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[matwek]

Inspired by some of the posts in this topic (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=30201.0) I’ve decided to start work on my first RPG and wondered if anyone wanted to help me out with programing and character sprites.

Before people get scared off by the fact that I’m starting an RPG (we all know how many of them get finished) this game will have relatively few RPG style elements to it.
•   There will be no levels and no grinding, although you will have a selection of team members to pick from.
•   There will be no random encounters just a selection of pre-set battles and bosses that need to be defeated.
•   Battles are kept simple with you only having access to attack, magic, skills and items. Stats will be simple as well with HP, MP, Strength, Defence, Magic, and Magic Defence.
•   The game itself will be set up like megaman. From the starting town you get to decide which path to take, battle a few monsters followed by a boss and then back to the town to start on the next quest. Storyline and scope will be kept to a minimum to help speed up production so it actually gets finished in a reasonable amount of time.

Now after hearing that list of restrictions I expect a lot of people are wondering what makes the game unique and interesting to play…?
Firstly all characters within the town can be recruited into your team of 3 and switched in and out before taking on a quest. With no levelling up or new abilities for people to learn you have to pick your team carefully and make sure your team are fit for the challenge. Some might be stronger than others but some obscure characters might have access to unique skills.

But secondly, and most importantly, all party members are vulnerable to permanent status aliments.
When being attacked as well as simply losing health a body part will be randomly assigned to take the damage and fill up a gauge on the stats screen. This gauge can’t be lowered or protected and when it’s full you gain one permanent status aliment and the gauge is reset to start filling up again.

•   Get hit in the head too often and your magic ability will drop, keep taking damage and concussion may lead to you forgetting a spell.
•   Damaging a leg might make you attack slower.
•   Being killed by fire too often can lead to a pathological fear of fire and will take double damage from then on.
•   Use heath potions too often and they lose effectiveness, or worse you get addicted.
•   Spending too long dead before being revived might lead to brain damage making that party member not follow orders properly.
•   In serious cases thing can even lead to permanent death.
I have plenty more ideas for this, some a simple lowering of stats and others more complex emotional changes to the character. Imagine trying to lead a team with a ‘Strength potion’ addicted, one armed knight with a God complex. An all-powerful wizard that’s forgotten half of his spells and suffers from narcolepsy. And a thief with a fear of fire and water.

The idea is that as the game progresses your small village of characters become physically and emotionally damaged as you switch useless characters out and force broken party members past what they should have to endure just because they still have that one good skill.
I guess there is no real winner, you just have to destroy the final boss before everyone dies…depressing? Yes. Interesting concept? I hope so.

As I mentioned above I would need help with the programing because I’m not very technically minded and the scope and size of the game can be determined by whoever ends up helping (although I want to keep it small at first, maybe 4-5 quests).
As for art I can manage most of that myself, you can check out my pixel art page here..
http://www.facebook.com/matwekpixel
The only other thing I would need help with is basic sound effects/music and character/enemy sprites (I’m more of a tile artist).

I have a few other jobs on the go at the moment so this wouldn’t be a top priority but I think it will be a fun little side project with no pressure.

My email is matwek(at)Hotmail(dot)com

[wccrawford]

It seems like a neat idea.

Can I suggest that I think it'd be more fun if the permanent effects weren't wholly bad?  Perhaps the pyrophobe also goes berserk when there's fire around, and (s)he's a lot stronger?

I don't have any available time to collab on this, but good luck to you!

[Graham-]

My first thought is regarding progression. Typically a game needs to become more dense or complex as it goes on. I suppose this game manages that by restricting successful strategies, as the game progresses, naturally through the "disabilities."

[matwek]

It seems like a neat idea.

Can I suggest that I think it'd be more fun if the permanent effects weren't wholly bad?  Perhaps the pyrophobe also goes berserk when there's fire around, and (s)he's a lot stronger?

The problem with that is I want these permanent effects to force the player into using abilities and strategies that they wouldn't normally  use. If you get a positive buff with any of them you start running the risk of players purposely trying to inflict an effect on a party member just so they can use a strategery that benifits from the buff.

Also from a story perspective I wanted the theme to be along the lines of "We won, but at what cost?" sort of thing. Maybe at the end the party of 3 that end up killing the final boss go back to the town and visit a hospital where you can see all your past party members and read what injurys they have.

My first thought is regarding progression. Typically a game needs to become more dense or complex as it goes on. I suppose this game manages that by restricting successful strategies, as the game progresses, naturally through the "disabilities."

I don't really think of the game progression as like a standard RPG, if you loose to a boss you reload and do some grinding before trying again. With this game I wanted more of an arcade feel were losing party members (either to death or injury) is like losing a life, and when you run ot of lives its Game Over.
The bosses won't get particulaly harder as you progress but you have less access to your favourite party members and strategies as the game moves on. I don't want to put the player in a position where they can't do anything or make a valid move but I do want them to experience panic as there best laid plans begin to fall apart.

Also I was thing that if I expanded the game I could always add new towns, with new chracters, who have access to new skills. That way I get a sense of progression.
Maybe the courage of a small village sticking up for itself is enough to get bigger towns involved.

[Graham-]

Yeah I get the arcade thing, and I like it. The joy comes from playing the game over and over, trying to get further by managing your units properly.

What I mean is... there needs to be enough tactical (or action-like) depth so that players can overcome the weaknesses of their party not just with proper party management but with skill in the actual combat. So at the beginning the player can be lazy with his strategies because no matter what happens he has many options to follow up with, but as the game progresses he has to think harder and bend the mechanics in more interesting ways.

There's nothing in what you said that suggested that this won't be possible. It was just my first thought.

--

The core sense of progression may be signaled by the "health" of the party at certain intervals. Say I'm at boss 3, and my party is at state X, when in the previous try it was at state X-5. That would be the progression. Maybe you would want accentuate the "health" of the party at intervals so that it is super obvious to the player what his progress is.

[rek]

Will you be able to swap out team members as the game progresses? It would defeat the idea of permanent disability if the player just dumps the cripple at the first chance, as any replacement would be just as good because no time was invested in levelling.

[Graham-]

I think the idea is that you can dump the cripple but quickly your whole town is filled with cripples. You have to start re-using guys at some point so you have to manage your team from the beginning.

[Udderdude]

I have a feeling the end result of this system will be that the player is forced to play really defensive and super careful, proceeding very slowly to prevent or limit major injuries which make your characters crippled.  While some people might like that thing, I think a better mix of offense and defense is better.

It could also easily succumb to randomness, as the effects of randomness could result in your whole team getting crippled in battle and killed before they even have a chance to escape.

Your example of a Wizard getting smacked so he forgets spells - wouldn't a good player/strategy prevent your casters from ever taking a heavy hit?

Where is the strategy in this case?  Are some crippling effects totally unavoidable?  That'd be pretty nasty, especially if they were randomly applied.

[Panurge]

This is a really interesting idea. I think it's going to need a lot of fine-tuning to balance it properly but if it works then it could be great.

How are you going to manage the ability to save the game? It will defeat the object if the player can keep replaying battles until their favourite characters come out unscathed. On the other hand, you probably don't want to keep the save points too far apart - there is little fun in playing back through sections of an rpg which you have already experienced, especially if there is no random content.

Also, you'll have to be careful to ensure that it will still be possible for the player to proceed at all times. If you lose key abilities (or even if your general level of stats drops too far) and keep slogging away without realising that you are doomed to failure then it could just be frustrating.

Anyway, you've probably already considered those points. Best of luck with this.

[matwek]

What I mean is... there needs to be enough tactical (or action-like) depth so that players can overcome the weaknesses of their party not just with proper party management but with skill in the actual combat. So at the beginning the player can be lazy with his strategies because no matter what happens he has many options to follow up with, but as the game progresses he has to think harder and bend the mechanics in more interesting ways.

Thats definitely going to be the hardest thing to manage. I don't want to put the player in a position where they can't win but I do want to make it increasingly more difficult for them.

Will you be able to swap out team members as the game progresses? It would defeat the idea of permanent disability if the player just dumps the cripple at the first chance, as any replacement would be just as good because no time was invested in levelling.

Yeah you will be able to swap out when you want but you have a finite amount of party member to swap in. You're going to reach a point where you have to use "damaged" party members, you just have to decide how damaged is "too damaged".

Your example of a Wizard getting smacked so he forgets spells - wouldn't a good player/strategy prevent your casters from ever taking a heavy hit?

Where is the strategy in this case?  Are some crippling effects totally unavoidable?  That'd be pretty nasty, especially if they were randomly applied.

The damage required to cause an injury are cumulative rather than coming from one heavy hit. So whilst you can protect someone from taking heavy damage eventually the amount of small hits might add up. Also these injurys aren't just caused by damage, I could come up with a condition for a character who doesn't like constantly being protected by other party members.

Some would be random and others would be down to circumstance, such as using too many health potions causing an addiction.

This is a really interesting idea. I think it's going to need a lot of fine-tuning to balance it properly but if it works then it could be great.

How are you going to manage the ability to save the game? It will defeat the object if the player can keep replaying battles until their favourite characters come out unscathed. On the other hand, you probably don't want to keep the save points too far apart - there is little fun in playing back through sections of an rpg which you have already experienced, especially if there is no random content.

Also, you'll have to be careful to ensure that it will still be possible for the player to proceed at all times. If you lose key abilities (or even if your general level of stats drops too far) and keep slogging away without realising that you are doomed to failure then it could just be frustrating.

Anyway, you've probably already considered those points. Best of luck with this.

I think save points would have to take place at the town before a quest, and the quests would have to be kept short and to the point.

As for reaching a situation where you can't procede, thats the point of the game. Its not like a standard RPG where prgoress is just a matter of grinding and trying again, this game is more like an arcade game where its a case of 'how far did you get before dying?'

[zez]

This sounds like it good be pretty sweet. If youre down too deal with the art assets/level design (nless we opt for procedural stuff, I can hang with that...) and collaborate on mechanics, Ill deal with the code and sound.
Its kind of a logic game for me too work on, my current overly long project I may or may not finish is a strategic rougelike, so some of the interface and behind the scenes stuff is probably already finished (ofcourse, anything and everything would need tweaking too accommodate the core mechanic,) and in a professional capacity, I teach special ed.
...
On that last note, it might be kind of cool if there where ways for characters too 'recover' from disabilities. Not in the sense of "I just drank a potion of growing back a limb" because that is pretty lame, but maybe there could be sidequests too heal tissue/brain damage that hinged on using the disabled character (only?) in ways made extra difficult by the disability.
Wouldnt make any sense too have it work on extreme cases, and it could also lead too different advantages (maybe the brain damaged mage learns a lightning spell instead of fireball, to reflect that the 'fire' synapses are still shot, but some ability remains...)

[Panurge]

As for reaching a situation where you can't procede, thats the point of the game. Its not like a standard RPG where prgoress is just a matter of grinding and trying again, this game is more like an arcade game where its a case of 'how far did you get before dying?'

Sorry, I didn't word that very well. I meant you'd need to make sure that no quests required some attribute or level which could conceivably have been permanently lost or ruled out because of a death or injury in an earlier level. If this were the case then the player could keep grinding away unawares from their last save point at a quest which couldn't be completed. I'm sure you've got that covered anyways.

[Muz]

What kind of programming? Are you looking for a specific language in particular?

Lol, I like the take on a 'dark' RPG genre. Send out some overenthusiastic newbies into a cave, and they come back shell-shocked and bitter.

[matwek]

What kind of programming? Are you looking for a specific language in particular?

Lol, I like the take on a 'dark' RPG genre. Send out some overenthusiastic newbies into a cave, and they come back shell-shocked and bitter.

Haven't really thought about what language to use, to be honest I don't really know enough about programming. It would only be a short RPG, straightforward but polished, a RPG maker might even be enough.

And it will definitely be dark, no brightly coloured chocobo racing. I was even thinking of having the final bosses biggest move causing psychological damage rather than physical. During the battle he could pick on a character by revealing one of his greatest fears and greatly droping his moral somehow. Picking on the young theif for having no parents or taunting the knight for never being strong enough to save his sick wife and so... Or is that going too dark?

[Graham-]

Or is that going too dark?

It's whatever you want.

[King Tetiro]

What kind of programming? Are you looking for a specific language in particular?

Lol, I like the take on a 'dark' RPG genre. Send out some overenthusiastic newbies into a cave, and they come back shell-shocked and bitter.

Haven't really thought about what language to use, to be honest I don't really know enough about programming. It would only be a short RPG, straightforward but polished, a RPG maker might even be enough.

And it will definitely be dark, no brightly coloured chocobo racing. I was even thinking of having the final bosses biggest move causing psychological damage rather than physical. During the battle he could pick on a character by revealing one of his greatest fears and greatly droping his moral somehow. Picking on the young theif for having no parents or taunting the knight for never being strong enough to save his sick wife and so... Or is that going too dark?

That's not going dark that's going badass man. Although I'm a busy programmer (finishing a project this month and finishing another during january and february), I'll happily give advice on how to achieve such things. And test of course. We RPG developers need to stick together

[Maud'Dib Atreides]

aw no comic relief??

[matwek]

aw no comic relief??

Of course they'll be some comic relief. His decent into a tourtured brutal depression will be a long fall.