Streamlined inventory

Let’s imagine a hypothetical game. A fantasy computer roleplaying game. Our hero is a great warriormage, who has been thrust into a political conspiracy. The themes of the game are choosing your sides in a world of grey morals. Along the way, our hero must battle ever-increasing monsters with sword combos, potions and simple magical spells. He is a capable alchemist and can make many kinds of potions and bombs from both conventional and rare essences found in the game. Now we need an inventory system, and by extension a whole system for collectible stuff. We also would like to put emphasis on realism, and since we have a ton of artists, let’s challenge them too.

First, let’s examine our hero. He is plagued by the difficulty of choice, the mystery of who to trust and whether he will survive the next battle. He helps peasants and solves problems, going by with the meager reward money for his troubles. He moves around a lot, often alone. This analysis would suggest that our hero is focused. He does not wait around. If he does not have a lead on the grand conspiracy, he helps those he can.

First, the most important variable object: The weapon. Our hero begins the game with a high-quality sword, forged for him by great dwarven smith. He also has another, heavier sword for different kinds of enemies, also of exceptional quality. Therefore, nearly every sword wielded by his enemies is inferior, and thus beneath our hero’s notice. The player can only carry two swords: One light and one heavy, and exchanging them is an important moment in the game that symbolizes choice and improvement. And what do you know: A human could reasonably carry two swords at any time, so we can animate our entire weapon inventory on our character model! Yay!

Now, armour. Same thing. It defines our hero, so the exchange of our armour should be a grand moment. At the beginning of the game the player can choose one of three different armour ”schemes” to compliment how he views the Hero. Like a blue tabard for a more royal take or a brown leather with belts for a utilitarian look. It won’t change the stats, though.

Then, money. Roleplaying game inflation is a really big problem. It ruins the game economy and implies the question: Where does he keep the twenty thousand gold coins? We are going to manage this by regulating the money we give the player. As our hero would undoubtedly not steal from peasants, we won’t put random barrels with 2-6 gold coins on the bottom in the game. Actually, we won’t put the option to loot dead people in either. Our hero is (usually) too busy saving the kingdoms to stop and go through the pockets of every damn guard he encounters. The only money we are going to give the player is the rewards from our quests. Now we know how much the player is going to make in the game.

What about other items? Now we must figure out what the hero would reasonably carry with him. A flint, some parchment, pen… Little items with which he keeps journal like some sort of obsessive diary addict. Spending time in the great outdoors is hungry work. Therefore food would be an important thing in his pack. Game mechanically food enables the player to use Rest. It heals HP, enables alchemy and advances in-game time. Since that is it’s only function, food could be simply represented in how many times you can camp. 2 or 3 would be a believable maximum.

Alchemy. Making items is fun. It brings out humanity’s primal aspect: Using a stone and a stick to survive in the grand wild. Therefore, we want to emphasize alchemy. Different potions and bombs require two things: Recipies and ingredients. Recipices are bought from witches and such with money. Ingredients are found in the nature and from fallen monsters. To avoid drowning the player in different ingredients, let’s just divide them in four categories: Common, Uncommon, Rare and Mythic ingredients. Most utility potions and bombs just require common and uncommon ingredients, which are found from common and uncommon plants and monsters. Powerful potions also require Rare ingredients, which are found from ”liutenant”-type enemies, which respawn in monster lairs. Mythic ingredients are used in permanent property-boosting potions, and are found from boss monsters.

There. Now we have 3 ”days” of food, a large pack of potion ingredients and alcemical equipment, several bottles of potions and a pouch of money. Try as I might, I cannot imagine carrying all of them comfortably in a swordfight. All this hard design work, and still not a reasonable inventory… right?

Actually, no. These items fit in a backpack or a large shoulder bag. And while I agree that they would get you killed in a mélee, there is no reason not to simply drop them. Let’s give the hero a reinforced shoulder bag. That is his entire inventory, minus five potions and five bombs. When the player draws a sword, he drops the bag in the same animation. And when the battle is over, the player just picks it back up. While the player is in no possession of the bag, he cannot access the inventory or journal. Whenever there is a larger battle incoming, we merely communicate that to the player so he can prepare his potions and yank the bag away at some point before the player goes past the point of no return. It’s also a nice use for major NPC:s. (Here, hold my bag. And don’t lose it!)

Without the bag, the player just has his swords and five potions and bombs on his belt. These can be accessed with hotkeys or a radial menu. If we deem necessary, he also has a maximum of 100 gold/florins/sovereigns. The potions created via alchemy are either consumed immiately or added to the belt. Same with bombs. And these ten items can also be reasonably modelled in the character model.

So there. A fantasy inventory system that makes sense with a fairly realistic character. For a completely hypothetical game, of course.

Complexity

In the podcast I was guesting in, one point emerged that I had not thought about yet: Complexity in game design. It was a beast to define and I feel my answers were lacking something. So I thought about it some more.

First, I’ll define complexity as the amount of available gameplay-related information available to the player. Let’s compare Half-Life 2 and Gears of War. In both games, the controls are fairly same, with the exeption of jump/cover dash function of Space Bar. Gears of War has a cover mechanic the player must think about, the speed reload system and buddy regeneration system. Half-Life 2 has health management, armor management and HEV-suit’s peripheral functions. So contols and gameplay are roughly equal in terms of complexity, despite both games being quite different.

Now let’s compare two similar games: Mass Effect and its sequel. Mass Effect 1 has about ten different skills on your character, all of which can be upgraded. At certain intervals, upgrading a skill will give a special ability. The player also has a truckload of skill points to allocate. Mass Effect 2 has only six on shephard, four on others. The amount of skill points that can be put into a skill tree is also lower. In Mass Effect 1 the player can collect a lot of weapons, armour and equipment from the world and can use them universally on every party member. The player can also upgrade the equipment freely. In Mass Effect 2, the player does not have a separate “inventory”. Everything the player finds in the world is either automatically-applied equipment improvements, money, weapons that upgrade the previous ones and resources with which he can research new improvements. In Mass Effect, the game world is open and firefights can happen anywhere. In Mass Effect 2, the game world is divided into mission hubs where you will not be attacked, and mission areas, combat will happen. So Mass Effect 1 has a lot more information for the player to absorb, thus being more complex than its sequel.

And at this point I realize that what I’m saying and what I’m about to say are already said in my recent post. But I’ll reiterate my point: A game should have as much complexity as it’s core idea requires, not more.

An example where too much complexity clutters the game: The Witchers. In both games, Geralt can enter people’s houses where he can find their food, alcohol and other items that make sense to be in a peasant’s house. He can collect them, eat the food for a minor health boost, drink the alcohol to make movement slower and sell the other items to merchants who apparently have infinite money in their wallets. In Withcer 1 it was generally not a problem, but in Witcher 2 with it’s weight limit, I constantly find myself collecting more or less useless crap and slowing myself down. But since the option exists to carry six longswords and sell them for a pittance to the local herbalist (?), I must exercise it, mildly annoyed that the game does not feel like it’s going anywhere. At this point, I feel like the game would be better with less inventory management.

You see, the ability to go into people’s houses to find 7-15 gold pieces and vendor trash in rpg:s were early attempts of adding verisimillitude in the games. Some proto-designer once thought: “You know, it would be more realistic and thus more cool to be able to do what you want in a game.” Then he proceeded to painstakingly program the first several random houses in the game and thought: “You know, this is boring and takes too much work. I’ll just copy-paste these finished house layouts, write an algorithm to populate them with some generic things you could find in a home.” (because in ancient times roleplaying meant D&D, and every D&D player loots everything his character can find. Since the GM can’t be arsed to enforce carry limits) The resulting game would then inspire many other designers, who would copy that feature into their game because it was the norm.*

The problem with this setup is that it adds a layer of complexity that does not necessarily serve the game idea itself. In Withcer, the player plays Geralt, one of the last Witchers, a monster slayer whose services are needed less every day, as knight orders, pollution and other factors reduce the number of monsters every day. He is mixed up in an international assassin conspiracy and wants to clear his name. He accepts that he is created to serve humans and to kill monsters. Then why is this man walking into people’s homes and stealing their money, herbs and cloth? The ability to do so makes no sense to the character and to the game! (I know what you’re thinking: “Why won’t you just not steal then?” The amount of crafting components you acquire by stealing it from people’s homes and merchant’s storage boxes is too significant to just not do it. The designers are counting on people to do it). If the game did not have such a system, it would speed up the as you wouldn’t stop every few seconds to scan the environment and take everything you can carry. Then you would actually remember what you were doing at which point and why.

Keep It Simple and Stupid. Always remember to kiss. Except when you need to Keep It Complex and Knotty.

*This entire paragraph is my own extrapolation. It may or may not contain actual facts.

Little points, round two

I seem to have problems with thinking about things. Specifically thinking about them too much.

Most roleplaying systems are more than just systems: They are frameworks for a very specific kinds of experiences and themes. Dungeons & Dragons is brainless dungeon asskicking. Storyteller (White Wolf’s d10-system) is about wielding inhuman powers and straddling on a fence between humanity and vampiricity/lycanthropy/magism/dickitude. Star Wars is all about the lure of the Dark Side and great destiny. Zombeja! Ovella! is about feeding the others to a zombie horde so that you can escape. A system that just handles combat or the interaction between characters risks being too vanilla.
Therefore I began to think about Champions of Ilea’s theme and the experience the system wants to give the playes. I realized that I did not have any, and the project grounded to halt. Now I’m thinking about redesigning the whole system from scratch. This is how progress is made.

Speaking of progress, I replayed Prince of Persia Sands of Time. Yet again I marveled how much polish the game has. Nearly every action and every facet of the game is there for a reason. A smooth player experience is at the forefront, and everything is crafted around it. The cool combat maneuvers are showcased with camera angles that do not impede the gameplay. The game is consistent with itself, as there are virtually zero mechanics that do not feel derived from the core controls. The oft-disliked combat system is actually a tactical puzzle rather than a mechanical skill challenge, which goes well with the platforming of the game. What maneuver was this monster weak to? Should I knock that monster down or should I finish that one with the dagger?

I also have played The Witcher 2. As I mentioned, there are Quick Time Events (cutscenes where you press buttons as prompted) in the game. It was quite surprising that the game handles the almost universally reviled gameplay mechanic quite well. Fistfighting is the prominent example: Geralt and his opponent face each other, a button flashes on the screen and if the player presses it, Geralt attacks and deals damage. If he fails, Geralt takes damage. The system works because the button presses happen before combat animation, not during it. In many other games that sport Quick Time Events the player must follow the button prompts in the awesome attack animations, missing the action itself easily. The Witcher 2 lets the player witness the fruits of their labor. The system reminded me of Sands of Time’s combat system and it’s camera angles. As the player does not have to input 5+ button press combinations, he has more time to watch the action on screen.

Little points

It’s midsummer party in Finland right now. I ate a half-raw onion for some reason and do not feel very well. That’s why I’ll just write about some little observations and thoughts and move on.

I replayed The Witcher since The Witcher 2 came out and I did not remember anything about it. I found out many annoying things about the game on my replay. Most of them were bugs, but there were some mechanical decisions and general balance issues (which probably aren’t that important since the game is a single-player roleplaying game without a class system). It reminded me of my Shadow of the Colossus replay. I was also annoyed by a slew of smaller problems I hadn’t noticed on my first play-through back then. This shows the importance of replaying in game testing.

The Champions of Ilea card roleplaying system is advancing at flank speed. The designing was accelerated by the presence of actual Dominion cards, Magic Set Editor and a friend to whom I explained the concept. Next I’ll add enough cards for a playtesting session. Explaining is a grand way to focus one’s thoughts and make preliminary decisions, I learned.

Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 Steam edition does not have local cooperative multiplayer. Not the entire game, just the Steam edition, and thus the PC-port. The one feature that made Duels 2011 a good digital Magic game in my eyes was dropped from it’s sequel. The only explanation I can accept is that they sacrificed the feature on an eldritch altar to appease the Elder Gods and thus postpone ragnarök.

In Machinarium, there is a hint function. Every screen of the game has a page on a grand hint book, with an illustrated walkthrough to every puzzle in the screen. To access the hint book, the player must play a small minigame where you drive a key in a maze and shoot spiders. The controls are clunky, the levels are tedious and the death animation long. When I first used it (yes, I used it) I thought the feature cute. Then the second time it was arduous. The third time I was eating my table in fury. The fourth time I said: No. Screw this, I’d rather actually find the solution to the puzzle than open that god-awful clunky hint book!

I played D&D 4th edition in a friend’s game recently.  A new player was introduced to the party, and to the Dungeons and Dragons game itself. In our quest to silence a ruined tower that threatened a nearby road we went through three encounters. In those encounters, about four of that new player’s attacks hit. He waited for many minutes to get to do something and then his contributions to the game were negated by bad dice rolls. After the game he preferred Twilight Imperium over another session of D&D, which is always a warning sign. I’m starting to think that the concept of hitting should belong to gaming history.

I finally admitted that my quest to use the 4th Edition D&D for a combat-light fantasy adventure that explored the concept of goodness in moral ambiguity was doomed to fail from the start. Pathfinder worked because the system is capable of running an internally consistent game world. A very stupid one, but consistent nonetheless. D&D assumes combat, with miniatures, on a grid. If you take those elements away, you might as well toss the whole system with it. That thought sent ripples throughout my view of roleplaying systems in general. How should you select a game system for your roleplaying game? By setting? By theme? Interesting questions.