Frayed Knights: Nuke the Town?
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Ruber Eaglenest, AKA El Clérigo Urbatain, with a very interesting suggestion. In a nutshell - his suggestion was to get rid of the towns, and any of the other space "between missions." All the narrative could be done with non-interactive cutscenes, and shopping could likewise be handled between missions.

He admitted that the town in the demo was rough, but expressed concern that the town added very little to the gameplay, and instead sucked development resources that could be better put into the dungeon adventuring. He also noted - very rightfully - that the limitations of 3D require a level of sparseness in the town layout, which means a lot of empty, open space. Which is boring. "The town doesn't add anything to the narrative that you could accomplish with traditional approaches. And I, like a player, just want be from mission to mission without so much waste of time in town."

Rather than just email him back with my response, I thought I'd respond here. Because he brings up a very good point. Not that I necessarily agree with him, but I think he's spot on in that the decision to the contrary demands justification.

Kivi's Underworld kinda takes this approach. Leveling up and narrative take place in a simple interface in-between missions, which are the focus of the game. There are definitely trade-offs here. On the positive side, as Ruber suggests, it keeps the emphasis on the fun part of the game. But we lose one aspect of that makes a great RPG - the emotional attachment to the world. While characters standing around in a town spouting off canned dialog aren't great emotional hooks for an RPG, they do work better than a vague text narrative.

Many of the early RPGs also abstracted the "home base" town down to bare-bones menus. And when I was working on Hackenslash, and had only 40 hours to make an RPG (from scratch), I ended up not only nuking the town, but even nuking a lone merchant for buying and selling stuff.

Ruber is correct - those kinds of things really do consume resources. Mike Rubin has talked about the difficulty of translating experiences from a more text-based world (or, borrowing from the pen-and-paper RPG roots of Frayed Knights, a verbal-based world). In a text adventure or a verbal tabletop game, it is easy to abstract out all of the extraneous details. Going to town to rest or trade equipment can take only three sentences. Of course, if the players decide to do more while they are there, and if the game master is interested, that can expand into an entire mini-adventure, and those details can be fleshed out.

But when you are making the town an actual 3D place, you can't just ignore those details. This has been a problem since the early days of RPGs. For example, a realistic town might have tons of houses with doors - but why waste development resources on stocking each of these houses with people and stuff? You'd end up with dozens of doors in town that were either locked with plot-onium force-fields, or where you would simply get kicked back to the street immediately. And then you had city population sizes that that didn't even come close to that of a realistic hamlet, let alone a bustling town. And you can't just throw in a few details of the local tavern. In a text game, you don't have to describe the furniture. But in a 3D RPG, the lack of furniture, decorations, patrons, plates, mugs, a fire, beer-stains, and all that is very noticable!

So - to some degree - abstracting a town is going to have to occur at some level in an RPG. We have to simplify. But to the level Ruber suggests?

It really depends on what you intend to do with the town. In the Frayed Knights demo, I really ran out of time to complete 1/10th of what was supposed to happen in Ardin. The assumption here is that the gameplay is what occurs outside the town. However, if you played the Ultimas, or the last two Elder Scrolls games, the Baldur's Gate series, the last couple of Wizardry games, or even Depths of Peril, you'll recognize that the towns can be as busy and active of a place for adventuring and gameplay as any dungeon.

That's where I'm going on Frayed Knights. While the bulk of adventuring is going to take place outside of civilization, the goal (assuming I'm competent enough to achieve it, which is quite an assumption) is to have the towns be interesting places to explore, and where (usually non-combat) adventuring will happen. In Mournhold Village, which I'm currently working on (another "town"), most of the key plot developments will require a bit of exploring - and even combat - within the confines of the village.

Secondarily - while the Temple of Pokmor Xang is an exception to the rule (as something of a tutorial adventure), I do not intend to keep a "mission" structure in Frayed Knights. Locations may be revisited at later dates. In fact, there is a room in the Temple of Pokmor Xang (the room to the south of the altar room) which is actually reserved for a later visit. Leaving a dungeon, going back to town, and coming back later are expected actions. Stumbling across optional content is expected. While the game will have a greater amount of linearity than I'd prefer, I'm trying to keep things as open ... and as interesting to explore... as possible.

And that includes towns.

So that's my justification, for what it is worth.

At least, it's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Progress
We've got the first high-level (but boring) monsters in the game... the Crag Wolf. The default camera positioning (and the wolf positioning, and color) are horrible. But they are in there, and managed to slaughter my party (which is still at 3rd level) within 3 rounds. My first attempt at putting the wolves in had their formations together so tightly that the rear wolves had their heads shoved completely inside the front rank wolves' butts. While this made for amusing visuals, it wasn't really what I had in mind.

The higher-level rebalancing has gone... slowly, but it's coming along. Spells haven't been coming along at all, in spite of my ranting and raving last time about them. The big thing right now has been working on feats. At every level, players can choose a new feat for the characters. Some are kinda boring, like adding +1 to Brains. Most are a little more interesting, but still still passive. Some are passive from the player's perspective, but require a bunch of coding on my end... like a feat that allows you to immediately counter-attack when an enemy attempts to attack the back rank with a short weapon (thus allowing Arianna to lay the smack down on a goblin that tries to attack Chloe with a sword). And then there are a few active feats that need to be accessed from the interface in combat.

It takes a lot of code.

We've also got concept art for Victor the Vampire. He's - kinda non-traditional. We decided he couldn't really wear black (too cliche), but white would just not work with his death-like complexion. So we settled on... baby blue.

We think the best way to attack him and flush him out of the protection of his castle is to disrupt his supply of hair gel.

And no, I have no idea how we're going to model his hair, yet. How'd they do Sonic the Hedgehog in 3D?

Mike has the first draft of the music for Mournhold Village. It's walkin' around, background-y music. Here's an excerpt, in case you are interested:

Mournhold Village Music Excerpt - First Draft

We've still got a lot of work to get done in the next four weeks, so it's gonna be busy. And I still - technically - don't have the "first five minutes" of gameplay fully functional. D'oh! Even worse - with the inventory changes - inventory activation isn't working anymore. So potions and Chloe's wand are useless. Double D'oh!

So that's where we are for now. More later. I hope.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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