Chain game ideas and discussion 2022-20??

[Moosetroop11]

Yeah this looks cool : )

[Momeka]

I went with a FF-1 approach where you create the whole party up front by selecting classes. So the game might not lend itself to be that  "character" driven when it comes to the story since we don't know what will be in the party really. I hope that's okay with everyone.
I tried to make it as easy as possible to add new classes so we can expand on it as we go. But there's a handful of events that will need to be expanded when doing it, but I'll write a guide for it once I'm finished.


(Ignore spelling mistakes, I'll fix later )

Anyway, that was the most complicated and pretty much only system I had planned. So I'm going to move on to doing the actual chapter now.

[Prpl_Mage]

That looks great.

I was about to say that completing tasks could unlock additonal classes, but I have no idea how to do that aside from doing it like the old NES password loads.

[Moosetroop11]

I like it, it gives the game a particular feel (though it does limit the options of the people doing the following parts). If we want character personality we'll have to do it through NPCs, that's fine : )

[Momeka]

I was about to say that completing tasks could unlock additonal classes, but I have no idea how to do that aside from doing it like the old NES password loads.

We could do "new game +" after beating the game. But we would manually need to reset all the variables and stuff in the game. Might be more work than it's worth for a chain game.

If we want character personality we'll have to do it through NPCs, that's fine : )

Yeah, npc and maybe quest lines. I ended up making another system for a quest journal. So I figured we could mainly tell some stories through quest and side quests and such. And if we wanted we could have class specific quests as well. Like if the player plays the Rogue there will be a series of side quests around other rogue npc characters bringing more "lore" about their class.
It would also add some replayability to the game for exploring what the other classes have. If we wanted we could even randomize what standard side quests are available, like in Diablo 1.


(It's not finished yet, going to have quest descriptions at the bottom panel as well)

For the journal system itself I think it will be fairly easy to work with. It's just a variable and an event call to add/finish quests in it. The downside of it is that it's pretty simplistic, it will not really be able to track progress an such. So if a quest was kill 5 skeleton, that is all that it would be able to say. No "1/5 skeleton killed" etc.



We will need to track quest IDs though. So each quest will need a unique number tied to them and that's what we send to the Journal system. I think I'll set up a excel sheet or something so we can easily track it.

[Prpl_Mage]

That's a lot of progress already mate.

For the character development part we'll just have to do something like in MMO's where the game centers around the character's role more than their personality I suppose. Or like Mass effect and Dragon Age where we leave decisions in the hands of the player even though it's the characters that act in the cutscene.

And for the quests, having a list of active quests is a lot better than not having any list. The NPC that gave the quest can supply you with the rest of the details and progress such as numbers of skeletons defeated if you return to them to check. I can only see this is a positive thing even if it feels like a simplistic system to you.