Development Diary Week 1 -- Basic thoughts

Here we are with my first weekly entry. So far I haven't accomplished anything concrete. I've just been thinking through the plot and gameplay, getting ready to write my design document.

Basics

The main game screen will be a third-person top/three-quarters view of the player character and surroundings. Settings will be general fantasy fare: castles, fields, forests, caves, etc. The player will visit towns etc. and talk to people to learn about what's going on and buy equipment.

A lot of time will be spent in battle against enemies (monsters, enemy soldiers, etc.), usually while traveling or exploring caves etc. Battle will be real-time action. I'm going for a bit slower, more tactical pace to the action, not a full-speed frenzy. The player will earn experience through battle (maaaybe also sneaking and other non-violent approaches, but that'll probably be too complicated for me to include) for increasing his power and learning new abilites. The player will also increase his power by buying/finding better equipment and magical items.

I'd like to include some puzzles and problem-solving to add some variety, but at this point I'm really not sure if I'll be able to include that.

I haven't decided whether you'll have a party or just one character. I'd really like to have multiple characters, but I'm afraid it would add a lot of work to implement (especially the A.I. for controlling your allies in battle).

(A note about pronouns: I noticed that I'm writing "he" for the player / main character. At this point, I'm thinking you'll have one main character as opposed to choosing one of several characters to be your main one. And he'll be a guy. Write what you know, right?)

Plot

The main character will begin the game as a soldier in his country's army, probably one who's just been drafted into service. This gives us a game opening where he goes through some basic combat training (probably a "go through my monster-infested training course" type of thing) to get the action going right away. The opening also needs to immediately set up the beginning plot situation -- why are we going to war? What's going on?

The overall plot is still unsettled, but I've got a couple of basic ideas decided. There's this guy known as the Last Ancient. Eventually it turns out that he's the lone survivor of an ancient race -- we're talking maybe dinosaur era here. He's come to the present day (suspended animation? just a spirit? near-immortal?) and is beginning his plan to revive his perished race. This plan will not turn out well for humanity, as you might guess. (It doesn't occur to him to care -- being from a much earlier species, he views us as just overgrown rodents.) He believes that the strongest (that's him and his people) should rule, and that the end of his race was contrary to the proper order of the world. It should never have happened.

So what's his plan? Um, that's what I still need to work out. It needs to lead to a good starting situation for the game. And it needs to provide good reasons for the player to travel to various places around the world. More subtly, it needs to be resolvable without requiring any crazy scenes or situations. (It could be fun to have a mass battle sequence, but am I really up for implementing something like that? No!)

I really want to avoid falling into the Collect X Special Items / Visit X Special Locations plot structure. I think we're all tired of that. But if I can't come up with anything better, oh well. I can't afford to aim for perfection here.

Battle Mechanics

The player should be able to dodge or block most if not all enemy attacks. That's a critical part of making action fun. Because the main character will start off as a generic soldier/swordsman type, the "default" defense will be a shield. I'm leaning towards having the shield be passive defense (it's always protecting your front when you're not attacking) rather than active defense (need to make a control action to block), but I may change my mind, especially if I add other advanced defensive abilities like barrier spells.

The player will need to make real-time actions to swing his sword at the enemy, cast a spell, and so on. Attack spells will vary in size and movement. Generally they will not be automatic hits, but will fly across the screen (or whatever) and hit the enemy or not.

I'm tentatively thinking that the player will charge up special attack points with normal hits. Special attacks will range from mundane ones like jump slashes and double slashes to more spectacular super attacks.

Spells (most spells?) will take time to cast (charge up) before using. There may be quick/instant weak spells and stronger more time-consuming spells. Magic consumes MP and is limited by your MP supply.

I may make a combatant go through a significant (a second or two) cool-down before making his next action. This cool-down, if any, will be whatever it takes to establish the moderate pacing that I want for the action.

As for damage calculations and such, right now I'm thinking to make them non-variable, that is, you know that it always takes 3 hits to kill So-and-so's. Not sure yet.

Puzzles / Obstacles

I'd like to include some puzzles and problem-solving to add some variety, especially when exploring ruins and such. Unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of ideas for this yet. Maybe I'll provide a wide variety of tools and magical items for solving obstacles, provide the obstacles, and not worry so much about scripting one "right" way to get through every area. For example, there's a high ledge. You can just take the long way around through the corridors. You can find the hidden switch to drop a rope up to the ledge. Or maybe the player uses his tree wand to make a tree grow on the ledge and grapples up to it, and maybe I never even thought of that solution -- great!

It seems like I'm thinking mostly in terms of optional obstacles / shortcuts. The player should get a hefty bonus (experience?) for cleverly skipping part of the "normal" path through an area.

Abilities

Experience lets you raise your stats or learn new abilities. You can learn new special attacks, weapon techniques, magic spells, or support abilities. Or you can improve one of your existing abilities, like making your Fireball spell cheaper, faster, or stronger. The key idea here is to let the character specialize in certain abilities (meaning he'll clobber some enemies but maybe not have much to do against others) or be more diverse (or jack-of-all-trades, depending on your viewpoint) as the player chooses.

I'd like to include non-combat ability sets, such as forging equipment, enchanting magical items, and so on. Again, not sure if it'll be feasible to include that.

Some abilities may have other abilities as prerequisites. But I think I'll keep that pretty minimal and instead make it easier to pick a varied set of abilities.

Conclusion

Well, this turned out a lot longer than I expected. Guess that's a good sign. My goal for next week is to get the actual design document started (possibly just this post copied and expanded). I should make myself a schedule too. Thanks for reading! If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to comment.