What's in *your* backpack?

So while I wait for a project backup and a Vimeo upload to complete, I figure I would take the chance to do a weekly development blog.

Epic Frontiers hit a pretty nice milestone today: The inventory class of functionality hit 86% completion. Why not 100%, you ask? Elementary, my dear . There are some features in the progress list that cannot be completed at this time, but do not affect the actual features of the game. Functions that do things such as changing textures or geometry when items are equipped. So for all intents and purposes, Epic Frontiers has a testable inventory system. Here, have a look:


The above shows looting and a few other things. The below shows a makeshift trading window with some inter-character inventory operations happening:


Snazzy. I'll tell you what else is snazzy(tm): Being able to embed these videos with Vimeo. Saves me the time from having to wait to see the other guys to show them my progress, and let's me share it with you too. Good stuff.

So with that progress announced, the next target in my sights is probably the AIAE system, along with its hooks into the NPC conversation system. You'll get some videos of that in action as well, but probably more of being in the form of the conversation side of things. But all that planning aside...

The inventory system is pretty full-featured, with things like autostacking of items and all the other basic features of inventory systems in place thus-far. Of course, the 86% completion will inevitably go down as we add a few things to the list that we want to see. This is not out of feature-creep, mind you, but something else.

In most of the discussions between the three of us designers, we're constantly talking about situations we would like to "support" in the game. Today's discussion wheeled around to something we've kicked around a few times, and probably will a few times more, until the features are either in place or testing confirms that it's not good for gameplay: Incarceration.

The premise of trying to make Epic Frontiers closer to a Pen and Paper game means that we have to think about and try our best to solve gameplay dilemmas such as this, but first I have to back up and talk about a few basic changes we're making. The first is that being killed in the game is indeed Permadeath (gasp!)- but that's not to say that you're going to be killed often... or even rarely, if you don't want to. The solution to Permadeath was to make it so that a player must voluntarily submit to that game-rule in order to gain a very rare, very hard, very prestigious achievement. And should the player fail and die, his next character will not start out empty-handed and at "zero", nor will the older character be forgotten in the gameworld. In order to allow character death, it cannot be any other way than to ensure that the player is taken care of both in success and in failure.

Now, if you don't really have to die except in trying to go for these uber-achievements, then what's the big deal? What happens when you get jumped by some Charkritian bandits in the deep deserts of the Hamak'Del and your hitpoints go to zero? Isn't that death?? Actually, it means you've been incapacitated. One of the things that gnaws at me in MMO's is dying fifty times a day and just running off to my headstone to come back to life. There's a lot of problems with this: What about NPC's and MOB's- don't they get to come back? Why not? Who buried me, and why put me in the ground or give me a headstone if all I need to do is run my ghost over to my carcass and- poof!- I'm back! No, death needs to mean something, and taking it out of that context is the first step towards making it happen. Of course, laying there incapacitated, you'll eventually get picked up by the roving rescue teams that are funded by the goverments of the area, and brought to one of the many anonymous medical clinics, where you will wake up to finish healing from your wounds. Sounds... What's the word... Reasonable.

So now we have a game where a character can be knocked out in combat and left for dead instead of actually being killed, and situations that are extreme enough to kill the character, but only if the character wishes and voluntarily opts into those situations, which are not designed to be commonplace. That is the underlying mechanic for incarceration. It's not the actual reason why we did that- it's a great underlying mechanic for a role-playing game as a whole, not just for individual features, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is, we were toying with the idea of how to make jail fun. We've actually managed to come up with an interesting gameplay design today that has a lot of promise, though it does need additional fleshing out to account for different types of players, but we're starting to feel good about it, even to the point of turning it into a feature.

The point of all this is: When you design your game, are you designing the game around your features, or the features around your game? It's a rhetorical question. Many people design the game around the features they outline in the beginning, which can be restrictive to the scenarios that they think of, leading to them wanting to put additional features into the game. They call that "feature creep". However, would you still call it feature creep if your design method involved trying to look at all the situations you want to represent in a game during the design phase and put those features in the list as they're being developed? That's a rhetorical question too. For both questions, the answer doesn't matter so much as the end result because neither answer really addresses whether your game will actually be fun to play. So maybe my point has no point after all, but is just trying to make people think about how they think about their game design practices.