Talking worldbuilding, history, and RPG success with Aether & Iron's Narrative Lead and Product Manager

It was a cloudy afternoon in June. The sun tucked away behind the towers my run-down apartment building lived in the shadow of. It's the end of the working day for some, the start for others. My eyes weary from staring at screens, my fingers automatically readying themselves to type. I open the meeting, camera on, unsure if the developers are ready for the pale shock they're about to experience seeing my face. They're frozen. Fear? Excitement? I quickly find the answer as someone says: "Teams isn't working for me, can we try Discord?"

Thank you for indulging that little noir escapade above. I felt it simply had to be done after taking a look at Aether & Iron, an RPG that asks what if New York in the 1930s was truly deserving of some romanticism. With a captivating art style and a lovely mixture of narrative decision-making, point-and-click elements, along with turn-based car chases, Aether & Iron captured and piqued my interest throughout the short preview, prompting me to throw as many questions as I could at Narrative Lead Tyler Whitney and Product Manager Joshua Enz. Below you'll find the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity:

Q: What can you tell me about the world of Aether & Iron?

Whitney: "We really like the aesthetics of the 1930s. But when we were talking about, OK, tactics game, roleplay game in the 1930s, a lot of the stuff we wanted to do had already been done. And we're like, OK, how can we elevate it? And the question really became about what direction we go to change it. And we settled on the idea of, what if 1930s New York, but in the sky? And to create this deco-punk world where the discovery of, or rather, the harvesting of aether...what if humanity was able to harvest it and utilize it? So New York City, instead of sprawling outward, sprawled up. Company towns were really big at this time, where you have a wealthy individual, or some individual driven by some religion, or philosophy, or concept, or government, or type, or political ideology. And what if those individuals were essentially given their own island? And New York City is now composed of all these competing individuals and their own idea of a better world. And so that gave us the backdrop. And Josh was talking a little bit more about the variety we have. And the key elements here is that we really pulled from history in developing these different biomes, we'll say."

Whitney (cont.): "You have a fractured New York. They each are self-determined. They do what they do as they please. There's nobody coming in and saying, you have to be dry, or you have to do X, Y, and Z. Each of them have their own set of codes and laws and whatnot, which is the perfect opportunity for you, the main character, Gia, Giovanna Rendazzo, to be a smuggler. Smugglers historically, socially, is acted as a person in the in-between. They live in the grey areas of society. They bring you what you need. And in a New York City composed of all these neighborhoods, each with their own sets of laws and restrictions and allowances, being a smuggler is good business, because you might have a vice island that we require you to drink two drinks a day right next to an island where it's like no drinking whatsoever, and that allows you to make good money. And so when we drop the player into this kind of very large world, you figuring out how to make the best of these particular sets of cultural rules and environments is a key element for you playing through the world."

Q: What made you go for the 1930s and bring this verticality to the world? Also, how does that verticality translate into gameplay?

Whitney: "I guess I'm a terrible romantic. And so taking the 1930s at kind of the most romantic version of it, of all of these new ideas were coming to bear. It was a time of great social change. It was a time when architects were expressing themselves in new ways to create these fantastic structures and cities. And then visually, I'm just a bit taken by it, to be perfectly honest. Cars are cool. The buildings are cool. They're just fun to look at. I think going into the verticality element of what you just asked, of how does it come into play, is that when we were building it, a good portion of the research early on was actually me diving way too far into sociological and psychological research on how skyscrapers impact people. And if you're stuck up there for long periods of time, it changes how you look at the world. And I was like, that's just a fascinating idea. Obviously, there's some internal compelling force that tells humans that we want to go up. And what if we were to indulge that? What type of world could we build out of it? And we just kept asking these questions."

Q: Gia serves as our protagonist, but she's also our narrator. What was the decision-making process behind this and is she a reliable narrator?

Whitney: "I think this goes back to our vision for this game of being something that fits within the 1930s world, is that when we really wanted to immerse the player in the 1930s and just say, this is the world you're living in. And one way that we thought to really indulge that fantasy is to have that first person narrator. Think of the old detective books and whatnot, or that classic detective voice of sitting in the rain and talking about life's falling apart, and let's go figure out this one last case. And it sets the mood and the tone and the feel, that type of thing.
And while we played around with a god narrator, it really came down to, I didn't feel right. And as to the reliability of the narrator, look, if she's narrating her own life, it's going to come with a whole set of things. And I'll let you figure out how reliable that can be as you play through."

Q: Is all of the combat based in your vehicle? How do you make that consistently engaging?

Whitney: "All of our combat does take place within the vehicles in our speeding world, with the backgrounds passing us by. And the reason we wanted to fixate on that is, one, it's something that we felt that we hadn't seen elsewhere, right? A lot of turn-based tactics games are individuals or machines that accompany the very thoughtful gameplay, it's very slow-paced or on your own pace. Doing that with cars doesn't necessarily make sense, right? There's momentum, there's speed, there's action. And if you're in a car during a car chase with Tommy guns and whatnot, it doesn't make sense that you're just sitting there waiting for someone else to make the turn. And maybe this comes from some element of growing up with video game logic so long of like, yeah, why are we all taking turns? And we're like, okay, let's push it a little bit if we can.

And that's what gave us this very energetic type version of the turn-based tactics grid. And I think, so going from there, creating this very action-packed thing, it also led us to think on, okay, if we have a car chase as our setup, as our premise with flying cars, how do we make sure that, one, you couldn't just take off the repulsors on these cars and put on tires and it'd be the same thing, right? Because what's the point then? And then two, if we have a moving grid, if we are simulating movement, how do we make sure that feels right? Otherwise, why move at all? So those questions really anchored us on the idea of how do we make ourselves unique and special and a whole bunch of, a whole slew of different design decisions. Imagine how it gets and changes when you get higher up. We have a sci-fi element in our world, aether, which is this material that contains massive amounts of energy, but also impacts gravity. And if we're in flying cars and we have machinery that impacts gravity, that's going to change how we have to interact."

Q: As well as Gia, we also get to recruit companions or Heroes, how deep do the relationships go with them?

Whitney: "Over the course of the game, there are four heroes that you can unlock. At any one time, you can have two of them in your party. And when you have them in your party, each of these characters will impact the rolls that you make. They, based off of the decisions you are making in our world, which we have a pretty grey world, can make them happier with you or they can get pretty upset at what you're doing. And I think while we aren't going as far as to doing a full relationship sim where each, all the ins and outs are accounted for, what we are working on is making it so that the heroes and the people you interact with are front and centre as you go through the game."

Q: Finally, for you guys, we've seen turn-based games come back in a big way, whether it's through CRPGs, more Final Fantasy-inspired games, or other genres, why do you think people have celebrated and wanted this return to turn-based gameplay?

Whitney: "It's a big question. Look, I can throw a stab at it, which I'm sure there are people far more qualified to talk about general trends, but what we were looking for as well, say, one is we're all drawn to turn-based tactics games or turn-based combat games because I think we like thoughtful games or we consider ourselves thoughtful people and we like analysing it or overanalysing it. Like if you were to play a game of D&D with us, combat rounds might go a bit long as we try to figure out the exact thing to do. I think also besides being tired of a lot of first-person shooters personally, I think turn-based combat does something really big for me, especially as a creative and as a storyteller, is that it allows you to pull in different ideas, maybe non-traditional ways that you might resolve or interact in a combat, right? It gives me more control in how I manage the battlefield and the different types of actions that I can do, and I can manage multiple areas of action from the different heroes. And I think that latitude, that freedom, that control...that freedom to do different types of things within that format, I think is kind of liberating and a lot of fun on our end."

Enz: "I think board games, I mean, they're kind of the core of turn-based. So whether it's a card game, dice rolling, or moving pieces on a grid, it kind of takes us back to the board game core that it comes from versus many of the other games, which they're not based on a board game or I guess what the heart of physical gaming is."

Aether & Iron releases later this year. The game is available to wishlist now on Steam.