Don't wake me up without a master plan

[Sierra]

Let's fucking do this.

I've known since I first set eyes on Final Fantasy VII that I wanted to make videogames. I've spent most of the time since then avoiding doing it, but that trend of "Let's never actually do things that we want to do" is looking pretty passe in my life these days. I've made serious attempts at this twice before and made substantial progress on each before collapsing in the face of engine limitations and depression, respectively. So this time I'm doing it right: going in with a plan and getting feedback from word Go.

The function of this post is not to sanity-check stat spreads and skillsets, or to brief people on plot and characters. This is a rough draft design document. The point is to make sure that my base assumptions for gameplay and narrative methodology are conceptually sound before I put in lots of work that might prove difficult to overhaul later if it turns out I embarked upon inelegant starting principles. I have always experienced great internal resistance at reworking key aspects of a project after they've settled into the conceptual bedrock of the structure. I intend to prevent that difficulty this time.

To that end, I am broadly going to talk about three categories in reference to my new project:

• Mechanical Conceits
• Narrative Style
• Potential Problems

But first, it may be instructive to provide an example of past efforts before proceeding further, for those interested in getting a more hands-on understanding of my basic design approach.

All Souls' Night was my Stay-Sane project for 2016. It fell apart the same time that everything else fell apart, but I couldn't credibly say it was anyone else's fault that I never finished it. It's functionally playable from start to finish, if progressively more unpolished towards the end of the game, but most crucially lacking any storytelling element. I never wrote the dialogue, save for some flavor text on interactable objects. I credit this outcome largely to the fact that I chose to leave the writing, the most difficult aspect for me to focus on (if arguably the side of game design that I'm better at) for the last stage of production. That is a lesson for my day-to-day production schedules going forward, but that isn't precisely what I'm posting to address today.

What I would define as ASN's most fundamental characteristics are listed below. I don't claim to have succeeded wildly at all of these, only that I identified them as design priorities:

• Emphasis on exploration (the entire game environment is one interconnected dungeon)
• Efficiency in storytelling--scenery, enemies, items, and even skill names all have their place for worldbuilding in an environment largely bereft of expository NPCs
• Nontraditional setting basis--I aim for something resembling the early modern era of incipient bureaucracy, colonialism, and gender struggles, though I doubt this is very apparent in the unfinished product
• Classic, turn-based, JRPG-style combat
• Threatening boss fights, random encounters meant to wear the player down enough to invoke the tension of potential resource exhaustion just before the next rest stop appears
• A battle rhythm more defined by attrition than a turn-by-turn trade of Attack -> Heal -> Attack -> Heal (WA3 was a conscious model here)
• The above is reflected in the function of healing supplies, which provide varying amounts of both burst healing and gradual regeneration; items best in an emergency aren't necessarily best for long-term survival
• NO MASH ATTACK FOR WIN
• Playable characters that each have their own, well-defined and distinctive mechanical niche
• The above should still leave room for the player to engage in some customization and optimization if so inclined
• Experience Points do not exist; grind is not the solution to any problem; leveling happens by fiat when the party defeats a boss
• Basic quality-of-life features that I consider near mandatory for anyone designing a game in this mold: save anywhere, freely usable run button, encounter control (in this case, visible/avoidable ones)
• The player should be as well-informed as character space permits about the exact functions of every skill and item at their disposal, about what status effects do, and about how long they last

For anyone curious, the Dropbox link for the ASN playable beta can be found here. For giving credit where it's due: ASN utilizes an array of Yanfly scripts for combat and party management, and Fullscreen++ by Zeus81. Everything else is just base engine material.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1vn0czzhf81yxkw/All%20Souls%27%20Night.exe?dl=0

(For those giving it a look, a few relevant points since no mechanical direction is provided in-game: Z is Confirm/Interact, X is Menu/Cancel/Run, big crystal sprites are stand-ins for skill/ally gain scenes, demon girl sprites are stand-ins for boss fight events, any statue anywhere is a free healing station, and the zombie girl sprite in the first room is not meant to be fought until the player has recruited allies. Also, this was built in VX Ace, which turns out products for PC only. Sorry, Mac users.)

I wasn't aiming for a magnum opus with ASN. I was just aiming to finish something. I conceived of the eventual finished product more as proof-of-concept than anything else: "This is what I'm about and this is what I can do." It occurs to me now that maybe this relative lack of ambition is part of what undermined my desire to finish it. Revisiting it now, it's straightforward to see which more granular aspects of the game were and were not conducive to fostering the effects I wanted the player to experience, but like all failures, I choose to view the game as a lesson. A multitude of them, really. I will therefore reference ASN when appropriate with regard to my intended work going forward.

Which brings us to our main subject: I am starting a new project. For a multitude of probably obvious reasons, I have identified working on something new as a healthier and more attractive use of my time right now than it possibly could be trying to revitalize an old one from which I am now psychologically disconnected. (The story I am now embarking on is in fact not wholly new material; but after revisiting the amount of background detail that I pumped into this last summer, I am unapologetically impressed with my own efforts, and the material itself still feels vital and relevant.) I am now attempting to drill down to the core strengths and priorities both of myself and of the classic JRPG combat model; to identify where they synergize productively; and to identify where they conflict and determine how to mitigate this friction. The ungainly fusion that is a Role-Playing Game lives or dies depending on how well it can master delivery of at least one of its two core components, combat and narrative.

So this, most specifically, is where I welcome feedback. For the writeups presented below, we should always apply the following questions:

• Which combat design approach is most conducive to enabling challenging, but fair, memorable dramatic encounters?
• Which narrative approach best suits the material in terms of clarity, immersion, worldbuilding, and basic flow of storytelling?
• Can the above points reinforce each other? If so, how?
  
• Focus on these essentials first--side content is a bonus!

We've all played games, or heard other gamers speak about games, which failed miserably at one of those first two key points, but which were nonetheless enjoyable for their successes in the other. Obviously, I would prefer to succeed at both, but no set of mechanics, no matter how finely-tuned, is going to please everyone, and no story, no matter how well told, is going to make everyone happy either. The point of this document isn't to design the be-all-end-all of any genre. The point is get the utmost quality results out of the abilities and materials available to me specifically. There will of course be limitations to work around, as I am working with a commercially available engine and have no knowledge of scripting. But, if there is any healthy central cross-section in the Venn diagram of "People who enjoyed the combat but didn't care about the story," and "People who don't get hype for JRPG boss battles but did enjoy the writing," then that is a result I choose to be happy about.

The title for this project, previously a Pathfinder campaign that I ran for a few months last summer, has been Beyond Chaos, but it's since come to my attention that there's also an FFVI hack using that title, so I'm now rather disinclined to keep it myself. Nevertheless, as I've not yet thought of a replacement, we'll continue using that title for the sake of this post. And yes, adapting an RP campaign to another format has its own hazards and growing pains, which I will note when relevant, and which is in fact a key part of why a document of this nature feels of value to me right now.

Without further ado, below is my two-pronged plan of attack, and some possible difficulties I foresee with the present model.

~

Beyond Chaos: Combat Design

Macro Design: frequency and character of combat

My proposed approach to the occurrence of combat in Beyond Chaos is perhaps more heavily colored by its origins than any other aspect of this project. I did not run principally combat-focused campaigns as a GM; D20 combat balance was neither my forte nor my primary point of interest in the medium. I do acknowledge that it's wise, when translating a pen and paper campaign to another context, to critically analyze which aspects of the campaign have value in another format and which, if translated slavishly to another context, may only prove a hindrance. In this case, I believe that the spacing of combat as originally conceived for the campaign is the pace that also best supports the story it's used to tell, presuming that I effectively utilize the strengths of JRPG combat in doing so.

I have concluded that the following credo best summarizes the macro approach to combat that I want to apply to Beyond Chaos recast in the JRPG mold:

• Every "random" encounter in Beyond Chaos should carry the heft of a miniboss fight in any other game.
• The natural corollary to the above is that there will be far fewer "random" encounters in Beyond Chaos than in any of the classic JRPGs it's most clearly modeled after.
• A "dungeon," in the usage of this game, is more likely to be a series of setpiece battles than a traditional dungeon with truly random encounters.

The balance of dialogue time vs. combat time is, by extension, likely to be higher than in many RPGs. I do not regard this as a liability. Instead, I choose to emphasize that the comparatively modest (by conventional standards) number of violent encounters that are present in the game should be better mechanical puzzles than the average run of dungeon random encounters in any given classic game cast in the same mold. The value of quality over quantity on this front is emphasized by numerous other design points, which I will address in due course. It is also reinforced by revisiting All Souls' Night, wherein it is patently clear that I both more put more effort into, and derived more satisfaction from, boss design than random encounter design. And if it's so simple to avoid random encounter combat, and if random encounter experience isn't necessary to advance the party, do they truly need to be in the game at all?

If it was within my means to do so, I would probably be making a strategy RPG instead. But it isn't within my means to do this, and I like conventional turn-based combat well enough to be content making use of the tools available to me. (While I am aware that SRPG Studio exists, I am also aware that it is a new product and thus very unlikely yet to have the kind of art assets that are useful to me.) My point in stating this, though, is that for a strategy RPG, every battle is a singularly planned and balanced encounter, and increasingly, my preference is to apply that way of thinking to Beyond Chaos. Such a model will make for a highly linear gaming experience but, as will be made more explicit in the Narrative section, that is a trait which I am choosing to embrace as a strength rather than view as a liability.

I realize while writing that this section of the "combat" document will very quickly shade into overlap with narrative imperatives, because there are more than mechanical reasons for me to consider doing away with the grind of random encounters. It is easy for them to become numbing after a while, and I do not use that word solely in the sense of mental fatigue on the player's side of the screen. There is something rather ghoulish, when one steps back to think about it, to the amount of carnage perpetrated by your average videogame adventuring party. This is especially applicable to Beyond Chaos, because most enemies that the story makes it appropriate for the party to fight are humanoids, and--whether it should do so or not--repetitious murder takes on a somewhat different character when the player is not merely grinding through enemies that are "only monsters." Quite a lot of them, in fact, will even be fellow countrymen.

I am not making Undertale here; the playable characters are in a paramilitary organization, violent action ensues. But what they are not is uniformly accustomed and desensitized to death. Grinding for power does not make sense either for this party of for their circumstances. Every fight should feel consequential, not just because I believe that a less-is-more encounter rate has intrinsic potential, but also because violence always has consequences for someone. I am no fan of fakeout battles in classic RPGs. I will not employ unwinnable plot fights, a cutscene will never declare that a curbstomped boss is "Just too powerful!" in flat contradiction of clearly demonstrated statistical reality, and it should be understood through demonstration that any opponent the party engages in combat is going to die, barring something like their mid-battle surrender on the brink of death.

I suspect some of this sounds severe, but it only dovetails with what I'm increasingly favoring for combat design on utterly practical grounds anyway. I am not a commercial developer. There is no compulsion for me to advertise X hours of playtime to justify purchase by a skeptical player performing a cost/benefit analysis of dollars spent vs. hours of content available. In some ways, this is actually a bit of a blow for me: I loved drawing mazes as a kid, and I love building dungeons as an adult. But I do not feel that random-intensive dungeons for the sake of dungeons help the story that I'm trying to tell this time, nor do I feel that random encounter design is sufficiently a strength of mine to justify the padding. I am one person working alone, and it only makes sense to concentrate my productive time generating what I most like to get in an RPG: memorably dramatic encounters and compelling storytelling. Anything more is a bonus; at worst, it's fluff.

Thus, a "dungeon" in the design of early chapters of Beyond Chaos may contain at most half a dozen fights, and most likely less. More labyrinthine structures are unlikely to appear until the back half of the game, when it makes more plot sense for the party to be physically invading hostile strongholds, and even then, I'm suspicious enough of that old problem of "Only the playable characters ever do anything in this world" to be skeptical of letting them be unstoppable murder machines casually mowing through entire armies. There are definitely times when a longer, sustained string of battles is dramatically necessary to emphasize the risk and hardship of achieving a particular goal, but even then, it will be my absolute intention to maximize strategic considerations for a number of encounters that, compared to conventional JRPG dimensions, is on the low end.

This approach will likely flavor combat in granular ways as well, most obviously resource exhaustion. It is fairly instructive to consider the amount of mischief that a low-level D&D party can get up to before needing to stop for rest and recovery. It isn't much. Early on, at least, that kind of dynamic will heavily inform their collective longevity in Beyond Chaos as well.

Transparency: combat information transmission, tutorial conveyance, statistical/elemental/status explanations, item & skill descriptions

An informed player is more likely to be a successful one. Conversely, a player who feels thwarted because they're not provided sufficient information to grok the system they're in is more likely to feel cheated, and probably less likely to continue being a player. In most aspects of mechanical design, I try to balance giving the player as much information as possible against delivering it as organically and unobtrusively as possible. It's very easy to overwhelm a new player with too much information and too many numbers right off the bat; I dislike the artificiality of out-and-out tutorial sequences; and I tend to assume that anyone playing a production of mine is, in the first place, very familiar with JRPG conventions. Nonetheless, all the basics should be available to anyone willing to exercise the modicum of curiosity necessary to interact with a bookshelf in the first room.

Our initial band of playable characters in Beyond Chaos is a squad of Civilian Militia enlistees. It's both in-flavor for an increasingly literate nation, and a very simple thing in terms of dev labor time, for the Militia outpost to come stocked with some modest guidebooks to the extent of "This stat does X mechanically," "These are the elements commonly available on physical attacks and magic spells," "These are the common status elements and this is what they do," and "These are your combat options, they rely on X resource and can be stopped by Y status effect." They only need to be written in terms that sound natural to a team of volunteer soldiers in order to serve more than a mere mechanical purpose.

But information conveyance should extend beyond tutorials to any new piece of design that the player encounters. In ASN, I had a standard formula for item descriptions that prioritized conveying key mechanical information first, in as concise but clear a manner as possible, and with consistency of phrasing and abbreviations throughout. Combat flavor text described what a newly-inflicted status effect did; onscreen icons indicated how much longer it lasted. Different elemental damage was indicated by differently colored damage numbers. Base hitrates for spells and weapons (I.E., before enemy resists and LUK influence were accounted for behind the scenes) utilizing negative status effects were specified in their descriptions. Any remaining character space I found available in item and skill description boxes was happily used for fluff and flavor purposes, but the first and foremost priority was always to communicate to the player exactly what their new toys did.

I wasn't always happy with the execution of those details. Some combat text flashed by too quickly for easy reading and I knew of no way to change the text speed; the combat log, while helpful in tracking all in-battle text, could be very easily overlooked; and there's only so much information that can be conveyed within the limits of VXA text boxes (for example, I never found somewhere to convey some minor esoteric trivia like Undine doubling item drop rates in battle). But the approach is one that I would broadly like to repeat with better implementation for Beyond Chaos.

Those two pillars should convey the tone of combat that I am looking to generate for this project. For the purpose of this document, I don't find it valuable to break down micro details like statistical interactions, types of skills available to playable characters, or the array of status effects used, beyond noting that these things should be introduced to the player at a reasonable rate of accelerating complexity. I want to build battles that are dramatically significant, tough but reasonable for an informed player, and to make every possible effort to ensure that the player is an informed one--without being so overbearing as to try their patience in that effort.

~

Beyond Chaos: Narrative Design

Linearity: Reasons and focus

I have no firm stance on whether or not freedom of player choice is integral to the RPG experience, save that it I think foolish to have such a stance committed one way or the other. Linear narratives and branching paths have each served their purpose well in different games. I count both rigidly linear JRPGs and more dynamically responsive WRPGs among my favorite games. I do have a strong conviction, however, about which approach works best for this project.

Beyond Chaos began life as an P&P RP campaign. Such stories tend to be at their best when they're replete with options, or at least offering multiple ways of achieving the same objectives. That established dynamic was a source of cognitive dissonance when I first considered adapting Beyond Chaos to a conventional JRPG format. I initially discounted the possibility of even doing so, because I had conceived of the story as a more open narrative with players in the driver's seat. For a number of reasons, however, I've concluded that linear storytelling is the only way to move the project forward in its present form:

• Practicality: I am one person working alone. I do not have the productive capacity to write the kind of branching path spaghetti characteristic of your common western RPG.
• Dramatic Impact: Nor do I actually think that I want to. I would rather commit to one outcome and tell it with superior finesse than divide my energies for less certain ends. Moreover, I think it takes a more skilled writer than myself to execute branching paths effectively.
• Messaging: When one branching path is, by almost any definition, objectively bad in the long term, I do not see value in exploring this path when I could more realistically and effectively focus my efforts elsewhere. Moreover, so few games execute this kind of split well that it does not seem worth my time expending energy to enable terrible decisions that I have vanishingly less tolerance for in the real world anyway. When a nation is faced with a choice of "Adapt or die," there are some cultural paths that can only ever lead to one of those outcomes.

If one doesn't have the capacity to go all out building a dynamically responsive narrative and world, I think it's better to refrain altogether, and presenting the appearance of alternate paths when there practically are none would only be confusing and discordant. I think that it's better to be open about how I'm operating, and why, and to make that underlying reasoning apparent by consistently adhering to a single narrative that opts to make its point through focused, character-driven writing. So I won't waste time with "But thou must!" fake choices to present the illusion of the player directing the narrative; it should go without saying that there are no silent PCs, and that the core party are vocal people with their own reasons for doing what they do. The only NPC question that will ever directly be addressed for the player's input are preparedness binaries like a commanding officer asking, "Are you ready to proceed to a series of probably difficult battles, or would you like to fine-tune your squad more?" Player choice in Beyond Chaos is how they deal with the mechanical obstacles along the way, I.E., party selection, equipment choices, turn-by-turn decisions, etc.

Some freedom of exploration will absolutely be available to the player, both because I myself love finding out of the way nooks and easter eggs in games, and because it is a good break for pacing (and for characters who are supposed to come across as having a life outside of killing things) to have, between battle sequences, the opportunity to spend a little downtime in ways that offer opportunity to flesh out the setting. But this won't be an open world game by any means, and any little bonuses that might be found poking around a new town or province will be there for character building and worldbuilding and rewarding such curiosity with a little extra combat edge, but definitively not to drive the story in divergent directions or towards different endings.

The other main point here is that, after the introductory chapter, player control will alternate between parties as the starting cast splits into two groups to pursue their goals in different ways and geographical areas. I concluded that this was the best way to tell this story for a couple different reasons:

• I realized while making plot outlines that it was a logistical nightmare to have one single party go everywhere and do everything that was slated to happen in the story. Having one party handle plot events in the western half of the country, and one party handle plot events in the eastern half of the country, nicely circumvents that issue. This is a way of dividing my work, not doubling it.
• This also alleviates the perennial RPG problem of presenting the player with a world where only one small band of adventurers ever does anything to try and change their world. The older I get, the more uncomfortable I am with the implications of that.
• It gives me more leeway to flesh out the setting by having each party interact with different factions which, on the national stage, might be outright adversarial.
• I could already tell that intra-party relations would become unwieldy by the end of the game otherwise. Two medium-sized parties are more intimate than one large one would be.

The two parties will periodically meet back up again in their centrally-located hometown to exchange information and leads and generally catch up. These meetings will not be without tension as the playable characters realize that their old friends on the other side are gathering patrons whose private goals might be mutually exclusive. They'll have to navigate some rough territory as it becomes apparent that they are developing personal interests and goals that might be at cross purposes, even while they attempt in a broader sense to solve the same existential crisis. This allows me to show more sides of national opinion than would realistically be possible with the whole mass of PCs operating as a single unit.

Worldbuilding: Exposition, dialogue, newspapers, books, items, other

The starting party of playable characters in Beyond Chaos is a four-person squad on the local Civilian's Militia, a sort of not-quite-professional police force for frontier communities that the government doesn't quite have the funds or bureaucratic sophistication to staff officially. I've concluded that one of them should be probably be new to the group, if not necessarily to the profession. An outsider's presence is too useful for the purpose of introducing the basics of a new setting for the player, who of course is a complete outsider. This is an old trope for speculative fiction, but I'd like to use it with a little more finesse than some fantastical settings have done. I.E., PC #4 is only an outsider to her squad, not to the world as a whole. She doesn't need to have every mundane fact of everyday life explained to her. Instead, we can establish the basics for the audience by having her and her new teammates gently interrogate one another to identify personal preferences and backgrounds, shared interests, and so on, the way any established social group does when a new element enters its matrix. Character interaction is how I'll start introducing the player to the world and what it's about. Subsequently, the squad's missions will build the backbone of the plot and affirm their goals. I'd rather not use authorial narrative captions any more than strictly necessary to establish the barebones facts of the world at the very start of the game, and to acknowledge time & place transitions between chapters.

Beyond Chaos uses a setting edging its way into something analogous to our early modern era. Printing is a growing industry, and this fact will be utilized to provide extra outlet for unobtrusive worldbuilding. There are newspapers in the old broadsheet style, most operating under the suspicious eye of government censors, some publishers of more subversive opinion printing pamphlets furtively and constantly moving operations to avoid prosecution. The genre of the novel is developing, and the nation has produced both prestigious works and a burgeoning pulp market sensationalizing the increasingly survivalist lifestyle of the country's crumbling frontier. It will be common for the party (and, by extension, the player) to find such objects strewn about in public places throughout their travels. I intend such items to serve less as loredumps than as triggers for the party to comment on their surroundings and their situation. I can only speak for myself here, but it took me very little time playing Baldur's Gate, Skyrim, et al to realize how dry their in-game texts were and to start ignoring them. Consequently, I would rather use comparable text objects in my games to convey information concisely, with more obvious relevance to the playable characters' circumstances and travels, and in a way that provides an outlet for additional character building at the same time.

Plenty of other onscreen objects can be used to serve a similar function; written ones are only the most obvious category. The one aspect of writing that I did manage to add to All Souls' Night was a wide array of common objects, such as paintings, clothes, artifacts, skeletons, etc, which could prompt reaction from the protagonist when interacted with (the fact that it was far too easy to accidentally cancel out of such exclamations is one of ASN's little eventing 101 lessons). And, yes, as is evident from All Souls' Night's item descriptions, should there be any place that I have text space to insert an extra sentence for flavor purposes, I will happily do so. By no means will it be my only, or even primary, means of adding background, but when the opportunity is there, why not take it?

Presentation: Map scale, freedom of exploration, cutscenes, gender balance

The progression of scale followed by Beyond Chaos is most comparable to that of a Suikoden game. We start local, as is usual for role-playing games of almost any type, and culminate in concerns of a national scale. One of the first things that I will completely build in the engine will be the full national map, but only so I can save myself trouble later by cut-and-pasting chunks it for use in individual chapters focused on a specific town or province. Most individual chapters will focus on a different specific area of the country, say a major town and its environs, or a rugged mountain frontier. Freedom of exploration will gradually escalate in step with story's slow expansion in geographical scope. My plan is that only in each party's last chapter does the full half of the country used for their section of the plot completely open up to allow revisiting all past towns and cities. (Their hometown, centrally located, may very well be the sole major location that appears on both final chapter maps.)

The exact execution of cutscenes in Beyond Chaos is one major factor that I haven't entirely settled yet. It's worth noting that, since I never completed the story components of All Souls' Night, I still don't know how to direct and build proper cutscenes in this engine. This may be part of why I have somewhat resisted the idea of using them thus far--I have even considered eschewing cutscenes that utilize moving sprites in favor of a more Disgaea-style talking heads dialogue exchange. I have to consider whether such notions may be driven by my not wanting to have to learn new aspects of the engine when there's so much other work to do. We'll come back to this in the Obstacles section.

And we can consider this final point my contribution to the feminism in games thread. ASN, and its sister stories that were meant to take place in the same world, were built in a setting where patriarchal culture was baked in, and one of the recurring protagonist struggles would be trying to forge one's own path in the face of that opposition. I acknowledge that there's value in telling such stories, as they are reflective of much of human history, but I've spent enough time down that well to conclude that dwelling fixedly upon the negatives of human behavior can invoke the dread specter of determinism. There's another path for addressing social issues, and that's to present people with a better example. In spite of the faults that Star Trek: the Next Generation had with the actual writing for its female characters, I will always love it for presenting as a given that such historical inequities were bunk. For approximately the same reason that I am dreadfully tired of dystopian fiction, this is the course that I now feel healthier pursuing. So: Beyond Chaos takes the starting assumption of the D20 system it sprang from, that we don't have to build our new world based on the oppressions of historical reality, and runs with it. This is not to say that it's a perfect world by any means--only that excluding some of our own historical inequities from a fictional setting is another way of opposing them.

It should be no surprise at all to anyone who knows me that the cast of playable characters here is almost entirely female (though political power in this setting is more evenly split). If anything, I have a problem adding male representation, but that hardly worries me because I'd be less interested in what I was writing if I changed this balance. The rest of the gaming world seems to have that angle well covered anyway!

~

Beyond Chaos: Potential Problems

No game will please everyone, and I certainly wouldn't expect my priorities in most fields to align with the majority of humans. Nonetheless, I think there's value in critically appraising which aspects of my approach may have the unintended side effect of irritating, antagonizing, or otherwise needlessly wasting the initial goodwill of a player. First impressions are important. Thus, below are a few design hiccups that I suspect may be problematic for some players. I have done my best to think of elegant solutions, but I am not an omnipotent creator.

I don't individually consider these dealbreakers for the project, but they do bother me.

Locked Inventory in introductory chapter?

Physically-focused playable characters will typically count two weapon types in their skill list, and all playable characters will have opportunity to tweak armor to optimize against specific challenges. When the parties are still small enough, early on, that there aren't yet a lot of options for swapping playable characters, equipment swapping picks up some of the slack in the customization department.

However, the mechanics of RPGmaker do not make it easy to build a campaign that routinely alternates parties, and this may have unfortunate implications for equipment. There is no means that I know of to flag certain equipment to make it not appear in the overall inventory screen during the chapter of a party that shouldn't have physical access to it. I do have a workaround for this problem, but it may, in the opening chapter, force lockout of equipment changing, which is a problem since it denies the player customization options early on and thus conveys a false impression about the degree of mechanical flexibility I wish to be available to the player.

My workaround for the party split is the following:

• Build into the engine two copies of each equippable item
• For each of these pairs, make one copy equippable only by the classes used by the western party, and the other copy equippable only by the eastern party

This doesn't stop the player from seeing, in their overall inventory screen, items that are flagged for use by the other party. It does at least mean that, when changing a playable character's equipment, the player will only see gear that they're flagged as able to equip (this is a basic feature of the engine that I don't have to do anything to enable). So it means bloat in the overall inventory screen, but at least shouldn't generate confusion for the player in the equipment screen itself. It's less obvious how to prevent one party from selling equipment flagged for the other party. My best idea at the moment is, for example, to flag the eastern party's gear as having a zero selling price whenever the player transitions to a chapter controlling the western party, reinstate the usual price when transitioning back to an eastern chapter, and vice versa. (This is less of a hassle than it might sound--build the event once and then cut-and-paste it for other chapter switch transitions.)

What makes this potentially a real problem for my overall combat design is that I may have to lock out equipment swapping in the opening chapter to enable the above. This is because I have no way of knowing what the player will have equipped at chapter's end, what they will have bought and sold, etcetera. Given that, there is no way for me to say, at chapter's end, "Turn X playable character's helmet into the eastern party's copy of the same item." My first thought in this context was that I would just have to lock everyone's equipment in the first chapter, which is a serious problem because it doesn't afford the player opportunity to play with equipment options, therefore incorrectly advertising the rest of the game's mechanics as being a lot more inflexible than they actually will be.

My best answer to that right now is that for the opening chapter, the party's equipment is owned by the Militia, so when the party splits, the playable characters have to leave a lot behind and start building their armories anew (from which point onward, anything new that they acquire is flagged for use only by the appropriate party). The player can thus still have some stock of equipment options to experiment with in the beginning, and it will still make some plot sense for all this equipment to be stripped from inventory when the characters go their separate ways. It isn't a great answer, because I'd prefer to avoid the mild player irritation that's likely to arise anytime you take something away from them. But it's the most practical one that I can see right now.

Wiped item stocks between chapters

It's very simple to have the engine memorize money counts at a chapter's end and reinstate the previous figure every time we alternate parties. There's nothing comparable that I know of for stocks of expendable items. The only answer I know to prevent one party from using expendable items obtained by the other party, therefore, is to wipe all standing inventory of expendable items at the end of each chapter.

As I've stated elsewhere, taking things away from the player for no obvious reason is unlikely to engender their goodwill. I have only two answers to this:

• Significant amounts of time, in-world, are likely to pass between chapters anyway. Unused expendable items could very well be food items that disappear between chapters because they expired.
• It may not be the worst thing in the world to encourage the player to use all the items they pick up instead of hoarding them indefinitely, especially early when they have fewer healer characters at their disposal.

It would make for an unusual dynamic, sure, but one borne more of developer necessity than intrinsic virtue, and I would anticipate player frustration the first time their item stocks vanish unless there's some way to be tactfully upfront about the fact that their healing supplies all come with an expiration date. It additionally means that prestige healing items (along the lines of your classic Elixir) should probably be restricted to endgame drops. Player irritation is only more likely if you take away something top-tier vs. something easily storebought. Possibly this is offset a little by the fact that the final chapters for each party are likely to be their longest anyway, so there's more time to dole out special items in the one chapter where there's absolutely no reason for the player to not go all out. Again, I don't feel like this is a great answer, but I don't have another approach right now.

Cutscenes: lack of villain presence without them?

My experience as a GM may have conditioned me in some ways that are not optimally suited for videogame writing. Key case in point, as a GM, I operated under two key limitations of villain presence: 1) that the player characters, being essentially the POV for this story, were not a presence that you could cut away from, in the way of a visual medium, to show a scene completely utilizing NPC dialogue and interaction; 2) that a GM should never, ever put a villain physically onscreen earlier than the point at which the story can withstand the party killing that villain. Because PCs.

These facts heavily influenced how I used villains in any story. Essentially, a major villain's presence had to be built up via hearsay, occasional found bits of their writing, and similarly indirect narrative bric-a-brac. Even villains that are playing the party and present themselves as an ally need to be relied upon cautiously, as an alert party may very well see through the charade with the right rolls.

I mention all of this because my story planning for JRPG Beyond Chaos has tended to assume the same primarily offscreen operation for major villains, but it absolutely needn't be so in a medium where I am free to cut away at any time necessary to directly show the actions of characters elsewhere not in the playable party. I have to consider the strong possibility that a compulsion to keep the camera only ever trained on the playable party may just represent an innate resistance to doing things differently (compounded by the fact that I've yet to learn how to construct cutscenes in this engine).

Lategame inventory bloat

This may be unavoidable. I want to provide a large number of equipment options for the player to tweak their party against specific adversaries (both for mechanical depth and because I just love brainstorming this stuff). Since the total inventory in Beyond Chaos will contain the mutually exclusive armories of two separate parties, it only compounds the likelihood of players getting lost scrolling through their stores checking for just what exactly that new weapon they picked up does. And RPGmaker has no means that I know of to enable auto-sort or manual sort options for the player.

What it does have is a dev that obsessively organizes such things in advance. Here is how I dealt with a similar situation in All Souls' Night:

• The order in which RPGmaker automatically organizes inventory for the player is by sorting items in the exact same order in which they are entered into the engine
• To try to minimize fuss on the player's part looking for a new piece of treasure, I entered equipment according to the following rubric:
• 1) Weapons first, sorted by type of weapon and then alphabetical by name; 2) armors next, sorted by type of armor (by which I mean equipment slot occupied) and then alphabetical by name; 3) in hopes that it would make inventory order look slightly more intuitive, I also sorted armor types according to the same order that they appeared on a playable character's equip screen (Shield, Head, Body, Accessory)

Crucially, I did not apply the same methodology to sorting expendable items. I entered them into the engine in the order in which they appeared in-game, which meant that the best items were sitting at the end of the list. The result was that the player's inventory of expendable items looked like an unintelligible jumble by the later zones. I myself grew quite frustrated looking for a specific item during endgame battles when playtesting, and RPGmaker innately having cursor memory only somewhat offset this hassle. That is the kind of mistake I plan not to make this time (though it does dictate certain priorities in production order, I.E., all usable items need to be designed and entered into the engine before I do the work of writing and scripting each individual chapter).

So there are means to make inventory management less of a hassle for the player, even working with the basic, no-plugins engine. I have to suspect, though, that twice the party means twice the mess even with this taken into account.

Insufficient combat for array of options planned?

I plan for each party to have a healthy array of combat options when it comes to selection of playable characters and equipment. One has to wonder, though, whether a game operating on a less-is-more philosophy of combat is really providing sufficient opportunity not just for the player to use everything at their disposal, but to even have sufficient experience to internalize a general sense of what works and what doesn't. Providing all these mechanical toys could be a bit silly or, at worst, confusing and overwhelming if the amount of combat in the game doesn't actually justify their inclusion.

But ultimately, this is a macro pacing concern, and there are still some plot sections I'm hammering out, so it's mostly a possibility to keep in the back of my mind and analyze later when there's a firmer timeline of story content to compare it against. Anyway, it's very easy to cut or simply not use extraneous items later if it looks like I overprepared!

~

That covers the main points. I am happy to go into the more granular detail of game mechanics (skill types, stats, etc) for anyone interested, but my principal goal in posting this was to establish an overall plan of attack in nailing the overall feel that I want for combat and story in this game. Therefore, I ask for response should anyone emerge with strong thoughts on the following main points:

• Are my operational priorities sufficiently clear based on this document?
• Does it seem that I have settled on a functional approach for achieving those desired effects?

[Dark Holy Elf]

Great read, first of all.


I played ASN a couple years back and I definitly remember enjoying it. I'm quite sad that it never got writing because it was closer to complete than any other RPGMaker project I've played, and the gameplay was quality.

Thumbs up in general to "everything is a well-planned fixed encounter" gameplay. Encounter design is so so so important, and it's easier/more satisfying to do for fixed encounters.

My approval for properly informing your player is well-documented. I've never understood the appeal of a game which tries to hide its rules from the player. I'm sure there's a space for them, but I'm not their target audience, and if that's not the type of game you're making, more documentation is always good.

Regarding linearity, i definitely found myself nodding along. I greatly enjoy the non-linearity of pen and paper games and, as a DM, seeing which paths my players follow. But pen and paper has a huge advantage: you don't need to fully-flesh out every path in advance! The DM can react to the player's choices and fully write only the path they actually go down, which keeps the work sane. There's no way to do this in a programmable computer/console RPG without a large team (and even then I think there are some logistic problems which tend to make the end results less satisfying, but that's not a discussion that needs to be had right now). So yeah, doing one path very well is definitely the model for a single dev to follow IMO.


Inventory issues: it is entirely possible to, with some simple scripting, "save" one party's inventory in memory, then delete it, and swap in a new party's inventory, and repeat the process as necessary. I in fact did this for my own RPG Maker project. It is not difficult and I would be happy to help you implement it. I could even just send you the script I wrote though it might need to be changed around for the slightly different engine. Hit me up on Discord. I strongly recommend doing this instead of the less elegant solutions for reasons you have already stated yourself.


Villain presence: obviously it's your call, but for what it's worth, as a DM, I definitely think there are various ways to increase villain presence without ever taking the camera off your PCs. For instance, the villain could be a political one, for whom "just stab her in the face" is not a socially acceptable solution in their earlier meetings. The villain could be in disguise (or alternatively, their villainous self could be a disguise). The villain could be someone initially friendly, but only later becomes an enemy of the party (e.g. the main villains of Shadow Hearts 2 and Suikoden 2, for two very different takes on it). I think there's a lot to be said for villain presence, however you end up doing it. I tried to think of effective villains who get near-zero screen time and I couldn't really think of any.


Inventory bloat: Yeah unfortunately this is definitely a problem with the default RPG Maker engine, and certainly something I remember finding mildly frustrating in ASN (though I probably never mentioned it to you, as I'm quite cognizant of the fact that it's not easily fixed). I suspect some tinkering with scripts could help, but it's a harder project than the inventory swap I mentioned above by a ways, so I'd more suggest just looking to see if someone else has done it already.


On cutscenes: Again, it's up to you if you want to bother with this. Talking heads are a cool way to do things (though work better if you have various facial expressions for your PCs of course). If you want to do classic, Final Fantasy-style cutscenes... I've spent quite a bit of time making them myself, so do feel free to hit me up if you need any suggestions on how to do things. For instance, if you want to swap to a different scene to show some NPCs, you can accomplish this by fading to black, setting the player to invisible, warping the "player" to the map where you want the cutscene to occur, then immediately animate the cutscene via an auto-run event (which begins by fading in from black, naturally). Of course, you reverse this process at the cutscene's end.


Good luck with this! It sounds like you've put a lot of thought into this and it definitely sounds like you have the approach needed to create a game that I, for one, would love to play.

[Sierra]

Thanks! I'll nab you on Discord about scripting later this week, next couple days are fairly spoken for. Will also want to take a dig through Yanfly's plugin library first to see if there's any more basic stuff I want to do but can't with the resources available.

It's definitely true that impromptu face-stabbing is something it's a lot harder to get away with outside of a P&P context. I still need to rewire my brain a bit for storytelling in another context. More political adversaries, for one, tend to not be directly assailable (which maybe makes them the most hateable ones?) I'll probably have to do writeups on my own for each of the antagonist mob to assess the nature and extent of screen presence they should each have to try and break myself out of the old mindset.

Cutscene basics sound pretty straightforward from what you're saying. I didn't even know how to start one! It will be on my agenda for the weekend to put together some simple test events to confirm that I understand the fundamentals.

All the sprites and portraits I'm using for this project are ones that I built in the MV character generator (which is, thankfully, not unbearably fugly like the one in VXA), so it would be simple enough to crank out alternate facial expressions as required (I suspect that I'll want to make a separate folder for each PC's images rather than having the main directory just inundated with everyone's variations).

My next step is to put a production schedule together, which will probably be a post later this week. And by schedule, I mean not so much a hard timeline on the calendar so much as assessing which tasks need to precede others in order to minimize inconvenience and repeat work down the road. The big lesson from last time, though, is: write, produce, and QA one chapter at a time in sequence, instead of leaving points 1 and 3 until the end!

[Dhyerwolf]

I agree with most of what NEB said, especially regarding fixed encounters and heavy documentation for players (as well as non-linearity, but I pretty care less about it than nearly any RPG player. I'm perfectly happy with a game crafting a complete narrative and being completely linear).

I wouldn't worry too much about having the same name as a hack if you felt really attached to a title.

Other aspects we can talk about soon!

[Sierra]

Life got busy for while, but here's where I presently stand: evaluating the incomplete projects of years past for lessons. And there's one big one in the mix:

If writing all of a game's dialogue is entirely up to me, then the best case scenario is that I will put off that phase of the project until the very last detail. The worst, and more likely scenario, is that I will simply never do it at all, even if I have essentially completed gameplay content, and as a consequence will ultimately leave an otherwise finished project incomplete. That has happened twice now. I'd rather it didn't happen again.

So I've decided to ask if anyone is interested in collaborating. It was always my plan to have at least one project completely finished before looking for someone else to work with, so I'd have some demonstration of both "Here is an example of what my approach to RPG design is all about" and "Yes, I can actually finish what I start." But that latter statement only appears to be true insofar as it pertains to the mechanical aspects of a project--combat, level design, and the quieter aspects of worldbuilding. Therefore, my request for the DL at this time is:

Please contact me if you are interested in doing the character writing for an RPG, and expect to be available to contribute. We would be working with a four-person party, mostly static from beginning to end, with relatively little in the way of civilization to deal with. The emphasis would almost wholly be on shaping personalities that can bounce off each other through adventures in a mostly barren and depopulated land.

For anyone intrigued or interested, I think I should detail a little about how I reached this decision, because doing so will illustrate a fair bit about the amount and kind of writing required.

Anyone who participated in the above thread last year may or may not recall, but the context was that I was looking for a way to tell a complicated and extensive story by breaking it down into more manageable bits. But even writing on that scale seems beyond my focus. I suspect that part of the reason it took me so long to reach this conclusion was that writing wasn't an issue through years of GMing--but that is a context where you have a group of friends constantly pushing you for reactions, and with personal projects, there's only me, and I have a lot more other work to do on fronts that come more naturally to me. So one of the key conclusions that I've reached since then is my best starting point would be to keep the story simple.

But there are other lessons. For example, I classed writing into three categories on the last project that I did everything but the writing for:

• Mechanical communication: descriptions attached to skills, spells, and items meant to convey first and foremost pertinent mechanical details of an object, and then use whatever text entry space remained to contribute to tone and world flavor. I can handle this part. It's even fun!
• Lore: any interactable scenery object that conveys, through the player character's reaction to or observations of that object, more detailed setting history and flavor. I try to minimize simple loredumps vomited at the player through found texts, principally because that approach has bored the hell out of me as a player in almost every game I've played that favored it. Indeed, for All Souls' Night (my 2016 project), it's probably telling that I completed everything that was flagged as requiring a reaction from the protagonist, and nothing that was flagged as being a readable (in summary, obviously) text.
• Dialogue: anything involving two or more characters interacting in a living conversation. I did virtually none of this on ASN--and there wasn't even that much of it demanded by the scenario. ASN had barely any of it planned, because plotwise there was functionally a solo PC, and I still struggled to maintain any degree of focus on the few conversations that I judged were required.

I concluded that the points I didn't finish were strongly indicative of my strengths and weaknesses as a designer.

So a few months ago I decided to switch projects, build from the ground up with core concepts that emphasize the aspects of design that I can get lost in for hours, and minimize those which my brain actively protests against dealing with. I drew a number of key conclusions here:

• What are two things I have loved most from games played in recent years? Dramatic boss encounters and having a sprawling, interconnected environment to explore. It should not be any surprise that the unfinished projects of my past also reveled in those aspects of design. Whatever story concept I decide to work with therefore must be tailored to emphasize those two key experiences.
• It should not be a scenario that requires complicated political intrigue to any significant degree. I often enjoy consuming such stories, but crafting them appears to be beyond my abilities. My experience has been that I may settle on the broad strokes and never quite grasp the nuances needed to execute such a narrative. So a remote, primitive, or abandoned environment looks much more likely to suit my favored approach than would a well-settled one with social minefields to navigate.
• A large part of what drew me into several of my favorite games was the simple joy of exploration, of stepping out into a great unknown where anything could be lurking. I concluded that this sensation would only be emphasized if, in-context, much of the world itself was unknown and even unheard of to my characters, not just in the common sheltered RPG protagonist way, but in the way of a world without reliable long distance travel or communication. Literacy and knowledge may be very limited, in the context of their upbringing, compared to what any of us are accustomed to.
• As much contextual information as possible should be conveyed to the player non-verbally--what items are found where and why, how the characters might respond to or discuss strange objects found, what types of other people they encounter out in the unknown, etc. Anyone who knows my preferences in gaming may very well take this as a given anyway. (But I should always note: while at no point is it my intention to mimic Fromsoft, it cannot escape notice that I find much to learn from in their approach to level design and its capacity to suggest contextual information.)
• As strangers in a strange land, our characters might not have any immediate inclination to open up to one another, but they would also have to work together to survive. So personal conversation might meet with some initial reticence, or be impeded by the relative stoicism of some characters raised in this primitive world, leaving plenty of time and potential for them to get to know each other better on the road.
• Finally, as a lark, I said to myself one day something to the extent of, "Silent protagonists cut down on an awful lot of writing, don't they?" It was in jest because I revile the tradition of silent PC as player stand-in and can think of perishingly few examples where the trope actually accomplished anything. But my brain went on to conjecture, "What if it's someone who lost their voice to injury, either accidental or malicious? They would still have to communicate with other people in order to accomplish what they want to do in this story; they would just have to learn how to do it differently. That would be part of their challenge." Then I wondered whether any game had actually done this and I couldn't think of an example. So now I'm rather attached to the idea for one character.

All of the above points were settled on at least in part to ensure that the production would not be frontloaded with exposition, and to leave as much of the heavy lifting of worldbuilding as possible to environmental cues. But eventually I realized that I couldn't eliminate the need for writing altogether. Even in a game designed to minimize the need for it, there would still have to be some--and, given my capacity to get lost in brainstorming zones, quite possibly more of it than I would anticipate. And even if I felt it possible somehow to wholly eliminate that necessity, I don't think that I would want to. I might be wired to excel more at the mechanical aspects of game design, but a game wholly without story content is something that it's very difficult for me to feel any attachment to. Changing the emphasis of storytelling is one approach--excising it altogether is something else entirely. Because for all that I've changed much of my approach to design, I do still start with a story idea. I've just decided to filter out the ones that are too labyrinthine for me to complete.

So here we are. If the above points have not already conveyed the approximate character of world I am working in, I am thinking early Iron Age and this conversation pretty perfectly nails the tone and degree of social sophistication that I am looking for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWG-nHuuCRc

While my overall scenario is fairly settled, and I have outlines for four protagonists, I understand the necessity to be flexible when handing writing duties over to someone else. I have only starting points for characters and I am sure that much else can be imagined. While I have never worked with someone else in this manner, I would hope that I have the good grace to acknowledge it when someone else has a better notion of what to do with an idea than I do. I wouldn't actually know, from experience, but trying it is really the only to find out, isn't it?

Hoping to hear from someone. I will probably keep working even if I don't, even if it leads to another endpoint of "Well, I finished all the gameplay work again and I'm never going to finish the rest again," because I'm never going to stop having ideas and I'm never going to stop following them, wherever they end up. But it would be nice to be able to say to someone else, "Here is a thing that I worked on, it is actually completely done this time!" And that part does not appear likely without a collaborator.

[Dunefar]

Let me ask you something: As a writer, what sort of writer do you want helping you? You talk a lot about the game, but I didn't feel like I got a lot of insight on to the type you wanted, beyond just hoping to get someone.

[Sierra]

I can describe what kind of tone I personally tend to gravitate towards, if that clarifies things.

If we were to make a distinction between "Mostly serious approach with the necessary occasional touches of levity" and "Mostly light and comedic with occasional dramatic flourishes," I prefer the former. Not that there aren't shades in between, but I feel like a lot of JRPGs have tended to pick one side or the other. I can enjoy things with a mostly lighter tone, I.E. Disgaea and the like, but it's a lot harder for me to believe that the story has real stakes, and consequently such games don't tend to rank among my favorites. I'm strongly averse to memeing, referential humor, and breaking the fourth wall. All of these things pull me out of the world the creator is trying to build and make it a lot harder for me to care about what's happening. I've always thought the best humor comes from strong character writing.

Also, and I'm sure this is zero surprise to anyone, but since this is me, the permanent PC cast is all ladies. So: someone who's comfortable working with that dynamic. (I do not have complicated interpersonal conversations and relationships planned. That is exactly the kind of thing that I struggle to nail down in advance. I have basic character outlines and only general suspicions of how they would bounce off each other beyond that. This is mostly what I'd be interested in having a partner develop.)

[Dunefar]

That's about what I figured.

I'm sort of interested, but brutal honesty: I don't think I can commit the time to this. I may try if you can't get anyone else since I'd really like to see you get over the hump and get a game done.