Some people have been asking what my game project is about. For a long time I would just summarize it every time someone asked, but today I finally got around to putting together material that I'd written in different places and editing it into a semi-coherent overall introduction. I'm probably NOT going to post regular updates about the project here, but I'm posting this, so that I can have someplace to point people when they ask. I know the text is rough; and the paragraphing is weird because this originated as a chatlog - actually several chatlogs. Just felt the need to explain that so I wouldn't be embarrassed. :) And please feel free to ask any questions you want!
It's an exploration platformer, with lots of story. My mantra, that I feel I will need frequent reminders of through the project, is that it's a platformer enhanced by pokemon elements, not the reverse. Because a pokemon enhanced by platform elements won't sell; too crowded an area.
So for example I intend to put lots of loving detail into the play control of each creature type, and give them unique moves and stuff. The abilities that you level up in the skill tree won't be abstract names and spells and stuff, they'll be actual perform-during-play moves.
I have a lot of backstory for the world it's set on. I decided the human trainer in pokemon-genre games is totally superfluous and primarily exists to be your map-screen avatar and so that the NPCs have someone to talk to. So I got rid of him. Rather like Myst, you're going to spend a lot of time discovering and reading through ancient libraries.
It's not a silent protagonist though, you're a very specific character - a linguist from Earth who's been astrally projected to this world because none of the actual diplomats were willing to do it. (Someone commented that silent protagonists are on their way out; I said, nah, they'll never be totally dead - cf. the first chapter of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics".)
Dialogue is gonna be Sierra-like conversation trees, except it's a conversation web, not a tree. To motivate the player to talk to the same character more than once, despite having not yet advanced the overall plot since last time, you won't be able to explore the full web in any one session. For the simple and obvious reason that as much as they might like to, people have better things to do than to talk to you indefinitely.
Obviously - as everyone points out when I mention this part - there has to be a careful balance struck there because it could become frustrating. I'll find the balance through experiment.
Somebody observed: “Conversations are tricky in games. Either you have the simple model where you talk to some stranger who happens to impart secrets in two sentences, or you have the Mass Effect model where you end up talking far too much for most people to care. “Mass Effect is a great game, but most will say the dialogue is far too extensive... But it's nice when you have a choice as to how you respond. I can tell someone 'thank you' or 'shut up' in the same choices and get an actual different response.” Right. I call that Sierra style. :)
I hope that the dialogue will be a) interesting, and b) only necessary if you want the full experience like all the sidequests and stuff. Another thing I'm doing is giving you the option to just walk away at any time if you realize "oh shit I didn't mean to talk to this person and now I'm stuck in their menus".
Another another thing is I'm using the Metroid Prime scanner. Somebody in an indy-game-dev channel thought I should only do that if the character had a good reason to have one; but, as you can tell from the background, he does.
And, I'm using the scanner as a way of interacting with other characters. You can show things you've scanned to the technician on your team, or email them to your grad students back on earth, or whatever.
I have frequently given my lecture on what an awesome game mechanic the Met Prime scanner is, because it lets you absorb backstory totally at your own pace and based on what you're interested in. The way it works in Prime (mine will have minor differences), you switch on the scan visor and you can see hotspots in the world; select one to get a bunch of text that talks about what that thing is.
Oh, one thing I'm NOT doing is having a zillion fictitious types of stone that are susceptible to a zillion fictitious types of explosive, but, for whatever reason, each only to its matching one. One thing that space exploration actually has taught us — do you know what Mars is mostly made of? Basalt. So is the moon. An ordinary rock that appears here on Earth.
Which makes sense, as the periodic table is the same everywhere. Of course planets without water don't have sedimentary rocks, only igneous and metamorphic. The planet in my game does have water so I'm going to have its geology be quite similar to Earth.
Although I came up with some unique terrain types too, like a gelatin swamp. The idea (which may or may not be explained to the player, but it's so *I* know...) is that algae got sick of the fact that larger life forms eat them and they can't do anything about it. So, they evolved a minor use of magic, thickening the water to the point that nothing can swim in it. Because life is very persistent, there are still creatures that live on the bottom of the gelatin swamp, and there are still plants that take root on its surface. But nothing *swimming* which means most of the fluid is solely the domain of microorganisms, without interference from larger ones.
I was asked: So the geology is similar, what about atmosphere, gravity, and such? And I'd assume the creatures are still carbon-based?
Still carbon-based, yes. Another thing we know is that practically every solar system, even interstellar space, has the same amino acids floating around. (We know this through spectroscopy; I'm talking real-world here, for just a moment, haha.)
And for that matter, I observe that the basic arrangement of a face - two eyes or at least eye-centers, a nose, a mouth, ears - and their relative positioning… Has evolved quite a few times, independently, just on Earth. Not all animals have all those parts of course, like snakes have infrared patches instead of ears. But when the parts do exist their placement is generally the same regardless of lineage. And some animals have noteworthy exceptions, like spiders and their many eye-centers.
Gravity and atmosphere I've been thinking a LOT about.
One of my other concepts is that this world is really big, so that, even as ice ages killed off their equivalents of the dinosaurs and their equivalents of the mammals took over, there were places remote enough that the dinos were able to survive.
In fact, part of the game's exposition will be of how the present-day political conflict on the planet is just the same ancient conflict between dragons (dinosaur-analogues and bird-analogues) and wyverns (amphibian-analogues). Playing out for the hundredth time in the hundredth way.
Now as for how Earth enters the picture, I stole an idea from Asimov and one from Niven, and bounced them off each other.
There's an old Asimov book "The Gods Themselves..." It’s divided into three major sections, with the amusing titles "The Gods Themselves", "Against Stupidity", and "Contend in Vain?". It’s about how an alternate universe makes contact with Earth and proposes a solution to their mutual energy crises.
But Earth doesn't realize that it's getting the short end of the stick, and the other universe basically refuses to talk to Earth, at all, ever, because the less Earth knows, from their standpoint, the better.
In my game Earth was very insistent on that point and that's why our linguist got permission to go there. Also it's not an alternate universe in my game, just another planet.
The part from Niven is from his novel "The Magic Goes Away," which depicts, in essence, a magical energy crisis. All the flying cities fall down when the world no longer has enough magic to keep them in the air. All the grand architecture that was twisted through other dimensions and stuff stops working. "And those damn stupid barbarians, with their damn stupid swords, will win after all."
You can see how these ideas mesh, I think, grin.
I even borrowed a bit from Lensman - this part is *definitely* detail the player isn't going to uncover, it's just for me.
In Lensman there are two ancient races which were the first intelligent races to evolve. And the entire history of the galaxy is the conflict between them.
They stay hiddean from the newer races... every planet ever winds up being either like the Arisians (the good guys) or like the others, whose name I forget. Transformers borrowed heavily from Lensman, as you can see.
You might have jumped to the conclusion that in my case I'm making one race represent science and the other magic. Not at all, grin. They are both proficient users of both.
But, Earth was an experiment where the "good guys", observing that having access to magic made it far too easy for civilizations to stay locked in a perpetual medieval period — which is indeed what happened on the planet you're visiting — decided to suppress the ability to draw on the planet's magic for a few million years and see what happened.
Notice how I have even things like microorganisms using magic as part of their biology. So it's not enough to just say "humans never learned how to tap magic"; there has to be a better reason that there's no magic on Earth. And this is what it is.
It's not a problem the player is likely to even think of until he's played the entire game, so.
Musically, I'm trying something a bit daring, encouraged by the success of Knytt Stories (free Windows game - go play it immediately if you haven't). I didn't want mediocre music to cheapen the experience of exploring the world, so I decided it couldn't sound like "game music".
One of the key things that makes music sound like game music is that it loops. So compare it to, say, the Nutcracker or Swan Lake. You can't *do* that; the music can't be like a little story, because it has to repeat.
I already knew that I wanted the game to have some areas that use music and other areas that use environmental sound — water flowing, leaves crackling under your feet, …
The songs will be longer than the typical game song, probably about eight minutes. Once they're over, the game will drop into environmental-sound mode, until something cues another song. Which could be a plot event, or entry into a new area, or the start of a plot-significant battle...
I decided that most battles will not change or interrupt the current music, only important ones.
Somebody said, “Interrupting music is always tricky to do anyways unless they're designed to loop, but it'd be better to actually have music broken into sections to where there are 'dummy endings' in case an event happens sooner than expected, but otherwise can continue normally.” In fact I’ve been discussing exactly that sort of issue with the composers. They seem to really get it and are excited to try something new. So I'm pleased.
Another thing I'm thinking about doing, in plot-battles, is having dialogue cued by the music, in real time, and not by events of the battle. The dialogue will just display in some way that doesn't interfere with you conducting the actual fighting at your own pace, which is still probably turn-based.
Now as far as visuals, the DS is *very* hardware-restricted. Compared to a computer, I mean. Have a look at, say, Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker, which, like my game, is full-3D. If you are doing something less than full-3D you won't hit the limits. It has slightly less ability than the original playstation.
The polygon limit is 2048 triangles per frame, but the effective limit is even smaller. For non-graphics people who read this, that’s small. Fortunately the screen is small too.
It was remarked that Mario 64 runs on the DS, to which I said, if you put Mario 64 side by side with Mario Sunshine, 64 would look dated and lame. 64 has very few textures; most things are constructed from solid-colored regions. Anyway, so yeah, I'm falling back on tricks like that.
Some of my scenery objects will simply be solid-colored flat things in arbitrary shapes. That allows me to have far MORE scenery objects than I otherwise could, you see.
Because otherwise textures would dominate the memory usage - absolutely everything, graphics, sound, code, etc has to fit into just four megs of working ram.
Which is the same as the original playstation, by the way. The PSP, now, has 32 megs of working ram, and a hardware codec chip for streaming video and sound. And a slightly faster processor than the DS. But I evaluated the PSP and decided not to go with it.
Someone mentioned demographics of DS owners being appropriate for this idea, which I agree with. Mostly it's that I think there's a lot of room in the DS market. A lot of released games have some really shoddy things and yet are still selling really well.
A lot of games for it are deliberately very "cute", targetted at the pre-teen crowd, yet I observe that the handful of games targetted at the 18-30 crowd are among the top sellers. (Based on Amazon sales rank, because I can't afford to pay a real market-research company for historic data.)
I'm definitely going for gorgeous, not cute.