The Dord of Darien

Welcome to the projects

Now I feel like a rapper. Excellent.

I’m using this category to discuss — nay, rap about — my pending game design project. Sure, maybe I’ll never get the damn thing developed and published, but game design is my passion. It’s what I do, and I’m doing it whether or not it’ll ever see the light of day. But game design isn’t something that can be kept to oneself — games, like all art, are to be shared. So if I can’t turn my design into a living, breathing game, I can at least turn it into a series of dull-ass blog posts. And who knows, maybe an anonymous internet billionaire will see this blog, become enthralled with it, and offer to finance the development before heading to his top-secret subterranean crime-fighting lair. Maybe I can even get his autograph!

Oh, note that these are blog posts, and will be written conversationally and probably with both jokes and swear words. I’m under no misconception that this is an actual proper design document, and you shouldn’t be either. Unless you’ll pay me, in which case feel free.

The game I’m working on is a dungeon-crawl-type action game; the closest analogue I’m thinking of is The Legend of Zelda. I’m presently envisioning an isometric style; this is largely because I’m trying to be bounded and realistic and assuming that I shouldn’t go for full 3D in my first-ever effort, especially if I’m hoping to find a handful of interested parties and go forward with this. Ideally, I’m looking for the game to play primarily in two dimensions (XY), but with limited interactivity in the third dimension (Z), such as ledges and staircases and pits and such. There is an overworld, which is a bounded section of a larger world (room for expansion / sequels); the plan at present is to treat the overworld as a "level select" screen rather than having free roaming, thereby reducing backtracking, since the game is structured as a series of "missions" involving going to a remote location, performing a task, and returning to base.

The base of operations for the players is located in a typical video game hub city, complete with shops and NPCs to talk to and whatnot. The players will spend some time in town gathering supplies and information, and then locate "questgiver" NPCs with major quests for them. Once they receive a major quest for a particular dungeon, other NPCs may have minor quests for that dungeon that offer extra rewards. To avoid the problem of having to talk to every NPC over and over again hunting for quests, we’ll implement a system like the "question marks" in World of Warcraft to indicate which NPCs have a quest you can pick up, and which will have a quest to give you once you’ve found the requisite dungeon. Once the players are done in town, they head out to the map, choose the dungeon to head to, and get started spelunking.

Play in the dungeon primarily involves making it past obstacles, traps, and monsters to acheive the goal set out in the quest. On the way there may be placed treasures to find in hard-to-reach places, in addition to treasure drops from mobs and (of course) the rewards for completing quests. I’m thinking of a mob loot system similar to that used in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where there will be a pool of "common drops" (simple things like health restores or small amounts of money) that can drop from any mob and drop rather frequently, along with more interesting (and less common) drops that are per-mob. It is of course important that the game furnishes sufficient fixed loot and quest rewards that it can be completed without necessitating the "farming" of mobs for certain items, but beyond that, hey, treasure is fun.

That’s the broad overview; I have a lot more designed and ready to talk about, but I don’t want to blow my whole load on one epic 30,000-word blog post. Please, if you’re interested in reading more about this, let me know in the comments. And if you have any questions aboud anything, by all means ask. I’d love to talk about it.

Next time, assuming I don’t get any particular requests that need to be addressed first, I plan to talk a bit about the mechanics and controls. Stay tuned!

April 2nd, 2008 Posted by Darien | My secret project | one comment