| Wednesday, September 16, 2009 |
| Tuesday, September 15, 2009 |
  RPG Anvil: Super Adventures and Campaigns | 
Posted - 9/15/2009 3:19:27 PM | I've been thinking a bit about the overall structure, plot, and story fit together in CRPGs. That is, how does the game designer arrange the progress through the game. This includes things like what locations the game includes, and when the player will have access to them. What overall quest or quests the player is pursuing, and when these quests are revealed to him. How the story unfolds, and is revealed to the player.
The Adventure
Old school pencil-and-paper RPGs (Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk) have the unit of a game as an "adventure", maybe known as a "module". An adventure takes a few hours to play through, and generally advances your character a level or two. The theory being, you'll get some gaming buddies together for a couple of evenings of play, and play through the adventure. If, after that, you got together with a different group of buddies, you can still use your beloved character, and just play a different adventure.
Classic D&D module "Tomb of Horrors" (http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd1/s1.htm):
Typically adventures are completely self-contained; they have a location or two (maybe a town and a dungeon), some sort of overall objective, and once the players obtain that objective, the adventure is over, and time to move on to the next one. Often multiple adventures share a setting (Greyhawk is the old-school D&D setting, but there are many others), but nothing more; no continued story or shared antagonists or anything (but see further down for exceptions).
This type of structure is rare in the CRPG world, for the simple reason that adventures are generally too short and unsatisfying for a full game. I played through "Witchs Wake", a Neverwinter Nights module that more or less fits the Adventure definition, and definitely felt unsatisfied and wanting more when it ended. (In that particular case, it wasn't helped that the story was clearly meant to continue but was never completed).
Witch's Wake (http://nwn.bioware.com/gallery/index.html?galleryID=7&screensize=2&screenimage=8):
Bag of Adventures
One thing a game designer could do is to simply release a "game" with a bunch of adventures, rated for different levels. The player could then pick and choose which adventures to play, based on his current character. There are actually some advantages to this, such as player-controlled difficulty scaling; if the player wants a less challenging adventure, he just picks a lower level, or maybe shorter adventure for his next task. However, you really lose the sense of continuity by just presenting the game as a series of unrelated adventures, and I've never seen a game take this approach.
One place that this might work well is as a multiplayer-only, online game. You get together with some buddies and play through an hour long adventure in an evening. The next night, you get together with some different buddies, and play a different adventure. I suppose this is something like playing an MMO that uses instanced dungeons, although MMOs have a whole extra set of interaction that goes far beyond this idea. Playing a Diablo game online is more what I'm thinking of, except of course Diablo has an overall structure to the game that is not broken down into nicely quantized pieces of evening-long gaming.
Diablo 2 (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/diablo2/images/0/2/):
Adventure Path
So, an adventure is too short to be satisfying; why don't we just link up a series of adventures to make the overall game? And in fact, this has been done, both in the pencil and paper world, and the CRPG world.
A few years ago, Dungeon magazine (the D&D adventures magazine) came up with the idea to link together a series of episodic adventures, published once a month, into an overall storyline; they called this an Adventure Path. The first one was called "The Shackled City", but it's been so popular that this practice has continued, both in the online Dungeon magazine and with Paizo's Pathfinder Adventure Paths. (Paizo was the old publisher of Dungeon magazine, which ended for reason too complicated to be interesting here, but readily available online).
Shackled City Hardcover (http://paizo.com/image/product/catalog/PZO/PZO1000_500.jpeg):
This format has clear advantages. The episodic nature means that the story is tightly controlled, so the game designer can tell a dramatic, well-formed story without worrying too much about the player wandering off track. The designer has a good idea of what level the player is at each step, so he can tailor the difficulty appropriately. And the players get the satisfaction of recurring characters, long-term objectives, and all those other things that are possible in a longer, more-developed campaign.
I find this format basically equivalent to some of the linear RPGs that have come out for computers; something like Icewind Dale. Now, Icewind Dale didn't explicitly sub-divide the game into a series of adventures, but it effectively did so; as a player you progress from one location or objective to the next, with no choice in the matter.
Icewind Dale (http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/icewinddale/images/0/2/?tag=screenshot):
Super Adventures
There are drawbacks to the Adventure Path format. The player may feel railroaded, with little choice about what course he progresses on through the game. It is difficult to present a good exploration interface in an Adventure Path, because the game typically doesn't want the player to have choices about which location to go to; if there is an exploration phase, it's usually just an illusion where the player "explores" but there is only one location to find.
The game designer can take a somewhat more flexible approach; I saw this referred to as a "Super Adventure" in the latest D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. To quote "A super adventure is a type of short campaign- really one long adventure- that focuses on a single, limited setting." Some of the characteristics are:
- The adventure takes place in a single setting (likely an extensive one).
- The adventure allows some non-linear exploration.
- The adventure involves different quests, objectives, and possibly even expeditions.
A classic old Super Adventure is the old adventure "Temple of Elemental Evil":
Temple of Elemental Evil (http://home.flash.net/~brenfrow/dd1/t1-4.htm):
Interestingly, some of the old D&D "Super Adventures" like "Queen of the Spiders", I would probably now characterize as an Adventure Path in the parlance of this article; they are much more linear than I see a Super Adventure being.
So, with the Super Adventure, we're giving the player a much freer reign in which actions and choices he makes; at its best he has complete control over what options and directions he takes. BUT, he can only do so within a limited setting with limited characters. This allows the game designer the ability to create a detailed setting to work in; he won't end up creating whole cities or dungeons that the player will never see.
A computer based example of this is "Pool of Radiance"; the old one, not the remake. This is a big game, with exploration and non-linear choices, but is all set within one city. (Actually I haven't played the remake so maybe that is a Super Adventure too).
Pool of Radiance (http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/c64-games/24):
Open World Exploration
The very other end of the spectrum from the Adventure Path is for the game designer to give up all control of the player's actions, and just present a world for the player to do whatever he wants. Putting the greatest emphasis on the "role-playing" aspect of the game. Bethesda is the CRPG master of this, with games like Morrowind:
Morrowind (http://www.bethsoft.com/images/games/gamescrn_morrowind_02-B.jpg):
I think the PnP equivalent is not a published adventure at all, but a Dungeon Master who presents the setting, and then lets the players do whatever they want, making up the details as he goes.
Anyways, these games, done well, are incredibly immersive and addictive. They are also a game designer's nightmare; huge amounts of content to create, horrible balancing issues, difficulty in presenting any sort of coherent story to the player. As a player, you have to temper your expectations, sometimes; if you are trying to do something that the designers didn't plan for, you might end up disappointed that you can't achieve your goal, or that doing so ends up being boring or pointless.
Hybrid
To my mind, the very best of CRPGs have taken something of a hybrid approach. The combine a fairly large world or area to explore, along with a more structured plotline to follow. Tricky for the game designer to get right, but very rewarding to play. I would point to the Baldur's Gate Series or some of the Ultima games as examples of the hybrid approach done well.
Baldur's Gate (http://www.bioware.com/gallery/index.html?galleryID=28&screensize=3&screenimage=4):
Wrapup
So, there's a survey of the various structures a designer can take when designing the plotline of a CRPG. In writing this up, I found it really interesting how many great games I could think of in each category. As long as the game designer is careful in fitting his game progression and plotting to the overall structure, he can succeed with any of these approaches.
The RPG Anvil column deals with the design and development of CRPGs, and is published whenever I can convince my lazy ass to type one up.
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| Friday, September 11, 2009 |
| Untitled SENG Game: Level Editor | |
Posted - 9/11/2009 7:16:51 PM | This week I've been working on some updates with the level editor. Based on my experience with To The World Tree (http://www.prankster.com/ttwt), I knew that I had some issues; the level editor was slowing me down. Rather than muddle through as before, the best thing to do was to revamp the level editor now, saving valuable time in the future.
Here's a screenshot of "Layout mode", a new feature:
The features to do on my list:
- Streamlined UI - Duh. Every fewer click I have to make is time saved.
- Layout mode - In TTWT, I would do level layout in an image editor, and then look back and forth between the level image and the level editor as I filled in the details of the level. I may still do rough layout in an image editor, but the editor supports better layout operations.
- Cut-and-paste - Previously, if I wanted to, say, move a room, even by one tile, I'd have to redo the whole room. Now I can just use the "move" edit operation to move things. This also helps make layout editing more convenient.
- Skin mode - Given a level with just a raw layout, now I can select a region and apply a "skin", which fills in the proper tiles for that part of the level. Previously tile editing had to be done by hand.
- Proper save - I'm embarrassed to admit, but the old level editor didn't actually save levels. Instead, it saved partial levels that had to be cut-and-pasted (in a text editor) into the actual level file. Easy to do once; sucky to do a hundred times.
So, I've got "Streamlined UI" almost done (just missing some keyboarding), "Layout mode" is done (see the screenshot above), and "Proper save" is done. "Cut-and-paste" and "Skin mode" are non-trivial to implement, but should be done next week. I can show you some good workflow screenshots once I have those ready.
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| Saturday, September 5, 2009 |
| Links: The Big Question | |
Posted - 9/5/2009 8:38:34 PM | Good article from Rock, Paper Shotgun:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/09/01/the-big-question/
About having, in an RPG, not just interesting quests, but quests that have meaningful consequences on the game and story.
I agree with this sentiment, and want to keep it in mind when designing "Untitled SENG Game". But there are two caveats:
- You can't have too many meaningful choices, or you'll end up with a giant game decision tree, and correspondingly, too much game content to make.
- When I'm playing a plot-full RPG, I hate it when I make a choice in conversation that has deep meaningful consequences, only it wasn't clear before I made the choice that I was deciding something really important. I prefer it to be crystal clear (maybe even belabored) that the choice I am making is going to effect the path my game takes (like ruling out other quest paths, storylines, or character advancement options).
Anyways, I wanted to point out the article, and personally to keep it in mind when doing my game design.
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| Tuesday, September 1, 2009 |
| Untitled SENG Game: Items and Journals | |
Posted - 9/1/2009 4:43:06 PM | Time for another update on Untitled SENG Game. I've been squirreling away on engine changes; in the last couple of weeks I've implemented (well, re-implemented) the way items work in combat, and added a conversation journal.
I had a small bullet on my "To-Do" list; make items work with the new RPG system. That quickly ballooned into a bunch of changes, spider-webbing through much of the code. However, by the time I was done, the programming for items was much simpler and less error prone, and as a fortunate side-effect, I got magic rings, amulets, and helmets working; a "To-Do" that has been sticking around since the "To The World Tree" days (http://www.prankster.com/ttwt).
The sexiest thing I implemented- well, look at this screenshot:
You can see that the newly implemented test item "Poison Dagger" has a Spell Attack "Poison Burst". Items can now have a Spell Attack which attacks an actor's Saving Throws instead of their Defense Points (the SENG equivalent of "Armor Class"). A magic item like this will do half the "normal" damage with its standard attack, but then another half with the Spell Attack.
And, in this screenshot:
You can see the Poison Dagger generating a particle effect when it hits! Cool, huh? The particle effect is just the same as from the spell-casting system, but later I'll customize so the particles look different (while using the same code).
As for the conversation journal, this is just a log of conversations that your party has had with "interesting" NPCs. I've often wished for just such a feature in RPGs I've played; most of them by now provide a pretty good journal of Quests, but I'm often frustated by the lack of a conversation log. Plus I included an entry for the last location that you encountered the NPC. I don't know if it's happened to you, but I've had times where I'm playing an RPG intermittantly, and I come back to a Quest log that says "Give Grobnar the Frozzle", but I've completely forgotten where Grobnar was.
Anyways, here's a screenshot of that:
My "To Do" list for this round of engine updates is really shrinking now; things are looking good. A few more weeks to go certainly (and I have a sneaking suspicion that if I did a real schedule it would be at least a month), but definitely getting there.
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| Thursday, August 27, 2009 |
| RPG Anvil: RPG Length | |
Posted - 8/27/2009 4:30:07 PM | I was reading Rampant Coyote's blog, and stumbled upon this post:
http://rampantgames.com/blog/2009/08/how-long-should-rpg-be.html
Where he asks, "How long should an RPG be?" (Specifically, in hours of play.) Interesting question, certainly. But, say you've already decided how long your RPG should be... how do you actually come up with a game design that fits that time budget?
I figure for "Untitled SENG Game", I'd like the average game to take about 40 hours of play. I can break it down further; I'd like 20 hours for the main plotline (and associated quests), and another 20 hours for optional quests. I also figure there should be about another 20 hours of optional quests that the player doesn't do in any particular game, by choice or because of availability (for instance, if you do the quest to become Chief of the Assassin's Guild, you probably can't also do the quest to be the High Priestess of the God of Law and Order). So, given that budget, how can I design the game to take that long?
This is an especially tricky question, because you need to get it right (or nearly so) _before_ doing extensive level design, and even overall design. Some questions, like game difficulty, you can generally tweak near the end, after doing playtesting. But if you get the game length wrong; say you only have half of the game-time that you wanted, then you are screwed. You need to somehow insert double the gameplay into the existing game. Whether you are making areas bigger, or inserting new areas, or whatever, you are going to be touching virtually the entire game, and it is going to take _forever_. So you really need to get this question right, or mostly so, up front.
Luckily, you don't need to get the answer perfectly right, as you do with other design questions. For example, if you design the game so that the final boss is correct for a level 20 player character, if you are off in your design by just a little, and the player has a level 22 character (just a 10% miscalculation), the final, pivotal encounter may be way too easy. But, for game-time, no-one will much notice the difference between a 20-hour game and a 22-hour game, or probably even a 30-hour game.
So, in a SENG game, I can think of 6 major contributors to game-time:
- Initial character creation.
- Talking to NPCs; exposition, quest assignment, and the like.
- Character development; fooling around with stores, inventory, and level-up choices.
- Level exploration.
- Combat.
- Replaying a failed quest.
NPC conversation in Icewind Dale, from http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/icewinddale/images/0/44/:
Certainly for points 2, 4, and 5, I can directly control how much of each one a player will take part in during the game. So, if I can come up with an estimate of, for example, how long an average combat will take, then I can just put in the design that the player will take part in N combats, and that tells approximately how much that part of the game will contribute to the overall game-time. More on that in a minute.
Point 1 (character creation) probably isn't a big factor in the game-time, so I'll just ignore it. Point 6 (replaying failed quests or encounters) better be pretty minimal, or I've failed in other parts of the design. If the player has to frequently replay areas, I suspect he will become frustrated with the game and give up. Point 3 is more troublesome; certainly in any RPG I spend lots of time agonizing over inventory and character development choices, but it's pretty hard to measure that. Reluctantly, I think I'll just ignore point 3 because I can't think of a good way to measure it.
So, I think the thing to do, before doing the full design of areas, encounters, and quests, is to come up with some small, representative demos of:
- NPC conversation.
- Level exploration.
- Combat.
Level exploration in Morrowind (http://www.elderscrolls.com/art/mw_screenshots_01.htm):
For combat in particular, I think I will need to have a couple of demos, for low, medium, and high-level play; although SENG theoretically scales combat to be somewhat similar across levels, I should make sure that's really true.
Then I need to play through each demo a couple of times, trying to use a couple of different styles ("Mr. Impatient", "Mr. Cautious", etc), and see how long it takes. Note that this is one case where I _don't_ think playtesters would help much (at least for the indie developer), for the simple reason that a playtester running through a level for the first time is going to take much longer than a playtester going through his 10th, or even 2nd, level. The only way to get good data on what an experienced player would do, would be to make a _lot_ of test content, first to train the playtesters, and then to get the good data. I don't think I have the time or patience to make that much test content, and I'm pretty sure free playtesters wouldn't have the patience either. Anyways, I digress.
Then, simple math should give me a game-time estimate, given:
- Number of NPCs to converse with.
- How much depth each conversation tree has.
- Number of Levels.
- Average size of each Level.
- Number of combat encounters.
Combat in Neverwinter Nights (http://nwn.bioware.com/shadows/screens.html?galleryID=14):
Thus, I should be able to have a budget of each of these items _before_ performing high-level game design, and definitely before doing the detailed level design. That should give a reasonable approximation of game-time.
After that, it's probably a good idea to do a little more testing during level design; say after 1/4 of the levels have been completed, just to be sure we're in the right ballpark. At this point it will be easier to get a good estimate for gametime; just multiply the time for 1/4 of the levels times 4. If the number is way off, we're kind of screwed, as we're going to have to seriously rework the 1/4 of the levels, but at least we didn't finish them all.
And then final playtesting should definitely include a measure of game-time for each playtester. At this point it will be hard to do more than tweak the number a little bit (one way or the other), but it is important data to have.
So that's my plan for game-time calculation. If a designer gets a good grasp on this issue early on, it shouldn't be much of an onus during the design. On the other hand, if a designer doesn't consider the problem from the start, it could completely derail game development, possibly even in the final playtesting stages.
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| Links: Dirty Coding Tricks | |
Posted - 8/24/2009 4:01:41 PM | This article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php
Really caught my fancy. It has a set of short features on last minute hack/bugfixes that programmers put in to quickly fix an issue just before shipping, often in horrible ways. Probably incomprehensible to the non-programmers out there, but I enjoyed it!
I don't have any stories quite as good as the ones in the feature, though I have put in my share of hacks in 16 years as a (professional) programmer. Some of that could be because I've been working on more mainstream software; we've generally taken the time to understand and fix bugs properly instead of doing the easiest (and least maintainable) thing.
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