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Game News Colony Ship RPG Update #4: Main Quest Design, Progress Report

Infinitron

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Tags: Colony Ship RPG; Iron Tower Studios; Vault Dweller

Vault Dweller has published a new monthly development update for his upcoming Colony Ship RPG. This one is an extended pontification on the design of the game's main quest. Unsurprisingly, it's extremely ambitious, and seeks to address some of the complaints people had about Age of Decadence:

There are many different ways to construct a main quest in an RPG and every studio uses a different set of building blocks reflecting their own preferences and goals. We’re all about Choices & Consequences, which means 3 key types of choices:
  • Multiple quest solutions (you should be able to go through the game in a different manner if you decide to replay it with a different character)
  • Narrative choices (craft your own story by making different choices and reaping different consequences)
  • Moral choices (aka ‘you should not be forced to play a hero obsessed with helping people’)
Needless to say, there is a lot of work involved in supporting these choices and giving them depth. Narrative choices require multiple factions, a branching main quest, and multiple endings; moral choices – evil/opportunistic bastard path, etc.

Our main quest’s building blocks aren’t that different from the ones we used in AoD...
  • 3-4 factions
  • Branching main quest (at some point you choices should take you into different directions)
  • At least 5-6 vastly different endings
... but we’ll use them in a very different way and craft a very different experience.

Before we talk about the CSG’s main quest design, let’s talk about the AoD’s main quest to illustrate some points without spoiling anything.

The main quest started vague – "go I know not where, bring back I know not what", and then the faction quests took over as the meat of the game. Essentially, the game wasn’t about finding the temple but instead working for the factions and slowly uncovering what happened in the past. By the time you’ve visited all 3 cities and learned what you can about the factions, the war, and the gods, you know where the temple is and you're ready to make your choice. That fairly important choice affects the ending slides, but not gameplay because the game is almost over at this point.

Naturally, we want to do better. So in the CSG we’ll get rid of the vagueness, move the main quest to the center stage, push the factions’ quests back, and allow you to make key choices earlier and thus enjoy the consequences earlier.

It will start simple – while scavenging you stumble upon something clearly valuable, a long-forgotten device that wasn’t meant to be used until the ship lands (but can be used in-flight). Not being an expert on such things, you need to know exactly what this thing is to figure out what one of the factions will pay for it, which is a good way to introduce you to the three main factions in Act 1, whereas in AoD the Noble Houses were introduced one Act at a time for storytelling reasons (escalating events).

Once you know what that device is (at about 30% of the game), you’ll offer it to the faction of your choice, at which point your relationship with the other factions will go down, introducing an aspect we didn’t really touch in AoD – factions acting against you, attacking your base of operations, and turning locations under their influence against you, which will boost replayability.

At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 'working for a faction' paths, 3 'fuck 'em' paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.

This way you’ll get to play through your key decisions, instead of being told about what happened next in the slides. Obviously, the slides will still be there but gameplay-to-slides ratio will be different.​

Also included in the update is a short report on the progress of the game's development. VD thinks he can conclude preproduction by March 2017, leaving 3 years for actual development.
 

Outlander

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Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Only 48 monthly updates to go before they delay the game into 2022.

~Maybe you will be on an actual colony ship when you play this game~

0d41808f60af8871fa122b3b0f37ab1b.gif
 

Trashos

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Naturally, we want to do better. So in the CSG we’ll get rid of the vagueness, move the main quest to the center stage, push the factions’ quests back, and allow you to make key choices earlier and thus enjoy the consequences earlier.
I am deeply enjoying the vagueness of the war history in AoD. I am enjoying uncovering the missing pieces one by one, and I won't even mind if at the end (after several playthroughs) I will be able to piece everything together accurately. The whole thing just makes my imagination explode and keeps me motivated to leave no stone unturned.

I don't know if that's included in the kind of vagueness you want to get rid of, but hopefully not.
 

Vault Dweller

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Not included. I meant the vagueness of the main quest itself not stories you hear.
 

duanth123

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I hope one of the mysteries yet to be revealed is a reason why humans in a future far enough out to have allowed for development of massive, interstellar (y/n?) colony ships would somehow be aware of mid-20th century cultural motifs.

So much so in fact that they use them as advertising for bars.

Fallout: Colony Ship confirmed

Aesthetics aside, the narrative sounds like it has major potential.
 

Roqua

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Everything sounds good but one thing that hampered playthroughs of AoD for me is in single player games I play a specific type of character with a specific personality and the way AoD was made there were only a few options that my character would pursue, so most of your content is wasted on me. Since slightly before release I played through 2 times to follow the two options available to my character with the two builds that interested my character.

When I can create multiple party members myself the possibilities for types of character open up as well, but my main guy is almost always consistent.

Now, in Underrail where there are a lot of build options my character could pursue such as a range build and different psionic builds on top of three different kind of melee builds since the gist of my guy is in a time of rifles he can use rifles, but he isn't a bow or crossbow type of guy. Neither is he interested in alchemy, but can use magic type skills as a supplement of his combat ability. Underrail had only two significant choices on playthrough for me since my guy could go with the rebels or military. But I played through 4 times, and two were just to try different builds.

Obviously, the character building will be different in the CSG than AoD since you will have perks and rifles, etc, so that will open options up. But, with your ability to see achievements on steam I would be interested in information on how many people played a merchant? I know only one background really fit my guy, and that was the Grifter or Drifter, I forget. The one that stated he was beholden to no one and nothing.

Now, I wouldn't be surprised if I play games different than others, and I know you are dead set against full party creation or other awesome things, but try and keep me and people like me in mind this time. Since this is still a single character game my hands are tied in what options my character can pursue.

I know there are plenty of people who only play mage type lead characters and skipped AoD since the did not see the scholar guys or alchemy as a good substitute. I can see where they are coming from as I have no interest in games that force me into doing things my guy would never do, or worse yet, force me to not even have my guy, but some fucking piece of shit that I hate such as Geralt from Witcher or the ponytail retard from Gothic. It just sucks what I like about rpgs right out of the game.
 

Vault Dweller

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I hope one of the mysteries yet to be revealed is a reason why humans in a future far enough out to have allowed for development of massive, interstellar (y/n?) colony ships...
It's a retrofitted cargo ship not a state of the art colony ship. The drawing fits in my opinion: a half-naked girl on a rocket ship, which is a good way to advertise a whorehouse. I don't think such things would change that much.

If it makes you feel any better my first thought was this:

Josefine-Mutzenbacher-Teil-5-250x357.jpg

^ now that's a classic

But then I thought that a girl on a spaceship would be better.
 

retamar

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Wow, I was specting the ship to look some sort of super high tech and clean in design, I really like that concept art.
Are you going after some 50's retro look? i really love the scifi illustrations of that decade and the comic books of the EC.
814efd4a186c207c2c1b7be555505128.jpg
wood-weirdscience-09c-9-51.jpg
 

Fry

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Is this the same engine as AoD, or has that not been decided yet?
 
Vatnik
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At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 'working for a faction' paths, 3 'fuck 'em' paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.

I wonder how you come up with these numbers and decisions. Do you just decide that you need 3 X paths, 3 Y paths and 7 different endings, and then write the script for it, or did you get these numbers from writing the script in the first place and branching out as you went?
 

Outlander

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I wonder how you come up with these numbers and decisions. Do you just decide that you need 3 X paths, 3 Y paths and 7 different endings, and then write the script for it, or did you get these numbers from writing the script in the first place and branching out as you went?

Eh, I assume he has a p. good idea how the story in his game plays out.
 

Shadenuat

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Tyranny developers Obsidian: "We're all about C&C!"
Indie developer: "We're all about C&C! and here's basically how:"

:shittydog:
 

Vault Dweller

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We're planning to use Unreal 4.

Why not Unity3d? Did you cross it out already?
No source code.

How can I license or use Unity's source code?

We license Unity source code on a per-case and per-title basis via special arrangements made by our business development team. As this can be quite expensive, we do not generally license source code to smaller operations, educational institutions, nor to companies in countries which do not have adequate legal intellectual property protection.

At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 'working for a faction' paths, 3 'fuck 'em' paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.

I wonder how you come up with these numbers and decisions. Do you just decide that you need 3 X paths, 3 Y paths and 7 different endings, and then write the script for it, or did you get these numbers from writing the script in the first place and branching out as you went?
The latter, of course. 3 "working for a faction" paths were defined by the number of factions, which in turn is determined by what makes sense. Since we're talking about the collapse of the previous society, 'the old way', 'the new way', and 'faith of our fathers' way are a logical split. 3 "fuck 'em" paths were defined by the story-related circumstances. I'd be ok with 2 or even 1 paths, but the story pushed for 3.
 

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