Dragon's Dogma plot structure

As part of the early stages of my PhD research, I've been studying branching narratives and trying to come up with a consistent system for diagramming them. This image represents my current solution, and this approach seems to work for any game that I've tried so far, including tabletop RPGs.

I'm currently only looking at the structure of how the branching narrative functions, rather than any actual story content. The goal is to be able to disassemble and reassemble these structures, to fit the current status of the story. It's early days yet.

Here's a sort of key for the diagram:

Thoughts on Dark Souls - The Board Game (Lost in Translation)

I recently played Dark Souls - The Board Game and had some thoughts that I wanted to share. While I’m not saying that it's a bad game, I do think it’s a bad translation of the video games into a board game. In particular, there’s major friction between the video games’ emphasis on skill-based gameplay and the board game’s emphasis on luck-based gameplay. I know that the video games include some reliance on luck and the board game includes some reliance on skill but their balances are massively different.

Most noticeably, I found the character progression to be very unsatisfying in a way that goes against the feel of the video games. The souls (currency) that you earn in the board game (at a frustratingly slow rate, I found) can be used to progress your character in one of two ways. You can either level up your stats (strength, dexterity, intelligence and faith) or buy new item cards from a deck. Both of these options have major flaws, in my opinion:

Misrepresentation?

I've recently been witness to a discussion about whether or not somebody (specifically, a heterosexual, cisgendered white man) should give a presentation about the representation (in a particular medium) of a social group (a minority) that they are not a part of. Some members of the given social group were wary of having a privileged person speaking on their behalf with no inside knowledge of the issues that they've faced, stating that a member of said group should be giving a presentation instead (or that the presenter's talk should be on another subject). Others were supportive of the presenter, stating that he is knowledgeable about the medium in question, has spent years researching this particular topic (including speaking with many people from said social group) and would approach it with care and consideration. It may be important to note that the presenter was invited to give a talk on any subject he wanted - he chose the representation of said social group in said medium - he wasn't invited in the place of somebody from that group.

This has troubled me. I am of the opinion that anybody should be able to give a presentation on any subject, so long as it is well-researched, considerate and useful. But I am not part of the social group mentioned above, so maybe my opinion is invalid. I certainly don't want to offend anybody.

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.

MA = Done!

Whoa. I handed in my dissertation last week so my MA is effectively done. I just need to wait for the marks and stuff, but that just feels like a formality. So now it's time to start applying for game design jobs with more vigour. Maybe I applied to work with you and you're checking out my blog. If so, hello! Play my games!

On that, my dissertation is a game design. Specifically, Contractual Hero: A Talky RPG. Both the prototype/ludic sketch that I just linked to and the design document. Feel free to have a look at and play around with them, if you're interested. Contractual Hero is a fantasy RPG with a Tactical Discussion System at its core, offering versatile and rewarding social "combat".

I'm proud of how Contractual Hero came out. While the prototype seems fairly small, I put a lot of effort into it and I reckon it hit my design goals near-perfectly.

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.

Cardiff Anime & Gaming Con 2015 - I'll be there, will you?

Hi everyone! I'll be at Cardiff Anime & Gaming Con this weekend. I'm going to be giving a talk about how to design role playing games on Sunday at 16:00 and I'll be running a new RPG, designed specifically for this event, throughout Saturday and Sunday. My new game is anime-inspired and is called something dumb like Ultra JankenSquad Forever. Come and play with us.

Indie Haven article on Us and the portrayal of chronic fatigue

Oh wow, you lot. A lovely person called Joe Parlock over at Indie Haven wrote a lovely article about my game prototype, Us. The article covers how the feels that Us is an effective illustration of the effects of chronic fatigue (a symptom of Multiple Sclerosis, featured in the game, and also Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which the author has). I would love it if you would go and read it. It's very well-written and you might learn something about how some people deal with some of the difficult parts of their lives.

The article made me feel pretty emotional. I'm super-glad that Us has been appreciated in a way that it was designed to, that another chronic fatigue sufferer feels that it is a meaningful illustration of their symptom and that it helped somebody else to feel a bit better for a while. That's why I do this. This quote in particular makes me feel real good:

It’s these dilemmas which people with disabilities face every day, and seeing it put into game form was really, really nice. It was weirdly validating to see other people have similar decisions to make as me: do I play a game or spend time with others to cheer myself up, even if I know that means I won’t have the energy to clean up or do some work later on in the day? Seeing these questions posed so blatantly in the game let me know it’s not just me who feels it, which was great.

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.

My current project, Talky RPG (ugh)

Here is the main character from the game that I'm working on for my dissertation. Currently, it's codenamed "Talky RPG" but I'll definitely give it a better name before the end.

It is a fantasy RPG, complete with many fantasy tropes (and parodies of them), but the player must solve problems without resorting to violence. The game features a tactical discussion system in which the player can attempt to influence other characters in a social (rather than physically violent) way.

In time, I'll post more updates.

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?

My first dollar!

I earned my first dollar as a game designer! I think this is pretty momentous. Like when business people keep the first dollar that they made.

This is all because I moved my games over to itch.io. Within a week of doing so, The Factory was featured in PC Gamer's free games of the week. It was the week of 30th May, but that page has now been overwritten. There's a copy of it HERE.

The PC Gamer feature scored The Factory a LOT more views than it would have received. It even led to one lovely person choosing to pay $1.00 for it, which I greatly appreciate. Thank you, you lovely itch.io user!

PS - I just noticed that The Factory was also featured on Ambushed Gamer's Free Fly Friday on 26th June. At the top! Hooray!

Blog overhaul & itch.io

You may have noticed that this blog looks and works pretty differently than it used to. Over the last couple of months I've given it a thorough redesign, adding a bit of colour, and changed the way that people can access my games.

I've started using itch.io, which is a great platform for distributing games. They host my games for me, track downloads and allow people to pay me for them. You can see my itch.io page HERE. I recommend using them if you've got some games of your own that you want people to see.

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!

Eat Fighter - a little prototype

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

(Windows only)

I'm now in Term 2 of my Games Design MA. The Design challenge this term is to make one game a week (though they need only be small prototypes), focusing on a different aspect of game design each time. Eat Fighter is the first. We were tasked to consider the core of what makes a game fun - what the player actually does. It was suggested that we design a game that is small in scale but still enjoyable to play.

If Eat Fighter was to be developed into a proper game, we imagined that it would be framed as a one-on-one eat-'em-up with in-match competitive actions and upgrades to be bought with your earnings. I kind of like the idea so may develop it later on.

Inevitable

Here is a new game for you to play:

Inevitable

(Click the link to download. Windows only.)

It is a very short, abstract game. It is a metaphor for something, but I won't say what yet. Please play it and see what you think. It will take you less than five minutes.

This game was created using Clickteam Fusion 2.5 (my first project outside of GameMaker). I still think I prefer GameMaker, but I need to get the hang of Fusion for my MA.

That's right. I'm doing the MA Digital Games: Theory and Design at Brunel University now. It's time to make a real go of this game design thing. The above game was heavily influenced by our theory discussions on the course this week.

Remember me?

Hi there. It has been too long. Way too long.

So, what have I been doing since last July? That's nearly a year ago! Frankly, I got too caught up in other things to be creative. My job was getting me down and sapping my energy. I felt a bit rubbish about where my life was going.

I lost my job last month, which may be a blessing in disguise because I can now do some creative stuff. I am also fully prepared to start Brunel University's Digital Games Theory and Design MA in September, though losing my job messed up my plans a little. There are a couple of things to sort out, but hopefully this will still be a go.

On the plus side, I've been regularly spending time with the lovely Cardiff RAWSoc people. A lot of this has been playtesting my Character Building system, along with the Conspicuous Events add-on. While I haven't done any real writing on the rulebook for quite some time, the systems are much clearer in my head.

To mention another (incredibly) positive influence, my girlfriend has a blog set up over here: Challenge TAMLA! She has been raising money and awareness to fight Multiple Sclerosis. She has MS and has been pushing herself to do regular challenges, partly to show that MS is not the end, partly for the fundraising and awareness mentioned previously. She is doing phenomenally, especially given everything that she has to deal with. I am incredibly proud of her. You should go to her blog and have a look at what she's up to. You will probably find it informative and inspirational.

Here is something: I never uploaded a link to the video of the dorkbot talk that I gave last February. It is here. I very much enjoyed the experience. The annoying buzzing (that isn't my voice) stops after a couple of minutes, thankfully.



I am hoping to write up some sort of summaries of the various projects that I've started/worked on/conceived of and post them up here. It would be nice to be able to see all the work I've been doing in one place. Maybe people will then think that I'm less of a slacker. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, that's enough about me. How have you been? Very well, I hope.

Take care, now.