Game Design NOT from scratch - building on firm foundations

Despite my best efforts at making this primarily a pen & paper RPG blog, I think my posts on computer games design are beginning to outweigh the former.  That's what you get from working in the industry I guess.  Nevermind.  I shall press on...

Because ideas for games can come from playing other games, I recognise the potential of modding.

The world renowned Counter-Strike, of course, started life as a mod.  The almost as well known Day Z did the same.  There are in fact numerous, notable examples.

I think there's an industry opportunity here that, to my knowledge has never been achieved.  Say you're Rockstar sitting on the GTA5 platform.  And by platform in this sense I don't just mean the engine the game is built upon, I mean the entire package.  Imagine being able to lift the bonnet on GTA5 and tweak the code and content to your heart's desire.  This is essentially what modders do. Different games make it easier or harder for this to be done and there is an argument to actually facilitate this as a popular mod can extend the shelf life of its base game.

But the industry misses a trick here, I think.

What about monetising the modding community?

Here's my point:  Games Development studios should actively encourage modding, and incorporate a licence agreement so that modders can SELL their mod, and split the proceeds between the modding team and the original developer.  More money for the original developer and actual money for the modding team.

AFAIK this has not been done to date.

It ought to be.

Mapping the sky

Just a quick one, not sure if I mentioned this before, but this is how I'd like to handle astronomy in a dRPG:

When the skill is active/selected and you look into the sky, the stars will slowly coalesce to reveal the cardinal compass points and some markers inbetween.  So characters with the skill (and no compass - which I feel should be an item that needs to be used) can look into the sky to orientate themselves.

It should be an active skill though, as sometimes its just nice to look at the sky withour forcing the stars to spell out N, S, etc.

That's all for now.

Death loses all impact...

...if you treat it as just another monster.  Or Fear of the Unknown.

Whilst this post rubs shoulders with some of my recent posts about death mechanics its not really about that.

I've been playing a smattering of Alan Wake recently.  Nice game.  One of the thing it does well (admittedly I've not finished it yet) is to not explain too much about the Darkness that possesses all the people and turns them evil.  And one of the thing a lot of dRPGs do badly is turning all the evil undead creatures into just another mob.

Think of WoW.  IIRC pretty much the entire backstory hinged upon the Lich King and his army of undead.  You had zombies and skeletons to fight and all manner of other undeads.  But in reality they were just another mob.  By explaining too much, by fitting them into the overt parameters of a NPC character sheet, with their hit points and DoT attacks and such, fighting an undead - the great evil in the world - often felt little different to fighting anything else.  A rabid bear for example.

If my intended dRPG is to be any different, I think I'll be borrowing a little from - or at least tipping my hat to - Alan Wake.

Having some dark foreboding evil present in the shadows, always looking to claim your soul would work well in a game where I intend to have interesting and unusual mechanics to cover death.  These could be portrayed graphically in an interesting way too - as you get low on health the shadows loom and writhe and reach out to claim you.  As a ghost you may be more vulnerable to some of these deathly aspects and the corporeal members of your party may have to take measures to protect their spectral assistants.

It's just a thought.

Creeping shadows and a sense of foreboding, that's what you want.  Don't explain too much or you lose all the mystery.

The Next Big Thing

Continuing a little from my last post which touched on the subject of body-swapping, I also like the idea of providing players with the ability to steal the shapes of other creatures.  Not just at the point of death, but also as a deliberate quest-line. 

I have this idea where sorcerers deliberately summon daemons in order to steal their bodies and provide themselves with a monstrous shape to bumble around in.  And by bumble around I mean adventure.

I also think it would be nicely different to provide players with the option of playing as virtually anything in the game.  Trot round as a dog for awhile.  If you handle the knock-on interactions effectively, entire story-lines and certainly particular quests could require one to acquire a different form.  Dogs might go unnoticed where a person would be asked for their papers.

Gods as Men

And three come along at once!

In my last post I began to discuss death mechanics in a co-op dRPG.

More meandering thoughts here on the vague topic of backstory.

In order to imbed the notion of resurrection effectively into the game world I like the idea of the player characters being Gods as Men.  The idea somehow that perhaps this is how Gods breed, or how new gods are created.  And what is more heroic that aspiring to be the next god?

So the players have the lofty ambition of being the next big Thing.  (There's a post for that alone!)

Perhaps not aspiring to be Gods exactly - maybe the characters are the tools of the gods, the weapons of the gods, vessels of the gods?  But basically the idea that a person can die but come back again has some pretty obvious connections to deification.

Another theme of mine that I can't avoid returning to from time to time is the idea of body-swapping.

Also, if a character dies I like to get some semblance of realism in their regarding what happens to their body, their equipment.  Depending of course on how they die.  More on that later.

But evolving this notion from the last post of ghosts.  I like the idea of possession.  So provide PCs in some circumstances with the ability to move as a spirit and possess the body of another.  Maybe requiring specific targets to do this (vessels of the gods).  Or a vessel is easier to possess.  Maybe have a sub-game around possessing an unwilling target?

But provide a post-mortem route back to the land of the living via assuming the body of another creature.  I know some players are fixated on having their character look a certain way - so build in a mechanic where a player can 'warp' (slowly or quickly) back into their previous appearance.  But I think it would make for an interesting and exciting experience to be slain mid-combat and possess one of the enemy and immediately rejoin the game in another form, and then slowly assume your original form.

Watch Fallen.  Really cool film.  Part of this idea came from there.  I warped it a bit of course.  But that's the general idea. 

Death Mechanics: Ghosts and such

And two come along at once!

That will make sense if you read my last post.

I'm ill.  Brain still vague and meandering.

On the subject of death mechanics: I like the idea of ghosts.  I like the idea of being a ghost.  I have a whole game idea based on being a poltergeist in fact, but that is for another post.

For my intended co-op dRPG, what I'd like to do is have a whole sub-game devoted to the Afterlife.  If you do die - and as I discussed in my previous post, Staying Alive, it is something I hope to encourage players to avoid by rewarding them for staying alive for as long as possible - but if you do die, I'd like to handle that with an entire sub-game that is extricably entwined with the world of the living.  In the Afterlife you have to perform certain quests/activities in order to be restored to your body - if applicable.  Or another vessel which you can warp over time into your former shape if so desired.

So you die, you perform certain actions and you are resurrected again in one form or another.  Another meter is managed here.  Maybe this one is called Favour of the Gods or somesuch, and it is linked to or derived from the Heroism meter from Staying Alive, but basically, in order again to encourage people to stay alive, the longer you stay alive - the quicker you can be restored to life should you die.  If you had a full Heroics meter before you died, then maybe you can get an almost instant 'it was not your time' restoration?  The important bit here is what happens if you don't/can't.

If immediate or near-immediate restoration is not possible then the player has two choices: they can either quest in the Afterlife building up their Favour of the Gods(?) until they can be restored to the land of the living.  Or they can remain as a ghost and assist the co-op party in a spectral fashion.  This aspect should be built into the game in such a way that certain situations might actually benefit from a party which has a spectral member.  A spectral player-character should have a severely limited capacity to interact with the world of the living - maybe an 'ectoplasm' meter which builds up over time allows them to occassionally pull levers or switches.  A ghostly PC should also have some spectral skills.  They should be able to make haunting noises - scare off the more readily scared - periodically appear as an apparition, distract guards, do other useful things that the party might benefit from. 

Assisting the heroic is this fashion increases the ghost's Favour of the Gods which eventually results in them currying enough Favour to be restored to the land of the living - to either their own dead body - if applicable - or into the shape of waiting vessel.

And here I come to my next post:  Gods as Men.

Staying alive, staying alive!

Well, if you can say one thing about this blog, its that it's intermittent!

On the subject of handling death in MMOs/RPGs, as I've mentioned before, the problem is no game that I'm aware of handles death anywhere close to correctly.  Generally speaking you either suffer some equipment damage, some monetary penalty is incurred, and you may have to repeat some aspects of your most recent journey/quest/whatever.

The problem is these penalties are either generally too insignificant that death becomes largely irrelevant, and/or there's a danger of monotony in repetition.

I've troubled over this problem for years: how to handle death?

But then it struck me, the reason why I couldn't find a satisfactory answer was that I was asking the wrong question.  Its not so much how to handle death, but how to handle life.

I went back to the core of the problem.  An episodic discussion I've had with several friends and acquaintances concerns an RPG I'd like to make.  Computer game RPGs - even the good ones - still fall short in many ways when comparted to their seminal pen & paper antecedents.  And one aspect is in the relative importance of the life of your character.  In the vast majority of p&p games (Paranoia aside) the life of your character is all important.  Rarely does one rush in (unless you have a headstrong, foolhardy character or a very forgiving GM).  Part of the fun and experience of playing such games is surviving - often against all odds - and indeed in many games the death of one's character may be permanent a cause a player to have to be reintroduced as a new character later on.
Death is so significant in p&p RPGs in fact that some of my most memorable p&p moments concern how various characters died.  The situations create experiences that are as memorable as the best films one has seen or the best books one has read.

In the digital RPG (dRPG?  computer RPG?) I want to make, I'd like to capture some if not all of this potential experience.  But dRPGs differ from pen & paper games.  Death cannot realistically be handled in an identical fashion outside the hardcore mode enjoyed by a smattering of hardcore players.  But it all boils down to tension.

I realised that what I wanted to create was tension.  Tension so that your character creeps along a dungeon corridor, flickering torch in hand, listening hard for the sounds of nearby monsters.  Not rushing about the place wading through rooms of creatures.  These games have their place, but its not the game I'd like to create.

In essence I want to capture the idea of threat.  Make the player feel threatened so they act cautiously and when they do achieve their goals the experiential award is all the greater for it.

So the mechanism here is not just about making a game hard - that road can readily lead to frustration - its about constructing mechanisms that reward a player for staying alive rather than how to correctly handle death.  I want to create the situation where death is avoided.  Virtually at all costs.  Handling death correctly is still an important mechanic, and one I'll return to later, but first, here's a few of the ideas I've had about rewarding characters for not rushing to their deaths.  I want to break that cycle I see online all too often that the way to play MMOs and RPGs is to rush-in, die, respawn, rinse and repeat until one eventually blunders one's way through.

No more Leroy!

Favour of the Gods.  This is a meter that builds up the longer you stay alive whilst you're actually doing stuff.  Questing etc.  You can't just hang about in a tavern, leave yourself logged in to a safe zone and build up the meter, you have to be actively doing something, so perhaps tie it in with movements/actions performed in a hostile zone.  We might want to call this meter Heroism, as that is one of the core experiences I'd like to deliver for players, make them feel like heroes. 

Favour/Heroism does two things.  It acts as a general buff to everything you do.  And it should be a reasonably significant buff.  Something you notice when you have it and when you lose it.  And you lose it by dieing.  You die and you're Heroism is reset to zero.   Maybe Heroism is not the right name?

Also, when you completely fill the bar and keep it filled for some time you are bestowed with a blessing from the Gods.  These blessings are generally situation specific - might well be permanent - and probably the only way to get certain boons.

In this way we should be able to encourage people to stay alive.

Another thing I want to achieve is the experience of a co-operative party.  I believe co-op multiplayer is the best way to achieve the kind of dRPG experience I'd like to deliver.  One of the flaws IMHO of MMOs is the medium's inherent failure to deliver heroics.   Yes I know that's quite a contraversial statement.  But in a game model where one is completing tasks that 1000s of players have completed before you, and 1000s after you, in a world populated by 1000s - many of which are more powerful than you - how heroic are you exactly?  The model, I believe, is inherently flawed.

But what MMOs have shown they do well is in their in-game marketplaces and economies.  So a combination of co-op multiplayer adventuring where you are the heroes, combined with an MMO marketplace for trading would make a nice combination.  But that's for another post.

So our intention here is to develop mechanics which support the notion of encouraging players to stay alive.  To act cautiously.  Death mechanics are still required and will be the subject of my next post.


*This post has been brought to you by Richard's Meandering Brain and its Inability to Stay on Topic.

Elementary Collaborative Story-Telling

Okay, I have an idea for character I'd like to play for a change.  Those of you who have read any quantity of my previous posts on pen & paper roleplaying will know they tend to revolve around ideas for games, worlds, settings or mechanics, enchanted artifacts and such, as I mostly GM.

Every now and again however, I conceive of a character I'd like to play.  And I live in hope that one of my friends or acquaintances will create a game for me to enjoy from the other side of the table from time to time.

The idea of this character has really been born out of two notions:

1) The idea of collaborative story-telling in an RPG.  The sort of thing John Wick bangs on about.  And the sort of thing I embarrassingly have never tried myself.  Too old skool, too much of a control freak.  But the concept does intrigue me.  Taking part in a game where the players don't just participate in, but to some extent actively modify the plot to a certain degree.  And...

2) I've been watching a lot of Sherlock Holmes recently. Most notably Benedict Cumberbatch's modern reworking of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic, to CBS's most recent adaptation set in New York.

And it struck me that playing a character like Holmes, displaced into a fantasy genre (so approaching, I suppose, to some degree the forensic eccentricities of Depp's Ichabod Crane) such a character could create a number of ad lib'd hooks for the GM to utilise in a collaborative style pen & paper RPG.  I've always wanted to play a character whose priniple 'weapon' was hypnotism too.  So I'll throw that in there as well.

This is the way I see it working:

The GM sets up the scene as per normal.  But whenever the Sherlock character begins to investigate the area, the player (that'll be me for a change) adds in detail that the GM didn't explicitly mention at the time - and may not have even considered, but the GM then uses these hooks to further develop the story.

So I get to say things like: Yes the barkeep at the Drowned Goblin seems like a pleasant enough fellow, indeed.  But appearances can be deceptive.  His clothes had a familiar odour, that of winter roses, an expensive perfume favoured by Lord Heldrum's mistress.  Moreover, the barkeep had abrasions on the back of his left hand, resembling marks left by teeth but with a noticeable indentation not present, commensurate with an upper left canine, missing from Heldrum's mistress's handmaiden, Flossie.  Moreover the Drowned Goblin itself is built on the old part of the town, atop the ancient catacombs that run the length and breadth of the merchant quarter heading towards the cliffs overlooking the bay.  The barkeep's boots were black with mud and yet it hasn't rained in days.  I'd wager that if we explore the cellar, we'll find a concealed entrance to those dank catacombs and a trail that leads directly to Heldrum's mistress's cottage on the outskirts of town towards the east.

I think you get the general idea.  From a GM's point of view players' actions inevitably require some ad lib'ing to weave them effectively into the story.  With a character like the one sketched out above, the GM will have if anything a surfeit of ideas to aid them in this endeavour.  And it would be a great opportunity to try out some of this collaborative story-telling all the kids are talking about.  :-)  I remember when all this was fields.

Now if I can just find someone interested enough to run such a game....  ;-)

Long time, no see...

Apologies for the lack of posts.  In my defense, I've been rather busy making this:

It's called Freq.Trigger, and it's a 2D top-down physics-based shooter modified by music.  Music changes everything and every song equals a unique experience.  We're just about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to finish the game (but its largely complete as it is).  But then, thinking about it, virtually everyone likely to see this post, will know about the game anyway.  My net doesn't stretch that wide, alas.

Anyway, excuse post over.  I do have a real post about RPGs and such!  Gonna set to it now!  :-)

If you happen to stumble past this blog, and want to know more about Freq.Trigger, check out our FB page here:  http://www.facebook.com/freqgames

And prepare to support us on Kickstarter! ;D

Levelling the playing field

So, I was playing Rift the other day, and I got onto this mission thread where you summon a Titan, lose control over it, it runs amok, and you have to perform a bunch of other tasks which enable you to craft a weapon which is capable of destroying it.

Well, that's the idea.

Except in my case (and I suspect myriad other players too), I summoned the Titan, lost control over it, then promptly killed it (in an admittedly) close battle.

But the point is, I killed it ahead of the story arc.  Obviously, as is another one of my major bugbears with MMOs, the thing respawned moments later, allowing me to complete the right quests and kill it 'properly' at the right time.

Now this should never really of happened.  Don't get me started on the whole respawning thing at this juncture - that's enough for a mega-post all its own.  But sticking with, for a moment, the classic old skool way of handling quests in MMOs, I should never have been able to kill the beast at that level, at that point.  I'd go so far as to say, even with a group of players, we shouldn't be able to slay such a beast.

Firstly, if you're going to make your enemies sound (and for the sake of the story) tough / threatening / awe-inspiring... then actually make them that.  Make them 10 levels higher than you.  Make it nigh on impossible to complete that quest outside of gaining a few levels and coming back to it later.  Keep the quest line going until you're tough enough, and let the players come back to such a challenging enemy when they are capable of slaying it.

Secondly, it got me to thinking about the distribution of level-specific entities across the MMO landscape.  Typically speaking, MMO worlds are set up in such a way that players move from region to region as they advance thru the levels.  They know they start out in the Beleaguered Isles, where everything is a convenient level 1-4, and then they move to the Dead Coast, where everything is levels 5-8 and they move inland to the Forest of Doom, where everything is 9-12 and so forth.  Quite frankly, and not to put too fine a point on it, that's a load of crap.  Yes I understand the reasons for it, but the genre has been around for quite a few years now, time to get a little more sophisticated.

When you see Kings and Generals and other leader types, I think they should all be pretty high level.  Even if it means that a lower levels you have no way of defeating them.  I'd like to see quest lines that take you back to regions you left long ago, to finish someone off that was previously too high a level to defeat.  I'd also like to see combat compressed a bit, so lower levels do have more of a chance to kill higher levels.  I know this may seem a little counter-intuitive when slated up alongside what I've mentioned above, but the two can work in harmony, and provide for situations where a high level King enemy can effectively get mobbed by a mass of low level characters (not without killing quite a few in the process, mind) which would be (for me at least) a welcome nod toward realism without taking things too far.