FFFLOOD Prototype

VLAMBEER’S NEVER-ENDING PROTOTYPE

This is a postmortem of a game that never made it over the finish line. FFFLOOD (with a various number of F’s throughout the years) has been a living prototype all the way throughout the 10-year existence of Vlambeer, that we never managed to get quite right. What follows is its story. 

EARLY DAYS

In the prehistoric days of Vlambeer, 2010, when Rami & I were just about ready to found the company, Rami asked me a question: “Hey, after Super Crate Box, do you have any other ideas?” Around that time I’d been noodling around with a simplified take on tower defense, which would become the prototype known as FFFLOOD . A game about defending a power core from tremendous amounts of alien lifeforms. As we got the company up and running, the prototype stayed on the backburner for a bit. We released Super Crate Box and Radical Fishing, and landed the pitch to make Serious Sam: the Random Encounter. It wasn’t until after the main development of LUFTRAUSERS in 2013 that that prototype popped into our minds again.

an early prototype of FFFLOOD 

THE PROBLEM WITH TOWER DEFENSE

The idea for FFFLOOD became to do a Vlambeer take on what we saw as the problems with tower defense; games that often were a bit too slow for our tastes, and that often punished you for making tiny mistakes spread over a long period of time. I especially didn’t like how losing a tower early on could make you slowly lag behind, eventually resulting in defeat way after the initial mistake.

With FFFLOOD we knew a few things had to be done: first of all, this was a Vlambeer game, it needed to be dumbed down and actioned up. The player wouldn’t be strategizing, we’d put them in a constant state of near-panic. We wanted a game where you wouldn’t carefully consider your positioning, but instead hold down a button and drop a whole line of ten-ton turrets straight from orbit. You didn’t shoot bullets, you shot guns. Cannons blazing, thousands of enemies active all at the same time.

a 2016 prototype of FFFLOOD, featuring a beautiful giant cursor

Second of all, we wanted to tackle the “your mistakes bite you in the ass later” problem. For this we introduced the scrap mechanic. When losing a tower, you instantly got back its full cost in scrap. Scrap would slowly (or rapidly, with the right equipment) convert back into cash. No matter how big your loss, you could eventually work your way back into the green. A player at Wave 10 would always have the same resources as anyone else at that point. The interesting question was: are those resources in the form of cash, scrap, or towers? Are those towers in the wrong position? Drop a bomb on them and recover the scrap. Did enemies obliterate your left flank? No worries, build some more scrap-converting factories on the right and you might just make it through this wave.

Early prototypes had a physical player character, but we quickly decided to ditch that. You simply embodied a cursor that dropped ten-ton turrets from orbit. We were going for a starship troopers vibe, but most of all inspiration came from John Ringo’s terrible Posleen War pulp novels. These books are simply incredible, not a single bullet is fired without describing its caliber, and every single explosion is measured in megatons. Incredible, rich source material. We could ridicule military fetishism and the exploitation of natural resources, and have a fun game all at the same time.

THE PROBLEMS

In the end, FFFLOOD’s design suffered from always being in a state of change. Ideas kept evolving, and we never quite got it to where it needed to be to get into full production. Prototypes were fun, but also a bit complicated. Ideas like the scrap mechanic, or the fact that the area around your mouse actively repaired turrets, or that you’d need to build near ever-moving Cores (also a good mechanic in that it’d make your defenses irregularly shaped and unpredictable) only made the game more complicated. We tried a lot of simple but unusual things, and all of that together resulted into something quite alien to players and would probably require heavy tutorialization.

THE VISION

Ultimately we envisioned FFFLOOD as a kind of roguelike-structured action defense game. Players picked a loadout, went into a run, and dropped tank-sized turrets onto a planetary surface in a flurry of corporate greed and intense alien slaughter. We had designed different playable classes, like the Architect, who can teleport whole swathes of turrets or enemies around, and the Bombardier, who takes a less subtle but more direct approach with heavy explosives. Each class would have their own tech tree, and players could freely create a loadout with different turrets to try out. In the full game we imagined a cool overlaying progression system, where completing runs or specific challenges would unlock more equipment and classes to try, eventually resulting in some sort of devious bossfight and looping mechanic like we did with Nuclear Throne.

fflood in 2019

As we continued through the years, there were also more doubts about the theming and what exactly the game would be saying. There’s a quote by filmmaker François Truffaut that goes “There's no such thing as an anti-war film”, and I felt like the same quote could be applied to games. In making a game that parodies military fetishism, we’d still be making it look really badass. This didn’t necessarily hold us back from working on it, but it is something that added to the pile of doubts and questions that stopped the game from ever going into full-on production. At some point we did start getting a team together, and Roy Nathan de Groot did some great concept art and sprites for the prototype and especially helped refine the interface a lot, but our timing was never quite right and the project always ground back to a halt.

THE END

In the end, in whatever form it took, FFFLOOD never really worked out for us. Ideas constantly evolved too fast to solidify into a full game, and as we grew as people throughout the decade, so did this game and the ideas behind it. Not everything always needs to be completed: we’re grateful for lessons we learnt and things we tried, and will take that knowledge forward in whatever we work on in the future.