Category Archives: game design

Let’s talk about attributes

From left to right, my cat Leon and Miele, having a discussion about RPG balancing

Balancing a RPG is… one of the hardest things in game design ever. Even in MMORPG made by teams of 100+ people with multi-million budgets you see patches for months after the game is out to “tweak / balance the game”.

So I am sure that even my new RPG Seasons Of The Wolf very likely won’t be “perfectly balanced”, but to me the first goal is to make it fun. But I know that there are some very hardcore people who will dissect the game in details and find all possible weaknesses.

Let’s have a NIGHTMARE

Let’s start with saying that this time I’ve listened to the pleas about the difficulty:

Note the new difficulty level with that friendly name “NIGHTMARE”. Already the hard level will be… hard, but I expect the nightmare to be a real pain in the ass, requiring people to grind, fine-tune their equipment, and maybe even reload old savegames to try a different tactic/leveling up path.

You know, all those things that for normal human beings are annoying, but for those guys are the most fun thing ever! 😉

I’m joking in case it wasn’t clear. No offense to anyone! Those hardcore RPG players are indeed the most useful testers since they usually find more bugs than anyone else, so an applause to them!

Attributes, attributes…

Loren’s attribute system was pretty simple: 3 attributes, Strength, Skill, Will. One of them particularly good for each of the 3 classes: Warrior, Thief and Mage. But even the other two would provide benefits.

This time in SOTW I wanted to have more attributes: six in total.

Let’s see each one in detail:

Constitution – increases character’s durability in battles. Each point spent in this attribute will increase the HP amount by 10.
Will – increases character’s ability to use special attacks or spells in battle. Each points spent in this attribute will increase the SP amount by 10.
Strength – increases character’s physical damage in battle. Each point spent in this attribute will increase the Attack value.
Skill – increases character’s ability to avoid or block physical attacks in battle. Each point spent in this attribute will increase the Defense value.
Agility – increases character’s Speed value. Fast characters will move sooner and perform the same actions quicker than slower ones.
Arcane – increases character’s Magical ability. A high value helps caster to cast more powerful spells, and also grants protection to magic attacks.

One of the rules for game design, is that each attributes should be at least useful to each Class. If there’s an attribute that gives absolutely NO advantage to any of the game Classes, you have “a problem”.

Currently, my only attribute with this problem is Strength. It works fine for Warrior and Thief since influences the Attack, but as you can imagine, Mages won’t have much use for it. Unless maybe I allow them to use Missile weapons too, or have strength influence some of the resistances.

Yes, because while the resistances will be the same as Loren, they’ll use a much better/more practical percentage based scale, so it’s not enough to have two armor items giving each Fire resistance to become immune. More like, each piece will give some percentage points.

So I have still to think better about it, I have some ideas already… (the attributes will surely change in the final version, but not by much).

Of course, there are plenty of RPG with unbalanced attributes that are still fun to play. Baldur’s Gate and Fallout comes to mind, just to name two very popular and fun RPGs 😉

More news coming next week, about this game and the other one currently in progress!

News on the new RPGs in development

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A “sneak peek” video of Planet Stronghold: Warzone (the sequel to Planet Stronghold)

Let’s talk about RPGs!

It was a while since I showed something about Planet Stronghold: Warzone. Being a bigger game than previous ones there has been some troubles developing it, but luckily now the development seems to be going at good pace. Making RPGs is very hard, sometimes I forget it 😀

Anyways, in the video above even if there’s still a lot of placeholder art, you can see some good stuff. The main menu, the music screen with some official tracks playing (the final OST will be available in the bonus content version like in my most recent games). But also the codex and the colony sim “minigame”.

I also made a test replacing the placeholder art with some of the finished desert tileset:

looks still a bit messy because it was just a quick test, but already better, doesn’t it ? 😉

We also had the “crazy idea” to have an exploration part similar to the one from the first game, using the isometric tileset system. It would show only during the missions (in the game there will be several missions to play, some unique to each side), so not the full game. This way the environmental situation the party is in will be better represented, offering some more strategy to decide how to pass specific points guarded by enemies, where to use the skills, and so on.

For now is just an idea and I don’t want to promise anything since is not like there aren’t other things to do, but if possible we’ll try to add it 🙂

The game will also have a much better “World Building”, meaning that the codex will talk about each race, faction, the main characters (in party and outside) and so on. It will also explain better how the Psionics work, the origins of Planet Stronghold and all that stuff. In summary, will rule 8)

The “Mystery RPG”

I have also some more good news about the “Mystery RPG” that I’m working on from time to time when there’s a moment of pause from the main games. I’ve hired again Taleweaver to write the story, and commissioned some of the art already. I don’t want to say any estimate release dates but if everything goes as planned (which probably won’t, by Murphy’s Law) this Fall the game might be at a good stage, maybe even in beta 😉

So as you can see, even if my next games to be released will likely be two dating sims (Nicole & Roommates) the fans of roleplay games can sleep well knowing that there will be some good stuff for them coming later this year!

The last missing piece

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What last missing piece you ask? Well, yesterday for real-life reasons I had to commute for long distances, so I spent a lot of time thinking. An activity that probably I should do more often 🙂

So, I thought that making games is like making a puzzle. You need all the pieces to finish it, and like puzzles, there are pieces that fit immediately, and others that take long time before you’ve found the right spot.

Gameplay design

A bit is for gameplay design reasons. I had to experiment a lot with the RPGs, but even for simpler games (at least apparently) like dating/life sim, quite often I have to tweak the screen layout and system for days or even weeks.

For example you might remember the old look of the scheduler for Nicole from last week post. Now look at the new version below:

Much better now! I eliminated the top title and made the photos look like Polaroid so four could fit on each row, and the text doesn’t overlap the image anymore. Small changes like that might seem obvious but still take time to design and code.

The real missing parts/pieces

But the most important thing, is to have all the needed pieces/parts/assets for a game!

I am doing several projects at once (probably too many) but there’s a reason for that: in every one there’s something missing. Nicole is missing some chibis and some extra artwork. Roommates some artwork, the main soundtrack, some writing. Planet Stronghold 2 is still missing a good amount of writing, some art (the talk poses) and good part of the RPG framework, plus GUI work.

In some cases is people’s fault, in other simply the job takes time to make, or is my fault because I waited too much to hire the right person for the job or planned the project badly.

But no matter the cause, every indie is in this situation, unless you make games that you code yourself using pixel-art / poser to do the graphics. In that case you might be able to do everything on your own, like I was doing in the beginning. No delays ever except for my own, but the results were much worse, since obviously I’m not a good artist nor a great writer!

So I wrote this post to say that even if a game is 90% done, sometimes that last piece of art, music track, writing scene, gameplay tweak, might cause big delays on a game release. That’s why when people ask me when a game will be out I always use the conditional “it SHOULD be out…” 😉

This year goal

I realized that we’re already in May, so at this point, as I said to a recent interview I did a week ago, my main goal is to release one RPG this year! Since I have the feeling that with the first Loren game everything went smoothly, all pieces fit together very easily, but I didn’t notice it until I started working on new RPGs and difficulties started to arise 🙂

Meanwhile, here’s a short video of Nicole so you can get an idea of the art and writing. The GUI artwork is still temporary placeholder of course!

Biting off more than can chew

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Gilda & Grillo sleeping together, pic from a few years ago

I would like to be able to sleep peacefully as my two cats above! The reality is that in the past month it has been quite stressful, for various reasons, personal and job related.

In particular, I recently had to drop the idea of making the “two independent parallel plots” feature of Bionic Heart 2. It was definitely too much. I tried to fix the numerous plot bugs, with the help of some people but we failed. Then asked Aleema, my trusted Loren writer, thinking that maybe it was my faul, that I was just “burned” by all the recent work. But even her gave up! So at least it means it wasn’t just me.

Thinking back about it I don’t even know how I thought I could make that work. It’s a total nightmare since the game is already super complex even played as “normal” visual novel, with lots of path/branching and variables to take care of.

By coincidence, this week appeared on a games site the flow chart of the Walking Dead game by Telltale, which I enjoyed a lot last year. Immediately, I noticed how simple it was. Yet, playing the game I had the sensation of much more freedom of choices!

So in practice, to the end users doesn’t matter much if there are really 150 parallel plots. Nobody except a few people are going to replay the game from beginning to see them all. I remember when I did a survey a few years ago, only 10% of people said that they try to unlock all the endings.

I think that for all future games, I’d rather make the story longer, and use other gameplay/narrative “tricks” to give the illusion of freedom (because even in the multiple path games, you still don’t have complete freedom, is just an illusion).

Anyway, what does it means in practice for Bionic Heart 2? I thought that by removing the parallel plot thing, all problems would be solved but I was wrong again. Testers in forums were finding lots of new plot bugs! The game logic is still to complex, with too many branching points, jumps, and so on. For every problem fixed, two new ones would show up. This was going to be a neverending story…

The solution is something that I should have done from the beginning: I’m going to reorganize all the scenes in a simpler way, still providing choices like in all my games, but with a more simple logic behind it.

Nothing is going to be missing from the original script (maybe a few parts of some scenes, but I’ll try to keep as much as I can) but simply I will make it so that behind the scenes doesn’t become the huge, complex mess that made me (and two other people) lose 2 months of time (the game should have been out last month).

I think I should be able to finish it in 2 weeks max, maybe sooner. I really want to get out this game as soon as possible! 🙂

Grinding or not grinding, that’s the question!

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In the photo above, Gilda and Leon sleeping “head to head” 🙂

I was hoping to announce the start of the beta pre-order for my fantasy RPG “Loren The Amazon Princess” but alas, I am going to delay it by a few weeks. I’m hoping by mid of February to have the full chapter 1 finished.

Below some screens of the vendor (WIP) and the battle with a 99% final layout:

What’s left ?

You might ask what exactly is missing? The biggest part of the game is done, but there are a lots of small things missing. To be clear I could release the beta at the end of this month, but it would miss a several interesting features like:

working vendor – the vendor code is still half-done, and even if the coder probably could finish it in 3 days, it would be greatly untested. Also I would need to define the vendors inventory, check what kind of items they might have available, and so on!
side quests – I’m thinking what to have as side quests. In the game, there are already side-quests but they appear later in the game, in particular in the expansion when you can choose if to recruit Sauzer, Mesphit and Chambara. I want to add a few more, nothing complex since the game is already VERY long, but still…
map system – it will be a simple map system like Planet Stronghold (nothing complex) but still I am missing the art and good part of implementation (like random encounters, and so on)
battle effects – there are SOME battle effects done (nothing fancy!) but when you have 80+ skills to do, it starts to be a LOONG task. I don’t want to spend much time on this, because it doesn’t make sense to make lots of efforts for a 1-2 second animation, but still I don’t want it to look like a total crap 😀

So as you can see, nothing really ESSENTIAL to the game, but I don’t want to rush out the beta, and have people test an already outdated version, since I will add most of the things above.

What about the grinding?

The term grinding, as defined by Wikipedia:

“Grinding is a term used in video gaming to describe the process of engaging in repetitive and/or boring tasks not pertaining to the story line of the game. The most common usage is in the context of MMORPGs in which it is often necessary for a character to repeatedly kill AI-controlled monsters, using basically the same strategy over again to advance their character level to be able to access newer content.”

As you might know, I make heavy story-based games. However, Loren is the first game that has a very solid RPG gameplay. It’s much deeper, detailed and also complex than Planet Stronghold. And you can reach up to level 30 (I decided to lower the level cap from level 60 !).

I know that some people hate grinding, while other consider it an essential part of RPGs. Of course, not an excessive grinding, but if the battle is well done, it’s cool to kill monsters to gain more experience and unlock new skills.

In my case though, it also helps the game. As much as I can test it, and even if I offer different difficulty levels, I cannot know every single player skills. So even if I give out more experience points at Easy difficulty level, I cannot know if it will be enough for everyone to win the battle with Jul in chapter 4 of the game (it will be a hard battle!).

A solution is to leave some zones of the map with “wandering monsters”, so that if the player is stuck in a battle and cannot seem to win it, he can visit those places and fight some grinding battles to gain more experience and level up. As consequence, he can retry the previous battle but with a strongest party, increasing the chances of winning.

I think done this way, grinding is not a bad thing anymore, but is a sort of “approved cheat mode”. You can win most battles at your selected difficulty level? Good. You can’t? Try playing in a easier mode. You still cannot win that specific battle? Try grinding a bit, and then come back with a strongest party and kick the enemy’s ass!

The other games

I know recently I’m completely absorbed into Loren and haven’t updated much the other games progresses. This is because Loren is a very long and complex game to make, and I want to finish it soon. However don’t worry, since after it’s finished I’ll release some new dating/life sim, including Heileen 3 (probably this summer).

Here’s a picture of Marie with the “new look”. I find her very cute:

And she is a romance option 😉

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva