Hello everyone and welcome back to the Machine Made: Rebirth blog, where I talk about our lofty goals for game development excellence, as well as the fun and exciting things that we encounter along the way. Today I'd like to spend a little time noting that we're behind on updates particularly in the area of reformatting our indiedb page and also with regards to finishing the world map. These are features that we hope to implement in a visually pleasing and procedural way at the appropriate time.
Today I'd like to talk about something that all of us have a tendency to do sometimes, that can present a challenge to even very experienced programmers and writers alike. The unfortunate activity that we'd like to discuss is over-scripting. That is to say, adding unnecessary steps and unnecessary variables to play that do not provide any benefit with regards to the overall game experience. I have been guilty of this in the past, with regards to creating too many variables to be tracked by the player… consider this — how many variables does the average person memorize on a daily basis? Their bill payments? A few phone numbers? A few relevant statistics? In their time to escape from this type of activity, we don't want to be bombarding players with information to be tracked — unless it is that type of game! If people want to play high stakes poker, fantasy football, eve online, world of warcraft or any other type of game that involves competitively tracking and working with statistics, then that is wonderful, but I think that what separates a good game experience from a beautifully made RPG is taking the step further to add a story, soundtrack and uniqueness that is the focus of the game, rather than the ability of the player to decode the mechanics of good play. Don't make your scripting so prevalent that it stops other aspects of the game moving forward. If it's too foreign or too hard to understand, it may not be as much of a benefit as the work that went into making it. I want to talk about the steal skill for a moment here — it's something that is incredibly time consuming to make, especially when there is a % chance of finding various different items. If it weren't a part of Lora's character and something that would be involved in finding crafting ingredients, completing parts of the storyline and so on, I would absolutely not put the time in to include it, because it would simply complicate the process of finding items — without any other benefit to the player or their experience. Creating excess ways to find gold and items is not really the goal of Machine Made — the goal is to find a way for the player to feel like their inventory is growing, expanding and being crafted all on its own as the player moves through the story.
This point brings me to other things that can clog up the game interface and prevent real interaction with what lies at the heart of RPGs — trying to add on excessive visual cues and extra character stats or other game stats (consider using a different currency at the golden saucer in ff7 as an example… versus something like reputation points in world of warcraft) as well as with regards to padding or inflating content by creating overprogrammed interfaces, number counters or excessively complicated encounters or even minigames. Even well designed minigames can slow down the flow of information from the essential plot and goals of a well crafted RPG.
In essence, I believe in using the simplest form of problem solving to show a result, and as we go along I hope that you all enjoy the evolution of my game… and let me know if you agree that in order to be well designed, something has to be essentially designed to distract us from its barest elements (scripting and so on)
I hope you enjoyed the blog today,
All the best,
Cheers,
Allsvin
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