I've been sketching out the design of a mobile video game. The concept keeps evolving, but I wanted to outline the basics. The purpose of my game design posts is twofold: to keep me accountable to some sort of schedule (or at least, to keep making steady progress), and to get gamer feedback on my concept.
I've been running a customized RUP lifecycle, and I'm starting to push through several use case realizations. For non-techs, that means I've got an idea for what the game software does, and now I'm beginning to architect a system that answers how it will perform its function. Since this is my first game design post, I thought I'd summarize why the software does what it does. Let me put it this way...
I keep playing Dragon Warrior over and over again.
Dragon Warrior was an 8-bit NES game released in 1986, when I was 10. It borrowed heavily from Dungeons & Dragons, the most famous tabletop roleplaying game ever produced. At the time, Dragon Warrior was a mind-blowing experience. You roamed a world between towns, fighting monsters, learning magic, buying items, leveling up and going on quests. Along with Final Fantasy I and the Legend of Zelda, it truly defined an entirely new category of video games that stood apart from arcade games like Mario Brothers and Donkey Kong.
Twenty-five years later, roleplaying games haven't changed much. Games remain very formulaic--gather 50 Wolf Pelts and 20 Iron Pebbles, bring them to the Smith, and he will give you a Wolf Belt +3. Despite a map implying freedom to explore, most games rely on grinding to occupy 99% of the player's time. Enough gold allows you to buy better equipment, and enough XP makes you more powerful, allowing you to defeat increasingly difficult bad guys. The story is a rigid linear progression through plot points, occasionally punctuated with huge boss battles. Stories have become so predictable that Game Informer published this handy RPG flowchart. And the only way to enjoy each game is exactly the way the developer coded it--no experimentation, no exploration, no customization.
Certainly there are games that break this mold, but they are few and far between, especially on handheld devices like iPads and Android phones.
Here is the RPG that I really want to play:
All story, all the time.
No grinding, no hovering, no gold farming, no quests to "kill 50 Purple Slimes in the Purple Cave", no waiting for rare item drops. Every battle I fight is relevant to the main story arc. Nothing is ever filler.
Meaningful story choices.
No more rigid and linear Main Quest, and then completely superflouous Side Quests. That isn't flexibility. I want multiple choices to navigate the story, and for those choices to have different consequences and different challenges. I'm fine if different choices result in accomplishing the same larger story goal, but I do not want those choices to be the same. Or worse, I do not want to be presented with one "good" choice and 1+ obviously sub-optimal choices.
Real character development, not just items and levels as a proxy for development.
When faced with major choices, the characters in novels will change. Those altered beliefs and traits will affect who they are within the story. The emotional and narrative aspects of characters are a lot more interesting than what's in their backpack. Also, it strikes me as somewhat ludicrous that all characters ascend to a god-like state of power, where they can deal 1000x more damage than at the story's beginning, and can generally do ridiculous things like destroy tanks with a single sword hit.
Challenging battles.
Fighting 200 brief, one-sided battles is not the same as fighting 5 balanced battles against skilled opponents. This goes quintuple in games where you can simply buy more points via healing potions. Fighting real battles is a satisfying gaming experience. My enemies should be smart and durable. I should be required to think to defeat them. If battles are so predictable that there's a single technique for a guaranteed win, your game design has completely failed at challenge. Multiplying that by 200 battles for every quest simply changes the game into an endurance match against repetitive boredom.
Permission to experiment.
Dear Mr. Developer: I paid you my dollar. If I decide that my character build sucks, I should have the right to change it, as much as I want, whenever I want. If I want to trade my Rusty Dagger for an IceFire Axe +87, you have no right to stop me. Maybe I don't care if your carefully balanced battles will take 10 seconds to defeat. If I think it's fun to destroy an entire Lizardman raiding party in a single blast of freezing incineration, that's my choice. I bought your game to have fun. I define fun, not you. I'm not going to tell you what to do with my dollar, so you don't get to tell me what to do with your game. From this point forward, if I think it's fun to give myself different equipment, or different abilities, or simply restore all my health in the middle of a battle because I'm pissed that I'm losing, I'm going to do it. If I decide that the consequences of this particular decision stink, I'm going to rewind the adventure to my last conversation and choose a different path. If I want to see what a Skreg Assassin can do with Venomous Spineblades, or decide I'd rather play a Master Invoker wielding a Mithril Runehammer, kindly stay the hell out of my way. Oh, and here's another hint. Making it impossible to explore all the options in a single playthrough does not automatically give your game replay value. It just forces me to play a game that's 90% the same to experience a new 10%. And if your items and rewards are random, I might never get the things that I wanted the most, and that totally sucks. You get to dictate the rules, the story, the art... everything in this game. Well, as a player, I deserve some extra control over how I experience your game. Maybe I won't choose to experience your creation exactly the way you intended, but ya know what? Get over yourself. I'm not a Neanderthal art-hater, and you ain't Da Vinci.
Permission to CREATE.
Dear Mr. Developer: Hi, it's me again. I had fun playing your game. It was like a Choose Your Own Adventure book crossed with all sorts of tough RPG battles. I liked the part where my Thief could sneak around and sabotage the elven fortress instead of forcing a frontal assault. But here's the thing--I'm tired of waiting for your updates. I mean, I'm only moderately invested in your story as it stands. The main character is kind of a downer, and I'd really like to strangle the uppity chick in the chainmail bikini. To be completely honest, I'd much rather make up my own characters and adventures using your game, and then share them with my friends. It gets back to that whole "paid you my dollar" thing. I should be able to write whatever stories I want, shouldn't I? I mean, maybe we want to play the Lizardmen for a change. You obviously aren't going to write that adventure, but that's a lousy reason to stop me from doing it. To which I might add, that's a lousy reason to stop me from doing it with my game. That I purchased from you. So it's mine. If you provide new content later, I'll consider buying it, but let's be crystal clear--if I buy it, I get to use it however I want.
This concludes my philosophical reasons for building a new game. In my next blog post, I'll talk about technical and structural problems that drive me nuts in games. And then finally, I'll describe the game that I actually intend to build.
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