Notes

Design goals

Player experience:

• Create sense of awe
  • Get powerful, feel cool? TODO: bad, that's actually boring and not awesome at all. This isn't a marble movie.
  • Mechanics discovery: delve into the game mechanics, figure out deeper layers, research combinations/possibilities
    • must be intriguing: multiple layers of mechanics at work at once, multiple variables affecting each action
    • must have good intuitive feedback, feel alive and not overly rigid (different scenarios / intentions call for different inputs). Input must result in what you mean.
    • must offer many local maxima, not just a single one, so that many different solutions are interesting, and not just one optimised, mathematical playstyle is encouraged.
    • Must offer multi-dimensional outcomes if possible. (Like how steels have different edge retention, hardness, flexibility, brittleness, which are tradeoffs).
      • Different properties of items to suit different needs (cost, effectiveness, suitability).
      • Different flavours of ability execution (range, power, latency, area, arc, velocity, etc.).
  • NPCs must feel real, or at least as if they matter:
    • Death of an NPC is permanent
    • All NPCs can die, and also level up
    • No system NPC shopkeepers that just spawn resources in exchange for money. Everything has to be somehow created by a player or NPC by hand.
    • NPCs must have actual jobs and not just laze around in the town.
    • Loss of an NPC is not just a loss of talent, but also a blow to morale -> NPCs must have some kind of "relationships"
    • Birth??? Where do NPCs come from? There should be a way to bootstrap NPC populations as an emergency, but in a settlement, NPCs should be added through birth.
  • No one-and-done stuff:
    • Items deteriorate and get destroyed if not repaired. No infinite repairs possible.
    • Setbacks in collective game progress are possible.
  • Fights must feel realistic and engaging:
    • Good input feedback, controls must directly affect movements adequately (do not make it too complex, though)
    • Adaptive tactical thinking must be required, and monsters must also behave somewhat unpredictable and adaptive.
    • No million hitpoint mobs as a difficulty measure. Enemies must have unique characteristics and be challenging in their own way.
    • Each NPC/monster type must have multiple branching behavioural pattern modes. Predictable/mechanical enemies are the worst.
    • Outlier monsters and NPCs with non-standard stats (like extra bulky bear, or especially fast wolf).
    • Behavioural types must differ (Extra cautious or aggressive specimen)
    • Monsters must adapt through selection or something (propagate effective behaviour against players). Same for NPCs. But without AI. More like probability / inclination tweaking. Needs sufficient amount of strategy patterns and some kind of failure reason detection (optional).
    • Varieties in fights: Monster kiting is super boring, but simply hard-preventing it is also gay.
      • Monsters attack, hesitate, or flee on sight.
      • Attack or flee on engagement.
      • Call for backup.
      • Monsters try to do pincer attacks, lure you into their base, or try to encompass you.
      • Monsters must also act as if they are trying to survive collectively and as individuals.
      • Monsters must always know whether peers are nearby or not. And then flee or call for backup or call to let the allies escape.
  • Long progression potential for all systems:
    • Many tech tiers, unlocking stuff as the overall level an resources of a settlement increase.
    • Settlement management becomes more complex as territories grow huge.
    • Crafting with new materials and better skills to make better items.
      • Magical equipment with customised abilities or properties
        • Unlockable magic formulas maybe? Or mastery of a spell + crafting level translates to effectiveness of enchantment?
      • Not just better items, also new types of items, e.g. muskets, artillery cannons, bombs, flame throwers, etc.
      • Machinery
      • More refined clothing, better-looking stuff. You start with animal furs and clubs and spears, mostly, and progress to plate armor, enchanted stuff, chainmail, etc.
      • Better tools for more variety of crafted goods.
    • Farming?? TODO: how can this be made more interesting with more progress?
      • Breeding? Create your own special breeds of cattle to optimise for some properties.
      • Raise tamed monsters? As warbeast / hunting dogs / watchdogs.
      • Optimise crops?
      • Fluctuating climates require adaptation (in colder years, some plants won't grow, etc.)
      • Not all soil fits all crops, different soil qualities.
      • Fabric production
      • Forestry? Need wood.
  • The game must not get stale: need replay value
    • Unique world every session / server (if desired)
    • Different settings per session:
      • differing resource constraints / rarities,
      • soil quality, too dry or too wet / swamp,
      • restricted cattle type availability,
      • very few / lots of trees, etc.
      • general climate zone
    • Endgame must either be hard/impossible to fully achieve, or inherently fun even without further meaningful progression. Or you just go to war against each other and bomb each other back to zero, that's also cool.
• Build camaraderie, make friends, have fun together TODO: Not just grind & economy! We don't want to build a virtual labour camp! We want to have genuine fun!
  • Fun together through necessary cooperation to solve challenges (raids, wars, adventure parties)
  • Fun together through collective creation (higher levels of civilisation / tech, better settlements, larger settlements, territory management, territory expansion)
  • Fun together through sharing discoveries
  • Fun together through forming cliques
  • Fun together through just hanging out and talking
  • Fun together through competition (not necessarily fighting, but creation, optimisation, strategising, management, etc.)
  • Specialise in what you like, become valuable to someone else (either farming, crafting, or helping out in a party, hunting, war, etc.)
• Go on thrilling adventures
  • Experience new situations (strategic battles in different setups, tactics, with different constraints and goals (protect, defeat, plunder/harvest, infiltrate, divert, etc.)
    • protect lands, pest control, bandit head-hunting
    • defeat enemies, conquer land
    • plunder/harvest resources from monsters or enemies
    • not sure about infiltration, but may be thrilling, also. Maybe burglary / sabotage?
    • strategic battles to tie up an enemy as a diversion? That would add a whole new dimension to the cooperative gameplay, and the story complexity.
    • Fights against other players of different factions, or against monsters? Intelligent monster factions? Maybe not.
  • Get skilled and master challenging trials
    • Skilled in combat, in tactics, in strategies, in character control
    • Trials need to be difficult enough for players to really try hard.
  • Get cool rewards: motivation to take on trials.
  • High cost of failure: difficulty becomes real and not just trial/error grind. Challenges must feel real and challenging.
    • Permadeath, full inventory loss, etc.
    • Negative challenges: no positive outcome, disastrous cost of failure.
      • Failing to resist an invasion will eradicate your collective progress.
    • Not just "somehow succeed", but quality must also count:
      • Wounds are hard to heal, take a long time, may lead to permanent stat loss? Focus on dodging and blocking, efficiency.
      • Clean kills reward in more meat when hunting? As opposed to completely mangling the prey.
  • No artificial limitations of what you can do, or artificially forcing you to do something a specific way:
    • No classes
    • Can learn multiple types of masteries / skills / professions.
    • Abilities like spells or even attacks must have controllable parameters, not just "press button, reproducible action happens". Like charging a spell longer before firing. Or taking a big swing. Or to pull the bow back further, etc. Especially for magic, there must be different parameters, like area of effect, intensity, duration, range, etc. which the player can pre-select, as well as a value range for "charging". Like, quick tap would be normal activation, but long tap would be maybe with more range, or higher area of effect, or something along those lines. Or maybe even 2-d input or something, or something like a slider (drag mouse during activation maybe). Even people with the same stats and items and skills should be able to produce wildly different outcomes based on choice of ability parameters. This is true customisation.
      • Maybe I want to go for ogre-style warrior that does one-hit KOs but has almost no stamina. Or I need to break through particularly tough armor, so I spend way more stamina on attacks than usual.
      • Or I want to go for artillery mage, doing long channelings of a spell with maximum destructiveness but long latency.
      • Or I want to go for medium range suppressive fire mage, shooting many less powerful spells.
      • Or I want to go for sniper style archer.
      • etc.
• Unwind, get cozy:
  • Explore beautiful, living scenery:
    • Different seasons
    • Different biomes
    • Events may destroy / influence scenery maybe?
  • Build cozy settlements
  • Farming or something
  • Pacify territory
  • Stand guard, fortify settlements
    • Build defense mechanisms, walls, towers, magic cannons, etc.
  • Research stuff, build cool niche character / equipment builds
• No compulsion to be online or to play together
  • hire NPC guards that try to prevent stealing and punish murder within settlements, protect settlements and stand guard
  • anyone can start a settlement, and populate it with NPCs if desired
  • every necessary task can theoretically be accomplished alone, but takes lots more effort and preparation
  • players can also play as outlaws if they want.
  • NPC guards to accompany a player, or maybe even squad-based gameplay (no main character, but everyone plays a squad)?
  • All fundamental tasks can also be automatised with an NPC (need to pay him, protect him).
• Gameloop must have different intrinsic goals that are parallel, sequential, and recursive:
  • Long-term goals:
    • Save the world or something. Or pacify/conquer the whole continent. Or reach maximum power / tech level.
    • Discovery new resources, become more industrious?
    • Support player & NPC population (food, shelter, etc.)
    • Maybe also different phases making some goals more relevant than others. Like defense becomes important during farming season or something. And conquering / pacifying lands during planting season.
  • Parallel goals:
    • Collective tech level advancement
    • Maintenance
    • Resource collection
    • Expansion of territory
  • Multiple short-term goals:
    • Get strong
    • Maintain equipment
    • Improve / craft equipment
    • Maintain health
  • Sequential goals / metas:
    1. Beginning: Create primitive settlement. The players start with basically nothing, and very limited access to technology.
       1. Secure food and shelter.
       2. Gather resources to acquire crafting technology.
       3. Set up NPCs to maintain stuff.
       4. Clear the area of monsters.
    2. Early game: Get an economy going. First tech advancements allow for specialisation, leading to division of labour. This is where the real role playing game slowly picks up.
       • Farming, resource extraction, crafting.
       • Territory defense and setting up real production pipelines.
       • Adventuring, discovering, wild west kind of situation. Also gold rush or something.
    3. Mid game: Expand, solidify, advance, protect. The players advance in tech tiers and get a more sophisticated settlement management going. More law enforcement etc., higher populations. Almost state-like entities.
       1. Advance settlement to unlock more gameplay variety.
       2. Form a stable economy.
       3. Set up solid defenses
       4. Expand territory for more resources and stability.
    4. Late game: Large power structures, spanning large territories. Race for dominion.
       • Conquer all the lands.
       • Reach maximum tech level / utopia.
       • Massive power struggles maybe?

RPG "vs." RTS

Blur the lines between the genres by having different modes of control, which can be switched by the player at will:

• Single-character control first person view (or third person view): fine control over a single character. Most rewarding if player is skilled. WASD-like movement + mouse aiming.
  • Order squad members via gestures and pointing (formations, movements, target orders etc.).
• Single-character control bird's eye view: better for strategic mode, allows more accurate orders to be given. Less accuracy for aiming due to a missing dimension.
  • Auto-pilot mode with less efficiency than FPS mode. You still give relatively fine-grained commands to the unit, but it does aiming by itself, and you only select the point of impact, or select a potentially moving target entity which gets auto-aimed at.
  • Squad leader mode: control a single unit medium-fine grained, and the whole squad coarse-grained.
  • Limited access to squad maneuver commands.
  • Full access to selected unit's abilities.
• Squad control bird's eye view:
  • Control entire groups as single entity.
  • Different characters' abilities on hotkeys without selecting them. Group ability hotkey bar.
  • Full access to squad maneuver commands: Coarse-grained actions that may contain pre-defined sub-commands to single units (command on the scale of entire maneuvers).
  • No access to individual abilities.
  • Positioning given by drawing formations.

The only difference between RPG and RTS is then the number of units you have access to. Single-character settings are RPG, while squad settings are more of a squad-RPG. A scenario with many characters is clearly RTS.

One interesting niche is when you cannot control individual units, and are forced to stay in squad mode, or there is only one or only a limited set of special units that can be directly controlled, and the rest is only commandable via maneuvers. Depending on whether you can select multiple squads in different locations, that also opens up different styles of gameplay. Squad mode is theoretically zoomable to larger scales, even up to controlling multiple armies. Squad mode relies on an expressive set of maneuver commands with satisfying customisability of the parameters. Like on army scale:

• draw a defense line, build fortifications here.
• Move in spear formation to attack along this path.
• etc.

All three major modes of command must be polished to the point where you could make a game with only that one command mode. Unifying those will create a truly satisfying versatile game, and maybe also result in multiple interesting games.

• Solo RPG (1.)
• Solo RPG with followers (2., fixed main character)
• Squad RPG (2., no fixed main character)
• Squad RTS (3., no selectable characters)
• Multi-Squad RTS (3., multiple disjoint squads or something).

Even the same game can be played in all these flavours, potentially. Although having someone play as multi-squad RTS player against a Solo RPG player could possibly be unbalanced. But maybe the increased control & more focused rewards of a solo player can make up for that. After all, squads have less precision for the individual units' actions.