Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Game Play
Of course, while the story of an RPG is important, you want your game play to be just a bit more enticing than just
going into a single 30-floor dungeon and killing things (although that
has
worked on more than one occasion as well,
especially for other genres, such as the action RPG). Basically, ask yourself this question: Would I play this game from
start to finish? If you can't answer yes to that question with a straight face, you have to reevaluate your game, or have
friends do it for you. A tried-and-true template for an RPG's game flow is listed below.
•
A town gives the player quests with objectives located at a nearby dungeon.
•
Said dungeon is filled with said objectives and a boss.
•
After defeating the boss, the player unlocks the next area.
•
This is a new town and a new dungeon.
•
Repeat until the final dungeon with the final boss.
It may seem ridiculously simple and boring, but several famous RPG franchises (
Dragon Quest
and
Final Fantasy
come to mind) had plots for most of their earlier iterations that followed that general sequence. Of course, there's no
problem with making the game a bit more nonlinear and allowing your players to branch off into areas they perhaps
shouldn't be in yet (as long as there is an appropriate risk-to-reward ratio). Also, evaluate whether you want to add
vehicles to your game, such as airships, submarines, or horses. You might even make certain vehicles available only
after lengthy sidequests but reward the player for doing said sidequests by allowing the special vehicle to access
otherwise inaccessible areas. Here are some other things to consider concerning your game's game play.
•
What type of progression will you be using?
Will you have the conventional system of gaining
experience via combat/quest completion and then grant skills/spells/abilities as your
characters level up? Or maybe you will go for something a little less conventional, perhaps
a system similar to
Final Fantasy 2
(the real
FF2
, not the one released in the West that is
technically
Final Fantasy 4
), in which you get stats by doing, so that if you take hits, you gain
health. If you cast a spell, you gain magic points, and so forth.
•
How difficult do you want the game to be?
Easier isn't always equal to boring, mind you.
Chrono Trigger
is one of the most renowned Japanese RPGs of all time, and I've always felt
that the battle system and encounters were on the easier side for such a game.
Shin Megami
Tensei
, on the other hand, is rather fair, if extremely challenging, for newer players. Fairness is
ultimately more important than difficulty when it comes to RPG game play.
•
How many characters will the player's party have?
Is the protagonist an army of one, or does
he/she have allies? I'll elaborate on the importance of this in the following paragraph.
Balance is an important consideration when you are designing your game. A preceding bullet point asks you, the
reader, about your party size. There is a concept in video game theory, especially when related to turn-based games,
called
action economy
. Generally, each character only gets a certain number of actions in the period of time defined as
a turn. The more characters you have, the more actions your party receives in total. For example, the original
Dragon
Quest
had the player control a single hero. That meant that effects that caused the player character to miss a turn (such
as sleep) were particularly dangerous. It also created a trade-off whereby if you were close to defeating an enemy but
your hero was near death, you had to decide whether to heal yourself or attack again. If you were making an RPG with
a single playable character, you would have to keep such facts in mind.
On the flip side, if you have a party of three or four characters, you must design some of the party's potential
enemies around that. Maybe the party will face off against venomous plants that can spew poison at the entire group.
When you have multiple characters, you can be a little more liberal with effects that cause turn-skipping, as the player
would still have other characters to defeat those effects or otherwise continue fighting. A game's balance is one of the
hardest things to perfect but is, thankfully, something you can work toward with the feedback you receive from your
game's players and your own play-testing.
