40 Hour RPG (Take 2)

October 14, 2005
Game DesignGame ProgrammingInaria
1 Comment

Well, things have kind of slacked off a bit…

Oh, so Hit & Myth shipped?

No, it’s kind of in limbo…

Really? What’s all that about then?

It’s part of the Story I Can’t Tell Yet, which hopefully I’ll be able to tell soon.

You cop-out! Tell us what’s going on right now with Hit & Myth!

Look, this post isn’t about Hit & Myth, okay? It’s about me trying again to make an RPG in 40 hours. I learned a lot last time, and I hope I’ll learn even more this time.

Unfortunately, what I learned was this: making an RPG of the kind I’d really like to make in 40 hours is nigh-impossible.

I could write a completely text-based engine that allows the player to buy equipment, go down into a “dungeon” which was basically one room with progressively harder monsters, fight them, level up, and come back up to buy new equipment. I could certainly do this in 40 hours. (Heck, I might be able to do it in ten.) But that’s not really an RPG; it’s just an RPG combat/advancement engine.

I could write a game very similar to the above, except that, instead of a text-based one-room “dungeon” I could create a randomly created dungeon level that the player could explore. His job would be to go in, kill everything and then come back up to get better equipment. He could then re-enter the dungeon, which would give him a new randomly-created level to explore. Basically, a very simple quick-and-dirty Roguelike. I might be able to pull that off in 40 hours; the real question is how long it would take to figure out (or research) how to randomly generate a dungeon level. This is basically what Jay Barnson did when he made his 40-hour RPG.

Or I could write a game with an overworld, towns and dungeons, with NPCs that you can talk to and can give you quests, an inventory that allows you to keep and store quest items, and an overarching plot for the game where you end up saving the world at the end.

This is what I tried last time, and you just can’t make that kind of RPG in 40 hours. But that’s the kind of RPG I want to make…

So I’ve got a choice – either scale back my game or give myself more than 40 hours. I think I might be able to write a simple RPG of the style I want in 80 hours…

I’ll have to think about this.

He Still Annoys Me…

October 3, 2005
The Game Biz
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…but I have to hand it to Greg Costikyan. He’s putting his money where his mouth is.

Proto-Survival Horror

September 30, 2005
Games
3 Comments

Update: Okay, okay! Good grief! Who knew Clock Tower fans were so rabid? It turns out that the original Clock Tower was not made or published by Capcom, but by Human Entertainment. When Human went out of business Capcom bought the Clock Tower series. Capcom then handed the series to Sunsoft, who made Clock Tower 3.

While I was incorrect about the heritage of the Clock Tower games, I don’t think it invalidates my point, especially since Sweet Home was created by Capcom.

Original post follows.

Digging through the history of video games can lead to some interesting places (most of them in Japan, of course). For instance, did you know that Capcom was experimenting with the horror genre long before Resident Evil?

I was looking through some reviews at Gamespot for Indigo Prophecy when I noticed that one of them mentioned a game called Clock Tower. I looked up the reviews for the Clock Tower games and saw that they were a series of horror games from Capcom for the PlayStation. Interesting enough.

Then, to my surprise, I googled “Clock Tower” and discovered that the original Clock Tower game was for the Super Nintendo, and the PlayStation Clock Tower game was actually a sequel to the SNES game! I finally was able to track down a ROM of the SNES Clock Tower that was fan-translated.

SNES Clock Tower is a very interesting game. In Clock Tower, you play a fourteen-year-old orphan girl named Jennifer Simpson, who has just been brought along with three other girls to live with the reclusive, eccentric Mr. Barrows. Upon arriving at the Barrows mansion, their ward, Miss Mary, goes to find Mr. Barrows. After a while, Jennifer goes to look for Miss Mary. As soon as she leaves the foyer she hears screams, and returns to find all of her friends gone. The player must now discover how to escape from the mansion.

It’s effectively a B-grade horror movie, and the game is effectively an adventure game, rather than a fast-action game. You move a pointer around the screen with your controller, and press the button to have Jennifer move there or interact with that object. It feels like a natural for mouse control (and a PC version was eventually made), and the stilted control system did put some people off the game.

But there were a couple of interesting things about the game. The first is that you will not kill anyone. Ever. No, you will not get a shotgun. No, nor a pistol. Or even a knife. While the villains will die during the course of the story if you make the right decisions, if someone is chasing you you have no choice but to run and try to hide or get away.

The other interesting thing is how the game tracks your damage. It doesn’t actually track Jennifer’s health, but rather her fear and sanity level. If the background behind her portrait is blue, she’s fine. If it’s green, she’s a little freaked out. If it’s yellow, she’s about to panic, and if it’s red, she’s in full-blown panic mode. When you are attacked, you can press the “panic” button on the controller rapidly to temporarily fend off your attacker, but this increases your panic level, as does hearing creepy sounds or running around if Jennifer isn’t being pursued. And if your level was red when you were attacked, then you’re doomed – Jennifer is so freaked out she can’t even defend herself.

Also, if Jennifer is being pursued, she can often do things she couldn’t otherwise do; for instance, if she’s being pursued you can hit the panic button to have her climb over a book case to get away from an enemy – but you can’t do this normally. Thus, in some cases you may actually have to find an enemy and have them chase you in order to be able to get to certain areas.

Is it survival horror? Not exactly, but it is a very interesting take on the horror genre, and I had no idea Capcom had made the game until just a few days ago. What’s even more interesting is that reading websites about Clock Tower brought up several mentions of another game called Sweet Home. What is Sweet Home? Why, it’s a horror game for the NES, of course. And get this – it’s a horror RPG for the NES.

Sweet Home tracks the adventures of five young artists who travel to an older artist’s manor to look for him, since he hasn’t been heard from in over a year. Once they arrive at the mansion, their retreat is cut off and they have no choice but to fight their way through the mansion, learn its secrets, and finally put an end to its evil.

So how do you do a horror RPG? Easy – make the game hella tough, make death permanent, and give the players as few healing resources as possible. The mansion holds a total of 21 healing salves – use them all up and they are gone and there is no way to get any more, ever. If one of your characters dies, then they are dead and they cannot be revived. Then add a truly creepy setting and plotline and you’ve got a horror RPG. One interesting element is that the game does not feed you the storyline. You figure out what happened by looking at the artwork that inhabits the mansion, as well as by reading the journal entries of previous adventurers who became trapped in the mansion and didn’t make it out. This “piecing together of the plot” mechanic works wonderfully for horror games, and was later used to great effect in both of the System Shock games.

So now you know – Capcom was into horror long before the RE series, creating horror games since the late eighties!

Power Outage

September 19, 2005
Uncategorized
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We had some weird power problems over the weekend…our breakers kept tripping. We’d turn them back on, they’d trip again. Trouble was, sometimes they’d trip right away. Sometimes they’d wait up to three hours before tripping. This was actually worse than having no power at all, because we’d turn them back on, wait about an hour, think everything was going to be fine, get situated doing what we wanted to be doing, and then bam – power back off. It made for a frustrating weekend.

Success

August 29, 2005
Self-Improvement
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Around the beginning of 2004, I started thinking about how to seriously improve myself. I wasn’t down-and-out or anything. Our financial situation was…adequate, and the job I was at was stable. But there were several aspects of my life that I didn’t feel were measuring up, and I wasn’t happy about them. I was fortunate at around that time to run across several articles on the internet that pointed me in a helpful direction.

Since then, I’ve read several self-help and success books and listened to many recordings. I’ve read The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, Success for Dummies by Zig Ziglar, and I’ve listened to The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale.

They basically all say the same thing.

First, in order to succeed, you must define success for yourself. This smacks of secular humanism, but it’s true: we all define success differently, and our definitions of success are direct reflections of who we are as people. Success is your goal – and your goal must be concrete and measurable. It must be a specific event. Unmeasurable goals are not goals at all and cannot be attained. Most people never specifically set goals for themselves, and then wonder why they feel directionless.

Once you have defined success for yourself, you then create a plan for achieving that success. The plan must consist of several steps or milestones, each of which is a smaller, measurable goal that, when completed, add up to the completion of your overall goal.

Then, having picked a goal and defined a plan, you must make progress along your plan every day.

That’s it.

Well, goshwow, you might be thinking, if it’s that simple, why doesn’t everyone do it?

Two reasons.

One, we’re not taught to do it. While I had very good parents, at no point did they ever sit me down and say, “Anthony, here’s how to ensure you get the most out of your life.” Most parents feel that if they simply ensure their children recieve a good education, they’ve done their job. It’s hard to blame them; they probably weren’t explicitly taught about how to succeed themselves.

Two, because, if you’ll forgive the hokey Matrix reference, it’s far harder to walk the path than it is to know the path. Succeeding takes self-discipline, which most of us don’t have (and again, aren’t taught). I recently watched an episode of Penn & Teller’s excellent show Bullsh*t!, which talked about Alcoholics Anonymous. One thing mentioned during the episode is that just about all professional self-help systems report about a 5% success rate (success being measured by a person staying on the system for a year straight). This matches up with Earl Nightingale’s findings; he found that only 5% of people are financially self-sufficient or better at retirement age. Thus, if you are capable of self-discipline, you have automatically put yourself into the top 5% of people, and it’s difficult for someone with self-discipline to fail.

But what about motivation? How do you keep going when it gets difficult?

This is where things get kind of fuzzy, because just about every major self-help author is a Christian, and he simply says, “Have faith in God! He’ll help you!”

(Yes, I’m violating PSRD a bit here today. You’ll live.)

I’m not big on God. Most people with an engineering mindset find it difficult to believe in something that there’s no physical evidence for. So what do I do? When things are tough, who do I lean on?

Well, the answer has to be me, doesn’t it? And it’s not as silly an answer as you might think; there are many people who aren’t religious and yet have the depths of self-discipline necessary to succeed despite adversity and difficulty.

Now, despite not being particularly religious, I have to express an admiration for Christianity at this point. Christianity is based around two powerful ideas: have faith and treat others as you would like to be treated. (Both of these are commandments from Jesus himself, see Mark 9:23 and Matthew 22:39). This is why Christianity was able to shuck the majority of its tribal, barbaric roots (see the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament for many instructive examples). It moved forward and became something very positive in the lives of its followers.

But if there is a practical difference between a person who succeeded because they believed, “God is helping me” and the person who succeeded because they believed, “I believe in myself”, I don’t know what it is. Hardcore atheists will doubtless say, “Well, the first person believed a lie, and the second believed the truth” but recall that I was asking for a practical difference. In both cases, the person succeeded.

It will be necessary for you to train yourself to stop negative, “I can’t”-style thoughts in their tracks and replace them with positive thoughts. If you’ve thought your plan out and it’s a good one, and you are making daily progress along it, then there really isn’t any reason for you to feel bad about yourself. You have proven that you are in the top 5%, and about the only way for you to fail to eventually reach your goal is for you to abandon your plan. And why would you do that?

Believe and succeed.

All things…

August 25, 2005
Games
1 Comment

All things come to he who waits.

[Keanu]Whoa.[/Keanu]

August 22, 2005
Game ProgrammingSelf-Improvement
1 Comment

Okay, back in March I wrote an entry here called The Power of the Force, which detailed how my life changed when I finally started moving resolutely towards my goals.

Well, a few days ago Steve Pavlina (who I mentioned in said entry) asked for people to submit stories about how what he had written had helped people. He was going to judge the stories and award the winner with a CD of Earl Nightingale‘s The Strangest Secret. So I posted a link to my story.

And I won. And now there’s an entry on Steve’s blog mentioning me and my story.

Whoa.

Pickled Ginger

August 20, 2005
Game ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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“God, I am so sick of this craptank! Day in, day out, same old metal walls, same old glass, two feet thick, keeping the same old stupid water pressure from crushing us like fleas, I need a change!”
– Captain Hazel Murphy, Sealab 2021

We’re crunching on Hit & Myth. This is my…uh…sixth? Seventh crunch? I can’t even remember now. And I’m starting to think that the problem with crunching isn’t the amount of work. It’s the fact that I’m getting up every day, going to the same office, working until I’m exhausted, then coming home, going right to bed, and doing the same thing the next day.

When you eat sushi, you’re given a small side of pickled ginger. Once you’re done with one type of sushi, you eat a piece of pickled ginger to cleanse your palate before starting on another type of sushi. This effectively resets your taste buds so that the last type of sushi you ate doesn’t flavor the type you’re eating now.

That’s what I need. I need some pickled ginger. I think tomorrow I’m going to take an hour or two off in the middle of the day and completely change my venue. I’m hoping that will allow me to come back and be more productive, because I can feel myself flagging.

The Non-Update Update

August 19, 2005
Game DesignGame ProgrammingThe Game Biz
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Lots of stuff has happened involving Gizmondo (the company), the Gizmondo hardware platform, Gizmondo Texas, and me personally.

Unfortunately, the story isn’t over, so I can’t really tell it yet.

All I can say is that we’re working hard on Hit & Myth (like we have been for months) and we are planning to submit our first gold candidate sometime next week. I really like how the game ended up – it’s fun and funny, and should be a good time for anyone who buys it.

Deconstructing RPGs

August 18, 2005
Game Design
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This may be kind of stream-of-consciousness, but I was thinking about how RPGs (especially Japanese console RPGs) are structured.

First, there’s the tutorial area. This area is designed to give the player a chance to get used to the game mechanics. The player usually isn’t in a lot of danger in this area, and typically can’t leave until they’ve accomplished the quests in this area (and the quests are designed to “prove” to the game that the player understands the basic mechanics).

Then the player leaves the tutorial area. Typically, this is when the player encounters the game’s villain for the first time. This is done so that the player can understand the nature of the threat he is up against. Sometimes the player will be forced to fight the villain, and will lose. If this happens, the villain won’t kill the player. Better games find better ways to demonstrate the villain’s power level without putting the player into direct conflict with the villain at this time (Final Fantasy VII’s flashback where the player plays alongside Sephiroth comes to mind).

Once the initial confrontation with the villain is over, the Journey begins. The player cannot go directly to the final confrontation with the villain, typically because the villain does not even exist in the gamespace at this point. Instead, the player travels from area to area in the game world. In each area the player meets new and different people with new and different problems, problems that have typically been caused by the villain. Thus, the player sees the villain’s malice firsthand and tries to undo as much of it as he can. He is rewarded for this with an increase in his power level. The game usually forces the player to explore every area of the game world before allowing him to proceed to the final confrontation with the villain.

In order to defeat the final villain, the player usually needs two things: a “key” object that either allows the player to get to the villain or makes the villain vulnerable, and an appropriate power level so that the player can survive the actual battle. Once the player defeats the villain the game is over, though some games allow the player to continue to play and see how his actions have affected the game world.

That, in a nutshell, is how an RPG’s gameplay is typically structured.