Not sure if anyone would want to read this, but I feel like blogging some of the design decisions we're making with the game. If nothing else, this will help us streamline our thoughts and keep us focused!
But most importantly, would be great to get everyone's feedback and ideas too! And who knows, maybe some of the design choices we made might help you all too.
1) Designing Progression for an Open World Game.This proved much harder than we initially thought. We looked at games like Skyrim and Dragons Dogma, and found things we liked in both, but also glaring flaws as well.
SkyrimWhat we loved about this was how accessible the world felt. It really felt like you could go anywhere, and that really aided in exploration. If you feel you could safely reach your goal, the motivation to explore off the beaten path is higher. However, this made progression in the character feel flatter than most other games. You never really have any trouble fighting monsters, and there wasn't that feeling of meeting an enemy that is too tough, but coming back later and completely destroying it.
Dragons DogmaIn some ways, I feel progression was done much better here. Parts of the world truly felt dangerous at the beginning, and when you got more powerful, you could return to these areas and completely decimate those foes that were once kicking your butt! However, this led to deaths that came from nowhere because it wasn't clear that you were in an area too high level for you. Coupled with the weird checkpoint system, this meant losing hours of progress if you weren't careful!
And now for what we did in Cat Quest....
So that's our whole map at the moment. We opted for a balance between Skyrim and Dragons Dogma. We wanted the world to feel accessible, because exploration was our main goals. However, we also wanted to give players a strong sense of progression with their character. Enemies that used to take 10 hits to kill, would eventually just take 1. Progression and exploration...two things we had to nail no matter what.
So as you can see, what we did was start players right down south. This is where enemies are easiest. We tell players that going further north, things get slightly tougher. However, this is where we cheat a bit.
Enemies on the world map are always beatable no matter what! Sure enemies near the south are easier, but even as you travel north, enemies get harder, but never TOO hard. A level 1 character could still fight ANY enemy on the map, it would just be difficult...but not impossible.
In addition to this, we gave enemies two values to calculate their level:
- A Min Level
- A Level Scale
The Min Level is the minimum level of the enemy. The enemy will never go below this level. We use this to set the bar for how difficult an area should be.
But because this is going to be a long game, we wanted enemies to still be fun to fight against as the game went along. As such, we gave enemies a level scale, where they would get more powerful as the player gets more power, but
never as powerful as the player. So if we give a level scale of 0.5 for example, enemies will always try to be half the player's level, and since our growth is exponential, players will still ALWAYS be getting more powerful than their enemies.
That's for enemies on the overworld. We mix things up in dungeons and caves. These are where we want that Progression feeling to come from. If you look back above, those are the level numbers of all the caves in the game. The red numbers are the 'hard' dungeons relative to those around it.
If you notice, we always surround 'hard' dungeons with manageable ones. This means that if a player explores and comes across a dungeon too hard for him, there is a always a manageable one nearby they can play. Remember how exploration was key for us, we needed players to feel that they could explore, and that there will always be something for them to do!
The 'hard' dungeons would be places where they would see early, and when they got more powerful later on, they would want to return to these dungeons to see how much they've grown. The manageable dungeons are just there so players have something to do en route to beating the 'hard' dungeons.
So that's pretty much how we tried to tackle exploration and progression in Cat Quest! Hope to hear stuff from you guys soon too(don't leave me hanging!) And if you all want,
Cat Quest is on Greenlight right now too, and all votes are welcomed!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=791480721
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