How is gameplay changed when you don't physically roll the dice?
Can roleplay even be part of it when you don't have a flesh and blood game master?
Since I was a kid I have tried to make games based on Dungeons & Dragons and have always given up somewhere into the process.
Like many people, I think the imagination part of it is the most fun, and when things get tricky I find something to distract myself.
This time around though I really want to see things through.
A lot of life stuff got in the way so the project sat stale for months, but I would really like to get this into people's hands so I have giving it another shot.
The screenshot above shows the Commodore 64 version but the code I am putting most of the work into is in fact cross-platform across a whole bunch of retro computers from the early days of the microcomputer:
Yes, I am probably setting myself up to fail by being ambitious, but the goal is to have a game or demo running on every computer and console in my collection of retro gaming systems.
Game Logic Versus Coding
There are a whole bunch of adventure-style games nowadays.
Back when I was a kid starting out on my vic 20 there were a couple of game styles:
- The Dungeon Crawl which today would be most recognisable as a "roguelike"
- Text adventure - think Zork etc - where you read text and write text commands like "go north".
Those were served both with commercial releases and even type-in games.
Once the Spectrum and C64 became the most popular systems, a couple of variations were added.
- Isometric adventure - games like Knightlore and Batman
- Graphical adventures - Text adventures with pictures, all the way through to Maniac Mansion etc.
The 16-bit era brought new opportunities for sound and vision, with Amiga and ST having many richly immersive titles and the Nintendo and Megadrive making popular the Zelda style cute action RPG.
We are spoiled for choice now, but games like Ultima, Might and Magic, Dungeon Master, Guild of Thieves, all broke new ground.
Games such as Warcraft, Dungeon Keeper, various Tower Defense games and Diabalo all drew on roleplaying tropes for ideas of course.
Story and Plot
One of the places games have been able to excel is rich storytelling. One of my favourite games producers was Lucasarts, with Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island standing out.
Interestingly, a lot of games started to push back on having a defined plot, and instead focus more on exploring an open world or procedurally generating.
My guess is that people would rather have re-play over a narrative?
Combat Versus Puzzles
Many games of the retro era started out, as mentioned, with the traditional dungeon crawl - fight baddies, collect loot, kill the big bad evil dude.
But they pivoted to more puzzle solving with the platform adventures and especially the isometric variety. Moving things into position and triggering switches were more important than your hit points.
With combat though we see card games based around just that mechanic. When Magic the Gathering came out I was the wrong age group to get a chance to play amongst my circle, the whole field passed me by. Lately I have tried the Magic phone app and purchased some deck building games to see if I can play solo to get a sense of if I like the field or not.
"Resource" games sprung up too, where you have to balance money and other resources to build things.
Roleplaying
Player to Player and Player to NPC Interaction has always been limited. The same thing is true of solitaire adventure games now.
As modems became a little more popular, it was possible to play online, first with bulletin boards and then Multi-User Dungeons. I enjoyed exploring one based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
These were, as expected, primitive graphically, but it was only with the advent of the web that it truly became accessible to the masses, and then powerful PCs allowed Massively Multiplayer experiences.
All the interaction, outside of chat, always comes down to kill, trade/barter, or very rigidly defined options.
Once your character is created, the roleplaying part of RPG games seems to go away.
Where to go?
I am not sure I have answers for what kind of game I want to make. Perhaps I need to try a few.
While I did build a text adventure engine, after solving the technical problem I gave up on the build. Dungeon Crawlers are something I have built proof of concepts of before but not procedurally generated.
Over to you
What do you enjoy in a computer RPG? Are there any you play often?
I have played a lot of entries in the Final Fantasy franchise, several Elder Scrolls games, Fallout games, and a recent retro title, Shadows of Adam. some are more scripted, some let you ignore the core story the moment you leave the introduction. Some, like Diablo, have procedurally-generated dungeons. Most have levels set in stone. Both work.
Procedurally generated might be the most fun for me as the developer just because even I will be surprised then, but I will need a mechanic so that you are not trapped with no options.
For example, if you collect a key and go into a room with a locked door and no key ... I guess I could make it so you can fight the door (knock it down), but should there be a penalty to stop you just running through every locked door?
I would add the key as part of the procedure.
If lockedDoor exists, add keyToLockedDoor where keyLocation is never beyond lockedDoor.
Good idea though I’d still need to ensure the player is on the same side of a wall as the door …
haha there's always some small detail that gets overlooked isn't there 🤣
Could combine the ideas though, still have the “hit the door 8 times to break it” fallback - means you can’t run through the levels like the koolaid guy
Maybe if a key is used, there is a stealth advantage on any encounters in the next room, because you didn't "Here's Johnny" your way through the door. But the loud way would be an option for wood doors. If you get crazy with coding, iron doors would require a key first, and would definitely need extra coding to make them work.
!PIZZA
Oh I like that 🤔
I'm weird because I don't play many CRPGs as opposed to other types of RPGs when I play video games (I tend to be an ARPG junkie), but I've always found that getting probability right as a tool for emulating the tabletop is what makes CRPGs work well.
A lot of modern CRPG-style stuff just doesn't hold up because it goes too far astray from the feeling of risk and chance, which is often just due to technical limitations.
I did play through a lot of Neverwinter Nights 2 recently (ran into technical issues where my save seems not to have flagged quests properly for a while which ended my run), and one thing that I noticed is that when it worked well it really let me just choose to do things and then ran through the rules for me, instead of when it wasn't working well and my character was sitting around taking hits in combat.
That sitting waiting to finish getting beat up is definitely something I want to avoid. Sometimes games feel more like work than fun
I'm a longtime fan of Rogue/Nethack - not a lot of dragons there, but it's in a dungeon ;) I've been playing that since it was only ASCII and still play a mobile version of it. One day the Amulet of Yendor will be mine!
I have only played very simplified versions, I need to actually have a proper go with the real deal! Which mobile game is it you have?
Nethack, it's in the play store - though it doesn't run on all modern phones.
Wow! What a beautiful nostalgia roller-coaster!
I remember that I was playing Final Fantasy and Castlevania II as my first gameplay experiences ever of my own. I remember that back in the day, RPG games were lack of technology but had a huge push for imagination. When industry started to materialize our imagination, they limited the options and we had less and less freedom over games. Like, back in Baldur's Gate days, you could randomly kill an NPC and if you'd continue like that, when you get a quest related with that NPC, you could never complete that quest and it would be a huge mystery for you. Now, you cannot even hit an NPC, you cannot play a completely evil character, you cannot deny the role game pushes you to, for following your own path of life. We mostly can get at top is extra dialogue options if you could meet some requirements, or if you could jackpot the random numbers (successful dice-roll simulation), and that's all.
I want to serve another kingdom. Nope. I want another person to be my mentor. Nein. I don't want to chase your problems because you couldn't understand basics of your own setting, instead I want to dive into my own drama. NEVER. Where is the "roleplaying" part in an RPG then? Industry thinks that spending points to improve characters numerically is RPG.
What is "your" RPG?
We are probably a few years away from a real digital RPG that replaces a dungeon master - I’m thinking Free Guy level of AI 🤣
Guess for now we have to stick to combat and gold/xp harvesting.
Makes me want to try running an asynchronous game of D&D using messages like the play by mail games.
Have you tried AI Dungeon? Once I was a paranormal investigator who lives in Istanbul, ended up accidentally joined a Lovecraftian cult :D It was a quite nice experience some years ago, but haven't checked its current version.
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