I'm currently at work writing up the list of possible effects (conditions that can apply to characters as a result of spells and techniques, etc) and came to "Afraid". Normally in RPGs this is a "can't control your character" effect, which in general I don't like, so I've been trying to think of a good way to handle fear, which is an important element of combat, especially against extremely powerful foes like dragons. Then the Eureka came: I already have a mechanic in place that can easily replicate many of the actual effects of fear -- the Aggressive vs Conservative and Assertive vs Passive personality sliders. In a nutshell, aggressive characters take more risks than conservative ones and assertive characters are more likely to interpret your commands loosely than passive ones are.
So, Fear effects in Fate will temporarily modify the targetted characters' aggressiveness (making them less likely to attack all-out/more likely to defend themselves) and assertiveness (making them more likely to modify your orders). This means that characters who are frightened will defend themselves (or heal themselves/the party) more, choose attacks that increase their defenses or reduce their opponents' attack abilities, and be more likely to "panic" and choose to do something that isn't what you told them to do. In short, it's a middle ground between full loss of control and the boring stat reduction that is the usual alternative.
Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to stick to boring stat reductions for the PC, as it doesn't use the AI command system. Oh well.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Interesting Choices, part 2
So, how does the concept of interesting choices affect game balance? I'll use the traditional pen and paper fantasy RPG archetypes as an example: fighters vs mages. Right away there's an obvious imbalance; mages wield great cosmic power! (to borrow from Disney's Alladin), while fighters hit things with swords. No comparison, right?
Maybe in "reality", but reality in general makes a poor game. As a wise man once said, "physics is a house rule". Think of it from a player perspective -- given a choice, would you rather play the guy who runs up and hits the "attack" button endlessly, or the guy who picks and chooses his spells carefully to conserve his power and reduce his foes to ashes?
This is an application of the Interesting Choices design I referred to in the previous post. In traditional RPGs, fighter type characters often have few to no choices in combat except to hit that big "attack" button, while mages get long lists of spells with varying and interesting effects. While generally the fighter is as effective in his own way compared to the mage, it's far less fun to have one button to push instead of several dozen. In other words, fighters don't generally have many (or any) Interesting Choices to make in combat, while mages generally have quite a few.
Even leaving aside game design holes, the sad state of non-spellcasting combat in most systems is even sadder when you consider the plethora of excellent "fighter type" myths to draw on. Miyamoto Musashi certainly had plenty of interesting choices to make in his sword duels. Cuchulainn had many tricks and abilities at his disposal without relying on spells. So did King Arthur and Gilgamesh, Beowulf and Paul Bunyan, and so on. In point of fact, I can't think of a single heroic mythological figure who does use "run at the enemy and swing my weapon in a single repetitive motion until one of us dies" as any kind of tactic in battle; even Conan is cunning and fights dirty if the situation calls for it.
So, how does Fate introduce Interesting Choices to the non-spellcasting character archetypes? That ties neatly into one of the big inspirations behind the Warrior-based classes in the game, although it applies to Rogue-based classes as well. In most modern fantasy stories with a swordfighter for a protagonist, a certain amount of detail is given to the fighting style the character uses. Despite other flaws in the books, for example, the sword fighting scenes in The Wheel of Time books by the late Robert Jordan are envigorating to read, with cleverly named manuevers that are both evocative and descriptive. Similarly, in the Drizzt Do'Urden books by R. A. Salvatore, while the techniques the titular swordmaster uses aren't named as Jordan's are, there's a very clear and evocative description of just how he fights. Even in the inestimable Princess Bride, there's the famous Duel of the Cliffs of Despair, with its Capa Ferro and Bonetti's Defense.
So, in Fate, just as spellcasters get to spend experience on spellcasting skills and proficiency with individual spells, so to do fighters and rogues get to spend experience on fighting styles and individual techniques. Some of the fighting styles will be full of colorful, Jordan-esque names, while others will be more clinically named along the lines of modern fencing or the Princess Bride swordfights; indeed, there may actually be multiple names for the same technique as taught by different schools. They will all, however, give the more "mundane" characters a variety of options in combat rather than to just hit Attack.
I can't say yet just how many schools there will be nor how many techniques per school, but I will say that people who want to play a fighter but get too bored to finish the game with one should hopefully be happy with what they see in Fate.
Maybe in "reality", but reality in general makes a poor game. As a wise man once said, "physics is a house rule". Think of it from a player perspective -- given a choice, would you rather play the guy who runs up and hits the "attack" button endlessly, or the guy who picks and chooses his spells carefully to conserve his power and reduce his foes to ashes?
This is an application of the Interesting Choices design I referred to in the previous post. In traditional RPGs, fighter type characters often have few to no choices in combat except to hit that big "attack" button, while mages get long lists of spells with varying and interesting effects. While generally the fighter is as effective in his own way compared to the mage, it's far less fun to have one button to push instead of several dozen. In other words, fighters don't generally have many (or any) Interesting Choices to make in combat, while mages generally have quite a few.
Even leaving aside game design holes, the sad state of non-spellcasting combat in most systems is even sadder when you consider the plethora of excellent "fighter type" myths to draw on. Miyamoto Musashi certainly had plenty of interesting choices to make in his sword duels. Cuchulainn had many tricks and abilities at his disposal without relying on spells. So did King Arthur and Gilgamesh, Beowulf and Paul Bunyan, and so on. In point of fact, I can't think of a single heroic mythological figure who does use "run at the enemy and swing my weapon in a single repetitive motion until one of us dies" as any kind of tactic in battle; even Conan is cunning and fights dirty if the situation calls for it.
So, how does Fate introduce Interesting Choices to the non-spellcasting character archetypes? That ties neatly into one of the big inspirations behind the Warrior-based classes in the game, although it applies to Rogue-based classes as well. In most modern fantasy stories with a swordfighter for a protagonist, a certain amount of detail is given to the fighting style the character uses. Despite other flaws in the books, for example, the sword fighting scenes in The Wheel of Time books by the late Robert Jordan are envigorating to read, with cleverly named manuevers that are both evocative and descriptive. Similarly, in the Drizzt Do'Urden books by R. A. Salvatore, while the techniques the titular swordmaster uses aren't named as Jordan's are, there's a very clear and evocative description of just how he fights. Even in the inestimable Princess Bride, there's the famous Duel of the Cliffs of Despair, with its Capa Ferro and Bonetti's Defense.
So, in Fate, just as spellcasters get to spend experience on spellcasting skills and proficiency with individual spells, so to do fighters and rogues get to spend experience on fighting styles and individual techniques. Some of the fighting styles will be full of colorful, Jordan-esque names, while others will be more clinically named along the lines of modern fencing or the Princess Bride swordfights; indeed, there may actually be multiple names for the same technique as taught by different schools. They will all, however, give the more "mundane" characters a variety of options in combat rather than to just hit Attack.
I can't say yet just how many schools there will be nor how many techniques per school, but I will say that people who want to play a fighter but get too bored to finish the game with one should hopefully be happy with what they see in Fate.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Interesting Choices, part 1
One of the key aspects of game design in general, and one of the most heavily emphasized areas in the design of Fate, is the concept of "Interesting Choices". Anyone can tell you what a choice is; you have the option to do A or B, where the actions you take to perform each option are different to one degree or another.
However, there's a very big difference between a choice and an interesting choice. An interesting choice requires that there are consequences for every possible option, and that the risk:reward ratios between the various choices are reasonably balanced. As an example, if you have the choice to either A) Kill the big bad boss instantly with no chance of failure, or B) attempt to fight him the traditional way, where no matter which choice you make the rewards are the same, that is not an interesting choice. The rewards are the same, but the risk levels are vastly different, making one choice obvious and therefore boring.
Similarly, if you have a decision tree that branches out to points C and D, but no matter which choice you take, the rewards are essentially the same and you end up back at the same point E, that is also not an interesting choice. As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to make the argument that it isn't a choice at all, as there's no substantive difference no matter which option you take.
Now that I've explained the general theory behind Interesting Choices, how does that relate to the design of Fate? Well, a better question would be "How doesn't it relate?". I've taken the concept and applied it pretty much everywhere I could think of, right down to the nuts and bolts of the experience system design. As I mentioned previously, characters are not forcefully restricted from being able to "do everything". Instead, the player must make a choice about what areas to focus on and what areas to leave by the wayside. If the player chooses to focus on a limited skillset, the character will be quite proficient at that skillset, but will be ignoring several other skillsets which could potentially provide it with performance increases. On the flip side, spreading out your experience over several attributes and skills means that your character can do more different things and will likely be at least partially relevant in any situation, but you're sacrificing the ability to reach the upper tier of effectiveness with any of your choices.
That same type of choice -- width vs depth, risk vs reward, conservative vs aggressive -- pervades the design philosophy. I detest "easy choices". If a choice is too easy, it ceases to become a choice except in the masochistic sense. There is certainly a market for that kind of thing -- a good example is Iron Man modes in games, where saved games are deleted upon loading, so that you can't save-reload to avoid bad consequences -- but in my opinion it needs to be restricted to metagame concerns only. Difficulty levels, Iron Man, options that you would find in the game's configuration menu. Easy choices once you're actually IN the game just fall flat.
I think that's enough for now. In part 2, I'll explore how the Interesting Choices combat affects the balance between fighters, rogues, and spellcasters.
However, there's a very big difference between a choice and an interesting choice. An interesting choice requires that there are consequences for every possible option, and that the risk:reward ratios between the various choices are reasonably balanced. As an example, if you have the choice to either A) Kill the big bad boss instantly with no chance of failure, or B) attempt to fight him the traditional way, where no matter which choice you make the rewards are the same, that is not an interesting choice. The rewards are the same, but the risk levels are vastly different, making one choice obvious and therefore boring.
Similarly, if you have a decision tree that branches out to points C and D, but no matter which choice you take, the rewards are essentially the same and you end up back at the same point E, that is also not an interesting choice. As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to make the argument that it isn't a choice at all, as there's no substantive difference no matter which option you take.
Now that I've explained the general theory behind Interesting Choices, how does that relate to the design of Fate? Well, a better question would be "How doesn't it relate?". I've taken the concept and applied it pretty much everywhere I could think of, right down to the nuts and bolts of the experience system design. As I mentioned previously, characters are not forcefully restricted from being able to "do everything". Instead, the player must make a choice about what areas to focus on and what areas to leave by the wayside. If the player chooses to focus on a limited skillset, the character will be quite proficient at that skillset, but will be ignoring several other skillsets which could potentially provide it with performance increases. On the flip side, spreading out your experience over several attributes and skills means that your character can do more different things and will likely be at least partially relevant in any situation, but you're sacrificing the ability to reach the upper tier of effectiveness with any of your choices.
That same type of choice -- width vs depth, risk vs reward, conservative vs aggressive -- pervades the design philosophy. I detest "easy choices". If a choice is too easy, it ceases to become a choice except in the masochistic sense. There is certainly a market for that kind of thing -- a good example is Iron Man modes in games, where saved games are deleted upon loading, so that you can't save-reload to avoid bad consequences -- but in my opinion it needs to be restricted to metagame concerns only. Difficulty levels, Iron Man, options that you would find in the game's configuration menu. Easy choices once you're actually IN the game just fall flat.
I think that's enough for now. In part 2, I'll explore how the Interesting Choices combat affects the balance between fighters, rogues, and spellcasters.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Fate of the Mullen Overview
Alright, so now I get to describe our flagship game. World of Olume: Fate of the Mullen is a fantasy themed computer RPG (role-playing game), set in an original world and designed to appeal to fans of old-school CRPGs such as Might and Magic or Wizardry.
Probably the first question people will have after seeing the title is "What is a Mullen and why should I care?", and that's a pretty good question if I say so myself. Mullen are a race of gaunt, bipedal humanoids whose main distinguishing feature is a softball-sized, ruby-like gem set into their foreheads. These gems allow the Mullen to access a kind of ancestral memory; every Mullen clearly and accurately recalls everything that any of their direct ancestors experienced or learned. In fact, this racial memory means that the Mullen are the only race that actually knows what the world was like before the Second Genesis (but more on that later, in another post). Why "Fate of the Mullen"? Because, not to spoil the plot too thoroughly, the fate of pretty much the entire race ends up in the hands of the player's character and its allies. As a hint: their ancestral memory is both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
When I started designing Fate, I asked myself some questions: What kind of RPG do you enjoy the most? What do you enjoy about that kind of RPG? What elements of other RPGs do you also enjoy? Is there any reason you can't combine them? How much of all that do you actually think you can pull off by yourself? After stirring those thoughts around for a while, I came up with the following formula:
Fate of the Mullen will be an entirely 2D game, using a mix of tile-based and pre-rendered maps. The player will only directly control their main character -- the one they create at the start of the game -- but that character will be the leader of a party of hearty souls and the player will be able to give general orders ("Heal the party!" or "Fight with all your strength!", etc) to each party member. Those party members will have their own individual personalities and will favor different types of abilities and may or may not follow your orders to the letter. For example, a pacifist priest may well ignore your orders to directly attack the enemy and instead cast a spell to increase the accuracy or attack power of other party members. To keep the "Why won't they do what I tell them to?!" factor to a dull roar, each NPC will have a personality profile that will be available to the player to view, so that the player can make informed decisions about who to bring along.
Most games would stop there and call it a day; not Fate. In Fate, you'll be able to expand your operations as the game goes on and recruit additional parties. These "extra" adventuring parties can either be sent out on their own to explore and adventure and bring back news and loot, or they can be brought along with the main character's party -- for example, if you know for a fact that you're going to be facing an extremely tough battle in a certain adventure site, you can bring along another party to tip the odds in your favor. However, the player's control over "extra" parties in combat is limited further to giving only a single general command to the entire group ("Fight defensively!" or "Take out the minions!" for example), and again each party member will impart their own spin to the commands.
I'll talk more about the decisions behind the party AI system in another post; for now let me get on with describing the game. Characters are made with a non-level-based, not-really-class-based system; while there are character classes, they mainly exist to help the player and the AI build their character effectively. Characters earn experience points for completing quests and defeating enemies, as normal for CRPGs, but instead of needing a set amount of XP to "level up" and improve all their capabilities in one fell swoop, the player or AI instead can choose to pay XP to advance any of their stats, skills, spells, weapon techniques, and so on individually at any time (even in the heat of battle!). The main function of classes in this system is to alter the XP cost of advancing your character's capabilities. Warriors, for example, will find it cheaper to advance their physical stats and combat skills, but more expensive to learn spells; Mages, on the other hand, get Arcana spells cheaply, but tend to pay more to increase their Strength and heavy armor skills.
In this way, characters can be built to do anything and everything, but it will be most efficient to "color within the lines", so to speak. There's absolutely nothing stopping the player from creating a Warrior who is an expert with a sword, wears full plate armor, carries a hulking tower shield, casts Magebolts and Benedictions, and so on -- but it will be very expensive and the character will sacrifice power for versatility in a very notable fashion. Now, I like making characters that can do two or three things fairly well just as much as the next guy, so there's even a system in place to allow this: you can take more than one character class. Essentially, classes are arranged in a tiered system, with Warrior, Priest, Mage, and Rogue at the bottom tier, then expanding outwards from there. Each character may have one class from each tier, as long as they meet the requirements. As an example, you can have a character start out as a Warrior, but work on his Reaction and Intuition stats and Stealth and Scouting skills and, once he reaches the required amounts, can pay the XP cost and take on the 2nd tier class "Scout" (part of the Rogue family). Scout will provide its own XP cost weights, which will make it easier to continue to develop the character as a lightly-armored strike-and-fade fighter. The counterbalance is that each tier of class offers less powerful and/or less broad bonuses, so your base class will always be the biggest factor in the development of your character.
The last major component of the game is the movement and exploration system. Essentially, the game is divided up into three map levels: World map, Area map (generally covering a state- or country-sized chunk of the World map), and Adventure Sites. You start the game only being able to access the starting Area map and the towns and Adventure Sites it contains. After a certain point in the game, you'll be able to explore past the boundaries of your current Area, which will bump you up to the World map to select a new Area to enter. Each Area has both obvious sites (major towns, poorly-hidden dungeons, and the like) and hidden sites ("Stand by the gray stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of the setting sun will shine upon the keyhole..."). You decide where to send each party on the Area map, how fast you want to move, how thoroughly you want to search for new sites, and so on. Moving quickly is unlikely to uncover any well-hidden location unless you happen to ride right over top of it, but you're also less likely to blunder into monsters, so it's a tradeoff. Quests may tell you exactly where to go and automatically open up the Adventure Site on your Area map, or they may just tell you the general area to search in ("Those boggs al'ays come from th' West, they do, Sir") and leave the hard work to you and your party.
Alright, I think that's a big enough wall of text for now. I'll post some more details up tomorrow. For now -- bed!
Probably the first question people will have after seeing the title is "What is a Mullen and why should I care?", and that's a pretty good question if I say so myself. Mullen are a race of gaunt, bipedal humanoids whose main distinguishing feature is a softball-sized, ruby-like gem set into their foreheads. These gems allow the Mullen to access a kind of ancestral memory; every Mullen clearly and accurately recalls everything that any of their direct ancestors experienced or learned. In fact, this racial memory means that the Mullen are the only race that actually knows what the world was like before the Second Genesis (but more on that later, in another post). Why "Fate of the Mullen"? Because, not to spoil the plot too thoroughly, the fate of pretty much the entire race ends up in the hands of the player's character and its allies. As a hint: their ancestral memory is both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.
When I started designing Fate, I asked myself some questions: What kind of RPG do you enjoy the most? What do you enjoy about that kind of RPG? What elements of other RPGs do you also enjoy? Is there any reason you can't combine them? How much of all that do you actually think you can pull off by yourself? After stirring those thoughts around for a while, I came up with the following formula:
Fate of the Mullen will be an entirely 2D game, using a mix of tile-based and pre-rendered maps. The player will only directly control their main character -- the one they create at the start of the game -- but that character will be the leader of a party of hearty souls and the player will be able to give general orders ("Heal the party!" or "Fight with all your strength!", etc) to each party member. Those party members will have their own individual personalities and will favor different types of abilities and may or may not follow your orders to the letter. For example, a pacifist priest may well ignore your orders to directly attack the enemy and instead cast a spell to increase the accuracy or attack power of other party members. To keep the "Why won't they do what I tell them to?!" factor to a dull roar, each NPC will have a personality profile that will be available to the player to view, so that the player can make informed decisions about who to bring along.
Most games would stop there and call it a day; not Fate. In Fate, you'll be able to expand your operations as the game goes on and recruit additional parties. These "extra" adventuring parties can either be sent out on their own to explore and adventure and bring back news and loot, or they can be brought along with the main character's party -- for example, if you know for a fact that you're going to be facing an extremely tough battle in a certain adventure site, you can bring along another party to tip the odds in your favor. However, the player's control over "extra" parties in combat is limited further to giving only a single general command to the entire group ("Fight defensively!" or "Take out the minions!" for example), and again each party member will impart their own spin to the commands.
I'll talk more about the decisions behind the party AI system in another post; for now let me get on with describing the game. Characters are made with a non-level-based, not-really-class-based system; while there are character classes, they mainly exist to help the player and the AI build their character effectively. Characters earn experience points for completing quests and defeating enemies, as normal for CRPGs, but instead of needing a set amount of XP to "level up" and improve all their capabilities in one fell swoop, the player or AI instead can choose to pay XP to advance any of their stats, skills, spells, weapon techniques, and so on individually at any time (even in the heat of battle!). The main function of classes in this system is to alter the XP cost of advancing your character's capabilities. Warriors, for example, will find it cheaper to advance their physical stats and combat skills, but more expensive to learn spells; Mages, on the other hand, get Arcana spells cheaply, but tend to pay more to increase their Strength and heavy armor skills.
In this way, characters can be built to do anything and everything, but it will be most efficient to "color within the lines", so to speak. There's absolutely nothing stopping the player from creating a Warrior who is an expert with a sword, wears full plate armor, carries a hulking tower shield, casts Magebolts and Benedictions, and so on -- but it will be very expensive and the character will sacrifice power for versatility in a very notable fashion. Now, I like making characters that can do two or three things fairly well just as much as the next guy, so there's even a system in place to allow this: you can take more than one character class. Essentially, classes are arranged in a tiered system, with Warrior, Priest, Mage, and Rogue at the bottom tier, then expanding outwards from there. Each character may have one class from each tier, as long as they meet the requirements. As an example, you can have a character start out as a Warrior, but work on his Reaction and Intuition stats and Stealth and Scouting skills and, once he reaches the required amounts, can pay the XP cost and take on the 2nd tier class "Scout" (part of the Rogue family). Scout will provide its own XP cost weights, which will make it easier to continue to develop the character as a lightly-armored strike-and-fade fighter. The counterbalance is that each tier of class offers less powerful and/or less broad bonuses, so your base class will always be the biggest factor in the development of your character.
The last major component of the game is the movement and exploration system. Essentially, the game is divided up into three map levels: World map, Area map (generally covering a state- or country-sized chunk of the World map), and Adventure Sites. You start the game only being able to access the starting Area map and the towns and Adventure Sites it contains. After a certain point in the game, you'll be able to explore past the boundaries of your current Area, which will bump you up to the World map to select a new Area to enter. Each Area has both obvious sites (major towns, poorly-hidden dungeons, and the like) and hidden sites ("Stand by the gray stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of the setting sun will shine upon the keyhole..."). You decide where to send each party on the Area map, how fast you want to move, how thoroughly you want to search for new sites, and so on. Moving quickly is unlikely to uncover any well-hidden location unless you happen to ride right over top of it, but you're also less likely to blunder into monsters, so it's a tradeoff. Quests may tell you exactly where to go and automatically open up the Adventure Site on your Area map, or they may just tell you the general area to search in ("Those boggs al'ays come from th' West, they do, Sir") and leave the hard work to you and your party.
Alright, I think that's a big enough wall of text for now. I'll post some more details up tomorrow. For now -- bed!
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
What is Rimurstar Productions?
Rimurstar Productions is a small, independent game development company currently located in Jacksonville, Florida. Or, to be more precise: Rimurstar Productions is me, and I'm currently located in Jax.
I started Rimurstar for a few reasons. First, because I have about a billion ideas swarming around in my head wanting to get free, and it's getting kinda crowded in here. Second, to keep me busy doing positive, productive work. Third, as a sort of running resume of my work.
What kind of games and products will Rimurstar Productions be working on? Right now there's just one, World of Olume: Fate of the Mullen, which I'll get into in a later post, an old-school styled computer RPG. There is another computer game in the wings, although serious work won't start on it until Fate is nearing completion, and there may be other World of Olume products as well.
I think that's enough about me and Rimurstar for now. In my next post I'll start describing Fate of the Mullen, my current project.
I started Rimurstar for a few reasons. First, because I have about a billion ideas swarming around in my head wanting to get free, and it's getting kinda crowded in here. Second, to keep me busy doing positive, productive work. Third, as a sort of running resume of my work.
What kind of games and products will Rimurstar Productions be working on? Right now there's just one, World of Olume: Fate of the Mullen, which I'll get into in a later post, an old-school styled computer RPG. There is another computer game in the wings, although serious work won't start on it until Fate is nearing completion, and there may be other World of Olume products as well.
I think that's enough about me and Rimurstar for now. In my next post I'll start describing Fate of the Mullen, my current project.
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