Category Archives: game design

Game development is a puzzle game

5 Replies

rebecca
Rebecca will help you train to keep in shape…! (from Planet Stronghold 2)

Game development feels like a puzzle game to me. How? Simple, let’s consider one of my games. How many roles/elements are needed to make one?

Let’s try to make a list:

  1. gameplay/rules = work of the game designer
  2. programming/coding = work of the coder
  3. artwork = work of the artist (in many cases, 2 or more for backgrounds and GUI)
  4. story/text = work of the writer
  5. music/sfx = work of the musician
  6. marketing/promotion = work of the PR guy
  7. hosting/demo/support = support / web dev guy

So as you can see, for each of my games there should be the need of 8 people. In reality, I almost always do point 1,2,6,7 myself, and sometimes I also do some GUI and write storyboards for the texts!

In the past I used to to really EVERYTHING on my own (using Poser 3d and royalty free music tracks) but luckily I realized that was much better to hire other people to help 🙂

The main problem when working with external people, is that since to finish a game you need all those roles/elements, often happens that I have some areas covered/completed, while others not. Some people work fast in an aspect of a game, others slow downs in different aspects.

In the end that’s why I say it’s like a puzzle game. You need all the pieces to finish and release the product. Unfortunately very often that takes a lot of effort 😀 but like all things in life, nothing comes easy, you have to sweat and work hard.

Another thing I often have to decide is the scope of the game. For example now I am playing with the great freeware tilemap editor Tiled, trying to make isometric tilemaps. For which game? well for Planet Stronghold 2, but also thinking if to make them for Seasons Of The Wolf.

The idea was to have a big map like Loren, that once clicked would let you zoom-in and explore the areas in more details, rendered as isometric map. I think the idea is great and I’m sure that I can make it, the only problem is: how long will take me? will I need extra tiles, so contact artist to make more?

When making those decisions I need to consider that there are two types of fans: those who wants the games fast and pressure you to finish them, and others that say “take as much time as you need”. But besides what fans say, I need to keep releasing games at regular intervals to survive in the competitive world of indie games, so right now, I am unsure if to use this system.

I set myself a deadline – if I can have the isometric map thing working in 2 weeks I’ll use it, otherwise not. Also because in theory very shortly Roommates public beta should start, and then will have even less time to make tests… 🙂

A stressful week, but it’s over :D

Leave a reply

hotbath
The twins Shea & Althea relaxing with a hot bath in Seasons Of The Wolf

I admit I’d like to be there with Shea & Althea right now. Here outside is freezing, and I really could use a hot bath to relax after one of the most stressful week of my life 😀

Was stressful partly because of the Steam release and also for other personal issues. In practice I had several small things/problems, not big if taken each one singularly, but that coming all together at same time made me go nuts 🙁

Anyway, all seems fine now, so today was able to resume working on Roommates and SOTW! 🙂

About the feedback I got on Loren gameplay, getting your game in front of a huge audience like Steam showed some weak spots in the rules design. I probably underestimated how good are RPG players, or maybe (ahem) I am not much good myself anymore.

Either way, I really think was a good idea to include a fourth difficulty level in the upcoming RPGs Planet Stronghold 2 and SOTW (the Nightmare level!) so that should be a good challenge for every kind of RPG player, even the most experienced who play the game for hours, grinding and finding all possible rule-exploits 😀

SOTW and Roommates quick update

I am currently scripting scene 10 out of 27 of SOTW, but that doesn’t mean that I fully coded 10 scenes: I am first scripting all the music and artwork, so then I have the game fully working as a “plain visual novel” and I can add all the battles in a second time, once even the side-quests are finished, since I’ll need to play those as well to get a proper idea if the difficulty is balanced or not, if the loot is powerful enough, and so on.

Meanwhile Roommates’ writer is doing some final polish, testing the scheduler and adding more “one-liners” sentences. This week delayed a bit everything, but I still think the game could begin beta and pre-orders at end of this month! 🙂

Two new arrivals on iOS

The game Nicole is available: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nicole/id794491905?mt=8

And Love & Order too: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/love-and-order/id794994051?mt=8

2014: New Year Plan

4 Replies

mirtillo
My cat Mirtillo sleeping in an unusual way 😀

2014! Happy New Year!

I’m going to change completely my way of working. From now on, I’ll only make games in my native language, Italian.

Heh, good joke uh? 😀

The real plan

OK jokes apart the real plan is:

1) Release Loren on Steam. This is going to happen soon ! Took a bit of time to the coder to implement the achievements on all the OSes, but now everything works. The DLC Castle Of N’Mar will also be released, a few days later.
2) Finish Roommates. The game is long and the writer Michael tested it a lot, but I really think the best solution is start the preorders and the public beta testing, this way thanks to the awesome users in my forums the testing will go much faster. In the next weeks will fix all the issues found and code the scheduler, which will be similar to Flower Shop one.
3) Finish Nicole Yuri version – though this mainly depends on the writer to be honest 🙂 my job in this case will be to motivate her!
4) Release another otome game that for now I’m still keeping “under the hood”, but that I’ll announce in the first months of this year.
5) And of course, finish Seasons Of The Wolf and Planet Stronghold 2. Both games are quite big, but this time I shouldn’t be distracted by other things and will make sure to motivate and help the writer and coder appropriately 😉
6) At this point we will probably be in late 2014. Depending on the situation, either start working on Spirited Heart 2, Undead Lily, Loren 2 or something else. In this case is impossible to make any kind of prediction since there are too many factors and people involved.

Better integration with the story

Looking back at past year, one thing I didn’t do properly was to support the writers more. This doesn’t mean telling them exactly what to write line by line, but (for those who needed/wanted it of course) be more involved in the process as they write.

Some writers are happy to work on their own at their own pace with minimum need of my support/feedback: but in any case I need to check what they do to make sure that the final product reflects my vision and most importantly players’ expectations, and that works with gameplay.

And also I need to integrate the story more with the gameplay, though probably this can be done only by planning better the whole thing from start and writing a good amount of draft/storyboards myself, so will need more time for this.

Always Remember Me on Dailyroyale.com

If you missed my Christmas sale, you can still get a good deal for my game Always Remember Me at http://www.dailyroyale.com/! Expires in the next 2 days (approximately, there’s a counter on the site).

I have many other interesting things going on in the next weeks, stay tuned 😉

The perfect balancing in a RPG

6 Replies

Let’s get back to talk about one of my favorite topics, rules/game design for RPGs 😉
One of the biggest problems of all RPG designers is balancing the game difficulty and making the battles/random encounters interesting.

In my first two RPGs, Loren and Planet Stronghold, I used two similar approaches. The enemies would auto-level, but on a different scale from the player’s party, to make sure that as the player leveled up the battles would become easier.

I had defined a base enemy stats/skills values set at level 1. Then I decided how much increase they would get for each stat on every level up, and did some testing, making sure that the enemy progression wasn’t as quick/fast as the players.

For example, after 10 levels, the enemy could have gained +10 HP while the player (on average) +20HP. And then I was scaling those values based on the chosen difficulty.

However, it was very painful to code it, because I had to define every single enemy this way. Copy/paste helped, but when an enemy definition looks like this:

enemy

it’s not really the best to avoid mistakes 😀 Also, balancing the game required tweaking the numbers over and over, test again, and overall took a lot of time.

So what I have decided to do, to shorten development time and make at same time the battles fun and challenging?

The Ultimate RPG System!

I’m going to use a different system that combines auto-leveling with keywords-based allocation of enemies’ stats.

By default, the enemy will scale completely to the average values of the player party. So attack/defense/speed/magic, so that we have a 1:1 copy of the character average party members values. Then I’ll use keywords and/or relative values to define specific trait of each enemy to differentiate them.

For example I could write using relative values:

  • Attack: -5% (the Attack would be inferior of the 5% to the party average)
  • Defense: 50% (the Defense would be 50% better than the party average)

Or also write using keywords:

  • “Defender”, and define it as an enemy having +10% Defense value and +15% HP value
  • “Magician”, enemy having +25% Magic value and +10% SP value
  • “Fury”, enemy having +25% Speed, +25% Attack but -40% Defense value

and so on, you get the idea! Also, the keywords will be parsed in sequence, so I could apply two or more and the final result would be a mix of the various modifier.

I think this system could lead to a MUCH faster development time, and also to a more fun/challenging battles, even to a better randomization of the enemies (for example in a region of Fire creatures, I could define the Flaming attribute that gives +25% Fire resistance).

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all the enemies are of SAME LEVEL. Only that the default/base level now matches the average party level. So while before I was struggling trying to have enemies match the party level, now I use that as starting point to create the opponents! But I can have in battles weaker or stronger enemies.

I’m going to use a system very popular in MMORPG, using color codes:

relativelevels
The color coding system, so you immediately know how dangerous each enemy is

Green – weaker than your current party average
White – same level
Yellow – one level above your party averageOrange – two levels above
Red – more than two levels (it could be even 5 levels, like in the screenshot above)

This way is even more immediate to spot the most dangerous enemies just looking at the color in which their names are displayed 🙂

Those who like to grind will still be able to do it, because I can always define groups of low-level enemies, and they’ll still be easy to defeat. The items you’ll find can be sold to buy better gears, especially useful for those mad enough to play at the “Nightmare” difficulty level 😀

As you can see, I’m going to experiment quite a lot with this RPG! So far has been fun and the result are very pleasing (though as always I’ll need to wait for the feedback from testers).

Terrain modifiers

Leave a reply

IMGP7266
A very nice dog that joined us for a trip on the mountains years ago

A concept that is well known to strategy/wargame players is the so called “terrain modifier”. What is it? is the influence that each terrain type has on the gameplay, for example movement, attack / defense bonuses, and so on.

I’ve decided to experiment with it too in the upcoming RPG Seasons Of The Wolf:

battlesetup
In the new pre-battle party setup there’s indication of the battlefield type

You might recognize it if you played Loren Amazon Princess, even if here it’s completely revamped: is the pre-battle party setup screen, where you place your party members in the front / back row.

This time though, beside letting you know some limitations/restrictions of the battle (like which party members must be present, the minimum/maximum party size, and so on) it also displays the battlefield type, in this case “Hot”, which gives a bonus to Fire attack/spells.

Of course there are still “normal” battlefields with no particular bonus. But I plan to use this new gameplay addition to make some interesting battles and to add more variety (since if you play at high difficulty level, you’ll need to take that aspect in consideration).

Amber Magic Shop update

I have also some good news for Amber Magic Shop. I won’t go much into details because will make a series of post about that game when we are closer to its release (which won’t be sooner than next year unfortunately).

Writer has planned the two extra characters yuri routes, and is already writing them. So differently from Nicole, this time even if the game will be out later all the yuri content will be available either at launch day. Or with a very small delay 😉

I’ve also got a bit more art, in particular some nicer clothes for Amber:

ambernew
Two new outfits for Amber, who on left is the young version, on right the adult one

So that’s another game which is progressing slowly but at least constantly and hopefully will be able to code a good alchemy/crafting system for it 🙂

Aravorn’s Map and Timeline (WIP)

I am also doing a bit more world-building of Aravorn, the imaginary world where all my fantasy games takes place. You can check this forum thread if you’re curious about it:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3007

That’s all for now! Lots of stuff happening, but can’t talk about it yet 🙂