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Reythia Profile
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Knight of Honor

Registered: 11-2005
Posts: 1883
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Writing an RPG


So about a year ago, a friend and I were playing the newest Star Ocean video game. There were a number of flaws in the game, critically including a dearth of save points combined with the fact that the game periodically CRASHED the Xbox. But ignoring that practical problem, there was another issue we had with it. Simply put, the plot SUCKED.

I don't just mean it was weak, or simplistic, like a classic battle of Us Vs. The Totally Evil and Irredeemable Bad Guys. It wasn't even that every female had to be hot, have a D cup size, and wear next to nothing, though that always ticks me off. Part of it was that it was so overly emo that Sam and I wanted to strangle someone -- preferably the game writers. But more than that, we just couldn't have cared less about the characters. And mostly, the last half of the plot was so outright STUPID that we almost put the game down without finishing. I mean, the main bad thing at the end was "The Missing Procedure". Ooooo! So scary. Not.

Anyhow, after playing that game, and having previously played a number of other weak games that weren't quite as nauseating, I decided to write my own. See, I figure there are lots of people who are good at writing the gameplay part of RPGs -- Star Ocean was actually a very satisfying game to play on an individual battle level. But seriously, they need to hire people to write PLOTS. I figured, why not me?

Yesterday I pulled it out again and am still mostly pleased with the beginning that I have. The over-plot isn't exactly screamingly novel, but that's okay for a game that, when you get right down to it, is based on hacking and slashing a bunch of robots and aliens and general monsters. I just wanted realistic, non-cheesy characters and a plot that won't make people cringe. Is that too much to expect? Maybe someday I'll even finish it and hand it over to my friends who work as game programmers.

Anyhow, has anyone else ever written a game plot? Just curious, since we have this nice new topic section which hasn't been much used. And if anyone wants to read over what I've scrawled out, let me know and I can post it. Maybe you can tell me if you'd like to play such a game.

Last edited by Reythia, 8/2/2011, 3:02 pm


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David Meadows Profile
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Squire

Registered: 09-2003
Posts: 693
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Re: Writing an RPG


I dabbled with writing text-based adventures, but they were very simplistic plots involving walking around and picking up useful items. My most sophisticated actually had characters whose motiviations you had to figure out and satisfy in order to complete the game, but I never finished coding that.

I would definitely be interested in you posting your plot, to see how you approached it -- I basically made mine up as I went along emoticon



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Review: Clouds Harp Quartet Sunderland, 31 July 2011
8/3/2011, 8:05 am Link to this post Email David Meadows   PM David Meadows
 
Reythia Profile
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Knight of Honor

Registered: 11-2005
Posts: 1883
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Re: Writing an RPG


Haha! Oh, there's definitely some making it up as I go along. A lot of that, actually. I pretty much started with a general motivation for The Bad Guys and a decision to only have four heros (since I HATE having characters you don't really like to play as much as the others). Most everything else is growing from there.

I'll try to remember to post the start of the game when I get home.

quote:

My most sophisticated actually had characters whose motiviations you had to figure out and satisfy in order to complete the game, but I never finished coding that.


I rather like that idea! How (generally) were you thinking about designing that?


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David Meadows Profile
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Squire

Registered: 09-2003
Posts: 693
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Re: Writing an RPG


I was using a game development environment called TADS, which is an object-orientented programming language designed specifically to create text adventures. Each object (including people) in the game is an "object" (if you know any OOP you will know what I mean, if not I'm not giving a crash course emoticon ) with its own set of properties that can be changed by defined events acting on the object.

My people had properties such as happiness and methods such as giveItem(), like this:

giveItem(thing)
{
   if thing == myLostItem
   {
       happiness++;
   }
}

And other points in the plot would check their happiness property to determine how they reacted to various other things you did or said.

Or something like that emoticon

The problem was that it needed a lot of conversation between you and the character you were trying to make happy, and working all the dialogue options became too much of a chore, which is the main reason I abandoned the game. I think a character-based game can work (I've played some good ones) but they are a lot of hard work, much harder than walking around and pickin up random plot tokens ("Find key" "put key in lock" is easy!)



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Review: Clouds Harp Quartet Sunderland, 31 July 2011
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Reythia Profile
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Knight of Honor

Registered: 11-2005
Posts: 1883
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Re: Writing an RPG


Haha! Yeah, I understand the style of coding. I once started programming a Neverwinter Nights game, and like you, I really wanted quests that were more than "Go kill unicorns and bring me 10 unicorn horns" or whatever. Which involved dialogue, and as you said, that got boring pretty quickly! After a day or two, I abandoned that attempt. Not worth my time!

...But I still LIKE games with more work put into them, of course!!

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Flasheart2006 Profile
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Grand Master

Registered: 04-2004
Posts: 301
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Re: Writing an RPG


quote:

Reythia wrote:

I once started programming a Neverwinter Nights game, and like you, I really wanted quests that were more than "Go kill unicorns and bring me 10 unicorn horns" or whatever. Which involved dialogue, and as you said, that got boring pretty quickly! After a day or two, I abandoned that attempt. Not worth my time!



Oh, that's my suggestion out the window then! I once used the Aurora Toolset as part of an online written-RPG (created the environments and so forth, then posted snapshots on the website so that the co-authors could get a basic idea of the setup, just to keep consistency), and I was going to say that I found that quite helpful, certainly very easy to use. After we'd finished certain scenes I went back to the levels I'd designed and tried to integrate some of the story into the game (dialogue, etc.), but I never really had enough interest to make a proper job of it--I was happy sticking with the designing and the writing.

But if you've already used it then I'm afraid I can't offer much in the way of advice. I had the opportunity to do a programming course once but turned it down because it'd have been a pain in the arse to get to; when conversations like this crop up I wish I'd made the effort! (though if I'd done that I wouldn't have been able to study terrorism!)

In terms of actually 'writing' it, I'd say just do what you do with your own stories: come up with a set of characters (make sure a dragon gets a look-in somewhere!), give them backgrounds and relationships, and let them tell the story. After all, it tends to be the characterisation that differentiates an RPG from a hack-n-slash or an FPS.

Are you actually coming up with your own, brand-new world and characters, or are you just fixing the problems with the storyline in the original game? (I did that for Gundam Seed: Destiny, which had so much potential but then blew it all when they couldn't decide who the main character was) If the latter, my advice (though again I suspect you'll already have done it!) would be to simply think back to the very first time you played the game and try to recall what you thought was going to happen (i.e. the thing that actually got you interested in the game in the first place), and use that as your basic outline. And within that overall structure, just follow something along the lines of the Three Act Structure, marking each plot-point with a boss-fight. Get that side of things sorted out first and then worry about setting up all the finicky sub-quests (which would probably take more time than the main storyline!)

But seeing as how you've blown the wind out of my Aurora suggestion's sails, I can't really offer anything more helpful than that, sorry.

Hope you get it sorted emoticon

Dan

PS. I'd second David's motion: I'd love to see what you've already come up with

Last edited by Flasheart2006, 8/4/2011, 8:15 pm
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Reythia Profile
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Knight of Honor

Registered: 11-2005
Posts: 1883
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Re: Writing an RPG


Oh no. That Star Ocean game was SO bad that I'm rewriting it entirely. Not even close to the original game. I'm really only keeping the style of battle play, since that was excellent. The plot's all mine.

And I've actually had a lot of programming experience, though in scientific work and not game design. I'm not scared of it. It was just too tedious for me to enjoy it, alas. emoticon Writing is also tedious sometimes, but it's also a bit more fun, I think.

Anyhow, I was thinking about how to share this with you guys. It's sort of long for on here -- really, anything over about 500 words is hard for me to read in this forum. So instead, I decided to use a different forum which is able to handle files. I made a Yahoo Groups set up, which I can invite people to. I've used it before for small writing groups and it works really well. Everyone can post and everyone can read everyone else's stuff. You can even make subdirectories, so (for example), you could separate stories and also reviews of others' stories.

Anyhow, I put my very, very, VERY rough draft of the start of my RPG up there. Send me your email address and I'll invite you.

Last edited by Reythia, 8/5/2011, 5:04 am


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