Fellow gamer and blogger AmstradHero has been doing a series on the game mechanic of level scaling (on the why, the drawbacks, and design considerations, with more to come). I thought I’d throw my two cents in about level scaling in RPGs, with a subtle agenda to talk about how I’ve been thinking about game mechanics for Kung Fu Legends. Read more…
Lately I’ve joined an RPG group. You know, the old-school, actually roll dice kind of game. It’s interesting after exclusively getting my RPG fix through computers games. But, as you may have guessed, this post is full of geekiness. Read more…
When you introduce a game to someone else, you tend to break it down for them by genre, setting and then maybe add in the gimmick that sets it apart from the rest. We all have an idea of what it means for a game to be a platformer, a first-person shooter, a third-person shooter, a real-time strategy game, heck even a role-playing game, despite the genericness of the monikers. By now there are well-established mechanics and expectations for all sorts of game genres. In platformers you are expected to jump. A lot. You are expected to build up an army from scratch in real-time strategy games. There’s nothing in the general idea of these genres that dictate that this is the way it has to be, but these are gameplay mechanics that have worked well. Not only this, but the fundamental style of your game has to more or less match the genre’s aesthetic so as to not scare new players off. Read more…
I recently watched a fascinating TED talk by Simon Sinek on starting with “why” rather than “how” or “what”. It gave me a chance to think over some of the things in my life and evaluate possible reasons why they succeeded or failed. While I definitely need to meditate more on Sinek’s ideas to see if I completely agree with it, I thought it might be interesting to share these evaluations of successes or failures and thrash out the idea. This blog is a place for me to discuss my many creative and technical projects, so I thought I might do it here, and focus just on projects (it’s not as fun subjecting personal experiences to philosophical framework in public 
).
I’m currently working on the basic game engine for Kung Fu Legends. I’m the only person working on the game and I’ve never successfully made a whole game engine, so progress is slow. To my delight I have one of the main subsystems up and ready – the graphics subsystem, powered by the Ogre3d library. I can change the background colour and display text on the window, which is pretty basic but it means it’s working. I’m also doing a lot of work of figuring out the software flow for the game engine (separate from the game world simulation) and I thought I’d talk about some of the ideas I’ve had there.
One way I want to make Kung Fu Legends a bit different is by making it all about the long-term strategy. In stories everywhere, the protagonist has a goal that they strive singularly towards. All the story between the introduction and climax is towards this goal. In fantasy stories, this is typically the arc of character development, where the protagonist and their allies build up their strength and alliance to defeat the antagonist. In fantasy RPGs, this is typically simplified to a bunch of possibly related encounters that allow you to build up your statistics so that the accounting on the final fight looks epic. There’ll be key milestones of acquiring some artifact of power and maybe roughing up the bad guy’s henchmen for intel, but everything else roughly equates to dicking about to increase stats. Read more…
Items are easily liquidated in most RPGs, especially MMORPGs. The main reasons for this are utility, efficiency and flexibility. It allows you to sidestep the minutia of item-for-item bartering, and incrementally build up a fortune. But as with most game mechanics, this is firmly anchored to the one true indicator of progress: the character’s level. Read more…
Rock Paper Shotgun have a nice article on traditional RPGs vs computer RPGs. If I can get my narrativist RPG Kung Fu Legends up and running, I’d be interesting to see how it went on this debate (old and silly as it is).
Maybe you’ll get a purity scale for RPGs, with old school first edition D&D players way way over on the far right.
As Yahtzee pointed out in his review of Dragon Age: Origins, we’re in a weird situation if there exists (without irony) the concept of a “generic fantasy game”. Even moreso when that phrase is basically equivalent to “action- and statistics-oriented role-playing game”. Seems like it’s time for people to try something a bit different, and that’s the point of my project Kung Fu Legends. Read more…