Frayed Knights Dev Diary: The Scoping Saw
This week ended up with me working too much of the weekend on the Day Job. For the record: I think I like developing for the Nintendo Wii. But CodeWarrior hasn't improved much since I was using it to develop on the Sega Dreamcast (another machine which was pretty sweet to develop on had it not been for CodeWarrior). As a result, weekend development on Frayed Knights and Apocalypse Cow did not happen much.

Nevertheless, after much perseverance, a couple of late nights (even by my standards), and possibly a sacrificed rubber chicken or two (I will neither confirm nor deny those rumors), I managed to get the Frayed Knights design document into something resembling a 1.0 state. I'm having some friends (and possible accomplices) take a look at it. I've already had to fix a couple of holes, and there are a few TBD details I'd like to work out this week.

Which brings me to a discussion on how I scoped this puppy. Which is probably only valuable to anybody as a sleep-aid.

This Week's Diatribe
New game ideas are all wild and free, and so full of potential. It's also completely unworkable without a team size of about 50 people, several millions of dollars, and a good 3 years of development. Surgery will be required, painfully cutting it down to a quivering bloody lump of What Will Be, a mere shadow of its former gleaming potential. Here's what I did with my hack job on Frayed Knights.

As with most game ideas, it starts with a cool idea and some brainstorming. When an idea hits with appropriate force, more and more ideas build upon the core piece, and upon each other, and you can't write them all down. Some of the ideas suck, some are cool but are at odds with other cool ideas.

Frayed Knights didn't get too out-of-control at this stage, because I'd always envisioned it as more of an ease-of-development exercise. But at times it ventured into real-time "action-RPG" territory. Then there were all the rants that I have had here on this blog about where games could innovate. Almost every single one of them found their way into my heap of Frayed Knights ideas. All of them sound interesting on paper, and I think most of them could be worked into very interesting game mechanics. Just not all at the same time.

Cut 1: What's Possible
The next "cut" was still pretty easy. Pull out all the best and most cohesive ideas into a whole.

What I ended up with was a game that would span seven baronies, covering seven cities in a search for (ugh!) seven parts of a seal to stop an Ancient Evil from rising. Of course, this being Frayed Knights, the whole seven parts / ancient evil things were going to be completely parodied for the cliches that they are. Part of the game would take place in the underworld (where best to find an Ancient Evil?)

To keep things do-able there's going to be a lot of texture swapping of objects with the same geometry. Lots of similar-looking buildings from city to city. Monsters will take advantage of any procedural modifications I can use to make a goblin not "just" a goblin. I'm going to use a lot of off-the-shelf content where I can.

Cut #2: What's Probable
Unfortunately, that still sucked. Way too big. Not only was the scope too large (by what I envisioned) to complete in a reasonable time with a reasonable budget as an indie, I was having trouble getting my head around all the details needed to flesh the whole thing out on paper. And one thing I didn't want to do was create this big, gigantic world full of boring filler content and empty space.

So I pulled out the "scoping saw" and cut it down further. Instead of seven cities, I began to think about having the entire game center around two or three small villages, out in some back-road nowheresville. I started thinking small and detailed, instead of big and epic. That's where the "Big World, Small Dungeon" post came from.

A funny thing then happened. While ostensibly the cut was to make it a project I could actually - you know, FINISH - as I thought smaller, the faster ideas began to flow. The more excited I became. Things became clearer in my head. For some reason, it's easier for me to think of cool things that happen on a road through a particular forest between a small, quiet village and an old, evil temple to a nasty god than to imagine something that could happen anywhere in the world somewhere.

The smaller scale also opened up new avenues for possible innovation. For example (not that I'm gonna necessarily be doing this, it's just a ferinstance I'd like to play with, time permitting): Relationships between NPCS, important for a more organic conversation system - could be tracked much more easily when you are talking about dozens of NPCs instead of hundreds of them.

Cut #3: What's Fer Sher Gonna Happen In A Few Months
STILL NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!!

Cut #2 seemed cool. But I realize that - especially with how long Apocalype Cow has gone over schedule - that I really need to shoot for an even closer target at first, and re-evaluate things once I get there. Call me overly cautious, or even a scared old woman.

So I cut things down to just the first chapter of my envisioned game. This includes almost all the actual programming required for the full game, so I get to play to my strength. About the only things that I could skimp on would be the full quest system, and some of the more event-driven logic.

Content-wise, we're talking one dungeon, one village, and one wilderness area. A handful of monsters. Some villagers. About two "levels" worth of character progress. Effectively, I'm making the free demo version of the full game, fully polished and ready to release. With a time horizon of one year at the outmost.

I went full-bore on the design document, spelling out everything in pretty reasonable detail at this point. When focusing on just one piece of a big game, it's much easier to plan out the details. Assuming I pull all this off, I can approach all the remaining chapters in exactly the same way. But with the benefit of hindsight and a mostly-completed engine.

And What Now?
Some people think the design phase is the happiest, coolest part of game design. I don't.

My favorite part is the early part of development. Every day sees the game improve in extremely measureable, visible ways. Progress happens in leaps and bounds. The vision on the "paper prototype" and in the brain starts becoming reality.

That begins now. Well, okay, some if it began weeks ago, but it begins in earnest now.

Now that I have gotten everything designed on paper, I'm feeling inspired to transfer all of it to code as quickly as possible. I'm going to try a top-down approach, basically creating a playable prototype of the complete game as quickly as possible, with stand-in-screens and stubbed-out systems to be replaced gradually with functional elements as I go.

Full-bore evolutionary prototype development methodology.

My goal for next week is that, if you squint REALLY HARD, it may look like I have a finished game. With really butt-ugly programmer art.


(Vaguely) related mad-scientist cackling:
* Frayed Knights Dev Diary: Design Doc Fun
* Frayed Knights Dev Diary: Prolog & Background
* Big World, Small Dungeon: Does Size Matter?
* RPG Twists I'd Like To See
* Ways To Be A Better Game Designer



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Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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