Ultra JankenSquad Forever playtest

We had a pretty good playtest of Ultra JankenSquad Forever at the lovely Cardiff BRAWL's All Day Roleplaying event yesterday.

JankenSquad (for short) is my anime-inspired, Rock-Paper-Scissors RPG system. It makes for an easy, fun and quick game with a lot of player power. The emphasis is definitely on the roleplaying rather than any complex rules simulation. That's fairly obvious though, given the simplicity of the R-P-S system. Having each of the three choices represent an approach to a situation, rather than a specific action or skill, gives the players a huge amount of freedom, which they seemed to enjoy. It does mean the GM has to be on top of everything and represent NPC and environment challenges fairly.

One issue is that it can be a bit easy for players to overcome challenges, given that they always have at least a one in three chance of beating the GM in a check. This isn't necessarily so bad, though, as long as the story is moving along fine and the players are having fun. The GM could always require several successes to resolve a problem or something like that. Also, it can sometimes be fairly obvious what the "correct" approach to a situation is (for example, Guile/Paper would always seem to be the right approach to a stealthy situation). This can be overcome by everyone bearing in mind that each of the three approaches can be applied to any situation. In the stealth example Resolve/Rock can represent careful, slow movement, Guile/Paper can represent outmanoeuvring/outwitting the enemy and Aggression/Scissors can represent dashing from cover to cover.

I've been thinking about writing up the rules and making them available online as a PDF or something. Maybe I'll sell a deluxe edition with pretty pictures for a modest fee. I'll add this to my list of projects to do.

How to Make Your Own RPGs - my Cardiff Anime & Gaming Con presentation

As I mentioned before, I was due to give a talk, titled How to Make Your Own RPGs, at Cardiff Anime & Gaming Con on the weekend. I did! To be honest, it didn't go amazingly well. I think there were only maybe six people actually listening to me. There were a couple of issues - one was that my talk was immediately after the big cosplay masquerade (one of the con highlights), so there was a huge crowd just outside the room shouting in celebration and so on, the other was that this convention only recently added "games" as something they're about and the crowd weren't particularly interested in playing RPGs, let alone learning how to make them. However, the people who were listening seemed very engaged and one attendee approached me afterwards to tell me that she really enjoyed my talk. That was lovely.

The lack of interest in games at the convention also impacted my planned running of the RPG that I designed especially for the event. I was scheduled to run six sessions, but there was only enough interest for one. It's a shame because I'm pretty proud of the design of Ultra JankenSquad Forever. Though I still think the name is pretty dumb.

You can download the powerpoint of my presentation from here, if you like.

The conversation map - tactical discussion system

Last time I briefly covered how the Stance you take can affect the tactical discussion system of Talky RPG (groan). This time I'll briefly cover the work-in-progress conversation map, which represents the topics of discussion that your character is covering with their partner/opponent.

The conversation topics are represented using a grid that the speech bubble icon (representing where you currently are in your discussion) moves through. As it encounters different topics/tiles, they affect the player and computer characters in various ways: they may gain or lose Stress, the computer character may lose Patience, the player may gain the information they require and so on.

The core gameplay consists of the player trying to influence the conversation so that it benefits them - usually by collecting the information they need (represented by exclamation points). They can do this using a variety of skills (partly dictated by their stance), guiding the conversation towards and away from tiles as they see fit.

The computer-controlled participant will also guide the conversation as much as they are able. Part of the player's job is to take into account the ways in which the computer will influence the path and take this into account, even subtly altering the computer's moves using their skills.

It was fun to get into coding a (pretty rudimentary) AI system for the opponent. Each turn, the computer analyses nearby tiles and chooses where it wants to go, steering the conversation in that direction if it is able.

This update took a bit longer than expected because I was laid up with shingles for about a week and a half. Don't get shingles. It's unpleasant.

Take a stance - tactical discussion system information

The tactical discussion system in Project Talky RPG (sigh) allows the player to choose a stance for the main character, representing how they say what they say (what they say is represented in the conversation map, which I'll cover later). The above pictures show Neutral, Aggressive, Witty, Closed and Stressed stances.

Neutral stance confers no special bonuses or penalties and has no extra impact on Control (representing who is in control of the conversation).
Aggressive stance causes Stress to both parties and takes Control away from an opponent in a Witty stance.
Witty stance recovers Stress for both parties and takes Control from a Closed opponent.
Closed stance reduces Stress gain for its user and takes Control from an Aggressive opponent.
Stressed stance is not really a choice - a character is forced into this stance when their Stress is too high. It severely limits their options for contributing to a discussion, but wears off quickly.

Each stance will also favour certain tactical approaches and some skills will only be available in a particular stance. For example, Aggressive will give bonuses to forcing the conversation down a certain path where Witty will help with tricking an opponent into talking about something that they wouldn't normally.

Brewing up an anime-inspired RPG system for Cardiff Anime & Gaming Con

These are a couple of character concepts for something I'm currently calling Ultra JankenSquad Forever. It's an anime-inspired role playing game system based around rock-paper-scissors (rather than dice and whatnot, for checks). They represent two character archetypes - Reckless Inventor and Grizzled Old-Timer. I'm making this system to run at Cardiff Anime & Gaming Con, where I will also be giving a talk on Making your own RPGs! Why not click that link and join me there?

Programming music

Today I feel like I've made a decent-sized breakthrough in my current project. I usually either ignore sound effects and music or just leave them until the end, but this time I wanted to develop them along with the visuals and mechanics so that they can all inform each other.

I've been searching for programs to help me make music and sounds for a while, but I think I've finally settled on the ones that will become my go-to tools.

PxTone lets me make music tracks in just the way I find easy - by picking sounds and then dropping them into a sequence. There's a bit more to it than that, but it really is very easy to use. I highly recommend it.

Bfxr lets me generate and modify sound effects extremely quickly. I've used sfxr plenty of times, but Bfxr is basically just better. I super-highly recommend it.

With these programs, I messed around and made some sounds and music that felt right for my game. While exploring PxTone, I thought it would be cool to have a basic backing track running that I could layer different tunes over depending upon what's happening on-screen. I figured out how to get GameMaker: Studio to do that (the above picture) and voila! Now, the music changes according to the player's stance in battle (that's not quite the correct description, but I'll go over it another time), but all the layers of the track stay in sync with each other.

It has been a good day for design.

Lots of one-game-a-weeks - a run-down

Here's a brief look at some of the little game designs I've been furiously working on over the last couple of months. I'll provide some (Windows only) links for if you want to try any of them, but be warned - they are small, incomplete prototypes and they may not have end conditions or built-in ways to quit (or even real instructions on how to play). You may have to resort to Alt-F4 or the Task Manager to close the programs.

Descriptions and links in the full article, below the jump.

Roaming Village - a little game

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

(Windows only.)

Another game made in a week. This week's brief was to make a trading game that implied a large scale. Roaming Village is about trading resources and trying to end on a high. Give it a go!