Category Archives: roleplay games

Follow the leader: about characters in a party RPG

As some of you might know, recently I fell in love with Bioware’s latest title, Dragon Age.

Of course there are MANY reasons to love that game: but as game designer, the most interesting new feature (never seen before in a RPG game as far as I know) is the party management / relationship between the main characters and his/her companions.

Beside the possible romance outcomes, which are very nice, I also liked in particular the skill bonus that each NPC can get if you have a good relationship with him/her. I definitely want to do the same in my game Planet Stronghold. Beside raising the skills the “normal” way (through Training or winning battles / earning XPs) I also want to have a relationship value with each of them, and that value will give bonuses to combat. Of course also a negative value will give a negative bonus to combat.

Another very interesting feature is that the NPC actually interacts during the exploration dialogues. Evil / selfish characters will be annoyed if you try to help too much everyone you meet, while generous / brave characters will be pissed if you do evil action or if you refuse to help the weaks. This will require a bit more planning during the dialogues to check for all the possible companions present in that point, but will definitely add much more atmosphere and realism to the game.

I always liked the idea of your party NPC being not simple soldiers that will follow the leader blindly, but real characters with their own morals / thoughts that will change their opinion on you based on your actions.

Planet Stronghold – New characters

Game art styles

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After posting my last sketch about my upcoming mystery / detective game Vera Blanc, I got some comments from people about the artstyle.

Everyone seems to love the new style, and I’m a bit relieved since it was a bit a risk to move away from manga style (even if many said that Heileen was a mix between manga and american comics).

Note that I will still make manga games too in future, but I also wanted to try a more realistic / comic style.

Especially since in that style women looks better IMHO 😀

Click on the image on the left to zoom in and look at the colors… only at the colors, eh! 😉

I played with saturation level based on suggestions of Jake, and indeed seems that it looks better to me too. I wanted to obtain a sort of comic look, but before the image was less saturated than the one I posted above, and while was ok for a printed comic I think this new version fits more a computer game.

That’s just an example of what kind of fanservice you can expect from this series – yes, if things go well I plan to make a series of games. Another decision I had to take, which scares me, is to have multiple artists work on each “episode”.

Like in comic books, where each episode would be drawn by a different artist. I had to take this decision if I wanted to release each episode at 4-5 months of distance, rather than 1 year 😐

I hope players will understand my motivations!

Regarding art, if I had the money I would make all my games looks like the picture on the right: that’s a new screenshot from Planet Stronghold game, probably the most expensive I’m making so far in term of art and coding (and I hope it will do well!).

Just for fun, I also wanted to post an image of one of my first games as indie: Universal Boxing Manager (see below).

Ok, it’s true that simulation/strategy games usually don’t need great art, however is fun for me to see how I started, and how the quality of the art in my games changed (in better of course!) over the years… 🙂

Planet Stronghold new artstyle

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Today I’ve received from the new Planet Stronghold artist the sketches for the characters. She worked already on a few enemies for the game, like the famous RoboAnts 🙂 But now I decided to use her also for all the game characters!
On the right you can admire the new version of Lisa Nelson, the game main character. I like her, she’s really beautiful but has also a determined expression/pose, typical of the natural born leaders!

I’m also going to replace the all-white uniforms in the game with more colored designs. I also have the “casual dressed” version of Lisa which is even more sexy, but don’t want to post everything here, you’ll have to play the game to see it 🙂

That nice looking guy on the left instead is Prince Cliff, a character you’ll meet later in the game, when you’ll encounter the Royal Family and decide if to work for them.

In my original idea you can choose if to remain loyal to the Empire (and the Royal Family) or become a rebel and join a group of native raiders on Planet Stronghold who wants to fight for their freedom.

Beside the sketches I’m also working on redesigning the battle screen to offer more fast-help, even if so far people who played it all said that the game is fairly intuitive to use: not just the veteran JRPG players but also a few more “casual” style players said it was pretty straightforward.

I’m happy since with this first attempt in a VN-RPG hybrid I don’t want really to create a complex JRPG, but build a base to make a JRPG (probably a fantasy one) later this year (or probably next year, considering how many projects I have going on!).

Planet Stronghold: How Psionic Powers work

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Today I’ve experimented with the Psionic Powers balancing. I raised one of my chars to level 25 (the highest currently attainable in the game) and checked how powerful the stats would be. This way once I know the maximum power of that power, I can simply scale down the effects level by level until level 1 (of course the power need still to be somehow effective even at lower level otherwise would be useless).

Psionic Powers in my game are the equivalent of the Spells in a classic fantasy RPG game. Since I wanted to keep the interface simple, I don’t have 50 “different” spells like in most games. Instead each Power has a value that represent the character knowledge of that specific power, going from 0 to 99 (even if at start of game each Power has a random value from 5-10).

Each Power also requires Psionic Points (which from now I’ll abbreviate into PP) to be used – sort of the Mana points in fantasy game. The difference though, is that rather than having “Heal Light Wounds” and then “Heal Medium Wounds”, “Heal Severe Wounds”, “Heal Critical Wounds”, in my game there is a different (more casual) approach: each Power has a basic “casting” value, but you can spend more Psionic Points to increase its effectiveness. The base effectiveness is influenced by the character level and the knowledge of that specific power.

A few examples with some non-definitive value:

Level 1 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending the base PP value of 5 and deal 5 damage.
Level 10 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending the base PP value of 5 and deal 25 damage (the bigger damage is because the character is higher level and has more knowledge of that specific Power).
Level 1 Psionic character wants to use the Harm Power. He can use it spending a PP value of 15 (base + 10 PP) and deal 5×3=15 damage.

So as you can see, a level 1 character can deal almost the same amount as the level 10 if he spends x 3 of PP. Of course, at level 1, if you use 15 PP you’re left with almost no PP, while at level 10 you still have a good reserve of them 🙂

I think this system will still allow a good flexivity, but without filling the character “grimoire” with 50 powers that basically does the same thing, just in different proportions!

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva