My Ideas for a new CRPG

[Elzair]

Well, since I am currently between jobs, I thought I would try my hand at making a CRPG. Since I am one person, I feel I need to do as many "slamdunk" elements as I can since as Slam Dunk to Black Isle would be an epic project to me. Therefore, I want to make an "isometric" party-based turn-based fantasy RPG using the D&D 5E OGL rules.

Anyway, for the past few days I have been brainstorming some design details. Here are some of the notable ones.

Technical Details

• I am currently aiming for fully 3D models and environments using an orthographic camera locked to a plane above the character's heads (to fake an isometric view).
• It will use my own custom engine (that I am developing). I object to proprietary software for both political and technical reasons. For my political reasons see this. I view the tradeoff between using an off-the-shelf engine like Unity and a homebrew engine as similar to the tradeoff between playing a fighter and a wizard in AD&D. Sure, you will get rolling faster using Unity, but eventually you WILL get bitten by nigh undebuggable bugs. If you use standard, modular components and glue them together properly, you will have a much easier time. Plus I want to play with Vulkan.
• Use as much procedural generation as possible. Use models created with MakeHuman, clothes created with Make Clothes, trees created with Arbaro, The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages provides plenty of opportunities.

Story

• As many people have said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." I thought I would find some inspiration from Final Fantasy VII. I like the idea of a struggle between a big corporation and an insurgent group of eco-radicals. Plus it gives Druids and Rangers something to do.
• Instead of Mako, the great ecological threat could be the use of Defiling Magic a la Dark Sun.
• Also, a little class struggle never hurt anything!

Game

• I definitely want a first hour as good as the first hour of Final Fantasy VII. (Hey, I want to sell this!)
• I thought of an interesting compromise between creating a single character vs a party of six: have the player create a main character and then give them the choice to use pregenerated NPCs or manually created characters.
• Each NPC could have certain background variables that would effect what NPC quests the party gets (i.e. if the NPC has the "troubled brother" background, the party may get a quest to help that brother deal with a loanshark). Both pregenerated and created NPCs could draw from this pool which means created characters could be just as "interesting" as the NPCs.
• If the PC is caught by the authorities, they would be faced with the choice of turning snitch or not. If they refuse, they will be executed but will be remembered as Martyrs of the Revolution. It is basically a Game Over but a little bit better. If they snitch, they will get locked out of the main quest but will still be able to do some sidequests.
  
  So what do y'all think?

 

[Calcium]

I'm an irredeemable newfag, so discard my opinion if you wish, but... have you considered making a 2D game instead? I don't know what your artistic capabilities are or whether you have experience with rigging and animating 3D models, but since you're a one man development team taking the 2D route would save you tremendous development time and potentially allow you to flesh out the features of your game more. Also, how much procedural generation are you aiming for? Are you going for fully generated environments? Is the game going to be open world? Will it be a narrative driven game? Also, you haven't listed much in ways of mechanics besides poking at some ideas for a party system, so I can't give much criticism in that regard. I suppose it's also worth asking: what is your experience with game development? What projects have you finished before?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Posting in an epic thread.

using the D&D 5E OGL rules

No clue about how D&D 5E OGL differs from D&D 3.5E OGL, but this might be useful to know if you're not trolling:

Since we already got the pleasure to implement the D&D OGL 3.5e ruleset featuring 8 character classes (with spells/skills/feats until lvl 18), I could provide you guys some hard facts.

Estimate about 6 months full-time coding work just for the basic system that allows you to author actions, spells, skills and feats. Do it via human-readable accessible scripts (e.g. lua), OGL requires of you making any content publicly accessible to the user. Same goes for for monster, item and class descriptions.

Estimate another 3-4 months (again full-time work) to write all those scripts to cover at least half a dozen character classes.

OGL 3.5e is a fucking nightmare if you want to translate most of its rules into software.

So my advice: start with 2 or maybe 3 character classes. Set up an open script-based system and move as much work as possible to external D&D fans/experts. I guess you'll find them easily here at the codex. But keep in mind: first you'll need a running combat engine and a quick&dirty character generator, otherwise there won't be a chance to verify the scripts.

Don't waste time with world maps, lore or background stories/NPCs until your combat engine works (and makes fun). Foremost, the quality of a proper GB remake depends on its combat.

 

[Alchemist]

using the D&D 5E OGL rules

No clue about how D&D 5E OGL differs from D&D 3.5E OGL

5E is a bit simpler mechanically than 3.5, so it might not be as much of a hassle.

But still, keeping the number of classes low to begin with might be a good idea. I would make the core essential classes first (Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Thief) and see how long that takes.

 

[Baron]

Or dispense with the Clevian project of creating everything from scratch and consider using Slowdive's IceBlink Engine. / What Calcium said.

I like the idea of a struggle between a big corporation and an insurgent group of eco-radicals. So what do y'all think?

I love your idea of the PC representing a big corporation fighting against an insurgent group of eco-radicals.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Yeah, I second what Calcium said. In my amateur opinion, going 3D is a bad idea for many indie/small-scale games. 3D development is very labor-intensive compared to 2D, and doesn't make much sense for a one-man (or 2-3 man) crew. With a 2D game (overhead, sideways or isometric) you just need to create the engine (which is much simpler than a 3D engine) and then create art assets for it (which even an amateur can quickly do, they'll just be ugly as all hell). With 3D, you need to think of stuff like modeling, creating textures, physics, more sophisticated pathfinding, performance, etc.

I've been following video games for a long time, and in all that time, I can think of maybe a couple of games that were/are made by small outifts and have good looking 3D graphics, most look like absolute budget level shit. But there are a lot of indie games with 2D graphics that look great (e.g. Don't Starve, Terraria).

But the most dramatic example I know of is this: Dwarf Fortress vs Kenshi. These two games both came from the minds of 1-2 people, at around the same time (2002 for DF, around 2006 for Kenshi), and both at first seemed very ambitious large-scope games. Well, the DF guys chose to go with ASCII graphics, and this in effect allowed them to focus all their efforts into the gameplay, and now, years later, that game has more meat to it than any other. Kenshi, on the other hand, chose to go with 3D graphics, and while it looks nice in some ways (but not as good as AAA 3D games), a lot of times when you read the guy's updates, he is talking about pathfinding or tweaking performance or rewriting some part of the engine, which in turn means much less time spent on the actual gameplay, the most important thing.

 

[Space Insect]

If you could throw in some grey morality instead of having a big evul corporation and an option to join the corporation and destroy the hippie terrorists, that would probably make the main conflict much more interesting and less railroaded. Or you could even add an option to side with neither group.

 

[Alex]

I would recommend using 1e instead, but I understand most people disagree with me there, at least on this site. At any rate, my reasoning is that the first edition is more geared to some stuff missing in the later ones (I haven't actually read the 5th edition, though). For instance, there are a whole lot of rules (or more like advice) on how to deal with NPCs that follow the party around.

About using your own engine, if that is what you want, go for it! But I don't think your evaluation is fair with proprietary software. Proprietary software, if it is something widely used, is much more likely to have good documentation and answers to problems than an open source but unknown code. Sure, if you suspect (or know) that a certain game engine is shoddy and you would need to fix it yourself eventually, it might be a better idea to start from scratch. But I think you should try speaking with people who have used an specific engine you might be considering first before deciding.

About the game's setting, could we, just once, play as the big corporation?

I don't like games that are too "on rails" like FF7 was. Sure, if you want to throw the player right on the middle of the action, go right ahead. But maybe not make the beginning so static? (Though, to be sure, FF7 was pretty static for the whole game). Allow the player to choose actions, to fail, to partially succeed, etc. Also, another thing I hate is when the game forces you to fail.

Being a snitch sounds a bit silly. If you are locked out of the main quest, what is the point? I mean, it doesn't sound like a very interesting choice, since it isn't really opening any new possibilities, only closing them up. Maybe you could have a more dynamic main quest, where the PCs choice can eventually limit their success or end in failure. But in that case, don't make it so direct. For instance, if you rat out NPC x, he won't be available in this or that quest, which means you can't obtain a total victory or something. If you rat out enough people, the game becomes unbeatable and shows a game over screen. Or something like that.

Anyway, good luck!

 

[Baron]

About the game's setting, could we, just once, play as the big corporation?

Exactly. If the Stanford Prison Experiment taught us anything is that it's much more fun being the guy weilding the baton than the guy on the receiving end. Although corporation vs environment is one of the most banal conflicts imaginable. You realise that was the plot of Avatar?

Regardless, it's a bit premature to worry about plot if you're planning on building your own engine. Might as well wait until it's finished / abandoned before worrying about whether the PC plays an elf or a chicken.

 

[Alex]

About the game's setting, could we, just once, play as the big corporation?

Exactly. If the Stanford Prison Experiment taught us anything is that it's much more fun being the guy weilding the baton than the guy on the receiving end. Although corporation vs environment is one of the most banal conflicts imaginable. You realise that was the plot of Avatar?
(snip...)

It could be fun from the company side. Trying to harvest resources as quickly as you can but not so quickly you shoot yourself on your foot. Darksun also managed to do it well, if only because the decayed nature made surviving that much harder. Also, templars, muls and defilers.

By the way, I think being able to create your party or hire in NPCs doesn't work all that well. The problem is that either the pre-made NPCs don't have anything interesting to offer, in which case you are almost always better off with a self made NPC, or they do have interesting things (quests, dialog, etc) to offer, in which case you won't want to make your own party, unless you are replaying the game. I think it might be a better idea to focus on one or the other.

 

[Alchemist]

I would recommend using 1e instead, but I understand most people disagree with me there, at least on this site. At any rate, my reasoning is that the first edition is more geared to some stuff missing in the later ones (I haven't actually read the 5th edition, though). For instance, there are a whole lot of rules (or more like advice) on how to deal with NPCs that follow the party around.

I'm with you, man.
Basing my own project on 1E actually. I will likely modify it a bit to make it work for a CRPG, but Gygax's 1E DMG will be my bible.

 

[Alex]

The GMG's advice is one the the three things I most like about AD&D. The other two, by the way, are the magic in general (magic items, spells, etc) and the way it deals with monster lairs. Also by the way, I think you could do something really nice if you expanded those lair rules into something a bit akin to how Necromunda dealt with gangs and how race codices gave rules for forming armies.