Friday, February 19, 2010
Frayed Knights - Talk Ain't Cheap. Apparently.
So it's about time for another update on the development of Frayed Knights, the upcoming tongue-in-cheek indie RPG coming from Rampant Games.I knew when I signed up for it that making an RPG would be a pretty significant undertaking. I had expectations of a lot of work. Even though I had elevated my expectations of the amount of work I had to do, there were a couple of areas where I woefully underestimated the amount of labor involved.
And dialog is one of those areas. I mean, it's just text, right? Sounds easy! I'm not even doing voice-overs for this game!
If my quests were just of the "bring me six rat tails" variety, and my dialogs were of the one-or-two-line variety, I wouldn't have so much work to do. Now I know why other games do that. I'd have three things for an NPC to say: "Hi there, get me six rat tails!", "Hi! Do you have my six rat tails yet?", and "I see you brought me six rat tails! Here's your reward!" No other NPC (Non-Player Character... anyone not controlled by the player) in the world would care or be involved in that quest in any way.
Easy. Simple. Straightforward. And of course, not what I chose to do.
Somehow I imagined my "slightly" more complicated questing would only be slightly more involved in developing. Hah! No, I have to had to make quests that involve multiple NPCs who respond contextually to the changing situations and are sometimes involved in multiple quest-lines. So I have to deal with how the event in one subplot might effect their responses to the other quest. Oh, and my dialogs aren't little two-line monologues, but complete conversation scripts with the party (which means I can't just mechanically string them together).Just for an example (and I know I've done this before), here's a single set of quest-related dialogs that would need to be implemented for a single NPC involved in a single quest with three non-linear subgoals:
Introduction - first-time meeting
Not on quest
On quest, no objectives met
On quest, objective A but not B and C met
On quest, objective B but not A and C met
On quest, objective C but not A and B met
On quest, objectives A and B met
On quest, objectives A and C met
On quest, objectove B and C met
On quest, all objectives met (give reward & finish quest)
Oh, and while I'm at it, I should try and come up with something vaguely humorous with each variation. And I need to test these dialogs and quests - repeatedly - by doing things out of order, and testing the robustness of the scripting and just how many punctuation errors slipped through my dialogs.
Seriously, if I skipped the "testing" phase, this thing would go about 10x faster.
Now, I have chosen to take a slightly rougher path than your average indie RPG developer with respect to quests and NPC dialog. But I don't suspect Frayed Knights is totally unusual in this respect. I'm compensating by having fewer NPCs. I can't really imagine right now having the number of towns and NPCs of Aveyond 2. I just really, seriously underestimated the task.So I'm just ... pushing on through, and trying to simplify where I can. And looking for ways of streamlining the process.
But mainly I'm just suggesting to other would-be RPG makers that if you expect character dialog to play a significant role in your game... be prepared for lots and lots of writing. My appreciation for how much writing goes into something like a Bioware game has gone up considerably.
In other news - content continues to be developed. We've got the lizardman lair from the Caverns of Anarchy just about wrapped up, and I've got the second village (Roark's Folly) about 80% built (sans NPCs and all that dialog-writing). Kevin had to re-do a lot of the Gloomspire Castle a few weeks ago from Act 3. It is quite the major construction, as you can see here:
So we've made some more excursions from Act 1, which felt pretty good. I think the later acts are going to be a bit "tighter" than the first one - mainly because each month I feel we have a better handle on what it takes and how we could do it "better."
But now I'm back to focusing on getting Act 1 100% playable. It's important. Many days, I'm not really sure what to make of all this. At times, it's simply stunning to stand back and take a look at all we've accomplished so far. And then, it's even more stunning to look at how much more needs to be done. I think getting the first act fully playable (if not "finished") from end-to-end will really help in that respect.
Labels: Frayed Knights, game development
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:32 AM (Permalink)
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I know what you mean about dialogue... I haven't fully designed my system for that in my vintage CRPG yet, but I'm under even greater constraints.
Also, that image of Gloomspire castle... that looks like the same floorplan of the castle of Ravenloft from the old AD&D module.
Also, that image of Gloomspire castle... that looks like the same floorplan of the castle of Ravenloft from the old AD&D module.
Quote: "...looks like the same floorplan of the castle of Ravenloft from the old AD&D module."
I hope you're not implying what I think you're implying. I've never seen said AD&D Ravenloft module. 100% of the reference material was located via the 'Net, with a primary focus on Romanian castles and fortified churches, particularly Bran castle.
I hope you're not implying what I think you're implying. I've never seen said AD&D Ravenloft module. 100% of the reference material was located via the 'Net, with a primary focus on Romanian castles and fortified churches, particularly Bran castle.
I'd bet that Tracy Hickman based his design on the same source material we are - Bran Castle, AKA "Dracula's Castle". So I would expect some cosmetic similarities, particularly with the exterior.
Once you get inside, though - we had to gut a lot of the real-world floorplan to make it work for our game (and we kinda did a mash-up of two different castles for that, anyway). I expect Hickman had to do the same. So I wouldn't expect many similarities beyond the basics most castles have in common.
Once you get inside, though - we had to gut a lot of the real-world floorplan to make it work for our game (and we kinda did a mash-up of two different castles for that, anyway). I expect Hickman had to do the same. So I wouldn't expect many similarities beyond the basics most castles have in common.
Yes, that's I was thinking, same source material as Ravenloft. NOT plagiarism. Sorry, I should have clarified that in my first post.
A lot of old AD&D modules used existing castles and layouts from the real world, with most gamers being none the wiser. Heck, in Baldur's Gate, the Gnoll-occupied ruins on the coast look just like the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado.
A lot of old AD&D modules used existing castles and layouts from the real world, with most gamers being none the wiser. Heck, in Baldur's Gate, the Gnoll-occupied ruins on the coast look just like the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado.
I'm trying to use the old-school games / modules / stories / etc. for inspiration and parody material, drawing what I can from them. But unfortunately, maps reminiscent of the era come out pretty boring and dumpy in 3D.
If I might offer some unsolicited advice, don't write dialogue that there's a less than 50% chance your players will ever see. For stuff that triggers depending on what order events happens, just do the bare minimum.
Players don't like missing out on something interesting just because they did something in a different order. You don't like doing the extra pain-staking work. (And your wallet will like you even less if you decide to voice every line of dialogue..)
My advice; do the bare minimum for each order of events, and then segue into a common dialogue sequence.
Players don't like missing out on something interesting just because they did something in a different order. You don't like doing the extra pain-staking work. (And your wallet will like you even less if you decide to voice every line of dialogue..)
My advice; do the bare minimum for each order of events, and then segue into a common dialogue sequence.
@Spate - True, and I'm doing that where I can. But in a lot of cases, I still have to script around these cases and test it out for even a generic placeholder script, so the time savings isn't quite as big as one would hope (usually). But you are right. Where possible I'm trying to create "one size fits all" dialogs.
I think you should just reduce the number of variations, instead of the # of NPCs. Instead of having different responses to 'you have A but no C' and 'you have B and C but not A' and so forth, just have one with 'you don't have it all yet'. Players will hardly notice the lack of responses depending on what you have and what not, but players will notice the lack of NPCs.
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