Director's Commentary: Why XSYS?
10 May 2023 - XSYS Team
Ultimately, this all starts with two things.
One, the tragic passing of Aurida, about which I couldn’t hope to say a damn thing that hasn’t already been said. But it gathered the #rpx community back together, and made me regret not ever really finishing a second swing at what was then called “ZSYS”.
Two, my Pathfinder GM turning up his nose at all my ideas for how to improve that system. “I’ll show him,” I whispered to myself. “I’ll show them ALL.”
I wanted to build a boss-battle system that’s:
- Fairly robust and resilient (rather than relying on a bunch of fragile mIRCscript)
- Future-proof (supporting both IRC and at least one modern chat protocol, making it fairly easy to bolt on another once Discord inevitably grafts on some bullshit feature and shits the bed)
- As easy as possible for nontechnical people to customize and run on their own (put important data in plaintext, document as thoroughly as possible)
- Elegant and powerful, under the hood (the Gimmick system allows making virtually any passive effect you can imagine automatic)
- Modern in gameplay design, while drawing on the strengths of our decade-long history of boss-battling (infusing the core design of late-Feyfei*Sys with FF14-style Job Gauges)
- Undeniably my own unique flavor (replacing the traditional drawing from mainline Final Fantasy games with incredibly strange, obscure sources instead)
If it’s half as fun to play as it was to make, I’ll be happy.