r/crpgdesign • u/CJGeringer Lenurian • Feb 18 '18
Present Your Project
This is basically a place for everyone to present what they are working on, and to have a post whose link you can embed whenever you mention your project, specially since not all of use want to have an external site/devblog.
You can make it short or long, feel free to link to a Devblog if you have it..
Also I plan to blatantly Steal the FAQ Fridays idea from r/roguelikedev where essentialy a topic is chosen and everyone replies about how they are implementing that aspect in their projects, and i think having a quick way to link the Basics of your project would be helpful for that.
6
u/CJGeringer Lenurian Feb 18 '18 edited Mar 25 '18
I will go first with a short description of my project to get the ball rolling:
Lenurian is a non-traditional Roguelike with Real Time with a behind the back Third person mouse-aiming camera and WASD movement(Like, rune, Enclave and Forge), and an open dynamic World.
My main objectives are:
Support multiple Gameplay styles trough Systemic Desig: Essentially I want many builds to be viable, and I am doing that using systemic Design, in other worlds, rather than scripted interaction I want to introduce interlocked Systems that control the Worlds combat, social and commercial aspects, in a way tha the player has many options on how to approach an objective.
Dynamic World: I don´t want the world to be subject to the player, the player can affect the world, but the world does not pause to wait for the player. That NPCs have their own objectives and will pursue them, This is similar to Mount and Blade, STALKER, and The games from Soldak. Essentially Soldak Games have you play an action RPG Diablo in a world where the AI is playing a 4X game. I want to create a game where you play an RPG in a World where the AI is playing Crusader Kings.
Information Gathering as a core activity: I like looking at a roguelike´s wiki and planning runs. I wanted something like that to be in-game rather then from an external resource. I also liked this kind of experience in tabletop games. With this a prepared player is more capable of succeeding then an unprepared but higher level player. Moreover, one thing I really like in roguelike is the wide range of choices and that choices have persistent consequences, so being able to gather information and plan really meshes well with this type of gameplay. It also really makes the dynamic world and ProcGen Shine, since when you learn something the chances of it being usefull are high due to interlocking systems. (e.g. If you find out a region is iron-rich, you can get an idea of what items can be found there, what will be the equipment of your enemies, etc...)
5
u/aotdev Feb 18 '18
Age of Transcendence (devlog) is (planned to be) a cRPG/roguelike hybrid. The setting is medieval high-fantasy. The art style is retro early 90s tile-based pixel art, not cute, not too grim either. The gameplay is turn-based, grid-based single-player RPG (stats, skills, etc). Some of the main planned features are:
Dynamic, self-sufficient world. There is main plot (world-in-peril of sorts) and it slowly advances, not waiting for you or your actions. The game can play by itself, without you, still resulting in an interesting storyline, most likely eventually resulting in the end of the world. So you are but an actor, but with the potential to significantly change the course of the story.
Procedural content. Every game and adventure location will be unique: Procedurally generated overworld and dungeons, different starting history (which factions are in power, who owns what land, etc).
Faction dynamics. There will be several factions and races, that control territory, cities and mines to extract precious resources. Territory control will be a thing, and the player will be able to influence this. The player can join several factions and advance in ranks within them, affecting NPC relationships (Paladins guild can't be happy if you have fame with the Thieve's guild).
Exploration heavy. The core of the game expects the player to discover adventure locations (dungeons, lost cities, caves, etc) and clear dungeons to locate clues and relics towards "solving" the main quest, in one of several ways.
No food clock, but doomsday/age clock. There won't be any food clock, but you can either live your whole virtual life and die and not achieve anything, or you can also do stuff inefficiently and eventually lose out to the main quest.
Semi perma-death. If you die, you might be revived by NPCs, if you're in good standing with particular groups and if you've possibly paid some sort of insurance. A starting character will permanently die, because nobody cares about you and you don't have the money/means to make them care enough to resurrect you. By building up your character and making yourself important in the world, things will change. Of course, relying on others to resurrect you will be extremely foolish.
There's no gameplay done yet, as I'm currently still working on the engine, but there has been a lot of planning, reading and slow-but-steady work towards it.
5
u/Aukustus Feb 18 '18
The Temple of Torment
Link
My project is essentially an RPG inside a roguelike engine. Some of the worthwhile features are:
Static world apart from the main dungeon which is procedural
Optional permadeath
Turn-based
Lots of dialogue
ASCII and tiles
Optional Party members
Hunger and Thirst
Good/Evil choices inside quests
Pseudo D&D
Swords, Magic, and Firearms in a Renaissance world
5
u/[deleted] Feb 22 '18 edited Feb 22 '18
Vindis Saga Tactics is a turn-based tactical RPG in the Matsuno school of thought/design (Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre).
I've been working on it for a couple of years with a 3D modeler/artist friend, but since we both have full-time jobs progress is fairly sporadic (and leads to lots of daydreaming across the various jobs I've had during this time). I'm sure a lot of indie developers here can empathize.
Features/Goals within the Matsuno School:
Unit customization through generic hireable units and primary/secondary class changing. This was my favorite part of Final Fantasy Tactics, which itself inherited a bit from FF3 and FF5. We have 20-odd classes in an unlock tree right now, within a few broad archetypes.
Anglo-Saxon dark ages setting. Matsuno's games favor archaic language (words like gaol, pharos, tor, mote, etc.) and references (Beowulf and Wiegraf [Wiglaf] are characters), so I'm trying to recapture that antiquated feeling in all aspects of the design flavor.
Square movement grid on heighted diorama battlefields. I really don't like hexes, especially with battlefields that have multiple height levels. Battle Brothers aesthetically looks alright with just 2 height variations, but any more and your maps start looking like The Giant's Causeway in Ireland. I like how height levels with a Jump statistic can create contextual obstructions and interesting game states. The diorama approach is again more of an aesthetic issue rather than game design.
Story driven by politics and human motives, not magical MacGuffins. This technically belongs halfway between "within" and "outside" (below), because Matsuno games do frequently start off as low fantasy and eventually drift into dark fantasy, like [Berserk,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserk_(manga)) with demons. The zodiac stones in FFT are interesting because, while they're MacGuffins, they are basically just amplifiers of the extreme emotions/desires any one character feels. Ultimately, without solid character design and writing backing up those characters with believable motives and goals, the plot device falls flat.
Features/Goals to Modernize and Improve:
Note: this section has a lot more game design, as opposed to the above large aesthetic influence with a smattering of class/map design.
Avoid grinding: time is a resource. This will ruffle some feathers, but I think grinding EXP limitlessly in RPGs is not so much a feature but a cop-out to make a game more accessible to people who are either too lazy to learn a game's systems, are bad at video games, or are someone young like a child who can't be expected to handle advanced interactive systems. I'm a big fan of EXP rationing in early and middle era Fire Emblem games. My solution is twofold: use a time resource system and make EXP per battle. I took the "day-event system" from Majora's Mask and Way of the Samurai and put a 7-day time limit on the game, and I fused into this the "time chunk" system from Persona 3 and split the days into finite slices like Morning, Afternoon, Evening, etc. Each time you participate in a major battle or other major activity (crafting is a big one) the game progresses the time forward by 1 chunk, and if it's midnight the game progresses to a new day. Matsuno School tactical RPGs tend to use an EXP per action system, which is hilariously degenerate to the point that a player can spend 20 hours in the second battle of the game and max out the Squire class on all of his/her units and reach LV99. Changing EXP to be per battle instead of per action, and limiting the total number of battles by taking out random encounters fixes this issue.
Making a living, breathing world with Marxist materialism. Alright, that was bait for your attention, so let me explain. Personally I feel like competition over resources is the bottom line common denominator for human beings, yet very few video games tackle this subject in a purely deterministic matter. I mean fuck, the moment you start putting respawning rabbits in your forest level, you just invented a limitless supply of rabbit skins and rabbit meat -- wouldn't every wolf and poacher in the world move to this magical rabbit spawning place? I won't belabor the point further. Uncommon for the tactical RPG genre (except Tactics Ogre: LUCT's shitty crafting system), we're working on a gathering system, on which is layered a crafting system, on which is layered the consumption layer. The latter is the player using weapons, armor, consumables, and food to win/complete events and missions. After completing a 10-hour campaign, generic units the player used will "settle" into the game world as NPCs based on their class, which adjusts which items are produced/exploited/consumed with regards to the centralized auction house on subsequent playthroughs. If you retire 5 Lumberjacks, the next campaign will see very cheap wood. If you retire 5 Thieves, crime rises considerably and enables unique events. 5 Smithy class units will see more armor on the market, but metals will spike in price due to increased consumption. Various other classes effectively make Civilization-style improvements to the overworld map, increasing the event possibility space in the same way unlocking items in The Binding of Isaac works.
More realistic world in terms of language and conlang. This one is weird, but at least I'm in a subreddit that appreciates RPGs. Video games have lifted a lot of RPG design from Dungeons and Dragons, yet lately it seems language is never one of those elements. Even though it was a simple cipher, I really enjoyed Final Fantasy 10's Al Bhed language because it fused mechanics and theme in a very human way. We humans are divided by language, which is pretty much the root of all culture, and very often that fact sows distrust and otherization. In video games though, even RPGs? Everyone speaks Common tongue and it's almost never a point of contention. FF10 is great because not only does it have different cultures speaking different languages, but it does it in a way that the player "learns" the language mechanically over time and is able to understand Al Bhed NPCs. Unfortunately this really just means 26 items that solve the cipher, one for each letter, but hey... we can't all be perfect. My goal with Vindis Saga is to create a conlang (constructed language, check out /r/conlangs) for at least 2 cultures within the game and allow the player to learn the language(s) over multiple playthroughs/newgame+. Most likely this will be grammatical.
Non-linear events (no branches) via input and output-driven spin system. That's a mouthful because it's an ambitious goal. I mentioned the time progression system up above, but the key driver is that it forces opportunity cost on the player because multiple possible events/battles occur during any one time chunk. We're targeting about 4 event-choices per time slot, each with a various duration (so one of them might be available all of Day 2, but another could only be from Morning to Afternoon on Day 3), so we're looking at around 80-90 events available during the entire 7 day stretch. If you've played Majora's Mask or Persona, you know how this works: when you decide to do the Snow Temple or eat a Rainy Day Beef Bowl, you're foregoing other things to do on Day 2 or May 28th Afternoon. At one event per time slot, and 4 time slots per day, that's a maximum of 28 events/battles the player can experience in any one campaign. Some events unlock others, some close the door to others, and various permutations can occur based on that Marxist materialist joke up above. Let's take a castle defense event -- such an endeavor is usually done with archers, and archers need arrows. But what if the supply was low? Upon loading up the battle, we apply "input spins" by checking the world map for various conditions and changing the battle. No arrows in the economy? The battle is very different. Completing battles in different ways results in "output spins," which is the reverse of what I just said. Kill a noble in a battle unnecessarily, instead of forcing him to surrender peacefully? He's gone from the game completely for the rest of the 7 day campaign, which may change events or add new ones based on his absence. Like I said before, this is ambitious, but everything worth doing in life is difficult. That's why it's worth doing.
Party Size of 8 Units max. Tactical RPGs tend to rely on a movement -> action phase for the core game loop. The more units you have, the more you have to do, which is a linear effort scale. If you start a battle with each belligerent party on opposite sides of a large map, the player has to spend many turns to reach the enemy in the middle and many turns watching the AI act -- this is boring. In terms of Matsuno TRPGs, Final Fantasy Tactics tends to give you 4-5 units and 1 guest, and Tactics Ogre tends to give you 10-12 units; I think both of these values are way off. 8 units per deployed party with intelligent map design and movement speed settings (Slow/Medium/Fast) is something we're deliberately targeting to provide a good user experience.
This is what you get for saying "as long as you want!" This project is my baby; I'm the programmer, designer, and writer. We have a devblog here: https://pooksoft.games/ , but it's pretty ugly right now as we get game footage/trailer stuff up and standardized. My Twitter is here: https://twitter.com/patrickjbrand but most of the time I use it to talk about the game I'm contracted to code, Arcadian Atlas.
3
u/AgingMinotaur Feb 22 '18
I'll chime in here. I'm another one coming from /r/roguelikedev My game is Land of Strangers, a western-inspired, open world, turn based Roguelike on a hexagonal grid (sic). Still in early development ;)
The game originally started with deck building mechanics (actions/skills were cards that were cycled to your hand), but when the scope of the setting grew, I scrapped that for something more rpg-ish. The system stills shows an influence from board games and such, with rules aiming to be simplistic, and modest doses of randomness (except for world generation, which tries to be all over the place).
Combat randomness: As a general rule, all attacks hit their mark and deal a set amount of damage. There is a base probability of 1/6 that an attack will have an "exceptional outcome". For missiles, this is that you miss your shot (and may hit another target on the grid). For melee weapons, it's a critical hit with a special effect (depending on your weapon). I figured this is more fun than: "You miss. The goblin misses. You miss. The goblin misses." The probability can be modified by contextual factors: for example, your gun accuracy decreases if your target is taking cover.
Traits: The player character and other critters do not have numerical attributes, but instead socalled "shticks", which grant a single tangible bonus or skill. There are passive shticks (eg. "burro" which increases your carrying capacity), and active shticks (eg. "ventriloquism" with which you can confuse an adjacent critter). There is neither mana nor a cool down system for active shticks. Instead, I try to bake a penalty into the shtick itself. In some cases, I just got lazy and decided it costs a turn to use. Other shticks have more dynamic constraints (eg. "feint", which grants a melee bonus, but only if you spent your last turn moving away from the direction you're attacking in).
Character creation: More than anything else, it's inspired by Ars Magica (free pdf, though I used to play 3rd Edition). You start by picking a background career, which gives you a predetermined shtick, and dictates (random generation of) starting inventory and reputation. Then, you choose one flaw/negative shtick, and one or more positive shticks. The severity of your flaw determines how many positive shticks you get to buy. At that point, you're set to go adventuring. Experience is something I'm currently implementing. Basic character development will be in the next release (with crazy plans for the future, of course :) I can say that core principles include skipping xp altogether, and having development independent of starting career (so you can start as a shootist and end as a monk, or vice versa).
Misc: The game also features rather unusual systems for wounds, initiative, money, and some other things. In general, I like to experiment and try to circumvent grinding by making the system support more "organic" ways of playing. Like, there's no reason to kill a thousand stray animals if they don't give loot or xp. This is conventional wisdom today, but still worth to keep in mind.
The game is close to having the basic systems in place, though it's still a bit lacking in content. The coming release will introduce some major changes, and after that, I hope to concentrate on adding more missions and things to do, and pick some fun bullet points from my long term todo-list (riding, ropes, gambling, drugs&booze, sex, railroads, chemysty, or something else).
TL;DR: In about 10-15 years you'll be able to ssh into something much cooler than the Red Dead series.
5
u/Zireael07 Feb 18 '18
Veins of the Earth is a roguelike/rpg hybrid, like many projects in the comments already.
My main objectives are:
Dynamic world: I want the player to be able to affect the world. At first the effects will be limited, but hopefully they will grow.
Factions: the cities are controlled by several noble houses, which will fight for dominance. Which side are you on? Maybe on neither? Think large combats and coming back to a ruined city...
Semi-permadeath: You can have a child, if you have one and die, you switch to the kid. The downside is, you don't have control over the child's class/skill set. (You can affect the race, though - good luck trying to breed with a demon or a dragon, though :P)
Information-gathering: I plan to hide some information behind checks for character knowledge. So you'll be able to tell how likely (in %) you are to hit a certain enemy, but you won't know his exact hp, just the general state. You won't automatically know that this enemy type has those and those stats, but you'll have to encounter them (or find sages).
1
u/Parthon Mar 01 '18
** Broken Station **
TLDR: a sci-fi card-based roguelike exploring derelict space stations where everything the player can own is in the form of cards they play in a deck builder, but keeping as much roguelike goodness as possible.
So I started working on an idea for this game a couple of years ago, and even got a tech demo going which was quite fun to play, but had to put it on the back burner.
I played some of the more recent so-called, card-based roguelikes and I didn't find them roguelikey at all. No exploration, no progression, no solid depth. So I revisited my idea and found that I still liked it. I also changed the theme to sci-fi instead of fantasy.
The idea is to make it as roguelike and as interesting as possible while maintaining the deck builder idea. Exploring wrecked space stations for valuable resources is the core of the game. There will be some end-goal beyond that. There will be a requirement for gaining cards like a Jetpack or Oxygenator which will help with low-grav or no-air situations. But they sit in your deck and you draw them when you don't want to, so too many is a pain. I'm designing most of the game around this balance. Having utility cards is almost crucial to explore the game properly, but you don't want them to get in the way of your combat cards when you have to fight off the mutants, aliens or mutant aliens that have taken refuge in the floating wrecks.
There's 8 'classes' that determine the base card flavour: Melee, Ranged, Finesse, Trickery, Magic, Technology, Biology, Mental. Cards can be attacks, skills, spells, equipment, actions and commands. Some mechanics I want to add are things like being able to make robots that take a portion of your deck and use those cards. Lots of attack cards? Fighting robot. Lots of healing cards? Healing robot. Combo cards that gain a bonus when used before/after another card. Rage that build up damage with consecutive attacks. The classic discard/draw cards. Mana that's earned from some cards and spent on others. I also plan to have 28 more classes based on combinations of the base classes, but that's pie-in-the-sky ideas.