I am going to start this out here in Other Games for now. I may move it over to Creative Projects at some point though. Essentially I am thinking about designing a CRPG that is more like a tabletop experience than other games currently available.
here what I want to do:
- discuss how CRPGs diverged from the old school RPGs they were trying to emulate
- discuss how we can emulate (as close as possible) a tabletop experience in a video game environment for a single player
- get down to brass tacks and design the game (this is where I would move it to Creative Projects)
so, a little explanation:
I have been working just a bit on a design plan for a computer RPG that is quite a bit different than anything out there, as far as I know. Essentially I feel that somewhere way back, CRPGS (computer role playing games) went down a different path than the tabletop games they set out to emulate, this may have been due to limitations of the time. Now-a-days it seems the video games industry seems content to continue on with their own set of tropes and conventions that have grown along with them. What I want to do is try to create a single-player computer games that looks and feels closer to the tabletop experience, in a nutshell, a tabletop RPG sim game of a sort.
Gameplay would involve a world map of a campaign region, you can travel on this map and get random encounters, search and explore for hidden locations such as ruins, all sorts of things you would expect on the world map. Still debating on a hex map to get that hex crawl look and feel or go with a hand drawn style map.
There will of course be towns and many NPCs about with lots of stories to tell and ultimately do a large part in provided the impetus for adventures. I want to try and avoid explicit quests like we see in so many CRPGs, but I need to figure out a way still to make it work without making it seem the same as all the rest of the games already. I mean sure, at the tabletop we get quests of a sort but it feels different, I want to try to make it feel this way. At any rate, I plan there to be complex factions that players can interact with, gaining favor with some and losing with others will be central to how the campaign plays out.
Dungeons of course, lots of em. The gameplay in these will be on a dungeon map that reveals itself as the players move through it. You wont be walking around by pressing move buttons or clicking to where you want to walk as in most games we have gotten used to. It should go like this: you enter a room or passage and the map reveals that portion, the map is hand created with art assets to look like our tabletop maps. You get a description, some images of things you see, similar to a visual novel type experience. From there you have choices on what you want to do in that room, including using the doors to move to the next area.
Next is combat, and this is where I am inspired by Redbox Hack, Old School Hack, and some of the derivative works following after that including Fictive stuff. I think this type of combat system would be very nice in a computer RPG. Each arena almost plays out something like a Japanese style RPG, except we can move among arenas here, an exciting tactical mechanic that I think will translate well.
Old School Hack can be found here:
http://www.oldschoolhack.net/The whole game, top to bottom is an homage to old school gaming. Some elements I would use:
- old school B/W line art
- awesome atmospheric music
- hand drawn maps of dungeons, towns and regions
- hex map for overland adventure
- maybe some random dungeons, done smartly with geomorphs (you can tell they are geomorphs on the game screen.)*
- old school sensibilities when it comes to adventure
- ability to load in new campaign settings and new modules within those campaign settings READ: expandable and custom content ahoy!
- multiple independent and interwoven branching plots set in a sandboxy campaign world
*I have a big running debate in my brain right now about procedural content and written content. I feel that to create a good tabletop experience, there needs to be strong story with many many options available. This means thoughtfully written content. Also, the tabletop RPG world does involves some off-the-cuff materials such as dungeon geomorphs and one-off type adventures. I think I may be able to include some procedural content in the form of dungeons, but these will not be the center pieces of the game. They will simply be there for added activity and they should be fun above all. Of course random encounters are not truly random, the table they are rolled on is often specific to the dungeon or terrain type, so in a sense this is procedural and not simple randomness. These concepts need to be developed further and it is perhaps one of the main questions I wrestle with now, to "procedural or not to procedural".
So...
Does this sound fun? I have lots of design ideas that I just wont put in here at this time. Obviously there will have to be modifications to the game for it to actually work well in a computer setti8ng, for example I am still scratching my head about how to implement awesome points in a single player game, but I am hopeful a good solution will come up.
Let me know what y'all think!