Category Archives: pets

Friday catblogging – Excessive branching is not good

In the picture above, Othello sitting in a flower vase with a blossoming cherry tree in the background. Took it in my previous home, during spring.

Sometimes when I have a little time I play other games. Recently I bought Alpha Protocol, and was completely fascinated by it (no wonder, Obsidian is one of the best AAA developers around). It interested me a lot because of the RPG/FPS mix, but mostly because of the dialogue system and the multiple paths/branching typical of VNs.

Here is the problem. The game promises lots of different paths, every decision influences the story, and so on. And it’s TRUE. The point is – is useful? Who is going to replay the game from beginning to see what he has missed (and no guarantees that he will really see everything) ? Very FEW people, believe me. Also, in a FPS/RPG you can’t just skip the dialogues forward like in my Renpy games, so you can’t just do a “quick replay” to see what you have missed.

So I thought if wouldn’t have been a wiser choice to have still some branching, but not so many. Or that would lead to a different subplot completely, like I did with Bionic Heart. Such games should either be quickly replayable to let the player see what he missed, or tell the player “Hey, save now because there’s a big branch of the plot now, so you can reload this savegame later and pick a different direction to see what you have missed”.

I watched on youtube many videos of Alpha Protocol just to see what I had missed, because I really couldn’t afford to replay the whole thing from the beginning. It felt like a “waste of time and resources” to me. The devs could have done a longer game (is already long, but could be even longer) instead of making it so “free-play”. After all, in a story-based game, is more important to KNOW that you can have 50 different endings but that you probably will never replay it to see them all (especially if you can’t play fast-forward), or that the story is much longer?

I’m sure most players would pick the second option. That’s why in my upcoming RPG Planet Stronghold I haven’t opted to have lots of different paths: it will have a common main plot, but with missions/quest that let you have some freedom (do them in any order you want) and several romance subplots that are optional, but can be done anytime after chapter4, without the need to restart from beginning (except if you want to see the romance from another gender). In practice, save the game at beginning of chapter 4 and you can then reload it and see all possible endings/branches for your gender.

Speaking of Planet Stronghold, the next version 0.8 will be out hopefully next week, I don’t know the exact day yet because I had some eyesight problem recently, and with the Christmas busy schedule you can never know. Anyway, as I wrote several times, with version 0.8 the pre-order price will increase permanently to $19.99 so if you are interested in the game, be sure to buy it now 🙂

Friday catblogging – moral decisions in RPGs

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In the picture above, the young cat Maja. I found her while on a trip in Croatia and decided to bring her home. She lived with me for 7 beautiful months (sadly, she’s not here anymore).

I’m writing right now the Planet Stronghold quest with the Matricks. They’re giant rocky humanoid, very resistant to physical damage but weaker against Psionics. During this quest, if you side with the Empire you’ll face a big moral dilemma: you have the option to kill their “breeders”, as sort of distraction so you can fight the King Rock (the evil tyrant of the race) with less defenses. Of course, even if we’re talking about aliens, killing breeders is always a bad thing! And indeed, some party members will be seriously disappointed if you do that.

I like how the “Empire side” is turning out. Because even if the ultimate goal is to submit all the alien races, it’s a somewhat grey territory – the decisions you make might seem inevitable since there’s a big war going on, but you’ll often wonder if what you’re doing is ethically correct, and you can still choose to act differently.

About the mid-december deadline, I’ll try my best to met it, however after the Matrick race I still need to write the Arnox and Apex Rahn quest, and then the final battle. My goal was to finish the game plot, apart for the romance subplots that can be done anytime since they’re not connected with the main plot (except when you decide to do the final fight). So I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it, it might be more like 20-21st december.

I want the next version 0.8 to have the full plot so anyone who preordered can play/test it and let me know any problem. Note that after 0.8 is released, I’ll raise the price to $19.95 and then once the final version is out, to $24.95.

Finally, I also got the new boys images for Spirited Heart new game. You can see a mockup below. Frebo is always the best! 😀

Friday (Saturday) catblogging – Planet Stronghold and Heileen spin-off

Friday catsnowblogging: RPG side-quests

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Gilda playing in the snow – she looks like a small fox. This is a photo from my archive. Thankfully didn’t snow so much today 🙂

Today I plan to finish the “Battle Arena” side quest in Planet Stronghold. I always loved arena battles, a series of consecutive fights of increasing difficulty. I mixed several robots, aliens, enemies that usually you don’t met in the game, and obtained interesting challenges (in many cases you’ll have to use psionics to win at hard difficulty level).

Yesterday I also finished adding all the achivements, there are 18 in total. They are all non-trivial ones. I hate when in some games you start playing, and suddenly you hear a jingle and a big text appears on screen “achievement unlocked! you pressed the mouse button for the first time!” 😀 I think they should be all somehow difficult to get. The easiest ones are the “killing ones”, like the RoboKill achievement that requires you to destroy 25 robot enemies in game. The hardest one probably is “Ultimate Hero” which involves never losing a fight in the whole game!

I was also thinking if I didn’t do too much for this game. For sure it’s going to be priced at $24.95 once is finished, but perhaps would have been a wiser choice to try first with a smaller story and see if my users like this kind of RPG/story hybrid. But anyway is too late to go back now! The good thing is that 80% of enemies are finished (including their statistics and special attacks) so really all that’s left is writing the story and design the various encounters and quests.

I am scared to say this but I think I might really met my self-imposed deadline of January 2011! 8)

Meanwhile I did some preliminary gameplay testing for my Heileen spin-off game idea. As I said it wouldn’t be a VN, but more like a story-based time management game (or strategy game maybe, since it involves thinking and not just clicking fast). I believe I might be able to price this one at $14.99 only since would be easier/faster enough to produce (but still quite fun I think).

Friday catblogging: RPG game balancing

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The red cat above is Miele (in italian Honey), our oldest cat (almost 9 years old!) relaxing on the bed.

Things are going pretty well with Planet Stronghold. Yesterday I made some big changes both in the Psionic Skills and in the level-up increase of HP/PP. This latest change was made because I used a cheat mode to raise my characters up to level 20 (which probably won’t even be possible to reach in the game, since I hope it does well enough so that I can do an add-on). Then I checked how they could be the characters at level 20, how many HP/PP they had, and I allocated all the Skill Points. The difference between the various classes wasn’t much noticeable! At level 20, playing at easy level, you get 20 x 5 skill points, so 100 skill points that increase each skill by 2. So in theory I could maximize any skill – a soldier could get to level 200 of Psionics for example!

While I like not to have too much restriction, I don’t want the class pick being totally useless. So I’m thinking to change the game so that some skills have a maximum cap based on your class. For example a Soldier could never get Psionics above a value of 50, and a Scout could never get Heavy Weapon skill above 50, and so on. I think it makes more sense to put some hard limits, so you can still create somehow “hybrid classes” but not change them completely!

The second big change I made is the Psionic Skills themselves. Right now, most were focused on two simple thing: Heal and Harm. Surely, doing damage, and healing HP are the basics for ANY RPG. However the gameplay would soon be repetitive, so I introduced new changes:

PROTECT – “Increases friendly target’s armor value vs all kind of damage”. This way even if you don’t have the right armor, your psionics can protect you
DISRUPT – “Decreases enemy target’s armor value vs all kind of damage”. This way even if you don’t have the right weapon, your psionics can disrupt enemy armors
CURE – “Removes any negative condition (confused, shocked, etc) from friendly target.” Very useful when you encounter enemies that Shock, Fatigue or Confuse your heroes
SHOCK – “Shocks enemy target stunning him for XX turns. Stunned enemies won’t attack.” This is also very important, preventing enemies from attacking completely. Of course, it’s not easy to be successful, especially at lower levels.
FATIGUE – “Attempts to fatigue a single enemy target for XX turns, with a success rate of YY%%. Tired enemies won’t regenerate skill points.”. This is essential for some enemies that have very powerful Special Attacks. Note that you cannot prevent them from using it completely, but once they have used you can slow down their skill points regeneration.
RESTORE – “Brings an hero back from his knockout state, restoring XX%% of total hp.” – You can use this even at lower level, and can make really the difference from winning/losing a fight

The changes above greatly improve the gameplay especially at HARD level. At easy level, doesn’t change much (I expect only those interested in the story to play at easy level!). But already at normal, and in particular hard level you can immediately see the difference. When before you could win a fight just by “raw force”, dealing damage and healing, now you can also win with cleverly used skills.

For example at hard level winning the training test if you are a psionic is really hard when you face Roboant-06 because of his Phasor Blast. Now with Fatigue you can slow down the amount of attack, or with Shock you can prevent him from attacking completely. The restore is also interesting because it works even at lower level (even if with high failure rate).

I also changed the concentration multiplier. Before the basic heal was 10 PP, the medium 20PP and the maximum 30PP. The problem is that already at low level you could heal for big amounts using 30PP. Now the concentration multiplier is: low 10PP, medium 30PP, high 50PP. This simple change makes possible to still use the first two at lower levels (below level 7-8) but to use the big healing you need to be able to spend 50PP (and this also prevents non Psionics classes from using strong Heal/Harm psionics).

Overall I’m quite satisfied. When before you would just use Psionics to Heal/Harm, now you can decide if to save their PP to use the new Psionic Skills that can really make hard battles easier if used correctly! 🙂

I’ve also implemented several minor changes suggested by “Iselwin” in my forums, like:

the window color is now BLUE for your party attack/actions, and RED for enemy
the message windows now is independent from the main action, reducing completely some delays during battles (I also added a nice fade in/out effect)
you can easily compare two weapons/armors in the inventory, because I display in brackets the values of the currently equipped one

Overall was a pretty productive week! Next week will go on with the plot and try to have a version 0.8 live by end of the month with a lot of new stuff!

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva