I think you misunderstood me a little bit.
I do understand that exploring a site like a cave or a dungeon in third person is the way to go but the world map?
I'm not contending text-based adventuring nor am I suggesting that third-person is better, but that your methodology, from the mechanics you've described, is insufficient.
It feels like you're generating a simulated world. Simulation games can be interesting, but in this case there would be a LOT of mundane activities, so you're looking for ways to short-cut those so that boring portions of the game are skipped and interesting ones receive focus. Games tend to do this to develop a narrative.
So- what narrative are you looking to develop? What narrative does playing your game facilitate? It's not a free-roam exploration game, because you have special exploration mechanics that narrate the exploration in a particular way. So- are these narratives connected in some way? Or is it just a continuous stream of novelties?
Each one of these experiences may be independently interesting, but how do you plan on making them meaningful in a broader sense? How is the 'world map' a necessary part of building the narrative? Your game will offer a lot of breadth with 100k sites, but they may all feel meaningless without some depth connecting them.
Anyway, rolling the dice is what roguelikes are all about.
No. Probability is a 'feature' in a roguelike. What roguelikes are all about are making decisions, without clear certainty as to how they will effect us, in such a manner that increases our chances to survive. I recommend playing Brogue (
https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/) for some inspiration. The failure to survive rests entirely on the fault of the player, not the dice rolls. The dice rolling creates variation, not determination, in how events resolve. In many games, the dice-rolling is arbitrary- because if a player encounters a situation where dice-rolling is important, she's already failed. Permadeath requires that a player always caters to the worst possible outcome. This means that dice rolls represent an opportunity for a boon rather than a penalty.
Your mini-exploration game doesn't provide the player an opportunity to avoid dice-rolls. What you really have here is a system of Random Encounters. The player can't foresee what will happen when exploring before making the decision to explore, so she is typically obligated to always explore- otherwise she will be missing content and the reason to actually play the game. So- you have to play a mini-game to get to points where you can play the game... in effect, you actually have two different games connected by a database. This can be interesting, but you will likely get a better game if your development time is spent devoted to making one of those experiences superb.
In games like Final Fantasy, random encounters exist as a means to pace the narrative of the story, manage flow, and develop ambiance. You wouldn't play the game for the REs because they are irritating and boring as hell-- the only motivation to continue playing is the narrative and interesting boss fights (and power-gaming if you're into that). The issue with text-adventuring is that the game is telling me what my narrative is. If it doesn't do more than connect a stream of novelties, it isn't giving me a story. Instead of being able to min-max my survival chances directly, it's obfuscated by a wall of text and some dice-rolling. Since the narrative isn't hand-crafted, what are our motivations to continue playing?
Have you ever played Seventh Sense? Check it out.
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/david/he idea of the game is to explore a huge world with tons of sites scattered throwout it (100k places to explore). Some areas will be empty others not.
This is another point of concern. What role does the player's character play in this world? Is she an already established hero or are we going to get a bildungsroman? If this game is primarily about fun simulated mechanics, it seems odd to emulate the simulated mechanics.
Now imagine being halted while in third person by bandits and wild life, as you try to explore a portion of land, just to realize at the end that that area was empty.
Don't generate meaningless areas? It's meaningful if the experience augments the narrative. Just make every path tie into some overarching theme. Or find ways to incorporate these seemingly nonsensical elements into a theme. For example- if you slay some goblin nobody but he turns out to be the goblin tribes successor king, they may start hunting you down to the point that they ally with some opposing nation that seeks to conquer that lands that you're involved with and... yada yada yada. You can make it so that the scope of an adventure is predictable or influences future events in some way.
First, you need to understand what type of land you're about to explore because it can be a dangerous place to go in at a specific time of the day, month, season or with certain weather conditions. You then define the pace at which you will explore it and define what you will be looking for. You will be able to actually define what each member will do during the exploration and if they should spread out to explore it way faster or remain together to increase their survival chances. Each choice shall bear an advantage and a disadvantage which only kin and careful players will sucessfully exploit.
I hope there are some options that will automatically do all of that for me. Will it tell me the danger level or do I need to discover and remember these things myself? It seems like another example of a poor mapping of feature to feedback. The player likely doesn't care about all of those things, just whether or not it's dangerous and how likely the area has something they are looking for.
Many events can be triggered during the exploration process like being ambushed or attacked by wild life, depending on the party skills that will tell who spots who first, giving the player the upper hand or a chance to evade an encounter.
The usage of skills, here, doesn't seem interesting in itself. The opportunity cost of skill development and the relative risk of choosing to go into an area could be interesting, but just having a skill floating there to modify random encounters can be disappointing. We want to get to POIs that are interesting- will these skills be useful in said POIs? It seems like we end up playing two different games. One is a dice game that determines what situations we end up in, and the other is a roguelike. They are connected only in that they share the same database. Sorry if I'm getting repetitive. Mini-games are fine, but, as this seems to be a game of exploration in many ways, your mini-game will be the main game and the roguelike will be the mini-game.
Other things will include unfortunate and fortunate consequences like falls and stepping on traps but also finding hidden treasure / items or special caravans carrying special cargo at a special price. Some situations will require player input to make important decisions like deciding if the exploration should be halted due to spotting a large enemy force or issuing shelter due to the weather changing, even though the area has been almost fully explored.
In a simulated world, locals become aware of POIs as a result of POIs likely being connected to civilization in some way (that is oftentimes why a POI is a POI). What are we exploring for in this game? The POIs could be unlocked via books or some other mechanisms that involve interacting with locals-- is there a 'need' for a world map? What incentive does the player have to explore apart from finding the fun of the game in POIs? If it's for special crafting opportunities (like in pokemon or something), why is the player motivated to do that? Is the player punished for not doing it?
I do think that the auto-explore feature does carry interesting decisions to make, in fact I believe its WELL above the options present in traditional roguelike exploration sessions. In ADOM the only options I had when exploring the world map were either [F]ight or [E]vade an encounter, that was it.
Okay- instead of paper-rock-scissors, it's now paper-rock-vulcan-lizard-scissors. It still isn't a mechanic that the player uses in a meaningful way. At the point in which it is, it's now the main game and the roguelike is the mini-game. Again- sorry for being repetitive.
Please understand, this post is all about world map exploration, and not about the best method on how to explore a dungeon or a cave, which is what this thread is all about.
I hope it's clearer now-- I'm not contending with your method of world map exploration, but rather the overall approach to developing the scope of your game.
I think that we need to know more about that to be able to rationalize whether your method of exploration is going to be interesting. The gameplay could be awesome, but I'm having issues understanding why that gameplay will be good. It seems like you're just trying to figure out a short-cut to manage a game that is too big-- this suggests, to me anyways, that the game is... well, too big.
Show Posts
