Good RPGs are few. Probably are the kind of genre where there are less games available. Note that I’m not talking about hack’n’slash RPGs, or “simple” RPGs. But story-based RPGs with lots of gameplay rules and many dialog choices and ethical / moral decisions.
It’s hard to write interesting dialogues that aren’t banal (and for a non-english speaker like me, is even more difficult!). In the screenshot above, Rumi Kai poses a good question to the player: she struggles between her interest in medicine and healing, and her innate destructive powers. She asks herself what is more honorable: to harm, or to heal?
That is an example from the various romance subplot I’m currently writing right now for my sci-fi RPG game “Planet Stronghold” which should be out at end of this month (with another beta 0.9 release around mid-January).
Dialogues and story apart, another aspect why RPGs are so hard to come by is gameplay balancing. I tested this game more than any other game I’ve ever made. Partly because it’s fun (so that’s a good sign!) and partly because every update, I regularly unbalanced the game 🙁
How this can happen? Easily, I’ll make you an example. The Psionic Power “Harm” at high level can do a lot of damage. Like even 100hp of damage. This would mean that some monsters could be killed with one attempt! That was bad for gameplay balancing of course, so I raised the Psionic Points cost (think of it like if is Mana in fantasy RPGs). Problem is that a few weeks later, I realized that even with higher mana cost, if you had two Psionics you could still do 200hp of damage even to boss enemies! A boss that can be defeated so easily with just two hits would make the game a bit ridiculous 😀
So, my idea was to introduce enemy evasion bonus. Some enemy have a very high evasion value, that doesn’t apply only to avoiding weapon shots but also Psionic Powers. So before the Harm would always hit the target. Instead now you could miss the enemy, and since every attempt costs high amount of PP, that would balance the game well. The problem was that I forgot to lower the PP cost, making the game insanely difficult to play!
This is just an example of how two small changes would affect the whole game! So, if you make a RPG, everytime you introduce a game/ruleset change, think about all possible secondary effects otherwise you’ll start hear (rightful) complains from people in your forums 😉
I see perfectly what you mean by that, having tormented various versions of rpg-maker myself lol in order to make simple but funny rpgs for my sons and going through lots of problems with balancing the games, the evolution curves, the strength of attacks and skills, the amounts of HPs, the resistance of the various bosses etc… The borderline between challenging and impossible is sometimes thin. But this is nothing compared to the necessity of an appealing story and likable characters, because those really make a difference. And such qualities I often find in your games ! Regarding story and moral choices, and space operas, I think that the first Mass Effect is the perfect example of what I’m really looking for in modern games. The combat system might have been awkward at times, but, wow, the characters, the plot, unveiling the worlds, the “bad-but-ambivalent- guy”, the invasion !!! That was epic !And I find the same spirit in Planet Stronghold so far, so I can’t wait playing the final version. And thanks for sharing your thoughts with us so we can learn from your creative process too !
Thanks for the compliments 🙂 I hope the rest of the game/story will appeal you. There are some big ethical decisions to make, but have yet to write the final part. The romance subplot are kind of disconnected from the main story since they’re optional, but I think discovering about the various heroes’ past could be fun too.
Balancing does certainly sound tricky. Have you considered automatic testing to ensure that changes aren’t making some battles unreasonably easy it difficult?
I haven’t thought this through, but I guess you could have an AI fight through several battles in the game, with several party and equipment combinations and then look at the data.
Probably nothing to consider for an almost finished game, but you can’t play through the whole game after every change, right?
Yes that’s something I could have done, but as you say in the early stages. To be honest while I know about those automate testing, none of the indie devs I spoke with use it. Unless the game follows very rigid rules is hard to code an AI that behaves like a player, in the end is probably harder than just testing the game. I don’t test all the battles from beginning, I do 15-20 minute testing and I see already if the battles are OK or not. An essential thing is to have difficulty levels so you can make happy people that wants to play it at easy level and those instead that want bigger challenge.
Is hard to explain, but game balancing is really an art, and often underestimated. I know a friend of mine, Caspian of puppygames.net that spent over 6 months only in balancing the gameplay of his latest game and it shows, because is very fun to play… 🙂