Game Design, Part 1 (Patreon)

Greetings!

Last night I completed postwork on the H-scene renders, so the only thing left is writing. There's a fair bit of it left to go, but one of the larger pieces of this release is finally done. So forward!

I wanted to share this news, but I also wanted to share some of my thoughts about development and describe some of the challenges I've encountered. Developing the game has posed a number of them; fortunately most are mundane, but the most serious ones center around the topic of game design. I've thought quite a bit about game design - especially since the release of 0.7 - and in an effort to clarify my own thoughts on game design and how it relates to this project, I decided to write about it. 'Writing is thinking!' as one of my old professors used to say. I always thought this was good advice.

I'm not done with the essay, but it's already quite long. Rather than post one giant wall of text, I thought I would break it up over 3 or so posts and space them out a bit over time. What follows is the first part - I hope you find it interesting. Please let me know your thoughts, and thank you for your support!

You May Not Care About Game Design...

 But game design cares about you! At least if you make games.

Some people meticulously plan out the details of any project before starting on it; if it's building a house, they'll work out the color scheme for the living room first. If it's writing a short story, before they set pen to page they'll plan out detailed backstories for characters you'll only meet once in a coffee shop. I think you should avoid being that guy; that guy usually ends up spending so much time planning that they never get around to actually creating something. But there is some value in planning; the problem is that as a beginner you may not understand what's important to plan out and what isn't.

This was certainly the case with me and The Proteus Effect. When first creating the game, I spent a lot of time thinking about characters, story and art design; I didn't think that much about game design. Actually, I guess that isn't true; I thought a lot about the things I didn't want. I didn't want the game to be grindy. Perhaps I spent too long playing grindy games in the past, but nowadays whenever I play a game that requires me to do something repeatedly, I always get a mental image of some poor mouse trapped in a Skinner box, repeatedly mashing a lever, hoping desperately that a food pellet will eventually come tumbling down the chute.

I also knew that I didn't want to make heavy use of standard RPG Maker combat. Most of the time I find it terribly boring. There are things one can do to make it interesting, but it takes a lot of work. And even if you manage to create some interesting mechanics, it still gets boring if you're forced to do it a lot.

A problem you need to solve if you're designing a story based game - one I didn't fully appreciate at the time - is that you need to give your players something interesting to do between important parts of the plot. Most games do this by having a core mechanic - the player runs around shooting baddies with a plasma rifle, say - and the gameplay can become more interesting as other mechanics are layered on top of it later on. 

RPG Maker provides the newbie developer with a core mechanic - the standard RPG battle - but I effectively decided I didn't want to use it. I didn't appreciate at the time what an important decision this was, since it directly influences other important parts of game design: rewards and progression. It's important to provide the player rewards for playing your game; It keeps them engaged and interested. Usually these rewards come in the form of increased player power - the more they play your game, the more badass stuff they're able to do in your world. This also lets you, the game designer, set up more difficult challenges to match the player's greater power - and when the player faces these more difficult challenges, but finds that they have enough power to meet them, they tend to find that fun.

Most of the rewards in standard RPG games are centered around making the player more powerful in standard RPG battles. Killing monsters gives them experience points, which let them go up in levels and become more powerful. Sometimes the monsters drop superior weapons, which make the player more powerful. And, if nothing else, the monsters usually drop gold, which lets the player buy better gear and become more powerful.

If this sounds like a grindfest, that's because it is. I specifically wanted to avoid giving players incentives to grind, so I eschewed the 'experience' system, and made gold not particularly useful. That's fine, but I didn't think through enough what I would replace these incentive systems with. 

I wanted the actual gameplay be sort of like WoW boss battles - multiphase encounters that required you to figure out what the boss abilities were, the tools you had available to counter them, and finally execute the complicated dance you'd need to win. This sort of thing is complex to create - especially within the RPG Maker engine - so as a step on the way to that, I decided to create minigames.

In the early days of developing the game, the word "minigame" irked me. I thought that when most folks heard "minigame" in the context of an RPG Maker game, they immediately thought of buggy, poorly-constructed un-fun bits they had to slog through in order to get to the rest of the stuff they cared about. And my stuff wasn't like that because I created it, right?

Or so I thought. I still do think my minigames - even the early ones - are better made than most, but my emphasis on minigames has proven to be one of the more divisive aspects of the game. I think a lot of this boils down to expectations. Some people think they hate RPG Maker games because they associate them with grinding and tons of repetitive battles, which they find immensely boring. Other folks seem to like the battles, and get irritated when they think they're signing up for a SNES-era Final Fantasy experience and instead find themselves healing chickens.

The Proteus Effect is, in a sense, an RPG Maker game for people who don't like RPG Maker games. By downplaying its core mechanic, I hoped to appeal to people who weren't fond of most games made with the engine. 

Part 2 will deal with minigames in The Proteus Effect.