I’m going to talk a bit about what kind of RPG this is, and how its designed.\u00a0 Many RPGs revolve around quests, story and dialogue.\u00a0 Some revolve around action and leveling up for the sake of it, and you skim through the dialogue that explains the plot about you being the only person who can save the world.\u00a0 Kenshi is neither, its more of a simulation of a living world.<\/p>\n
Firstly, the game is not based around scripted events, or even scripted AI.\u00a0 I am aiming for a mostly emergent game, that means basically that everything that happens occurs as a result of interacting forces, rather than being specifically scripted to happen.\u00a0 Mainly this means factions, nations and individuals pursuing their own goals will cause events to occur in the game world.\u00a0 The player may run into these events, hear about them, or just see the after effects (or warning signs).<\/p>\n
Secondly, there are no “quests”,unlike the standard for most RPGs.\u00a0 You are not told what to do all the time and continually given menial tasks, like fetching a farmers missing ring.\u00a0 What you have instead are professions and self-interests.<\/p>\n
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You enter a village and talk to the chief who tells you they have a bandit problem, and asks you to go off and kill them all.\u00a0 Great.\u00a0 So you follow the map marker, kill the bandits, come back, get your crappy reward.\u00a0 Great.\u00a0 Why did you do it?\u00a0 Because its there, its a quest, but you don’t actually feel like you saved a village from bandits, do you?\u00a0 You feel like you just killed some more bad guys and then collected your reward from the “quest giver”. Same as you always do.\u00a0 If you didn’t take the quest, you could come back a week later and the bandit quest and village will still be there, in the exact same state.\u00a0 Everyone is just waiting around for you, like actors in a farce.<\/p>\n
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Lets say you enter a village, you like the place, its in a handy location for you to rest and resupply, and you use it all the time.\u00a0 Maybe its a good trading route, maybe you own a building or a business there.\u00a0 Now one of the big bandit gangs that wander the world map has visited and done all the scary threats and posturing and said, “we’re coming back in 1 week, if you don’t have 1000 boxes of rice for us by then we will burn this place to the ground and kill you alive!”.\u00a0 Maybe you saw this event, maybe you didn’t, either way all the villagers are panicking about it and maybe they have even been hiring mercenaries.\u00a0 So you hear about this and think “damn, if those bandits burn this place that means my favorite village will be gone, and it will mess up my best trading route too, and the price of rice will skyrocket.\u00a0 Oh dear.”<\/p>\n
So then you DECIDE to stand with them to defend the village, you help shore up the defences and maybe gear up some locals, then you have a lovely great big battle 7-samurai style and the bandits flee.\u00a0 You just had a major impact on the state of the game world, you did something because you wanted to and it had a real effect. You saved a village, made the area safer, maybe tipped the balance of power among the bandit clans.\u00a0 If you did nothing the village would have been razed, they wouldn’t all have waited around for you to “accept the quest”.\u00a0 Now you have to decide if you should pursue the bandits and wipe them out, because thats a real group, they weren’t just spawned for the purpose of that one event, they will probably be back for revenge.<\/p>\n
And what if one of your men got captured during the attack?\u00a0 Now you have to go track down their camp and rescue him.\u00a0 Sneak him out, free him by force, buy him back, or maybe he is skilled enough to escape by himself.<\/p>\n
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And thats just one example, its the tip of the iceberg.\u00a0 Imagine this occurring in different events all over the world among factions, lawmakers, thieves, guards, kings, nations, traders, armies, zombie hordes etc.\u00a0 Its the holy grail that developers talk about all the time but so far nobody has the balls to try it because quite frankly, its mad, its chaotic and even I don’t know what will happen or how well it will work. \u00a0 I am essentially designing a game to be beyond my control.<\/p>\n
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I know what you are thinking now, you’re thinking “that’s too much work, doing all that, single handed, you’ll never manage it, you’re a fool!\u00a0 A handsome fool!”.\u00a0 Truth is, its not as hard as it sounds.\u00a0 It only seems difficult because no game has done it before.\u00a0 Its still hard, but for a single handed programmer who specialises in AI and has little time and art resources and a large world to fill, its actually a better idea, because such a system essentially generates the game content and events for me.\u00a0 Unpredictable, chaotic content perhaps, but fun and real.\u00a0 Its not like conventional methods where I have to manually dictate everything that can happen, it saves me a lot of time in many areas, and the foundation for it is already done.\u00a0 I’m not saying I can do it perfectly, but I’m going to damn well try.<\/p>\n
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Procedural techniques are the staple tool of the big-time indie developer.<\/p>\n
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So if its so great why hasn’t any big developer done it yet?\u00a0 Why can I do it and not them?\u00a0 They can’t, no sane investor would allow such a gamble.\u00a0 Not to mention its so unpredictable you don’t know how its going to turn out, and developers really don’t like not having absolute control over everything.\u00a0 To me however, thats the whole fun of it.<\/p>\n
Its something only an indie developer can do, someone who is not being controlled and not making a game for money or a target market, someone who is making a game because they want to play it themselves, because they want to see it done.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m going to talk a bit about what kind of RPG this is, and how its designed.\u00a0 Many RPGs revolve around quests, story and dialogue.\u00a0 Some revolve around action and leveling up for the sake of it, and you skim through the dialogue that explains the plot about you being the only person who can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[90,15,88],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","tag-dev-thoughts","tag-game-balance","tag-rpg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lofigames.com\/zh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}