Setting

[Colin]

Our game needs a setting and overall theme before we make any real progress on story and the like. This needs to be linked with the game structure to produce a game that makes some sort of (internal) sense. My current ideas for that are in another thread. Naturally, both that and this may be subject to change, depending on the input of the rest of the creative team (if I ever get one ...)

In a small, out of the way village in reasonably contemporary fantasy world, strange things are going on; stranger than usually happens in such obscure rural settings. Everyone has secrets they want to keep, and ones they want to find out. Between the oppressive local government, corrupt police, witches, monsters, and other horrid things and folk, everyone knows the national government needs to send someone in to deal with the whole mess.

Someone, that is, almost but not entirely unlike you. You play a traveller, a scholar, a historian, and a curious bystander, but not a government agent or a hero. You've heard of this strange little village and are visiting out of curiosity. While people might think or hope (or fear) you are their to bring justice, you really aren't. How you deal with each problem - or even whether or not you deal with it at all - is up to you. Once you've seen enough, you leave, and that's all.

[Jonathan G]

While I like the theme and setting ideas, I'm concerned that the game may have a lack of progression. Non-linearity is an interesting concept, and works in favour of the innovation factor of our game, but I still think the player should gain something for his experiences. Saving the game isn't out of the question, so we can have locked quests/weapons/etc to give the player something to work for, rather than simply playing all the quests then walking away.

[NickF]

Yeah, non linearity is cool, but you still need to give the player a sense that they're making progress

[Mat]

I think that although the complete non-linearity is always going ot be an interesting concept, I think it should be part of the game design itself and not be there for a particular purpose to be innovative or whatnot. I actually wrote an article on this a while back, on how lots of games "simulate" non-linearity nowadays (the Zelda games are a great example, they appear to have a sprawling RPG landscape but in reality you need certain items to progress to "locked" areas, although they are not forcibly locked by "You cannot go here").

When designing for the Game Boy Advance, you have to take the playtime of the player into advance - when a player plays a game on the game boy advance they are usually going to consume it for typically a time of around an hour. This means that a game must have a progression so that the player feels there has been a net gain from the start of the hour to the end of the hour.

Non-linearity on this level would be useful in a mobile phone game, where the playtime in question is more in the region of "up to 10 minutes" as opposed to "an hour and above", because in the gamers' mind 10 minutes is a length of time where someone can't expect to have made reasonable progress, and they are simply for the case of "gotta whack them all".

This isn't a puzzle game, it's an action game, and in my opinion there should be some basis of progression in the game, as much as I'd love to make it completely non-linear - I can't see it working.

[Colin]

I'm not convinced that it won't work well, and I'm not convinced that it's a particularly bad idea to make a game that doesn't work well.

What the player gains from each story is exactly what the character gains from it; they learn the story, learn about the characters, and learn about the world. I don't really see why players need us to tell them how well they're doing, as they ought to be able to work it out for themselves.

Another thing I'd quite like to do is have alternative endings to all the stories, depending on whether you win the fight, die, run out of time, or whatever. Then having the game reset every time you restart means you can play them again and get the alternatives easily.

I'd be disappointed if the stories were so short as to be finished in ten minutes each (at least the first time through). Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about our game writing skills, but I would hope we could stretch them to two or three times that.

[Mat]

You'd expect players to play through each mini-quest (of, say, half an hour's play) and then have no benefit from it other than story gaining? Interesting...

[Dan]

It might be more interesting if knowledge was power.

Say knowing things from completing one quest gave you information that made other quests more interesting or added more options to them. Say there is a point in quest A where you are urged to say the secret word for some reason - If you have played quest B then you'd know it. Something like that, adding a bit more depth to the game world.

Actually that reminds me conceptually of the film Sin City, where each story is narratively seperate but builds up a picture of a world. If you designed a narrative designed to do this, then it could be very interesting indeed. Say a quest that centres around the poltics of living in world X and another quest that investigates the gang culture of that same world and you buiild up a picture of the world in your head through these quests rather than through an introductory FMV.

Keep thinking of fresh ideas I say.

[Colin]

You'd expect players to play through each mini-quest (of, say, half an hour's play) and then have no benefit from it other than story gaining? Interesting...

What else would you expect to gain from an RPG, ever? No matter how many shiny swords you pick up, or experience points you gain, at the end of the day you're just trying to advance the story and find out more.

The difference here is that the story is essentially static; there is no plot to advance. If we make the world and characters interesting enough, I don't think that will be an issue.

Say knowing things from completing one quest gave you information that made other quests more interesting or added more options to them.

I did think that if we wanted to add a final "boss" level of sorts, we could have it start with some questions about the other stories, like asking for names and secrets. This requires the player to have played the other stories, but not necessarily in the same game session.

[Jonathan G]

What else would you expect to gain from an RPG, ever? No matter how many shiny swords you pick up, or experience points you gain, at the end of the day you're just trying to advance the story and find out more.

Gaining shiny swords and levels and stuff is an indicator of growing power, which players like. The player used to have the +3 wooden sword of breakability and was having a hard time beating the monsters, but now you've retrieved the golden roast chicken of Zeus from the dungeon you can trade it for a +12 titanium sword of lens-flaring. Those scary enemies from before seem a lot more appealing as you can now hammer them into the ground, making the player feel a lot more powerful.

Shigsy was explaining Zelda on that DVD, he said it's a story of gaining power and achievement, the player can look at Link and compare how powerful he is now to when he started. I'm not saying we should make a game like Zelda, but we should at least have some progression and power gaining.

[Ricky]

Since we're essentially making a hack & slash game, I'm not sure how we're going to fit in such an original idea when it comes to story; we can't ask the player to wonder around for a while talking to people, since this isn't an rpg.

Or, we decide that it sort of is one, and there are places the player can buy weapons/armour from (not in a complex way, think Diablo) and enemies could award some kind of currency on their defeat. Big enemies would give better stuff.

The trouble with quests being there just for plot and story etc. is that it'd be hard to communicate it without just sitting there reading dialog boxes...and hard to manipulate it's course since when playing, you're just going to be hacking through legions of enemies.

What I'm trying to say is : hey, cool idea-but for an RPG. We're not doing an RPG, so will it work? Can we sucessfully interleave a set of interesting and short stories with a hack & slash 'em up?

[Colin]

Since we're essentially making a hack & slash game, I'm not sure how we're going to fit in such an original idea when it comes to story; we can't ask the player to wonder around for a while talking to people, since this isn't an rpg.

I'll admit it: I don't want to make a "hack 'n' slash" type game where the story serves to advance the action, rather than the action serving the story. I don't see much room for writing a particularly interesting story in such a game (and from what I've seen no one else ever has either).

Gaining shiny swords and levels and stuff is an indicator of growing power, which players like. ... [Zelda is] a story of gaining power and achievement, the player can look at Link and compare how powerful he is now to when he started.

Zelda and its successors have shown that the formula of progressively shiny swords is good. As far as I know, no one has ever tried anything quite like this idea. Apart from anything else, I want to find out if it's a good one.

Shigeru changed the face of gaming adding a story to make the experience more cinematic. I want to try using a story that couldn't sensibly be told in cinematic terms. Again, as far as I know this hasn't really been done yet.

[Ricky]

If the story could be written in a way that action can then serve the story then I'm for the idea, if we could make it a little more moderate. If the player gets generally more stuff through fighting (by getting money or weapons or whatever) then that's motivation for him to do more quests and see more of the game-as well as doing and finding out more about the story.

I think that it's an idea worth exploring, but there needs to be at least some sense of goal or objective, even if it's just some kind of better reward for doing a quest well, and a worse reward for doing a quest badly. Then some quests could be harder than others, and the hardest quest would sort of be the 'end'. That would add some sense of progression and goal to the game.

[Jonathan G]

I'll admit it: I don't want to make a "hack 'n' slash" type game where the story serves to advance the action, rather than the action serving the story. I don't see much room for writing a particularly interesting story in such a game (and from what I've seen no one else ever has either).

Can you give us an example of exactly what you're trying to do here? At the moment the engine is design purely for combat, as that's what I thought we were going to make.

[Colin]

If the engine doesn't allow for anything other than combat, how are you expecting to include a story at all? I don't expect anything particularly outlandish on the programming side (I neither know nor care about the programming), just things like dialogue and being able to interact a little with the environment. Ideally it should be adaptable so some of the stories can be (or can include) puzzles instead of fighting.

Heck, surely I'm making the programming job easier by eliminating the need for an inventory or statistics. Or saving.

[Jonathan G]

The suggestion was to design for combat first and get it running, then extend the engine to allow for dialogue and interaction once the story was decided upon. While I agree with the principles of the game, I'm uncertain what exactly you're planning so I'm just asking for examples of quests, basically what you envision the player doing during the game. The engine will be adapted later, I'm trying to figure out what to adapt it to do.