Only if I heard particularly good things about it.
Most creative endeavors you could undertake have a very small chance of leading to external reward, even the validation of people reading/watching/playing them—there’s simply too much content available these days for people to read yours. So I’d advise against making such a thing, unless you find making it to be rewarding enough in itself.
Think that would have been a good move. Advice can be pretty good at presenting the outside view—isn’t as good at presenting the inside view unless the advice-giver really knows the advice-receiver well (ETA: meaning relevant details to receiver’s specific case, etc.). Receiver should keep this in mind and update on relevant evidence (especially inside view evidence) that giver likely did not take into account.
My underlying motivation is to feel better about myself. I feel that my life so far has lacked meaningful achievements. Pushing memes is a side benefit.
I do not expect to make money by selling the game, but if I do manage to make something that turns out to be pretty good, I think it would be a big help in getting a job in the video game industry.
I’ve played several RPG maker games made by amateurs. Some of them seemed to have significant followings, though I wasn’t interested enough to make a serious effort to estimate the numbers, since I wasn’t the creator. What kind of game were you thinking of making?
I have a game I’ve been fantasizing about and I think I could make it work. It has to be a game, not a story, because I want to pull a kind of trick on the player. It’s not that unusual in fiction for a character to start out on the side of the “bad guys”, have a realization that his side is the one that’s bad, and then go on to save the day. (James Cameron’s Avatar is a recent example.) I want to start the player out on the side of bad guys that appear good, as in Eliezer’s short story “The Sword of Good”, and then give the player the opportunity to fail to realize that he’s on the wrong side. There would be two main story branches: a default one, and one that the player can only get to by going “off-script”, as it were, and not going along with what it seems like you have to do to continue the story. (At the end of the default path, the player would be shown a montage of the times he had the chance to do the right thing, but chose not to.)
The actual story would be something like the anti-Avatar; a technological civilization is encroaching on a region inhabited by magic-using, nature-spirit-worshiping nomads. The nature spirits are EVIL (think: “nature, red in tooth and claw”) and resort to more and more drastic measures to try to hold back the technological civilization, in which people’s lives are actually much better.
That sounds fun, and something that’d actually translate nicely to the RPG Maker template. It’s also something that takes skill to pull off well, you’ll need to play with how the player will initially frame the stuff you show to be going on, and how the stuff should actually be interpreted. Not coming off as heavy-handed is going to be tricky. Also, pulling this off is based on knowing how to use the medium, so if this is the first RPG Maker thing you’re going to be doing, it’s going to be particularly challenging.
There might also be a disconnect between games and movies here. Movies tend to always go out of their way to portray the protagonist’s side as good, while games have a lot more of just semi-symmetric opposing factions. You get to play as the kill-happy Zerg or Undead Horde, and nobody pretends you’re siding with the noble savages against the inhuman oppressors. So the players might just go, “ooh, I’m the Zerg, cool!” or “I guess I’m supposed to defect from Zerg to Terran here”.
Random other thoughts, Battlezone 2 has a similar plot twist with off-script player action needed, though both factions are high-tech. Dominions 4 has Asphodel that’s a neat corrupted nature spirit faction. Though I’m guess you’re going for nature just being inherent bastards instead of the more common corrupted nature striking back trope.
Also, games really train people to stay on the script nowadays. Games that let you go rogue with an actual in-game-world action instead of choosing ‘yes’ on the blinking “DEFECT TO TERRAN SIDE” dialog are rare, since letting the player go off the script in-game and meaningfully interpreting their actions is really hard in the general case, and really frustrating for the player if they have to guess the particular special case where the off-script action actually opens a different plot branch instead of just leading nowhere like it did in the 10 previous levels. The original Deus Ex did have bits where you could mitigate the shit your early game actually evil employers were pulling with quick in-game thinking, but going over to the rebels was still always in the script.
So, overall, challenging project. You need to figure out RPG Maker and where to get the art assets and such, if you’re not already skilled with it, you need to do worldbuilding for two worlds, and neither can be a cardboard cutout for the conceit to work, and you need to figure out how to make the game narration work so that the player can both get effectively tricked and has all the necessary pieces to put together the alternative choice during play.
Also, games really train people to stay on the script nowadays.
When I played Zelda games, I would always work out what option I was supposed to take, then take the other one, confident that I would get to see a few extra lines of dialogue before being presented with the same option again.
(I say “always”, but when I first played, I would carefully make the correct choice, for fear that something bad would happen if I didn’t agree to help Zelda. I don’t remember when I developed the opposite habit.)
Yeah, it’ll be hard. Right now I haven’t worked out much more than the basic concept; I’d have a lot of writing to do, in addition to level design, learning RPG Maker, and so on.
As for art, RPG Maker does come with some built-in art and offers some more in expansion packs. If I have to, I can use placeholder art from the built-in assets and find some way to replace it once I’m happy with everything else.
Have you thought about how much time you are ready to put into the project? I’d ballpark the timescale for this as at least two years if you work on this alone, aren’t becoming a full-time game developer and want to put a large-scale competent CRPG together.
EDIT: I’m guessing this would look like something like what Zeboyd Games puts out. They had a two-man team working full-time and took three months to make the short and simple Breath of Death. Didn’t manage to find information on how long their more recent bigger games took to develop, but they seem to have released around one game a year since.
Honestly, I’d probably start by trying to throw something much simpler together with RPG Maker, just to learn the system and see what it’s like. And I don’t actually have a “real job”, so the amount of time I spend is mostly limited by my own patience.
And using RPG Maker might help speed up the technical work.
I like the idea, mainly because I spent most of Avatar rooting for Quarditch (easily the biggest badass in the last decade of cinema), but it seems like there’s another way to do it that might have a bit more power;
Why not have them both be “right,” according to their own value systems anyway, and then have the end-game slideshow in both branches tell the player the story of what they did from the perspective of the other side?
In terms of workload, it seems minimal; from a story perspective you already need both sides to have sympathetic and unsavory elements anyway, while from a design perspective all you need to add is a second set of narration captions for the slideshow contingent on which side the player supported.
And in terms of appeal, it certainly seems more engaging than most AAA games. Spec Ops: the Line proved that players are masochists and that throwing guilt trips at them is a great way to get sales and good reviews, while Mass Effect 3′s failure shows that genuine choice in endings is pretty important for a game built on moral choice.
Why not have them both be “right,” according to their own value systems anyway, and then have the end-game slideshow in both branches tell the player the story of what they did from the perspective of the other side?
You don’t have to make both branches equivalent. Both of them could feel “right” from inside, but only one of them could contain an information which makes the other one wrong.
In one ending, the hero only has limited information, and based on that limited information, the hero thinks they made the right choice. Sure, some things went wrong, but the hero considers that a necessary evil.
On another ending, the hero has more information, and now it is obvious that this choice was right, and all the good feelings from the other branch are merely lack of information or reasoning.
This way, if you only saw the first ending, you would think it is the good one, but if you saw both of them, it would be obvious the second one is the good one.
I like this idea but it seems hard to differentiate between “You did what you thought was right but you need to be more careful about what you believe” and “you got the bad ending because you missed this little thing”, which is something many games have done before.
An example is Iji where the game plays out significantly differently if you make a moral decision not to kill, but if you take the default path it doesn’t let you know you could’ve chosen to be peaceful the whole time. It involves an active decision rather than a secret thing you can miss, but it also doesn’t frame it as a “MORAL CHOICE TIME GO”
That sounds awesome… except now that I know about that twist it’s ruined. And if you publish it under a different name and don’t reveal it it wont sound awesome so I’ll never discover it.
The only way to do this justice would be nagging enough people to play it that they can insist that it’s better than it sounds and someone should really play it for reasons they can’t spoil.
It sounds very appealing to me, but as KaynanK pointed out, you have to be very careful about keeping the twist secret. To this end, I’d suggest not revealing to the players that they could have gone off-script, unless they do.
It seems like an interesting story idea, but, of course, the twist can’t be revealed to any prospective player without spoiling it, so it might seem cliched on the surface.
That does sound very appealing. I’m not well versed at all in game creation, but I do remember playing with RPG maker a few years ago and it was pretty limiting. Rather than RPG maker, why not make a Skyrim mod? That would be much more fun to play and would have a much larger potential userbase.
Well, that’s just the twist idea, but what’s your framework? Are you thinking about first-person shooters (Deus Ex style, for example) or about tactical turn-based RPGs or about 2-D platformers or what?
If I made a game in RPG Maker, would anyone actually play it?
::is trying to decide whether or not to attempt a long-term project with uncertain rewards::
Only if I heard particularly good things about it.
Most creative endeavors you could undertake have a very small chance of leading to external reward, even the validation of people reading/watching/playing them—there’s simply too much content available these days for people to read yours. So I’d advise against making such a thing, unless you find making it to be rewarding enough in itself.
Would you have given Alicorn the same advice if she asked for it before writing “Luminosity”?
Yes. Do you think I would have been wrong?
/me shrugs
It seems to have found an audience.
Obviously some works will always be popular. That doesn’t change the fact that the prior odds for any particular one doing so are very low.
Think that would have been a good move. Advice can be pretty good at presenting the outside view—isn’t as good at presenting the inside view unless the advice-giver really knows the advice-receiver well (ETA: meaning relevant details to receiver’s specific case, etc.). Receiver should keep this in mind and update on relevant evidence (especially inside view evidence) that giver likely did not take into account.
What do you hope to achieve? Making money through selling the game? Artistic expression? Pushing memes?
My underlying motivation is to feel better about myself. I feel that my life so far has lacked meaningful achievements. Pushing memes is a side benefit.
I do not expect to make money by selling the game, but if I do manage to make something that turns out to be pretty good, I think it would be a big help in getting a job in the video game industry.
I’ve played several RPG maker games made by amateurs. Some of them seemed to have significant followings, though I wasn’t interested enough to make a serious effort to estimate the numbers, since I wasn’t the creator. What kind of game were you thinking of making?
I have a game I’ve been fantasizing about and I think I could make it work. It has to be a game, not a story, because I want to pull a kind of trick on the player. It’s not that unusual in fiction for a character to start out on the side of the “bad guys”, have a realization that his side is the one that’s bad, and then go on to save the day. (James Cameron’s Avatar is a recent example.) I want to start the player out on the side of bad guys that appear good, as in Eliezer’s short story “The Sword of Good”, and then give the player the opportunity to fail to realize that he’s on the wrong side. There would be two main story branches: a default one, and one that the player can only get to by going “off-script”, as it were, and not going along with what it seems like you have to do to continue the story. (At the end of the default path, the player would be shown a montage of the times he had the chance to do the right thing, but chose not to.)
The actual story would be something like the anti-Avatar; a technological civilization is encroaching on a region inhabited by magic-using, nature-spirit-worshiping nomads. The nature spirits are EVIL (think: “nature, red in tooth and claw”) and resort to more and more drastic measures to try to hold back the technological civilization, in which people’s lives are actually much better.
Does this sound appealing?
That sounds fun, and something that’d actually translate nicely to the RPG Maker template. It’s also something that takes skill to pull off well, you’ll need to play with how the player will initially frame the stuff you show to be going on, and how the stuff should actually be interpreted. Not coming off as heavy-handed is going to be tricky. Also, pulling this off is based on knowing how to use the medium, so if this is the first RPG Maker thing you’re going to be doing, it’s going to be particularly challenging.
There might also be a disconnect between games and movies here. Movies tend to always go out of their way to portray the protagonist’s side as good, while games have a lot more of just semi-symmetric opposing factions. You get to play as the kill-happy Zerg or Undead Horde, and nobody pretends you’re siding with the noble savages against the inhuman oppressors. So the players might just go, “ooh, I’m the Zerg, cool!” or “I guess I’m supposed to defect from Zerg to Terran here”.
Random other thoughts, Battlezone 2 has a similar plot twist with off-script player action needed, though both factions are high-tech. Dominions 4 has Asphodel that’s a neat corrupted nature spirit faction. Though I’m guess you’re going for nature just being inherent bastards instead of the more common corrupted nature striking back trope.
Also, games really train people to stay on the script nowadays. Games that let you go rogue with an actual in-game-world action instead of choosing ‘yes’ on the blinking “DEFECT TO TERRAN SIDE” dialog are rare, since letting the player go off the script in-game and meaningfully interpreting their actions is really hard in the general case, and really frustrating for the player if they have to guess the particular special case where the off-script action actually opens a different plot branch instead of just leading nowhere like it did in the 10 previous levels. The original Deus Ex did have bits where you could mitigate the shit your early game actually evil employers were pulling with quick in-game thinking, but going over to the rebels was still always in the script.
So, overall, challenging project. You need to figure out RPG Maker and where to get the art assets and such, if you’re not already skilled with it, you need to do worldbuilding for two worlds, and neither can be a cardboard cutout for the conceit to work, and you need to figure out how to make the game narration work so that the player can both get effectively tricked and has all the necessary pieces to put together the alternative choice during play.
When I played Zelda games, I would always work out what option I was supposed to take, then take the other one, confident that I would get to see a few extra lines of dialogue before being presented with the same option again.
(I say “always”, but when I first played, I would carefully make the correct choice, for fear that something bad would happen if I didn’t agree to help Zelda. I don’t remember when I developed the opposite habit.)
Yeah, it’ll be hard. Right now I haven’t worked out much more than the basic concept; I’d have a lot of writing to do, in addition to level design, learning RPG Maker, and so on.
As for art, RPG Maker does come with some built-in art and offers some more in expansion packs. If I have to, I can use placeholder art from the built-in assets and find some way to replace it once I’m happy with everything else.
Have you thought about how much time you are ready to put into the project? I’d ballpark the timescale for this as at least two years if you work on this alone, aren’t becoming a full-time game developer and want to put a large-scale competent CRPG together.
EDIT: I’m guessing this would look like something like what Zeboyd Games puts out. They had a two-man team working full-time and took three months to make the short and simple Breath of Death. Didn’t manage to find information on how long their more recent bigger games took to develop, but they seem to have released around one game a year since.
Honestly, I’d probably start by trying to throw something much simpler together with RPG Maker, just to learn the system and see what it’s like. And I don’t actually have a “real job”, so the amount of time I spend is mostly limited by my own patience.
And using RPG Maker might help speed up the technical work.
I like the idea, mainly because I spent most of Avatar rooting for Quarditch (easily the biggest badass in the last decade of cinema), but it seems like there’s another way to do it that might have a bit more power;
Why not have them both be “right,” according to their own value systems anyway, and then have the end-game slideshow in both branches tell the player the story of what they did from the perspective of the other side?
In terms of workload, it seems minimal; from a story perspective you already need both sides to have sympathetic and unsavory elements anyway, while from a design perspective all you need to add is a second set of narration captions for the slideshow contingent on which side the player supported.
And in terms of appeal, it certainly seems more engaging than most AAA games. Spec Ops: the Line proved that players are masochists and that throwing guilt trips at them is a great way to get sales and good reviews, while Mass Effect 3′s failure shows that genuine choice in endings is pretty important for a game built on moral choice.
This would ruin the point I’m trying to make.
You don’t have to make both branches equivalent. Both of them could feel “right” from inside, but only one of them could contain an information which makes the other one wrong.
In one ending, the hero only has limited information, and based on that limited information, the hero thinks they made the right choice. Sure, some things went wrong, but the hero considers that a necessary evil.
On another ending, the hero has more information, and now it is obvious that this choice was right, and all the good feelings from the other branch are merely lack of information or reasoning.
This way, if you only saw the first ending, you would think it is the good one, but if you saw both of them, it would be obvious the second one is the good one.
I like this idea but it seems hard to differentiate between “You did what you thought was right but you need to be more careful about what you believe” and “you got the bad ending because you missed this little thing”, which is something many games have done before.
An example is Iji where the game plays out significantly differently if you make a moral decision not to kill, but if you take the default path it doesn’t let you know you could’ve chosen to be peaceful the whole time. It involves an active decision rather than a secret thing you can miss, but it also doesn’t frame it as a “MORAL CHOICE TIME GO”
That sounds awesome… except now that I know about that twist it’s ruined. And if you publish it under a different name and don’t reveal it it wont sound awesome so I’ll never discover it.
The only way to do this justice would be nagging enough people to play it that they can insist that it’s better than it sounds and someone should really play it for reasons they can’t spoil.
/me shrugs
For some reason, people still like games such as Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line after knowing about their twists...
It sounds very appealing to me, but as KaynanK pointed out, you have to be very careful about keeping the twist secret. To this end, I’d suggest not revealing to the players that they could have gone off-script, unless they do.
It seems like an interesting story idea, but, of course, the twist can’t be revealed to any prospective player without spoiling it, so it might seem cliched on the surface.
As an example of a flash game with similar story branches (albeit a pretty different plot), there’s endeavor.
That does sound very appealing. I’m not well versed at all in game creation, but I do remember playing with RPG maker a few years ago and it was pretty limiting. Rather than RPG maker, why not make a Skyrim mod? That would be much more fun to play and would have a much larger potential userbase.
JRPGs are what I know best.
(And RPG Maker makes standalone programs; someone who wants to play an RPG Maker game doesn’t need to have RPG Maker themselves.)
Well, that’s just the twist idea, but what’s your framework? Are you thinking about first-person shooters (Deus Ex style, for example) or about tactical turn-based RPGs or about 2-D platformers or what?
RPG Maker, by default, makes games that look like SNES-era JRPGs.