As a bit of a side hobby, I’ve enjoyed teaching myself how to program in various computer languages. I hardly call myself an expert by any measure, nor is my portfolio particularly large. I’ve focused primarily on ASP, ASP.NET, VB, VB.NET, and VBA. My knowledge of any said language varies at any given time, and as things currently stand right now, I can only competently speak VBA because it’s what I use all the time at work as I tinker around in Access.
However, back when I was working extremely hard on this little RPG project, I was well versed in ASP. I was working as a web developer and was using it to maintain an internal departmental website; but, prior to that, I had put my knowledge to building a webpage specifically for our game. It featured things such as character databases, quest databases, image repositories, and god knows what else (I’ve honestly forgotten everything I put in there). It let me access things remotely so that I could tinker around with my stuff when I probably should have been doing more productive things (like working). So it is with some consternation that I am unable to access large portions of my data simply because I’m too lazy to bother setting up a web server within my home network. With that in mind, you’ll have to bear with me as I try to remember things that I haven’t really touched in well over 6 years.
So with all this I’m going to touch a bit on our character development. I’m hazarding a guess here, because I really can’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe we had around 16 different characters. We introduced 3 within the first chapter, and then two more in each subsequent chapter to bring the total introduced up to 10 (11 maybe?). It would be with this initial group that people would begin their quest. There would be a maximum of 5 people available within a “group” at any given time. The remaining 6 (or more?) would be introduced after certain conditions had been met. We figured that each chapter would take anywhere from 1 to 2 hours to complete, so we figured that after about 10 hours all of the party members would have been introduced.
We fully expected this game to be many, many hours long. Potentially it could even become multiple games, so we weren’t specifically concerned with the amount of time it took to meet everybody. The whole idea of chapters and acts was something that really appealed to the both of us, and while the game was divided into chapters, there was also a larger, more reaching, story that would have been divided up into separate acts. Act 1 was essentially the introduction of the first 10 characters. I suppose this could have become its own game because the way I constructed it, there was a beginning, middle, and end to the act. Act 1 was also the only part of the game I really only ever finished. I have some 400 pages of word documents floating around on my hard drive with this act – 400 pages that will become much larger if I go back and insert/rewrite dialogue for the parts that don’t have it.
As I stated before, magic was essentially gone from the world. Not that people were incapable of using magic, just that nobody remained who knew how. The main character was the first, in many hundred years, to appear who had access to magical spells. Consequently, the thought of how we were supposed to keep people alive during combat was somewhat high on our list of things. The majority of healing was going to be done via a “medicine” system. Things like bandages, potions, tonics, and the like would have been primarily used until sometime in Act 2 or 3 (depending on what actually became of Act 2, again, I never got around to developing it). At that point, all of the characters in the party would have had access to magic. This would allow for the use of the stereotypical “white mage” to help augment the medicine system.
It was with this challenge that we had to figure out a magic system that made sure each character continued to remain unique. Now, I am of two minds when it comes to characters in RPGs. First, I believe it is absolutely necessary for a story to be character driven and the majority of focus should be spent making each character come to life and allow people to become attached to them. Pursuant to this, however, brings up my second thought. Far too often characters are made extremely generic in terms of how they fight. It becomes extremely easy to just throw whomever you want into a party and not have it make a difference. This is something I wanted to avoid. I wanted people to specifically pick people in their party because of who they were – in terms of characterization – and how they fought. We didn’t want to set up a situation where you could bring either character A or B because they both did the same thing. At the same time, we didn’t want to punish people who chose to bring in certain characters and later decided to change. Thus, combat experience would have been divided among the entire party – even those who weren’t in the active combat group. I don’t believe we ever decided if it was going to be 100% or if it would be some other percentage, but one thing I always hated in RPGs was suddenly having to go back and spend several hours in lower level zones leveling up somebody because I decided I wanted them in my group or was forced to because of something that happened in the story. Moreover, we didn’t want to become gimmicky where we would force the player to pick certain characters. We didn’t want to make it so they had to have characters A, B, E, F, and I and ONLY A, B, E, F and I in order to make it past a certain encounter. Far too often, in a game, you’ll find a zone where every monster is vulnerable to, say, fire magic and you happen to have a character that uses ice magic. The game has just forced you to stop using a certain character, which I feel is unforgivable in terms of game design.
I think a large part, really, of what motivated us to do this was a horrible trend we began observing at the time. In order to give you a good perspective, the big genre names at the time were Final Fantasy 7 and 8. I will not lie; I am not a big fan of these games, 8 least of all. I felt the choice in game play made the characters far too generic. Suddenly everybody could wear each others clothes, cast the same spells, and that connection – which I feel is necessary – in combat was no longer there. Xenogears had come out shortly before all this started and that game holds a large place in my gamer heart. To this day, I still compare games to it. The graphics weren’t very amazing – realize here the game came out concurrently with FF8 and look at what they did with that. But the story, the characters, everything…was just amazing. I remember writing an ‘about us’ section for our “company’s” website and putting down Xenogears and Chrono Trigger as my two biggest source of inspiration and favorite games. So with that in mind you can probably understand why I felt like I did regarding 7 and 8. I know everybody views these games – 7 in particular – as somehow being watershed moments for the RPG genre in that it somehow made it more mainstream, but I think that was more because they were in the right place at the right time. I cannot give so much credit to games that, in my opinion, were less than previous outings in the same series. But I realize I’m in the minority here.
So with all of this in mind we set about to creating unique characters with unique fighting styles and unique magic abilities. It was a monumental undertaking looking back. As this project developed, I began to understand more and more how much of a huge undertaking it was. And I think that’s part of the reason why it never went anywhere. You just can’t expect to get very far very fast with only 2 people really working on the project (well, 1 person really, as I’ve explained).
Anyway, eventually what would happen was that the remaining 6 (or so) would have their own act devoted to them as well – or at least a large portion of one. There story is unrelated to the original 10, but only at first, and with all stories theirs too, must start with a beginning. Eventually certain circumstances would draw these two groups together. These circumstances were largely as a result of the end of act 1. What would probably happen, were I to start writing again, was that act 2 would be devoted to these remaining characters, and act 3 would cover these two groups meeting up. I can probably imagine this being a 5 act type of a thing. I’m of the opinion that there is such a thing as “too long” and for some reason, “5” has always struck me as a nice number of “things” to be together.
What will probably be the hardest part for me during all of this will be to come up with acts 2-5 (or whatever) because act 1 is all fairly clear to me simply because it has already been written, I think I just felt too overwhelmed to make it beyond the first act. By that point, it was just me doing everything, and my desire to keep it a game probably washed over me. Maybe it will work better as a novel.
I guess we’ll see where this all goes.
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