Developer Lovely Hellplace is once again partnering with DreadXP – one of my favorite publishers at this point – to bring us Entropy, another gritty, beautiful game with low-poly visuals, reminiscent of their previous release (Dread Delusion), and tactical turn-based combat inspired by classic JRPGs. I took some time with the demo presented at PAX West, and it was interesting! It gave away enough of the weird and alluring world and lore to want to know more, and the combat was familiar with little tweaks here and there to feel new compared to my experiences with turn-based systems. As a fan of Dread Delusion, I’m eager to see how it comes together in the full release.
To get a little more insight into Entropy and how it’s coming along, I spoke with Parker Hamilton, project manager at DreadXP.
Parker: Entropy is our most recent announced title by the developer of Dread Delusion, Lovely Hellplace.
Entropy is a tactical turn-based RPG inspired by classic PS1 Final Fantasy and Vagrant Story. It’s a dark fantasy similar to Dread Delusion, where the world is abandoned by its gods – which are cosmic beings that are unclear if they’re good or evil – in a post- post- post- post- post-apocalyptic world. The land is beginning to turn sour, people are beginning to get sick, settlements are all dying out, and there are demons running rampant around the land.
You start as a member of a theater troupe, one of the players, and during a demon attack all of your troupe is destroyed, the town is destroyed, and you’re sort of thrust into this situation where in order to survive you have to band together with any survivors and mercenaries to figure out how to re-establish contact with the gods who abandoned you.
Franny: I like that there’s still theater in a post- post- post-apocalyptic world. No matter what we’re always going to find a way to get on stage and embarrass ourselves a little bit.
Parker: Absolutely, and you know, I think if we were, in real life, living a post- post- post-apocalyptic world where we didn’t have the comforts and technologies to rely on right now, and like generations from now not knowing what any of this did, it would kind of seem like magic to them. So, I would say if anything, we would probably regress as a society back to medieval times or something like that, back to feudalism.
Franny: It reminds me a little of 17776 by Jon Bois. It’s about what football looks like after humanity has become immortal, so the world hasn’t exactly ended but it’s changed fundamentally, and people are going to still play football, just crazier. Why not go to space? Why not go a hundred miles per hour? Or whatever.
Parker: Okay, space football sounds cool, but I do want to ask: is it American football or other football?
Franny: Good ol-fashioned.
Parker: Throwing stuff at people.
Franny: Absolutely.
Okay, back to Entropy, and actually, a question for you: What does your role look like in relation to Entropy?
Parker: Yeah! So, on the publishing side with DreadXP I’m the project manager. We’re a pretty small team, we just expanded to around nine people, but we have multiple projects ongoing. The core production team is four of us, so I’m one of those four. Henry, our head of operations and production leads the four of us to make sure that everything is going smoothly on the games, that we’re providing the developers with the resources that they need to continue working.
We provide feedback on the builds and we all have prior development experience as well. So, we all like to think and practically know what goes into making these games, and can provide that experience a little bit as insight for new developers, or for smaller teams that are kind of wanting to fill the gaps.
Franny: The catalog of games that DreadXP publishes seems really specifically curated. At least personally, I look at the games you have here and they seem like exactly my type, there’s a real aesthetic consistency.
Parker: That’s what I like to hear! And Hunter Bond, our studio director, and Henry Hoare, our head of operations and production, have recently really expanded the catalog of DreadXP games to incorporate multiple different genres.
When the company got started a few years ago with the Dread X Collection, that was kind of a way to have little bite-sized tastes of all different kinds of games. Instead of just doing, you know, traditional outright horror, we’ve expanded to like Resident Evil/Silent Hill homages, some that are comedic, some that are their own takes on things, to First-Person Shooters. And now to tactical combat sandboxes and turn-based RPGs and roguelikes like White Knuckle, PIGFACE, The Secret of Weepstone, and Entropy, which we just announced, and The Lacerator. It’s really fun to be able to see people of all different tastes get to try things in our catalog.
Franny: About Entropy, can you speak to some of the inspirations behind it?
Parker: I would say personally, and after talking with James of Lovely Hellplace, even just looking at the key art, classic RPGs and JRPGs, especially from the 90s and the early 2000s are the main inspirations for gameplay. But the development team that James is working with all have really in-depth knowledge of their world’s lore, similar to Dread Delusion, where the narrative is so focused.
Franny: It does seem dense, richly written.
Parker: Very dense, and they’re excited to unveil like all of the cosmology that’s going on around this, and I think James has a taste for that kind of large-scale incorporation with small-scale personal issues, to show how the two are correlated.
Franny: I played a bit of Dread Delusion, and it kind of had that way of not necessarily holding your hand through the world. It was just like, this is the world, here are the people in it who’ll tell you what they know, and you kind of have to piece it together yourself.
Parker: Dread Delusion being so inspired by Morrowind was the same deal. Where like, here’s the world, here are the directions you can go with this beautiful establishing shot, have fun! You’re prompted with some main quest stuff, but you can just go do whatever. Entropy is actually very different from Dread Delusion in that sense.
It’s channeling the stories from traditional JRPGs from the 90s, it has a more concrete story that it wants to tell and to unfold in a certain order, while also having side quests and rich characters that you can engage with. One of my favorite mechanics that are shown in the demo – which will be available to the public later – is these little choose-your-own-adventure vignettes. So, in the overworld map, there are locations you can visit. Some of them, you walk up to- and it kind of reminds me of Zork in a way, where it’s text that unfolds with these beautiful images and sprite work, and you’re like walking through this trail and suddenly teeth are raining from the sky, like what do you do? I think that’s a creative way to allow the player to engage in bite-sized side content to flesh out the lore and the atmosphere and the rules of the world.
That’s something that I really appreciate about it. It has a lot of different flavors for people.
Franny: I think I did run into one of those where it was like a guy in a tent, and he asks me for help killing some big monster, and I’m thinking I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet, and he just leaves mad.
Parker: He’s like “fuck you, alright, I’ll go do it.”
Franny: “Well, I didn’t need you anyway!”
Parker: And seeing the consequences of that later as something that’s gonna be shown off in the full game. The demo here only covers part of the intro area, so there’s a lot more to discover.
Franny: What did Lovely Hellplace take from Dread Delusion over to Entropy, if anything? Or are they jumping into a whole new thing?
Parker: Yeah, after talking with James about what he enjoyed from Dread Delusion, what James really does well is tell engaging, lore-rich stories that unfold to whatever degree the player wants to learn from it. And mechanically, James really wants to create a combat system that’s engaging, and a progression system and a quest system that not only harken back but also iterate on the inspirations it’s taken from.
Dread Delusion being so narratively focused and so exploration focused, now he wants to kind of hone in all of the skills that he took from that, and say, here are all the story bits that I want to tell, and here’s a more in-depth combat system, and here’s a more streamlined way to experience the story, while also providing more player agency.
Franny: Has anything changed about the visual design between the 2 games? They look very similar.
Parker: Yeah, that PS1 low-poly aesthetic. I would say the lighting and the texture work, at least from working with James on Dread Delusion and Entropy both, those are things that I’ve taken away from their visual style. And Dread Delusion was so large-scale, but a benefit of doing something like a JRPG is that with an overworld and specific explorable locations, that also lets them play with level design and to actually curate things. So, not only are areas more dense because it’s not trying to render an entire big world at all times, it’s more pretty to look at and they can play with the lighting a little bit more.
Franny: In the demo, I noticed all the finer details seemed tighter and sharper without losing any of that chunky PS1 aesthetic, or the colors, or whatever. Like, I can read everything a little better, make out details on a face a little better.
Parker: I think that James, both in Dread Delusion and in Entropy, harkens back to the PS1 in terms of how many textures and polys that it does, but one of the things that you can leverage now with current day technology is you can just make it more dense. In a lot of old games, they couldn’t render as many objects on screen at once. Like, I love Final Fantasy 9, and I’m thinking back to the original version where it’s just some grass texture or whatever.
Franny: It’s the same grass stamp over and over again into a horizon, the rest of imagination.
Parker: Whereas now, it’s like let’s build an interesting backdrop. Let’s fill it with mushrooms that are explained in the lore as like, how did the soil let these mushrooms grow? It looks more lush.
Franny: One of my favorite things that I’ve seen so far from Entropy, and especially from Dread Delusion, is the narrative. How expansive it is, but also how developed it is. Can you speak to the team’s process in developing that narrative at all?
Parker: From working with James earlier in the process for Entropy, the narrative informs the design a lot of the time. So, they have these key world building narrative events laid out and outlined already, and they want to curate the heavy-hitting gameplay moments around those.
Franny: Is there anything else you wanted to say about Entropy or DreadXP, or just some final thoughts?
Parker: You know, I really love working at DreadXP. I feel like getting to work so closely with the developers gives me inspiration to continue to work on my own stuff too. I learn a lot from them and I hope that I can impart and help contribute just in some small way to the games being successful and them, you know, hopefully still having really good mental health and work-life balance with scope and everything.
Franny: That’s the important thing. Some of these bigger games sometimes kind of sacrifice the people making them in ways.
Parker: One thing I love is like, we’re just normal people. We all want to help each other. I think that I’ve grown a lot since working here, with my skill set, with the breadth of games and development experience of the teams that we’re working with.
I have been given a lot of perspective, and I know that it’s a common thing to say “I’m so grateful to work at this job, this job is my life.” It’s important to me and so is my team, but they also really value lives outside of that. To be like games isn’t all there is, and we can take inspiration to make games from elsewhere, and I really appreciate the team for reminding me of that and offering that perspective.
I think for Entropy, James’ love of classic fantasy and world building lore-rich things help him flesh out the game mechanics and the visuals, and I’m really excited to see it all come together.
