Game Design: Tough Choices
Is the most powerful tool for gamers' emotional involvement, the ability to make the touch choices for themselves , also what is holding us back from making emotionally compelling worlds?

I've become a fan of Leigh Alexander lately, and in several of her most recent articles she's been discussing the nature of choice in videogames. Here are two focused on the subject:

The Mechanics of Choice

The Aberrant Gamer: Choose Your Own Adventure

She brings up some very interesting points. In particular, she notes the difficulty of putting moral or emotion-laden choices in games. Not that the attempts to do so have been scarce --- it is just that they so often fail.

"...Thus far, what we’ve been offered in terms of "choices" from gaming often tend to amount to little more than what one reader called a “cost-benefit analysis”. In other words, since the impact of our choices is limited to a statistical benefit or penalty (with perhaps a different ending tacked on), any moral or emotional decision presented to us can be reduced to a technicality."

Does it all come down to math? When we get in the competitive mindset (and even in a single-player game, we get in that mindset, desiring to "beat" the system or the designer or whatever insubstantial challenger we can imagine as a competitive proxy), it's hard to just 'experience' a game, or even get into the mental state where more subtle emotions can take root. We instead mentally go through a mental calculation of "guess what the designer had in mind."

So is it possible for us to separate the dynamics of gameplay from the elements of story? Arguably, Alexander believes this worked - for her - in Bioshock.

"Cost-benefit regardless, the choices in this game are beyond the mechanics. The merit of choice in games may not be what we get from it, but when done this richly, how it feels."

What makes it work for her? And does it work for other players? In Bioshock (which I still haven't played beyond the demo, though it's almost impossible to avoid reading plenty about it the last couple of weeks), you are presented with a choice to commit an atrocity --- but it is presented in such a context and with such great justification as it makes the reprehensible acceptable.

Several players - stuck in the "cost-benefit-analysis" mode, have complained about the lack of leniency in the multiple endings. Outspoken journalist Kieron Gillen eventually came up with a stock answer. "As I’ve said to everyone complaining about being treated as a shithead when they’ve “Just harvested a couple”… exactly how many little girls do you think the world thinks it’s acceptable to kill?"

Interestingly enough, even much-acclaimed Ultima IV, with its complex virtue system, really broke down into just a cost-benefit analysis of decisions. Your choice of whether to be honest or humble often came down to a matter of which virtue needed more points --- or which you felt was easier to "make up" later. What U4 did offer, at least, was a chance to check in and measure your virtue changes - a mirror to your avatar's soul. There weren't any surprises in the end when you discover the depth of the stain on the soul from a single murder - even one performed for the greater good.

The most powerful tool of the storyteller is to evoke an emotional response in the audience. And with interactive entertainment (read: Video Games), what is potentially our most powerful tool for evoking emotions is the ability to give the player the ability to make those key decisions himself. Yet that very potential is frustrated by the challenge of a game - it encourages the player to shut off the parts of his or her brain that get distracted by context, metaphor, and meaning, and instead concentrate on the purity of the elements of the challenge itself.

Maybe the ability to see the "big picture" and appreciate the overall context and metaphor capable of evoking emotions is really only possible when the audience is in a passive frame of mind? While giving the controller a rest during a cut-scene, or while contemplating the game after it has been completed? Or is it just a case of making the player "comfortable" enough in the game-world that they feel free to explore it on all levels, rather than narrowing their focus to pure survival mode.

Is there a better way to present pivotal moral decisions in games to players that are as emotionally laden as they'd be if the player had been merely an observer?

Or perhaps the best way to handle it is, as in Fallout, Bioshock, and other games - to simply have the big reveal at the end to shock (and sometimes delight) players with the realization of the consequences of their action within the context of the games' fiction. Though for too many players, as evidenced by the Bioshock ending complaints, might not be too satisfied with the results of their handiwork.

What do you think?


(Vaguely) related inconceivables...
* Game Moments #7 - Ultima 7
* Why Was Final Fantasy 7 So Successful?
* Fair Game or Drama?
* Game Moments #4 - Daggerfall

Read or Post Comments on the Forum!

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights: Taking Inventory
Building an indie Computer Role-Playing Game can make you crazy.

Maybe it's the milestones I've set for myself. Which are starting to slip. I've got two more days in August, and I've gotta finish the inventory system and the conversation system (which I haven't started beyond June's prototype). The pressure is on, even though these are self-mandated milestones. So I have Frayed Knights on the brain. This week has been particularly brutal. I work on the game at night. I put a few minutes into it before I go into work in the morning. This is turning me into a terrible conversationalist. I'm beginning to sound like the Rain Man.

I vaguely remember Void War getting this way during the latter stages of development. But it's been a while since I've gotten into this mode.

Inventory
I think I underestimated the difficulty of implementing the inventory system. It was something I figured I could whip out in a two or three caffeinated nights. It's turning into a somewhat higher-hit-dice beast to slay.

There are two parts to it (as usual) - the internal mechanics, and the user interface. I've now re-written both twice. I'm not sure I'm ultra-happy with how things stand, but it's workable now.

I borrowed a little bit from old-school jRPG-style inventory systems in that you've got a party inventory (which is virtually infinite - maybe its some kind of magical bag of holding) and an individual character's equipment.

I know. The Tardis-style party inventory means the player won't have to leave the dungeon six times to go back to town and sell junk. Which will cut those total gameplay hours way down and make this game compare unfavorably with mainstream games that have all that make-work in them. I'll just have to deal. Let's just consider the party inventory thing to be an abstraction, shall we, representing LOTS of trips to and from the dungeon happening "behind the scenes." So we can get that "realism" protest out of the way.

The party inventory also means that - for now at least - I'm not going to worry about a special interface to transfer items between characters. You "unequip" an item and it goes in the party inventory. Then someone else can equip your hand-me-downs or something.

Oh, yeah, and I borrowed some of the graphics I used for Hackenslash for the inventory. Gotta love stand-in graphics! Man, those are terrible, aren't they?

Plundering Clichés!
While the main storyline and a chunk of the world back-story has already been designed, I've still got a lot to fill out. And I noticed that my brain has been in programming mode getting the systems all working lately, rather than the lovely "design mode" I was in many weeks ago. So it was time to jump-start my brain to focus a bit more on the "non-crunchy" stuff about the world and subplots.

I put out a call for some common "old-school" RPG traditions, common situations, and clichés on the local community and over at Necromancer Games. Shamus Young of Twenty Sided also added his voice to the call, and has so far received over 60 responses. And then there are links to sites which keep track of this kind of thing. I was familiar with the largest one (and I've been pushing to have Dirk bemoan the killing of a "Load Bearing Boss" at some point), but they are all handy.

Why am I asking for these old-school traditions and goofy stuff? I'm glad you asked! (Oh, wait, you didn't, I did. Well, I'll tell you anyway)? I have found I use them several different ways:

#1 - I turn them on their ear. I won't give any examples here as they might be spoilers. But ... I start with a cliché, and then add some major ---hopefully unforseen - twists to bring out the funny and keep it interesting.

#2 - I turn them into jokes. This can range from one-shot snarking in a static dialog, to a whole subplot or monster (like the pus golem).

#3 - I embrace the cliché! I take some of the weird, classic idiosyncrasies of old-school games and build them into the back-story or world history - sometimes mixing them with a little bit of anachronistic modern mentality. For example, the explanation as to why all these dungeons, caves, and underground fortresses are found everywhere (often filled with monsters and long-lost treasure) is a huge part of the background of the world.

The World of Frayed Knights: Pokmor-Xang
Pokmor-Xang is the god of boils, blisters, and pimples. And also, apparently, the god of donuts. Undoubtedly, this last sphere of influence was attributed to him more as a marketing effort on the part of his followers when proseletyzing. After all, potential followers might be put off by worship services where festering sores might be involved. As in modern-world departmental meeting, one finds oneself able to stomach all kinds of horror so long as someone says, "Hey, we brought donuts!"

Likewise, while ancient depictions of Pokmor-Xang tend to emphasize his bestial, plague-ridden forms, more enlightened priests of the "Zit God" (as only heathen nonbelievers sometimes refer to him) chose more human depictions like the idol to the right that are collectively referred to as "Happy Xangs."

In spite of their best attempts at public relations, and the occasional dabbling by teenagers wishing beauty-marring pustules on the faces of their rivals, the cults of Pokmor-Xang have never enjoyed much popularity amongst human civilization. Perhaps it is because love and appreciation of boils, blisters, and pimples comes alien to most human minds, but most of the clergy positions become filled by man-eating monsters with complexion problems.

Until Next Week...
Well, that's about it for this week. Tune in next week when I'll hopefully have the conversation system done. How hard can it be?


(Vaguely) related random bits and bytes:
* Frayed Knights: Getting Around in the World
* RPG Design: Feed Me, Seymour!
* What Makes a Good Casual RPG?
* Frayed Knights: Solving the Saved-Game Problem

Got Two Coppers To Add? Share Your Ideas on the Forum!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Vista-Exclusive DX-10 Bad For PC Gaming?
According to Gabe Newell of Valve Software in this Heise interview, Microsoft's attempt to force gamers to upgrade to the latest version of its operating system may not have been a good thing for PC gaming. It's fragmented the market, and adoption amongst gamers has been noticeably low.

It's quite possible that the adoption rate is so low because Microsoft and the other console manufacturers have succeeded so well in getting the most hardcore (and early-adopter) gamers converted over to consoles. And now Microsoft has a chicken-and-egg problem: Gamers will migrate to Vista when there's a "killer app" that they must have which will force them to make the costly upgrade for questionable benefits. But right now, unless Microsoft bribes them with actual cash or a major free marketing push, no developer or publisher (outside of Microsoft themselves) is willing to cut themselves off from the vast majority of their market for the sake of DirectX 10 support.

As one who has stubbornly held off on making the upgrade to Vista, I'm probably not one to disagree. Of course, it usually took a "killer app" (like support for new hardware) to make me migrate in the past... I think I've always held off until the first service patch fixes all the horrible nasty bugs and security holes first after Windows 95. My strategy has paid off --- I managed to avoid the Windows M.E. debacle altogether. But I do like the idea of the majority of Windows machines having .NET already installed...

In all likelihood, this problem will fade away within the next couple of years as the install base gradually increases. If adoption remains sluggish and Microsoft is very timely with Vista's successor, then we may just get to worry about a new set of problems.

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:57 PM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
Help! I Need Some Good RPG Clichés!
Hey folks...

One of the sources of humor in Frayed Knights is some good natured ribbing of old-school RPG conventions, classic situations, and clichés. As an example, while the pus-golem joke is pretty much stand-alone, it's also a little bit of a joke about 3rd edition D&D game books... every monster book seems to need to add some constructs, so they all include new golems made out of every substance imaginable.

So I'm looking for a few good jokes.

Rather, some silly elements from computer and "PnP" role-playing games to poke fun at. The weirdness in games that you just learned to ignore. Like... well, like this list here:

Lessons Learned Playing Computer RPGs

Do you have any others? If so, please post 'em. And then I'll see if the Frayed Knights can be made available for commentary...

Gripe about favorite clichés, conventions, and weirdness here!

Thanks in advance, everyone!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:00 PM (Permalink) links to this post

 
Indie RPG Updates, August 28th
Indie Computer RPGs - just like grandma used to make. If your grandma was named "Richard Garriott" or "Jon Van Caneghem" or "David Bradley," I guess. I've been a little slow in getting this one out, but things have seemed a little slow this month:

The Broken Hourglass
Planewalker Games has several bits of information on their website about their upcoming "Baldur's Gate" style indie RPG. First off, there's this artice on the game mechanics discussion Point-Buy Strategies. Find out how to level up! Then, for prospective modders, there's an in-depth article on area creation in The Broken Hourglass. Find out how to create your own dungeons! This is actually a pretty interesting article altogether for game developers working on any kind of isometric-style 2D game.

Aveyond II - Ean's Quest
Not to be outdone, Amaranth Games reports that the maps are largely done, and that mouse control - perhaps the most-requested feature for Aveyond I - is now in. Even better, Amanada claims that she'll be retrofitting it into the original Aveyond once it has been fully tested. So expect a new version of Aveyond coming soon! The projected release date of Aveyond II - Ean's Quest is currently in November. But as always, it's true release date will be "when its done."

Minions of Mirth
Patch 1.25 is live with tons of new content and enhancements. A full list of the patch features can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/29hxsu.

Prairie Games also reports that they've got a new Minions of Mirth Website featuring community blogs, picture galleries, integrated game encyclopedia, server status, and more! They've also got a Halloween Raffle contest going on for MoM players, which includes the chance to win one of several game consoles.

Depths of Peril
Soldak has posted two new monster profiles for the Lich and the Stalker. There's also a new preview from TechDomain. And of course, if you haven't tried out the demo, here's a whole list of mirror sites to download it from.

I guess I set my expectations too low for this game, because the demo really surprised me - in a good way. I guess I was expecting just another Diablo clone with a strategy element tacked on. Instead, the hybrid elements seem really nicely integrated, if a little confusing at first. I look forward to playing the full version. Try the demo out and let me know if I'm wrong!

Avernum V
Spiderweb Software has a bunch of screenshots now available for their upcoming RPG, Avernum V.

And I gotta say... holy crap, how they crank out the games! I'm still not very far into Avernum IV! But I'm kinda playing a dozen games at once and actually trying to get my own games completed, so I guess I can't say I've really been working on it all that hard. Still, Jeff Vogel and company are prolific. They remind me of a time when we didn't have to wait five years between sequels for our favorite games.

Nethergate Resurrection
The PC version of Nethergate: Resurrection is now available!

Frayed Knights
Hey, I'm allowed a shameless plug or three, aren't I? If you are a regular here, you know all about this one. Another month of development is nearly at an end. Core game systems are currently scheduled to be completed in November, with lots of content work taking place after that. The latest update was on the Drama Star System, an attempt to provide a partial solution to the "Saved Game Problem." You know, the one where players brute-force their way to success by saving every step of the way and re-playing any segment that doesn't go perfectly for them?

Yeah, I know. Most games actually RELY upon that in order to squeeze out twelve hours of gameplay from a four-hour game. Ah, well...


Wow. I guess things weren't so slow after all. Guess it was just me...


(Vaguely) related items of possible non-interest:
* Indie RPG News, July 24th
* Indie RPG In Development: Scars of War
* Cute Knight Deluxe Now Available
* Interview With Amanda Fitch, Creator of Aveyond


Forum Discussion on the Latest Indie RPG News

Labels: Indie Evangelism, Indie RPG News, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
A Better Way To Fight Piracy?
The latest flap over the "excessive" DRM restrictions of Bioshock has once again reminded me that in the battle between content-makers and digital pirates, the biggest loser is usually the honest consumer. Increasingly invasive or restrictive licensing may force them to find "cracks" just to allow them to play the game they paid for (been there, done that, and had friends have to do the same), which of course exposes them to the wild, wonderful world if pirate websites and executables --- with all the security risk that entails.

There has got to be a better way.

Now, as a game developer or publisher, what is your goal? Is it to stamp out piracy? Not in the least. You could get 100% effective in combating piracy by simply refusing to release your game, but that wouldn't exactly be sound business decision. Your goal, as a gaming business, is to maximize revenue on your game. There is anecdotal evidence that going from a weak incentive to buy to a stronger one can yield five times more sales.

It's not about pirates or "non-customers" versus real customers. It should be about customers versus potential customers. And it definitely shouldn't be about treating all customers as criminals until they've jumped through enough hoops to qualify for temporary upgraded status.

The First Stage Is Acceptance
I heard a story once about a software company which - like too many software companies - found that about half of their customer-support time was being spent supporting non-customers. In other words, people using pirated copies of their software.

Their approach to the problem was to get these "highly questionable" users who had lost their documentation and license keys to sign up for their mailing list. And then send them the same upgrade offer they sent their legitimate customers. From what I was told, a surprising number of these users accepted the chance to "go legit" with a discounted upgrade.

So in other words, their approach was to treat the criminals as customers, rather than to treat customers as criminals. And it worked.

Is It Time To Embrace Reality?
Could game developers and publishers adopt a similar approach? Instead of making it harder for legitimate users to enjoy their rights as consumers, could they instead add incentives for the so-called "casual pirates" to not only go legal, but also to buy other products?

Is it time to give up the fantasy that we can fight a winnable war of defense against piracy? Can we instead embrace reality, and try to turn it to our advantage?

Winning Customers Through Convenience
Stardock tried something along these lines with Galactic Civilization II. We may never know how it would have gone if they had decided on a more draconian DRM solution instead, but rumor has it that the game has sold quite well. Now, they do have some basic license restrictions with their software, provide a serial key that you need to install the game, and so forth. In a forum article, "Galactic Civilizations II, Copy Protection, and Piracy", they state, "Our primary weapon to fight piracy is through rewarding customers through convenient, frequent, free updates. If you make it easy for users to buy and make full use of your product or service legitimately then we believe that you'll gain more users from that convenience than you'll lose from piracy. "

Their approach was outlined in a JoeUser article, "CD Copy Protection Is Not The Way To Stop Piracy," their recipe includes provide a unique serial number for each game, tying those to personalized user accounts, providing frequent and meaningful updates to the game for customers, and providing other benefits for customers. All this adds up to make it far more convenient and beneficial to be a legitimate customer than to be a pirate. The only ones who will really prefer the inconvenience and danger of illegal downloads are those who really couldn't afford the game in the first place.

Winning Over The Kids Who "Wouldn't Buy It Anyway"
Amanda Fitch, of Amaranth Games, had a very clever way of recovering some of those other "lost souls" who would have turned to piracy out of economic necessity. She received emails from kids who couldn't afford her hit casual RPG, "Aveyond," and she offered them a free copy in exchange for their marketing efforts. This converted a non-sale into MANY sales, potentially, in addition to earning her some rabid goodwill.

While that solution doesn't scale very well, it does show that there are some ways of thinking outside of the box and turning economic realities into an advantage.

Any More Bright Ideas?
What other things could be done to combat piracy by encouraging pirates - particularly the "casual" pirates - to "go legit" rather than (only) erecting semi-effective barriers that are more painful to legitimate consumers than the pirates they were designed to foil?

If you have ever had less-than-legitimate software installed on your machine, what would it take for you to spend the money to make it official rather than buying something new?

Is there a better way to turn people's tendency to share with each other to an advantage (as was used back in the pre-web shareware days) rather than fighting against the tide?


(Vaguely) related stupidity, absolutely free:
* PC Game Publishers: Please Hurt Me Some More!
* A Pirate Story
* Will 2007 Be the Year of the Downloadable Game?
.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 16 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design: Above All, Stand Out!
On a whim, I pulled out an old gaming mag the other night. It was Computer Games Strategy Plus, a great PC gaming magazine of yesteryear. Its the August 1994 issue, with an Earthsiege robot ("HERC") on the cover. I do this kind of thing from time to time. So I'm a little bit of a freak.

Anyway, I turned to the adventure / RPG section and reminded myself of what games were available at this point. Al Qadim - The Genie's Curse, a pre-Diablo click-style action / RPG gets a review. I actually played and enjoyed this one. Then there's a review for "Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard." I couldn't recall this one at all. Apparently it was a sequel to an Amiga game. I went to some online sites to see what they had to say about this one. Information was scant, but for the most part they echoed Steve Wartofsky's words from this review:

"What distinguishes Hexx: Heresy of the Wizard, then? Nothing significant. I can't really see anything in the way of story, implementation, puzzle design or character creation to single this out from the scads of designs that have been developed over the years... Hexx seems conservatively unimaginitive and overly derivative, but within those constraints, it plays well."

In his summary paragraph, he states, "All in all, Hexx looks to be the kind of game that might fill some hours up for truly dedicated CRPG players who've run through all the other major CRPGs out there, while they wait for the next major CRPG release. Its conservative design approach means little in the way of new surprises for such gamers, in both a good and bad sense: it's a game we've all seen before, but unlike some more innovative recent designs --- it runs. That last bit alone would be a recommendation to many PC gamers."

Some other comments include phrases like, "pleasant to play," "pretty evenly balanced," "pretty effectively..."

Not words of high praise, but nothing really damning, either. All-in-all, this sounded like a pretty okay game. I've heard far, far worse reviews for games like, oh, Daikatana and Trespasser.

But I don't know if I've ever heard this game mentioned ever since 1994. It's forgotten. And I'm willing to bet that both Daikatana and Trespasser enjoyed both greater sales AND a larger fanbase. Sure, this could be chalked up to larger marketing efforts and timing. But I believe that a crucial element is simply that Hexx just never stood out in any way. It was like a single Dorito in a bag of Doritos - it was crunched down and forgotten.

While it is true of any crowded game genre, the key is to be a "purple cow" - to stand out amongst other games in the genre. Quality alone isn't enough. And it is also important to make your stand-out qualities obvious in your marketing and your initial gameplay experience. Sure, having a twist ending at the end that turns your game into something other than a generic "Kill the Foozle" experience is great... but you don't want players to wait that long.

Graphics. Mechanics. Story. Characters. Setting. Style. Pacing. Interface. Mood. Sound. All of these are areas ripe for doing something different in RPGs (and most other game categories) to make a game stand out and get noticed. It's important to be good. But it's just as important to be different.

Labels: Game Design, retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:10 AM (Permalink) 4 comments links to this post

 
PC Game Publishers: Please Hurt Me Some More!
When I first heard about the two installation limitation on the PC version Bioshock, my first thought was, "Screw that, I'll just buy the XBox 360 version."

I'm a die-hard PC gamer. And I do not even HAVE an X-Box 360 yet (rumor has it Santa might have it on order for Christmas). Given the choice between a console and PC version of a game, I always go with the PC version.

Yet my first thought upon hearing what sounded like a pretty onerous copy-protection scheme was to hand in my PC Gamer card, and wait four more months so I didn't have to deal with that kind of B.S.

Since then, it has been clarified in that as long as your computer is hooked up to the Internet... and there's no firewall issues... and no hiccups... IF you uninstall the game correctly, it will count as a "negative installation" and you don't have to call up the copy protection company and prove your innocence and beg for them for permission to play you bought from them.

And really, it shouldn't affect me one bit, should it? I am usually hooked up to the Internet, and I do know enough to uninstall my games properly --- usually. Assuming my hard drive hasn't crashed or become corrupted by spyware (or other copy protection software) or anything. And I play downloadable games all the time, and more than once I've had to email the developers / distributors and ask for my old key back. Assuming they are still around when I reinstall - as a retrogamer I am pretty used to playing games that are no longer being supported (and whose former publishers no longer even exist). But barring any of that, it shouldn't be a problem, should it?

So what's the big deal? Why should I object to being treated as a criminal by the game publisher, and putting my faith into an untrusted mechanical guardian that has power over whether or not I have the right to enjoy my investment? Why should I be concerned about having to jump through a bunch of hoops as a legitimate consumer, knowing that the dishonest pirates will soon be enjoying a superior product than what I have paid good money for?

And after the PC gamer has been filled with the spirit of generosity for having bolstered a company's sales projections by pre-ordering the game and paying for it in advance, why should they be annoyed that they are denied the opportunity to play their long-awaited purchase immediately because the registration servers that dole out permission are overloaded for a few hours or days?

And why should game publishers complain that the PC market has been weakening? You mean that pissing off all the PC gaming fans and turning this open platform into a desolate wasteland of gaming hasn't been their plan all along? Surely they could not have been constructing such an sophisticated bed to lie in purely by accident?

(Incidentally... is the Steam version free of this particular crap... albeit coming with it's own unique brand of crap? Somehow I have more faith in Steam than SecuROM... or maybe it's just my loyalty to a developer-turned-publisher...)

UPDATE: According to the PCGamer blog, uninstalling isn't guaranteed to count. And SecuRom is friggin' PSYCHOTIC and paranoid about re-authorizing the activation. And, according to this unlucky journalist, they aren't doing what they promised. So... uh... guess what? I'm gonna be giving this game a miss unless they pull a rabbit out of a hat and make things right. At this point, I won't even get the X-Box 360 version. I don't want to support a publisher that treats its customers like criminals. I've had enough. Thanks to Shamus Young of Twenty-Sided and Scorpia for the tip-off on this latest development!

UPDATE #2: Buying it through Steam is the same raw deal. Joy. The registry entries are no big deal though... unless someone finds a non-deleteable process running after installing the demo, I wouldn't get too worked up about it and cry "rootkit." Yet. Again, thanks to Shamus Young for THIS little tidbit. You know, I'm suddenly feeling even more warm fuzzies towards Stardock... Incidentally, here is a post that tells you how to remove the SecuRom crap that was installed on your machine as part of playing the demo...


(Vaguely) related tirades:
* CD Key Frustration
* A Pirate Story
* Enjoy an Oldie But Goodie
* Will 2007 Be the Year of the Downloadable Game?
.

Labels: Biz

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:27 PM (Permalink) 13 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights: Solving the Saved-Game Problem?
More data-dumping on Frayed Knights, the humorous indie role-playing game in development here at Rampant Games. This week, I discuss two very experimental game mechanics. Both have the potential to ruin the game, and I won't know until late playtesting whether they work or not.

Joy.

What Do Those Stars Mean?
A lot of people have asked what those stars at the top of the screen in the (VERY WORK-IN-PROGRESS) screenshots are supposed to do.

Some folks have put part of it together, based on comments I've made here. Since I worked on their implementation this week, I thought I'd pass along the deal with 'em. These are "drama stars", and they are my attempt to solve (at least partially) the "save game" problem.

How Drama Stars Work
Drama stars accumulate points over time as you do "dramatically interesting" things - in other words, taking risks. When you try a dangerous dialog choices, battle monsters, or engage strangers in conversation, those earn you drama points. In fact, when Bad Things happen --- like one of your party members is incapacitated in some way --- you get bonus drama points.

Those stars fill up over time. They start empty, and then fill up to become bronze stars. Once all three stars are bronze, continued points gradually changes them to silver. Once you have three silver stars, more points make them gold. Eventually, they cap out at three gold.

What Use Are They?
These drama stars can be spent to directly change the progress of the game. To modify the (melo-)drama! In some ways, the effects are kind of like spells, but they effect the way the story plays out. For example, you can use the "Only A Flesh Wound!" effect which immediately restores all incapacitated characters to action (read "resurrection"), and heals everyone to partial health.

Wow! Major ability, huh? And given to the player all the time. Well, whenever he can manage to accumulate enough drama points.

Isn't That Overpowered?
Here's the kicker - drama points are not saved with the saved game file. You can SAVE the game during normal "exploration" mode whenever and wherever you want. But whenever you load the game, you start at zero drama points. Drama points are per session only.

Huh? What? Why?

I'm treating them as an alternative to restoring a saved game. Let's say the Frayed Knights battle the Big Bad Evil Guy, and two of your characters are incapacitated (nope, not dead... only mostly dead) by the end of the fight. You COULD just load the saved game from before the battle started, and re-play it again... and again... and again... until you are satisfied with the results. This is how people play RPGs much of the time, after all.

OR - you could keep the results, and find that you have just enough drama points to determine that it was "Only a Flesh Wound" and said party members recover. In fact, with enough drama points, you could use this ability in the middle of combat, too (probably). Imagine the look on the Lich-King's face when two heroes he thought he'd dispatched manage to "pull through" and rejoin the combat!

Does This Solve The Save-Game Problem?
So those drama stars are there to motivate the player to stick it out through some bad decisions and bad luck in hopes of them experiencing a more interesting (and more dramatic?) story, rather than re-loading the game every time there's a setback. With luck, the player might even seek out some trouble and setbacks just to build up the drama point total.

Does it solve the save-game problem? Well, no, not completely. But I think it's preferable to some of the horrible solutions out there like only being able to save the game at specific save-points. The trick is presenting it as it is - an alternative to reloading a saved game. Otherwise, players will see it as an entitlement and the failure to restore the drama-point status as a "bug" that they will complain bitterly about.

What Happens When You Die With Drama Points?
There are, unfortunately, some corner cases I haven't fully resolved yet. Like dying with active drama points. Now we're treading into some waters where I really don't know my depth. And I don't know how well things will work in practice. I'll have to try things out and see how well they work.

Normally, if your party is all incapacitated, then your party is "dead." Ideally, I want the death menu to be kind of fun and funny, too. With the characters complaining of the unfairness of it all while waiting for the player to make her choice. Anyway, if you have enough drama points to resurrect your entire party, then that should be an option.

And what happens to your drama points if you re-load the game after a total party wipeout? Well, I haven't decided, entirely. But I might make an exception to the reload rule here. Getting at least partial stars back after something like that might take away some of the sting of death, doncha think? So long as that doesn't cause people to try and suicide the party prior to loading the game all the time.

We'll see how it all works.

Long-Term Fatigue
I don't like it in games when whatever juice that fuels spellcasting is a highly restricted resource, turning your spell-lobbing master of reality into a weakling in a bathrobe with a knife after only a few fireballs. Your fighter can swing his sword all day long. Why can't a magic user do the same?

So I decided that fighters and spellcasters will both use the same "power source" - endurance. Something which might be in scarce supply in long, drawn-out combats, but otherwise you won't find yourself entering combat with your casters completely unable to do anything useful.

One issue I found myself facing was that with endurance as an easily-renewable resource, which in turn can be used (by the party healer, Benjamin) to replenish health, this pretty much destroyed any concept of resource management between combats. There's no concept of holding back during an easier combat, because you always start with full resources at the beginning of every combat. This would mean, essentially, no easier "speed bump" battles.

I wasn't satisfied with this. I've played a dice-and-paper RPG with that mechanic (the Hero system... Champions, Fantasy Hero, etc.), and the result was that anything less than a full-on life-or-death battle was boring. But constantly getting into those kinds of fights can be really tiring. The pace never changes. And there resource-management challenges don't exist. It makes for much more one-dimensional gameplay.

Unfortunately, I found my preliminary design for Frayed Knights suffering from that same malady. So I created a new mechanic, called "Fatigue," a factor which slowly erodes the party's maximum endurance level from combat to combat. Spellcasting can erode it even more quickly. Certain feats slow it's accumulation. Certain spells or magic items may temporarily eliminate its effects, and a set of drama-star powers may reduce or eliminate fatigue.

Fatigue can have some additional effects as it increases, though it will cap at a certain point. So you'll never have the Frayed Knights utterly powerless in the face of fatigue. Just very reduced in strength.

Fatigue Downside
This introduces another problem: having to quit in the middle of the assault and go back to town to rest and buy mana potions is also lame, as is taking a nap in the middle of the dungeon. After all that talk about drama stars trying to increase the tension and drama of the game, do I really want to introduce a mechanic that encourages the player to halt the action?

Truth be told, I don't know. What I do know is that the resource management elements of most RPGs can be the source of a lot of challenge and fun gameplay (and, admittedly, some frustration).

What's On Deck?
I managed to complete most of the tasks from last week. The holdout is the inventory system. I guess I could say I've started on it, but I've not gotten too far yet.

So this week, my goal is to get inventory management and interfaces working. And maybe start a little bit of work on the conversation system.

So... Whadayathink? I mean, these aren't Peter Molyneaux "Scar Systems" or anything... but hopefully these will add an interesting element to the game.


(Vaguely) related going and going and going...
* Ye Olde Saved Game Debate
* RPG Design: The "Brute Force" Problem
* Frayed Knights: The First Five Minutes Walkthrough
* Frayed Knights: Getting Around in the World

Inform Me Of My Impending Failure On the Forum!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:51 PM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Game Reviews - What Are They Good For?
Does anybody actually use game reviews to make informed purchase decisions anymore?

I used to. Back in the 80's and 90's when a release wasn't embarassingly "old-school" by the time the print review came out, I used to actually read the full text of game reviews, and even had some favorite reviewers. Fellow gamers didn't snicker behind their hands and say, "Dude, didn't you realize that game was released like EIGHT WEEKS ago? We're all playing something else, now!"

I guess everyone rents the game on Release Tuesday, and have it finished two weeks later. There's no purpose in discussing it further! The review is now the culmination of a discussion about a game, not the introduction.

I can only assume that they serve SOME kind of purpose in the grand scheme of things, because online gaming sites fall all over themselves trying to get positioning on search engines for the word "review" mixed with the title of a hotly anticipated game. In the print world, having the best reviews might have mattered, but no more. It's all about down-to-the-minute timeliness and keywords, not content. So we have sites that have stooped to posting a review of the pre-release DEMO of a hotly anticipated game (or even the trailer video!). All so that they'll be on page 1 of a search engine query by some poor consumer who might, you know, actually be looking for a real review of the game. Which will undoubtedly appear as well, quite often without the reviewer actually finishing the game for the sake of speed. Post now, edit later! (Kinda like how I create my blog articles...)

And then how do they get used? Maybe it's just the vocal minority of the denizens of Teh Internets, but it seems that the purpose of the reviews - at least for highly anticipated titles - is merely to confirm the pre-existing belief system of the audience. Maybe they are looking for justification of their purchase, or to belong to the "in" crowd of hardcore gamers (is that some kind of oxymoron?). But post a less-than-stellar review of a popular game - at least within the twenty-day attention span of today's gamer - and you will be burned in effigy by legions of fanboys... even those who haven't played the full game, yet.

Does anybody actually use game reviews to decide on what game to buy anymore? Or has the immediacy of Internet communities done away with this in favor of immediate "word of mouth" buzz? (Some of which, remember, is generated by shills... er, excuse me... "viral marketers")

Is the historic role of the game review - to educate the consumer - now being fulfilled by previews, which are almost by definition uniformly favorable and saturated with marketing propaganda?

Does anybody really care about game reviews anymore, beyond a simple numerical score that can be averaged together with similar scores on GameRankings.com?

If this is a problem, is it unique (or more acute) in the video game biz, or is it common across other media?

What are game reviews good for anymore?


(Vaguely) related rants:
* The Worst Game Ever
* R.I.P. Computer Gaming World
* Game Journalism and the Games Industry
* Fallout Over the Fallout 3 Trailer
* This Isn't Viral Marketing!
.

Labels: Biz, Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:11 PM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
My OTHER First CRPG
A while ago, I talked about the first computer role-playing game I ever played - the notorious Telengard. We're probably talking the summer of 1983 here.

But I may have been fibbing. I don't really know for sure. At some point, around this time, I played another CRPG on the C-64. It may have come before Telengard, or afterwards. I can't say for sure. In fact, until last week, I couldn't even tell you the name of the game. I did some scouring of the Internet to find any record whatsoever of this obscure little entry point into the wild and wonderful world of computer RPGs.

Be advised, my memory of the details here are very vague. Though, through the miracle of emulation, I managed to relive the pain experience.

The Dungeons of Magdarr
The game was called The Dungeons of Magdarr. It wasn't available in stores - at least so far as I can recall. No, this little gem was a mail-ordered special from an outfit called "Aardvark Software" or something like that, which advertised text adventures and little arcade-style games in a quarter-page ad in the pages of Compute! magazine. The tiny screenshot vaguely resembled the Wizardry perspective. Since there was, at this point, no word of Wizardry actually getting ported to the C-64, this poor-man's equivalent sounded awesome. And the price was right --- I think the games in the ads only ran something like $15 to $25.

So here was a cheap Wizardry clone! Ka-ching! Color me there. I spent my lawn-mowing money and waited the 3-6 weeks for delivery.

As I can recall, the game arrived in packaging that resembled a Zip-Lock bag. The manual was photocopied page of instructions. This was kinda old-school even for 1983, but I didn't worry about it much. I was ready to dive in! I'd been waiting YEARS for the chance to play D&D on the computer. Well, two years, since I'd discovered D&D in 1981. But this was it!

Kinda.

The interface just to roll up a party was... clumsy at best. Sometimes it expected a full name to be typed in, and other times a first initial was preferred. You went through the usual CRPG conventions of the time - endlessly rolling the dice until you saw a set of statistics that looked good, and then you'd turn them into one of the characters for your party.

And yes, it was a party-based game.

The game would convert your character into a 30-character string, like "bolton@@aabeaba@e@@b@bb@@@@@ci". Yessir, all the details of your characters (including an 8-letter name) stuffed into 30 bytes. That's 1983 for ya! If you had trouble saving the characters to disk, you could just enter the strings manually again in future game sessions, with an added advantage that typos might really cheat up your character!

There were some cute little bits of personality during the character-creation stage that were interesting. Occasionally a god would bless your character with maximum hit-points or something along those lines. Most of the gods were taken from historical pantheons, but re-playing it I found that the god of sex, "Gonaddo," might intervene.

Exploring the Dungeons
The game itself... what can I say? It could all be summed up in one word: Boring. Even when compared to... well... nothing. I could never finish the game.

Not to knock the efforts of the authors, Rodger Olsen and Bill Atkinson, who were probably a couple of high-school seniors or college students at the time. It was a paint-by-numbers D&D game written in BASIC that had dungeons that were scrawls of featureless hallways. Occasionally you'd stumble across a treasure chest (which might be trapped) that would ask who tries to open it. Or you'd encounter monsters, which went through the party one character at a time asking, "Does X fight the Y?" Answering with a "Y" keypress rewarded you with a question to choose which weapon you would use. "S" for sword (if you had one), "B" for bow (if you had one and weren't too close), "M" for mace, etc. Then you'd be invited to hit "any key" to strike to get the results of that character's attacks.

Monsters, stairs, treasures. And that would repeat infinitely until you made it to the end of the dungeon... which was, at least, only on the third level. I know this only because I looked through the source code --- I couldn't bring myself to actually play the game that far. You'd trigger a boss encounter and... something would happen. Who knows? Maybe I missed out on one of the best RPG endings of all time.

But I don't think so.

And bugs! Replaying the game last week, I found that I'd get stuck trying to buy more equipment in an infinitely looping menu. Brilliant stuff! Maybe there was a keyword or something that I'd missed, since the documentation was long-gone, but still - this was pretty horrible even in the early days. Being able to find and play the Dungeons of Magdarr again served to remind me that did not everything that came out in those days was classic material. In fact, just like today, 90% of everything was crap.

This just happened to be something from the forgotten 90%.


(Vaguely) related wanderings:
* Telengard - My First CRPG
* Can CRPGs Age Gracefully?

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights Poll: Chloe Versus Chloe
Okay, ignoring (if possible) the difference between a professional artist's coloring-and-shading versus my quick-and-dirty flat-color job, which color scheme works better for Chloe? The pink "Disney Princess" on the left, or the purple-and-blue "Cyndi Lauper" version on the right? Vote and tell me what you think...

Labels: Frayed Knights, game art

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) links to this post

 
Jamie Fristrom on Why Games Are Important
Jamie Fristrom of Torpex Games - a man who has had a long and illustrious career stretching back to the old Magic Candle series - has posted a substantial article on why games are important.

His conclusion? Games help you learn about learning. They rarely teach you anything about the subject matter they supposedly represent. A first person shooter will - if anything - teach you horrible habits with respect to using guns in combat, and Guitar Hero won't teach you much about being a rock star. But they will teach you lessons in what he calls "meta-learning." Learning how to learn.

His full article can be found here:

Why Are Games Important? One of Many Reasons

Labels: Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:54 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Announced
I guess it's official. My extensive library of 3rd edition and 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons crap is going to be obsolete next summer. Dungeons & Dragons, the great ol' granddaddy of all role-playing games, is apparently receiving another facelift.

For a scary amount of detail pulled out from GenCon and press releases, check out this thread at ENWorld.

This time around, the goals for the latest revision seem to be:

* Faster set-up time and game play
* Easier / More Accessible to new players
* Integration with digital distribution, and the online gaming community, including online "gaming tables" to bring people together to play across the Internet
* Trying to see if they can't buy into the whole MMORPG "monthly fee" thing.

All noble goals, to be sure. And there are rumblings and rumors that there will be a 4th edition equivalent to the "Open Gaming License" that helped make the original release of 3rd edition such a huge success.

Bill Slavicsek, the Dungeons & Dragons R&D director, drops some more hints about what's going on:

The future (only nine months away!) contains the same D&D we all play on a regular basis. It’s still going to be a tabletop roleplaying game. It’s still set in a medieval fantasy world of magic and monsters. It’s still the d20 Game System. But the rulebooks appear more vibrant, more visually stunning, and much easier to use. The game mechanics have been amped up to eliminate the game-stoppers, accentuate the fun factors, and make play faster and more exciting. In the future (now only eight months, 29 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes from now!) D&D Insider provides its members with immediate access to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, to enhanced and expanded content tied to the newest physical book products, to an amazing suite of digital tools to make Dungeon Master preparation and campaign management easier to handle, to a Character Creator that provides not only an interactive character sheet but a visualizer that lets you determine the exact look of the characters you create—and, D&D Insider provides a digital D&D Game Table. that turns the Internet into your kitchen table. This amazing application, which we’ll talk more about as the weeks go on, allows you to supplement your face-to-face gaming 24/7, helps you find a group to game with if you don’t happen to have a face-to-face group, or lets you hook up with gaming buddies who long ago scattered to the four winds. Take a look at the prototype movie we showed at Gen Con to get a first taste of the D&D Game Table.

But will I be buying into it? That, I cannot say. I am sure I'll be picking up the 4th edition Player's Handbook, at the very least, because I am a Dice & Paper Role-Playing Game junkie and I read game books for games I never play just for the fun of it. Yes, I'm a sick guy who probably needs professional help.

But playing it? Probably not so much. Besides the problem of convincing our gaming group (which has now swelled to WAY TO FREAKING MANY PLAYERS for a Saturday night game - we have enough for 2 separate games now) to buy new rules, there is a really huge issue in that I am not seeing (at this point) a compelling reason to change.

First of all, the designers did too good of a job in 3.5. They fixed most of the "bugs" in 3rd edition (which was a fantastic re-envisioning of the game on its own). Unlike the previous editions, there isn't a whole lot that I'd consider "broken." Other than the fact that the game is a little on the complex / unwieldy side, but as a Hero system veteran I mock those who think it's "too complicated." I mean, you don't even have to do long division in the middle of combat!

Secondly - edition 3.5 finally feels "mature." This means something different to a consumer than to the publisher. To a publisher, "mature" equates with "stagnant." Sales have dropped off because people already have all the books they could possibly use - and then some additional ones besides. I can't blame them for wanting to press the "reset" button at this point to go back to the days where everything was fresh and new, and players were ready to buy every single piece of crap book you could throw out at them.

To the player - mature means something else entirely. To me, it means I've got a sagging bookshelf full of possibilities that will take me years - decades, really - to get close to exploring fully. It means our gaming group is finally comfortable with the rules and gaming sessions tend to go more smoothly. It means I'm heavily invested in one product, very satisfied with said product, and not particularly interested in making a switch to a competing product even by the same manufacturer, even under threat of dropping support for the old product.

Because it's been a pretty plentiful seven years.

A similar thing happened with White Wolf's World of Darkness system (of which "Vampire: The Masquerade" was the flagship). Second edition really cleaned up the problems with the first editions of all the books. Then the third editions came and broke almost as much as they fixed. And now they've completely modified the entire world in an effort to push that reset switch and get everyone buying brand-new sourcebooks all over again.

But meanwhile, a lot of people (our group included) are still playing 2nd edition. Or a hybrid of 2nd and 3rd.

Still, it'll be interesting to follow what happens. Even if you don't touch the dice & paper stuff, you know there'll be some licensed D&D 4th Edition CRPGs we'll be playing in a couple of years.

The first official 4th edition D&D book will be the Player's Handbook, to be released in May 2008, followed by the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide in June and July, respectively.

For more information, check out the new website, DNDInsider.com.



(Vaguely) related expositions of my geekiness:
* Original Dungeons & Dragons Trivia
* Disappointment in the Demonweb Pits
* Adult Dungeons & Dragons
* Teenagers and D&D
.

Labels: Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 2:00 AM (Permalink) 8 comments links to this post

 
Depths of Peril Demo And Quick Take
Soldak's long-awaited indie RPG, Depths of Peril, now has the demo version available for download. Just do yourself a favor...

Download an play the demo of Depths of Peril.

And now here's my quick take on the game:

I've gotta admit --- I wasn't extremely excited about this title. There were some cool-sounding elements, but I didn't see how they fit together as a whole. Having played the demo far too long tonight, I'm gonna admit... Steven Peeler has pulled it off. This is an indie RPG that shows what indie RPGs can be about. It's got all that "innovation" and stuff that the press and fans claim they really want, but they too often ignore even if it bites them on the face.

At first blush, the game appears to be something of a Diablo 2 clone / wannabe. Nice graphics, but nothing that would blow you away. And really, if that was all there was to it, it'd be just another ignorable effort by the indies to prove that they can follow the mainstream pack just like anyone else. But Depths of Peril takes it an important step further.

Many winters ago, Ultima IV took the traditional RPG formula and game system of Ultima III and made it something special by making it about something - driving the meta-game of the virtue system and the "Quest of the Avatar." Suddenly, the accumulation of power and beating up hordes of monsters became simply means rather than an end. The embodiment of the virtues was the focus of much of the game, requiring a broader set of decisions.

Soldak seems to be going after the similar goal, using a Diablo-esque game system as the engine. But it adds a whole 'nother level of gameplay - a campaign if you will - a replayable meta-game of battling factions and survival on the edge of civilized territory. The monster-bashing and level-building is just a vehicle for athe larger game. Depths of Peril never lets you forget that there's a larger campaign and issues at stake, and three other AI-run competitors gunning for you. Its very clear that simply making yourself the biggest, baddest guy in the game world isn't going to save you or your faction should you ignore the larger game.

That's not to say the game is without flaws. It has its share, but its nice to see a game like this shoot for the stars a little. I was pleasantly surprised.


(Vaguely) related word-stuff:
* Indie RPG Roundtable
* Depths of Peril Preview
* Where Is Indie Innovation?
.

Labels: Game Announcements, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:41 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights: The Door Is Ajar
Time for More Stuff You Didn't Want To Know about the indie RPG that refuses to take itself too seriously!

Put On An Unhappy Face!
Last week, I started receiving some more artwork for the game. This week, I continued to receive some more facial expressions for all the player characters. Each of the player characters has eight different facial expressions (that's right... a total of 32 portraits for the main characters alone) to use in static dialogs and other parts of the game. The eight expressions are neutral, upset, happy, enraged, disgusted, sly, shocked, and thoughtful.

Hitting Game Mechanics With a +2 Wrench
Another surprisingly large task was to create the character information screens. While dumping the data into various fields in the UI isn't rocket science, I found myself dealing with implementing more stuff and handling yet more repercussions of the redesign.

For example: I want characters to be able to "pinch hit" in each other's classes if the player wants to build them that way (or if I, as the designer, want to customize the monsters that way). But I don't want them to come close to overshadowing each other. Arianna might be able to pull off some "sorceressness" of her own, but she should never be able to match Chloe in potency... and she'll have to sacrifice her own skill as a warrior to do it. In general, it takes about four levels to "mostly" emulate another class by taking the appropriate feats.

So why the pseudo-multiclassing? Well, let's say Dirk is currently unconscious, and you need someone to pick the lock of the dungon door to escape. Or maybe in a pinch, when the enemy spell-slinger is focusing on counter-magicking poor Chloe, Arianna can pull out an almost-as-powerful fireball herself and put some area-effect hurt on the bad guys and annoy the rival sorcerer.

So you can have an entire party of wannabe-sorcerers if you want. Which is cool, until you encounter some highly magic-resistant monsters.

So after a bit of fiddling with implementation, I now have somewhere north of 30 feats in the game (not all functional, but there) so far --- with probably three times that many when I am done. They are being handled and listed properly. I fixed spells so that they can only be cast by characters with the appropriate feats. And I've tightened up the mechanics a bit. I hope.

But Which Side Are The Hinges Facing?
I'd made a commitment to try and get doors done this week, so I had some solid direction when I got done with the feats, spells, and character display logic. The cool thing about doors is I had no freaking clue how I was going to implement them. So it's been a fun ride.

Since I'm a "learn by doing" kinda guy, I started out by modeling a door. I already had a photograph with a cool wooden door obtained from Mayang's Free Textures a couple of years ago. So I cropped, transformed, and modified the photo into something resembling a texture, deformed a cube in Blender to be roughly door-sized and door-shaped, slapped the texture on it, added a collision volume, arranged it in a hierarchy the way the Torque exporter wants it, and boom! I had something horrible. But it took only a couple more passes to get sizes and orientations into the game. So now I had a door which was a static barrier against movement. Total time-to-door was only 30 minutes from start to finish.

But how to get it to work? That took a little longer. First of all, I had to stumble across the obvious way to make it open and shut - through animations. I hadn't animated anything in Blender for a while, so I had to spend some time online brushing up on my dusty skills. The next challenge was that you can only animate the visual object elements under Torque. This means collisions don't animate. Ouch. So while the door might animate opening, it still wouldn't let you pass through it because it's collision was still blocking the doorway.

I kept my solution entirely at the script level. I ripped out the collision information on the door itself, and added an invisible, separate collision object linked to the door by code. When the door gets opened or closed, the script modifies the collision's rotation to match the door's eventual orientation. The collision doesn't really rotate along with the door so much as snap into conformity, but I think it will work just fine.

Next... How does the player trigger the door opening and closing? I just made it a new type of interactive object, like the fountain and talkative NPCs'. Viola! Not only did this allow me to be lazy and write very little new code, but it will (hopefully) provide a more consistent experience for players.

And there we go! A door! This screenshot was taken in the middle of its opening animation. Oh, and I grew tired of the color orange, so I slapped some textures on the dungeon. Nothing too elaborate. Or final. But it makes a huge difference, don't you think?

Who'd have thought making a door would be such a pain in the butt? From 30 minutes on my first pass, the whole thing ended up taking over 3 hours. But at least I only had to solve this problem ONCE. Adding additional doors to a level will be a cinch.

More Concept Art

Here's a "Weed Goblin," probably my favorite of Shawn's concept pieces. You won't encounter any of these in the dungeon itself, but they can be found in the countryside between the temple of Pokmor Xang and the village of Ardin.

My Next Trick Will Be...
August is going by way too fast. The code to make the "First Five Minutes" work is all there, but I've got tons to try and get done between now and November. So for this week:

#1 - The characters aren't really getting sick when they drink from the fountain. I need to test the state code and add illnesses with debilitating effects --- and list those effects in the character information screens.

#2 - Drama Point Gain. So those stars at the top of the screen will actually look like they are doing something.

#3 - Design the Long-Term Fatigue system (more on why this is useful next week).

#4 - Update the design document.

#5 - Get started on inventory system

That's a tall order. It's gonna be a busy week. Again.


(Vaguely) related tiptoeing through weed-goblin infested tulips:
* Coloring!
* The Frayed Knights Get a Makeover
* Frayed Knights: Task Resolution Revisited
* Sucking Slightly Less
* How To Make a Better RPG With Procedural Content

Wanna Chat? The Cool Kids Are Hanging Out on the Forum!

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, programming, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post