Category Archives: roleplay games

Leveling Up

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I’ve been playing Fallout 3 on Xbox a lot lately. A thing I’ve noticed is that leveling up is done in the JRPG style, and not in the old AD&D one. For those unfamiliar, let me translate: JRPG usually have FAST leveling up. It means that you will level up quickly and constantly during the game, opposed to the AD&D system, where leveling up is a real “event”. I still remember the old SSI games based on the AD&D rules, the early levels were even acceptable, but then… going from level 10 to 11 was a real pain 🙂

To be honest I was a fan of the AD&D. Until recently. I mean, is cool that every level up is something unique, that brings new perks/features to the character. But on the other hand, I really like constant reward to the player. In Fallou 3 (but also in other games like Everquest 2) for example you can experience points by just discovering new locations. Or every trap/lock that you manage to disarm/unlock without a key. Beside of course completing quests and killing enemies!

It’s cool to see the EXP bar whenever you do one of those steps. It feels “right”. It’s like the game is telling you “YOU RULE”. I fell in love with it, and I am going to implement something similar to my VN/RPG game Planet Stronghold. There won’t be a full 3d virtual world, but I’ll fill it with many quests and also will make sure there are places in which you can use the various non-combat skills.

Speaking of which, two new screenshots: the skills screen, and the quests screen. They should both be final, no more change to skills 🙂

Visual Novels in AAA games market

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No, outside Japan there aren’t any AAA-commercial quality visual novel games, of course. BUT – and it’s sa big but, the visual novel elements are starting to pour into the normal AAA genres. Some examples? Mass Effect, The Witcher, and probably more I haven’t played.

Ok, but why you say this? What exactly defines a visual novel, and differentiate it from a normal RPG game? Well in the cases above is really difficult, but I think I could say that while RPGs had NPC and quests already as a feature, the way those two games present the dialogues and the choices makes them much more close to visual novel than other games. Indeed, there aren’t simply quests: first, there is LOT of dialogue. Those games are fully voiced (well, like all my future ones) so that helps a lot. Many people don’t like when there’s much text to read, but if you present the same text under the form of a movie/cartoon, with moving actors, scenes and voices, it’s VERY different (in practice is the difference between reading a book or watching a tv movie). In those games, there are MANY choices. Both on Mass Effect and The Witcher you can influence lots of characters/factions, and in the end, really change your ending.

RPGs always had the possibility to make choices, but to influence the world/characters around you and “unlock” different endings? No, that’s more a visual novel thing, to me 😉

Both those games were huge successes, selling million of copies. Of course, it’s not JUST because of the visual novel component: but I like to think that it played a big role. Yes, you can have visual novels features in a AAA game and not bore the western gaming public: you just need to insert them into a context with many other gameplay types (shooters, strategy, simulations). That’s what I’m going to do with The Flower Shop and Planet Stronghold 🙂

What are “light-RPG” games?

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I remember when I was young, the game genres where very well defined: there were action games, adventure games, role playing games and so on.

As the game industry grew up, some interesting genre-mix started to pop up. For example now we all refer to Diablo as a RPG, but would be more accurate to call it Action-RPG. Actually, right now, we can find many “RPG elements” in lots of games. Very few “pure action” games remains.

One of my upcoming games, Planet Stronghold, is a “light-RPG” game. I consider it a visual novel with RPG elements, but stronger than those you can usually find in dating sims. What I exactly mean? I’m talking about quests, relationships, interactiveness? No, because many of those features were already present in my other “normal VNs”. In Heileen 1-2 there are quests, in Bionic Heart relationship and some interactive scenes, in Summer Session there are the stats/skills to improve and so on.

So to call the game “light-RPG” I knew I had to go forward and push renpy to its limits (well no, not really, is quite easy to achieve good results with it!). Indeed in Planet Stronghold there will be combat, an inventory, quests, character relationships and so on. There will be several kind of weapons based on the damage type: energy, piercing, explosive, etc. There will be 4 classes: psionic, soldier, guardian and scout, each one with special advantages.

BUT, the game won’t be FILLED by stats. You’ll clearly know from beginning what kind of gameplay you can expect from a certain class. Scouts will need lot of time to recharge but will be able to kill opponents with a single shot, especially human ones. Guardians will be tough and have lots of hitpoints, psionics duty instead will be to heal / protect others. That’s why I use the word “light”, because while is clearly a RPG game, it’s not hard to understand.

Clearly is not easy to create a game like that. Is actually harder than creating an uber-complex game like some I did in the past (Magic Stones or Supernova 2 for example). Because with this game, even a casual player should be able to pick up the game and after learning a few basics, being able to enjoy the game without getting lost not knowing what to do.

Space RPGs !

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There aren’t many space RPG. There is fallout, but is more post-apocalyptic RPG than pure space RPG. I remember some good wargames like Space Hulk & Co. But really very few space RPGs. Especially Manga RPG (I’m talking about Pc/Mac platforms, not consoles).

So, I’ve decided to make one! The two screenshots you see in this page are from Planet Stronghold, my upcoming space RPG. Originally that game should have been another wargame, similar to Supernova 2. But after falling in love with Python I decided that doing a space RPG (with some VN elements of course!) could have been a more interesting game experience.

The player will control the adventures of Lisa Nelson, a young cadet just graduated from the Royal Army, that gets sent on the military outpost of Planet Stronghold to train. Of course, as soon as she arrives there, the situation will go out of control… 🙂

How to do perfect (or almost) gameplay balancing

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If you check at the bottom of this post you’ll see a sort of spreadsheet page (and indeed, it is!) and you’ll wonder what the … is that.

It’s my system to do perfect gameplay balancing! In games like RPGs, where you have lots of skills/stats, is really hard to balance properly games. There will always be some classes/races with better attributes than others. This is inevitable, but there are some tricks you can use to at least try to make a balanced game.

In what consists my method? simple, I take a spreadsheet program (Openoffice in my case) and I lay down the stats needed in row/columns like in the example below. Then, I use the SUM function to sum all values in rows/columns. The result should be that all totals are equals: it means that if I have a class with more Willpower, there will be another with more Wisdom, and so on. But in the end if you sum all values they should be all equals, grouped by your RPG system (in my case races/elements).

Hope I managed to express myself well. If you’re making a complex game, just try it, might save you some time! Of course there are still lots of things to balance inside the game itself but this should be a good start.
balancing