you’ve become a shark, but now you’re swimming in an even bigger pond.

[William Usher] - Has the Tradewinds Legends engine been used for any other games? If so, how long does it take to modify the engine to suit the purpose of a new game with new ideas?

[Andrew Megowan] - We have an engine that we use for most of our 2D games, called “Game Factory�. It provides a set of common tools and code that we have found useful for several games. Game Factory was initially used on our earliest titles, “Super Granny� and “Orbital�, and continues to evolve as our needs expand to include Multilanguage support, additional content that is downloaded after the game is already installed, and more elegant, sophisticated user interfaces.

Game Factory has served us well for the past few years, and is in the process of getting a significant overhaul to allow us to do even more in our games.

[William Usher] - The Free Trade mode seems like it would be perfect in a competitive on line environment. Has Sandlot considered adding network play to a Tradewinds game, for a mode like Free Trade?

[Andrew Megowan] - We have been discussing the potential of playing with other people ever since the first “Tradewinds� game. It’s a huge step, and one with many hurdles unique to the Casual Games industry. There is a lot of culture and history to online play that we cannot assume our audience already has under their belts. How do you get strangers to play well with each other? How do you arrange to play a game with your friends? Do you need to form a group of people and then start a game, like you would for a boardgame or a sport? Or do you make a world that people can visit at any time, in which life continues whether or not people are playing?

We are excited to announce that we have found satisfactory answers to these questions (and thousands more) and are hard at work on “Tradewinds Online�! My mind reels at the sheer ambition of what we have planned.

[William Usher] - Wow, now that does sound ambitious. It’ll also be a great alternative to the anti-cost effective MMOs out there that require omega-computers to run them. It seems like a lot of publishers always push for really big games with a really big price tag (plus monthly costs), and it weeds out a lot of casual gamers. Will Tradewinds Online still cater toward the casual crowd?

[Andrew Megowan] - Ha! Fishing for secrets about "Tradewinds Online"? You'll get nothing from me! NOTHING! I refuse to even mention that the game will once more be for the increasingly sophisticated casual gamer. And if you're hoping that I'll tell you that it will preserve the humor and depth that you've come to expect, you're completely out of luck. Besides, our Legal Department would slap me in irons if I uttered so much as a peep about the return of popular characters and locations. Not a word. Nuh uh.

[William Usher] - With the emersion of consoles supporting more independent software, has anyone contacted Sandlot about porting Tradewinds Legends as part of an independent lineup for the new consoles? Or have you considered the option of porting over Tradewinds as an "arcade" game for any of the newer consoles?

[Andrew Megowan] - We are considering a few options for ports of Tradewinds onto upcoming platforms. We are certainly open to any opportunities to bring the game to new audiences.

[William Usher] - Any final comments for fans in the independent community?

[Andrew Megowan] - We all want to see innovation as well as perfection of what has come before. Every gamer out there has a vote on what will be developed in the years to come. Several votes, actually. Each time you buy a game, new or used, you have just cast a vote that's worth a hundred opinions. So vote for the new, the innovative, and the unfamiliar. It's far more enjoyable to master a new skill, solve a new kind of puzzle, or sample the spices of a new culture rather than play something you've seen before but with different costumes and props.

Oh, and go outside more.