Designing Games

I’ve been writing game design documentation for over 15 years now, during that time I’ve solidified a rather long storyline with 3 ”spinoffs” which I will overview in this post. For safety, I’ll be using dev titles where applicable.

Do be mindful that I’m rather graphically challenged, so I don’t have much in terms of graphics to show off. This will be mostly text, but in Graphic Design you can see some concept art of creatures at least.

General Design Philosophy:

I’m quite old-school in the way I design games, I believe that doing more with less and allowing the player the freedom to figure out their own path is a bit of a lost art these days. I like to challenge the player to think outside the box and push their skills, but it is not the matter of ”beating the player”, each challenge needs to be fair. If you can do it on your first try, it’s too easy, but if you can’t do it without taking damage, it’s too hard, that sort of thing. I like to keep numbers small and have fights resolve quickly either in the player’s or the enemy’s favor. I also love having gameplay styles that every player can customize to their liking, like in deck builders. Finally, I have an affinity for weird things, which is reflected in my character design.

The Action RPG: Project Chronicle

The ”Main Series” of my design plans fashioned in the style of 16-bit SNES action RPGs, not necessarily in graphics, but design philosophy, featuring ample secrets and bizarre enemies. Each of my plans is made in style of a story medium, in this case taking inspiration from epic literature and heroic myths, the story explores various aspects of humanity and spirituality and allows much freedom of choice in both story and character building.

Rather than roleplaying as the main character directly, you take the role of their Manah, or conscience, who guides their decisions from the shadows. The primary conflict is between the ideals of Egoism, those that believe in individuality and wish to create a future where everyone is a god of their own private universe, Altruism, those who’d sacrifice their free will and uniqueness to build a perfect society where no-one is alienated, and Balance, those who believe that the universe itself is good as it is, it’s only the residents’ attitude that needs to change. The themes include spiritual growth, the imperfection of everything, life’s variety of forms and viewpoints, the creative force possessed by mortals and how there often is no right answer. The stories can contain moments that are serious, silly, sad, scary, philosophical or anything in between. Just like real life, every day brings something different.

The gameplay features exploration and combat where skill and smarts go hand in hand. While there are no exploration tools, each character role has unique abilities that can be used both in and out of combat for a variety of purposes. For example, a healer’s normal attack is a barrier that reflects physical attacks, but can also be used to reflect physical projectiles like say, swinging iron balls or rolling barrels. The world is semi-linear, but full of secrets as previously mentioned.

The Search-Action Game: Project Moon

The first of the ”spinoffs”, this one is a 2D platformer where you explore one big level and collect power-ups that allow you to reach new areas. It has the theme of ”love in its many forms” and is styled like an old fairy tale in both telling and visual style.

The main character is a wandering, kind-hearted bard who gets mixed up in a variety of adventures with his familiar, a golden retriever who can absorb power from the monsters they defeat. His songs are laced with the beauty of the moment, fleeting nature of things, longing and appreciating what you have.

In gameplay he wields an unique weapon called a liuxing or meteor hammer, a chain tipped with metal balls at both ends. These metal balls can be swapped with a number of different things ranging from grappling hooks to burning oil containers to make facing the monsters roaming the level easier, combined with the dog’s ability to occasionally gain special attacks or passive abilities from defeated enemies. This makes the available playstyles highly variable. There could also be other playable characters, such as a huntress who wields an enchanted self-loading crossbow that can fire endless copies of the loaded bolt and has an owl as her familiar instead of a dog. Defeating the boss of an area often significantly alters the area in some fashion, such as defeating the boss ghost of a haunted living quarters will stop the paranormal activity in the area.

The Turn-Based Horror RPG: Project Trauma

This one is a bit hard to describe concisely. It’s a 1st person dungeon crawler/point ’n click with turn-based battles focused on efficiently defeating enemies without too much loss of health or resources, as both time and resources are limited and dead characters cannot be brought back without starting over. It also features some Visual Novel and Roguelike-elements as the endings are numerous and a general run is rather short for RPG standards. It’s styled after urban legends and horror stories, often featuring relatively cutesy human characters juxtaposed with horrific monsters and gruesome situations. The theme of this spinoff is penance and childhood traumas.

Story-wise it has a simple premise: A group of modern youths are forcibly dragged into a supernaturally dangerous place, then each of them is given a choice of a role to fight back with and challenged to escape the place alive within a specific time limit or they’ll never be seen again. As they fight off bloodthirsty, man-eating nursery bogeys on their way to freedom, the main character must keep up the party’s morale or find that when one of their companions cracks under pressure, they can be even more dangerous than the monsters they face. The party is faced with difficult decisions and personal conflicts that must be resolved lest infighting claims their lives, but unlike most other survival-horror games there IS a happy ending where everyone survives and everything is resolved. Reaching that ending is the ultimate goal, but also the most difficult challenge.

As previously stated, gameplay-wise the focus is in carefully laid out plans under pressure. Monsters telegraph their intentions and the player has a lot of control over their party’s turn order, but social problems might hinder the other members’ willingness to listen to the main character’s commands. Death is permanent and morale drops as the party’s ranks thin, but good leadership is rewarded with more reasonable companions and more tools to even the playing field. Furthermore, every unique ending, even the main character’s death in combat, grants you a ”Memento”, which is a toggleable thing that can help your future runs in a variety of ways. Likewise, they might add new tools to the pool of randomly found things around the labyrinths.

The Deck-Builder RPG: Project Digital

Have you noticed that I like RPGs? I just think it’s a perfect blend of story and interactivity when done well. This one is a mystery and detective-story inspired sort-of action RPG where enemies drop card-like collectibles that act as your main source of actions in combat, where player and enemies both get a 3×3 grid to move around and perform actions in. Out of combat you go around trying to solve supernatural crimes both off and online, switching between a human main character and their spirit companion.

The story takes place in a large, futuristic floating city, where government has issued everyone a smartphone that acts as the ultimate citizen ID, containing bank account details, identification and so on. There would be two main characters that you can pick at the start, each viewing the events from a different perspective, both of which obtain an orb containing a spiritual creature called a Yazata, which have no physical body but can be channeled into physical form by people called Mediums and can be transferred into electronic devices. With their Yazata companions residing in their smartphones for convenience, the main characters fight against criminals also using Yazatas to protect their home. Important themes include Technology vs. Tradition, loneliness and friendship and what it means to be a hero.

The main blunt of gameplay happens inside the digital world, where the Yazatas fight against malware and other hostile Yazatas, but even in real world the humans can explore and solve puzzles as well as find new points where to Upload their companions into electronics to investigate. As friendship is an important theme, the players can battle, trade and link up for various benefits with each other, even if they’re playing as different main characters. In fact, linking with the opposite main character is generally more beneficial than linking with people using the same main character.

The big focus is on the Yazatas, which serve as the boss characters. As it happens, I’ve made a list of boss ideas for the game. I figured I could throw in a sample of 11 bosses I’ve hand-picked to show off the variety of forms Yazatas take.