Most Significant Digit

Thursday, October 30, 2003

Comments are up now, thanks to HaloScan!

More coherent stuff about plots...

The Snowflake Method is a way of producing a "design document" for a novel. It's an interesting way to look at things, and it highlights an important method of developing ideas. Also, I have NaNoWriMo on the brain. In fact, I'll probably have it on the brain for all of next month, too.

When you're working on the world for a game, there are two ways to design it - from the top down or from the bottom up. If you work from the top down, e.g. starting from cosmology and creation myths and working down to continents and history, you get a more coherent picture of the entire world, and it will often feel "deeper". On the other hand, it's a whole lot more work. If you work from the bottom up, you develop areas as needed and stitch them together later. Consistency can be a big problem, but it's definitely less work.

However, I do advocate the top-down method for plotting, if only because that's the way most of us think. Actually, I think I like a work-from-both-ends approach, but that's because I'm weird like that. Work-from-both-ends means that you have a general idea of the overall plot, and some more specific ideas for quests or scenes. So what you need to do is write a slightly more specific version of your plot summary that takes into account the quests, and then maybe build up the individual quests some more, and then expand the plot summary, and... It's not the most efficient way to work things, no, but I like it.

This post has officially gone nowhere.

Okay, so I didn't get around to posting a more coherent post. Oops.

I did get a bit more done conceptually for NaNoWriMo; my story now has a one-sentence blurb! (And also a vague idea of plot and such-like.)

Plot in games is an interesting beast. On the one hand, people seem to want deep, complex plots (frequenly involving saving the world). On the other hand, people don't seem to want to be railroaded through each plot point. Combining both of these together is hard. For an amateur game developer, I would probably suggest going for a single, complex plot, possibly with sidequests but without (much) branching. Okay, now I feel like this is too obvious to need saying.

Because I can't think of anything better: The Well-Tempered Plot Device. It's an introduction to the Art of the Predictable, i.e. cliches.

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Oh, a little addendum or something...

I count days by my waking and sleeping periods. My sleep schedule is extremely irregular, so if the dates don't look like I've been posting once a day, I feel like I have.

Well, I've been silly and stayed up waaaaay too late looking at websites and reading stuff for NaNoWriMo, which I'll be participating in.

Sometime soon I'm going to use a third-party service to add a commenting feature to this blog, but for now, you can e-mail me with comments.

Game thoughts... I've mostly been thinking about the plot of my novel for NaNoWriMo, and the characters involved. It reminds me of a popular complaint about FF7 and FF8 - the characters are pretty much interchangeable. Materia does mean versatility, but there wasn't terribly much difference between, say, Yuffie and Cloud once they had materia on them. So... Make characters that are different from each other in abilities! And try to make those abilities make sense for the characters and be important in some way. Otherwise we might as well be back to the days of the old old CRPGs where you hired all your party members.

Okay, so this is a pathetic gaming thought for the day, but I've been up way too late procrastinating on my Programming Languages assignment.

Monday, October 27, 2003

Well, since I seem to be thinking about weapons, there's the matter of making every character only able to use one weapon. This is used in the later (PS) Final Fantasy Games, Chrono Trigger, and a gazillion other CRPGs. I don't see terribly much point to this other than laziness, especially for combat-centered characters. (Casters can be kind-of excused because presumably they've been spending time on learning spells rather than on weapons training.) At the very least, I would try to make some basic weapons that everybody can use in the beginning, and then some more character-specific weapons later.

I guess this is more a matter of personal taste than some other things are, but I liked being able to shuffle weapons between people in FF6.

It also seems silly to me how every newly-accessible town has more powerful weapons and equipment than the last, even if it's a tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere. I would prefer being able to enchant/upgrade weapons and equipment, possibly through quests. Of course, this was rather annoying in FF8, but that was because of those bloody magazines you had to find before you could forge weapons.

If you hadn't noticed by now, I speak mostly from experience with console RPGs. I have tried several PC RPGs, and I keep getting lost and stuck...

Yay, I have a blog now... Hopefully this will get updated frequently. I certainly think about games often enough.

Something that I've been wanting to mention about the amateur CRPGs I've seen developed... There's a fairly easy change that will make the game more interesting: change the available weapons and equipment. The problem with a lot of games (even commercial games fall prey to this - FF7 comes to mind) is that when given the choice to buy a new weapon, the new one is better in all aspects than your last one. So of course, given the choice to upgrade a weapon, you'll always take it, as long as you have enough money. (I'll talk about weapons for now, but I mean all kinds of equipment.)

A simple change is to make weapons slightly different. Make several different elemental weapons with the same attack power, and the player is going to have to choose which element they feel they need most. Give the player a choice between two weapons of the same price, but one does more damage and the other gives a small bonus to defense.

The problem with this, of course, is that the player might feel overwhelmed by choices and not be willing to commit. In that case, it might be a good idea to have "paths" of weapons, where every weapon in the path is strictly better than the next-cheapest weapon.

Well, there's also the problem that this is a bit more work than not thinking about weapon stats at all, but even occasionally giving the player two weapon choices - say, one elemental, one not - will add a bit of interest.