First, I would like to thank anyone who is kind enough to read this entire post and provide feedback. I have some general questions at the end that I would love to hear responses on, but any feedback on any part of the design is appreciated. Tentative Project Name: Luminence Calling Genre: Turn-Based RPG Language: C++, probably DirectX Introduction Luminence Calling is an independent project to create a turn-based RPG. Gameplay will be similar to the classic Turn-based genre (e.g. Final Fantasy 1-6, Dragon Warrior), but with a game world reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics, utilizing isometric projection graphics and anime-style sprites. In order to provide a sense of scope to the game, the entire world map will be sculpted as an isometric terrain. Part of the goal for this is to offset the monotony of leveling-up by utilizing a more varied area to explore while doing so. Characters The game will utilze a job/class-based advancement method combined with experience points. Some example jobs include Warrior, Mage, Monk, Thief, Scout, and Healer. Jobs/classes can be switced at Guild Halls in each town. Parties consist of four characters, and over the course of the game, players will have the option of recruiting many potential characters into their parties. Each character has advantages and disadvantages, and can only learn certain jobs. Battle Flow Random Encounters are utilized; to make programming random encounters easier, each terrain type has several arenas to battle in. Battles are done on a turn-based system with a power bar indicating when a character is ready for action. Very reminiscent of the earlier Final Fantasy games. Money - earning and uses for Players have a variety of ways to earn and spend money in the game. In addition to fighting and finding treasure chests, there are several mini-game offerings such as diving for pearls, participating in Gladiator battles, and robbery which can earn your characters cash. They can then spend that money on new and used equipment, transportation, and property (because no one likes to sleep in an inn all the time). NPCs Each NPC in the game has a variety of potential dialog. A randomized grammar engine has been designed for the game to allow NPCs to say a variety of different things to keep them both interesting and useful. Here might be an interaction with an NPC: TALK -> Welcome to Moes, Im Moe! TALK -> What would you like? DUFF ($5) -> Here's your Duff. TALK -> Burns' power plant has had a lot of accidents lately. TALK -> What? You wanna buy something? TALK -> I haven't seen Lenny or Carl lately... TALK -> Would you like a pickled egg? NO -> They're good. Lenny's favorite. ... By combining random bits of info (such as offering a pickled egg) with useful bits (accidents at plant, Lenny and Carl missing), NPCs can perform multiple functions, and still sound interesting. Three basic categories of dialog are used - Regional (things that all Springfield residents might say), Character-specific (Moe missing Lenny and Carl), and Event-Driven (Action to purchase beer after Moe offers, Lenny and Carl thanking you the action of rescuing them). Feedback Questions Here's several questions I hope to receive feedback on: - What do you think of the overall design? Any elements you particularly like or dislike? - How big is too big? It will be a single player game, and I would like a nice blend between action and story progression. - Mini-games and optional side-quests: I like the idea of having things to do that don't always advance the story, sometimes they're just fun things - like Chocobo racing in FF7, or the digging mini-game in Zelda 3, are there any interesting mini-games that might be particularly fun in an Isometric environment? - More features: I was thinking of including some additional elements. Some of these potential elements are: Day & Night transitions - Sleep & Fatigue (Each day would take about 1.5 real-time hours, and players may take a short nap, sleep for a moderate amount of time, or get a full-night's sleep. More transportation alternatives. Different classes of ships, from row-boats to 3-mast vessels, several classes of airships, and maybe some horses, wagons, and carriages. Thanks in advance to everyone who has read this!

Hi,

Nice ideas, here are my comments.

1. About job switching - This needs some elaboration. I mean, a level-20 warrior doesn't just turn into a level-20 mage all of a sudden. Would you allow your player to develop each of the jobs separately? What about XP? Would the user have different XP requirements and accumulation for each job separately, or will it be summed up, therefore making it very hard to go from level-1 mage to level-2 mage when you are already level-20 warrior?

2. Regarding battles - will you have specific monsters in specific areas, or will the monsters change according to the user level? Also, always waiting for the player will result in a somewhat easy game, wouldn't it? The player should keep himself out of harm's way when he's not ready for a fight.

3. I loved the idea of having quests for sheer gold. Property, well, I don't know :-) It's not YOU who is sleeping in an inn, after all ;-) What would a property offer you other than just sleeping in it?

4. Chatting can be developed into a whole Turing-test attempt. Question is, do you really need to put an effort in there. If chatting has a real meaning, then ok - but then it would need to be scripted or maneuvered correctly. If chatting has no meaning and you're throwing it in just for the AI feel, I'd suggest investing AI thoughts in other areas, such as efficient NPCs actions in combat, interesting foes and so on.

5. How big is too big, you've asked. Well, personally if a game is good, innovative and keeps on surprising me - I wouldn't care if it took me 2 years to finish it. The problem is that you'll find it very hard to keep the surprise level high. Eventually you'll start reinventing yourself. This is the point where you want to stop and wrap it up, or otherwise people will be just bored and that will be the last impression they'll have. Nobody would like to go on yet another quest which is just like the 40 last quests, only with a different view and monsters. I recall that in neverwinter nights you had several chapters. The first chapter wanted you to collect 4 items. That was a real thrill. The next chapter wanted you to collect 5 items and really wasn't surprising, and the story was, well, very expected. The next chapter had you collecting another 3 items, and when it was finished I was actually glad it was over. It really felt like WORK, instead of being FUN. This is a narrow line which takes a master to control. On the other hand, of course you wouldn't want your game to be a 3-hours game... Good luck! ;-)

6. I can't help you with actual mini-quests, but I do feel the same way as you do, and the games I liked best were those that had me going on like 40 quests simultaneously. Bioware had mastered this theme, with Baldur's Gate (1 and 2) and Torment. Their problem was, like in NWN, the fact that you could really FEEL how their team had put a lot of effort into the first chapter, and then it kept deteriorating. Torment was a bit of an exception as it was a great game, but even there - the first chapter took me twice the time it took me to complete ALL the others.

7. The additional features you've mentioned are all nice to have. Also consider teleportation, and - as I recall from Might and Magic (Wooha, nostalgy) there was this spell you could use to place a marker somewhere, and then to return to it from wherever you were later on. VERY useful.

Good luck :-)

1. I haven't really decided how to do the job situation, or whether to include it at all yet. That part of the game is still very theoretical. The basic way I planned on doing it was that your character's basic attributes decided HP, attack, defense, etc, while your job decided what special abilities you learned.

2. There will be specific monsters for each area. The world-map will basically be described in a series of 16X16 isometric maps linked together, and each 16X16 tile gets its own list of random encounter possibilities. The same is true for interiors. The map will be largely open to the player from the start, although certain areas will be inaccessible due to tough monsters, and rarely plot events.

3. Once you own property, its free to stay there. Inns and houses offer better beds to sleep on than the wilderness (replenish more fatigue per hour of sleep), and Inns at the larger, more important cities are more expensive. My original plan included buying furniture for the houses as well, but that might not be implemented (at least not in the first version), since I would have to deal with players placing the furniture.

4. Mostly, this is because I already have the tools to do this, so it doesn't require a lot of work on my part (except for writing the scripts). I was always frustrated with the guards at Corneria who kept telling me "Welcome to Corneria" - I mean... at least they could say "Man, I could use a snack!" or other random comments on the side.

5. I agree with this. That's a problem in a lot of great games, which is why I plan on working to develop innovative storyline missions and making side-quests that are less innovative. I've been doing a lot of reading online about different basic quest types and trying to think how I can weave them into the story together.

6. Some of the mini-games/side-quests are designed to help the story-line, such as fighting in an arena, or farming (similar to harvest moon, but... more basic), but with additional levels or elements outside of the story-line. Others are designed to just be something you can try if you want to, but have no connection to the main quests - like the Weapon bosses from FF7.

1. Well, maybe "skills" would be more appropriate here, and not "jobs". You have used the term "jobs" as if it was the class of the character (basing my terminology on D&D and most RPG games). Skills may be much more diverse, and any character can learn any skill (though some classes might be more adept with some skills).

2. How do you plan to balance the player with the monsters?

3. Be careful not to turn this into "The Sims 485" ;-) Well, in that case an investment in a property should be really worth it. Also, I presume that the property will exist only in a specific town, which is a disadvantage compared to inns.

4. So long as this feature doesn't become your main occupation while developing the game, it could be nice.

5. Sounds like a plan to me!

6. I'd go for special rewards. For example, a side quest to rescue the daughter of a trainer who'd teach you some important skill in return; A really difficult message to pass between two cities, with lots of ambushes and things like that, that will result in a nice sum of money (or maybe a property somewhere...) In Torment, IIRC, there were "threads" of quests - you would finish one task and immediately get the next one, which is related to that specific thread; all the while you would maintain 6-7 threads like these, in addition to single mini quests. That worked for me.

I'll have to do some research on Torment, maybe buy the game (hehehe). As an option, I think quest threads feel pretty solid as far as developing different layers of quests. This also gives players more freedom as far as where and when they want to complete certain tasks. Not up for arena fighting? Don't worry - you can always come back to that later.

I definitely don't want this game to revert to the sims, but I think a little bit of customization is never a bad thing. You're right, I don't want to go overboard with this - and I certainly don't plan on introducing neighbors, kids, or an obnoxious "fun" meter. Im the sort of gamer, though, who likes collecting things. I have a blast collecting all the cars in Gran Turismo, or hunting for the last chocograph in Final Fantasy 9. I got all the characters in Chrono Cross (before the game was stolen), even though I never even used 12 of them, so for me, having something in the game to collect, whether its furniture or mutant chocobos or blue mage spells, I'll have something.

At this stage in the planning process, Im not too concerned with monster balance. It's something I'll have to deal with, but its more finetuning monster stats than anything else, meanwhile I still have a whole game engine to develop.

Im also working on a side-project that's going to prep me for working on this game. It's a small 2D top-down RPG (like the original Final Fantasy), that should only take about 5-10 hours to complete. It will utilize some of the elements from this game (such as the dialogue script), and some of its own. Its a lot less technically intensive, but at least I'll know where I stand and have something of moderate difficulty to be proud of.

I'm a little confused about the battle system. Is it going to play like FFT, more more like a FFT-slash-traditional RPG hybrid, sorta like Shining Force? (In SF, the units moved around like FFT, and when they attacked, it moved to a more traditional RPG system, where the attacking unit hit, and the defending unit make a retaliatory strike)

To put a restriction on class changing, you might want to charge the player for each change, more depending on the level of the character. Also, in Ogre Battle 64, You were required to have certain equipment before you could change classes.

As far as isometric minigames, You might want to think about doing a Q*Bert clone. I've never really played it, but it's basicaly an isometric game. Also, Easter Egg hunts and maybe footraces wouldn't be a bad idea.

No, this is not a tactics game. The battle mode will pretty much play out just like a traditional Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior game.

A system without leveling up, but with Core Skills and Sub Skills.

Core skills are the ones you get xp for

so for example Thrust + Slash + Parry = Sword Fighting

using a sword would increase those skills but alos would enable you to still use anothe weapon that uses one or all of those Core skill, like a pike for example which would use Thrust.

and a sub skill is the result of skill mixed together.


another one would be Kick + Punch = Fighting
but Kick + Punch + acrobatics = Martial Arts

essentially an rpg with this system would need about 10 skills for each speciality

unarmed, melee, ranged weapon, etc...

I don't know how crazy I am about that system. To be honest, I really like the Diablo 2 System - where your character has levels and skills that are divided into different sets. The thing I don't like about Diablo 2 though is the particular skills - Barbarians get a bunch of weapons masteries, but what does the poor witch-girl (what was she again?) never gets to wield her staff like Jackie Chan.

E.g.

Knights can get sword skills, shield skills, protection skills, and some healing magic
Lunar Mages can earn staff skills, fire magic, ice magic, and team magic (like Palom and Porom, only better)
Monks can earn barehanded combat skills, stat-boosting magic, and some fire magic
...

and the different characters can study certain jobs:
Homer can be a knight, an archer, samurai, or ninja
Ned can be a monk, thief, ninja, samurai, or priest
Lisa can be a black mage, white mage, fire mage, ice mage, or lunar mage
...

Either that, or I'll just have to pigeon-hole each character into a specific class and give each access to specific skills. We'll see. I'll sleep on it.