Eidolon Games

I’ve spent the last little while fixing bugs and polishing things up for a video to submit to the Utah Game Wars. It’s a contest between in-development game ideas, where the winner gets a lot of cash. It took some work but wasn’t as difficult as I had feared. Here’s the video if you’re interested. Also, someday I’ll figure out how to embed a youtube video, but NOT TODAY.

I’ve been doing some research lately, playing other space games, and trading games, trying to refresh my memory of how other people have done it and get some good ideas. I’ve noticed something interesting in my playing, most of the games haven’t given me the same sense of presence that I always got from Wing Commander: Privateer. I was 12 or 13 when I picked up Privateer, and it was amazing. A whole galaxy full of interesting planets to visit, pirates to fight, and missions to perform. I remember how strong the sense  of presence was, each ship had a detailed cockpit, you could look out the side windows or backwards and see the door that lead to the rest of your ship. Getting a new ship was awesome not just because it would have heavier armor, more cargo room or more weapons racks, but also because it gave you a new cockpit, and I relished the brief bit of exploration as I got accustomed to the new interior.

The planets also felt like they had a real presence. When you landed on one you would see the spaceport where your ship had landed. From there you would have to click on a door that would take you into the base proper. From there you could click on different doors to move through the base and perform tasks, like trading merchandise, upgrading and repairing equipment, purchasing new ships, getting missions, and other stuff. Having to click through the different areas of the base gave each base a unique feel. The agricultural planet felt way different from the mining bases, which felt different from the space stations. You were doing the same tasks at all of the different bases, but they felt like they were genuinely different places.

Most of the games I’ve been playing in research just present a menu of options when you arrive at a base. You pull into the outpost, or land on the planet and you see an image depicting the location, but all of the interactions are carried out through a menu, and it really seems to affect my sense of immersion, and how much the locations feel like a real place.

It’s certainly more expensive to create the additional art to represent the different areas of a location, but you could probably get away with recycling the art. If I remember correctly a lot of the planets in Privateer used the same art for the merchandise room, and the ship upgrade rooms. Recycling would help, but it would still demand a larger art budget. But I think it can be well worth it, presenting the locations as different areas that the player has to move through really enhances the feeling of the location being a real place. It’s something that I plan on putting in the Space Game I’m working on, we’ll see if it works as well as I think it should.

Back in mid December I decided to take a break from Tot Voltus for a while and work on something else. That something else has really taken off, and I’m excited to be talking about it. It doesn’t have a name yet, but it’s a space-trading-and-combat simulation wrapped around a strategy RPG. Think Wing Commander: Privateer meets Fire Emblem with a dash of Steambirds thrown in for good measure. It’s going to be pretty great.

Although it seems like there are a lot of space games out on the market at the moment. I’m hoping that’s just my heightened sensitivity to space games now that I’m developing one. Here are a couple of screen shots from the version I showed at the Indie Game night this past Tuesday:

Ship Modification Screen

Giving orders to ships

The game will let you recruit other ship captains and crews, explore the stars, and take part in the shaping of the political climate. There should be more details and more screenshots as development continues.

How would you go about representing a conversation in a game?  The most straightforward way is the conversation tree.  You make a statement, someone else makes a response, or counter statement, and back and forth it goes.  Each statement is a move in the game, each statement performs many different functions.  This statement insults the person, and subtly implies a threat; that statement offers reassurance, and an offer of alliance.  You can recognize the the different subtleties of the conversation, and all of the functions that each statement performs because of the context that the game narrative has provided, and your understanding of humans.

The problem, is that it’s very inexact, and you’re really constrained in what options you have.  You can only walk the path that the designer has laid out for you.  It doesn’t give any real flexibility for your approach.  Further, it makes it really hard to make conversation a major method of conflict resolution in the game.  With a combat system each NPC in the game can easily be preprogrammed with certain behaviors and the combat system will play out organically to make each encounter unique.  But with scripted dialog trees each encounter has to be hand written to make sense.  Imagine writing dialog trees for all of the guards in a secret underground base in Deus Ex, it would be ludicrous.

So, I began thinking, that perhaps you could represent the purpose of the statements, rather than the exact words that make the statement.  After all, if you understand that you are making a threat, does it really matter the exact words you use?  So I started investigating ways of representing a conversation made up of statement functions, rather than actual statements.  Instead of picking a statement like “Let me through this door or I’ll call your supervisor and get you fired!”  You would compose a functional statement that combined deception and threats.

Eventually, for this game, I settled on the idea that all conversations in the game are about convincing someone that you are somebody other than who you actually are. You’re trying to steal secret corporate records, so you pose as a corporate bigwig. So you dress the part and make your way through the building convincing everyone that you are indeed a corporate bigwig, and when they are convinced that you are someone they want to help, they let you through. This might mean that for one guard you have to be mean and aggressive, because if he doesn’t know you personally then he doesn’t want to help you unless he thinks getting in your way will get him in trouble.  Another guard might be more willing to help people that are friendly and charming.

The conversational conflict game then, is about taking different statements and fitting them into the other person’s perception of you in such a way as to conform to their expectations of what the person you are trying to emulate would act like.  That’s kind of the thinking that went into the game design of the conversation mini-game.  Give it a try here, you’ll find instructions and hopefully have a good time.  If you have any feedback, please leave it in the comments here, or on the game page.

Most western RPGs are enjoyable because they allow you to live out a life as someone else, someone you could never be, and honestly, probably wouldn’t want to be.  They give you the chance to live as a sword swinging hero out to save the world, or a gun toting mercenary making his way through a post apocalyptic wasteland, or a cybernetically enhanced commando.  Notice one thing though?  All of these fantasies revolve heavily around the use of weapons and force as a means for solving conflict.  Admittedly, this is pretty awesome, and I enjoy these sorts of power fantasies as much as the next guy, but sometimes it seems like it would be fun to play a different sort of character.

Admittedly, there are other approaches available in some games.  Deus Ex: Human Revolution did a great job giving you the option to sneak around, and even on occasion use diplomacy.  Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines also allowed for a lot of sneaking around and diplomatic solutions.  But the game still revolved primarily around combat.

So, Tot Voltus is my attempt to create a game that allows for a different sort of character.  The player takes on the role of an infiltrator trained in social manipulation and deception.  The game takes place in a large city, with many forces vying for power and control.  The player takes on missions of sabotage and espionage.  The player will have the option to choose who to take work from, what sort of jobs to do, and what friends to cultivate.

Mechanically this will work by giving the player a map of the city, each day will represent a space of time, and the player will be able to spend their time doing missions, going to meetings with characters, or even just relaxing at a night club, where new friends and enemies might be met.

If nothing else, it should be different, and I’m hoping that it will be something very enjoyable different.

I’ve created this blog largely as a way to drum up awareness of my latest project.  I thought it would be helpful to talk about some of the ideas behind it in a public forum where I could hopefully get some feedback. So this post, and the next couple posts will be largely about that.

First lets talk about some of the ideas that motivated the development of the game.  RPGs are awesome, I love how they give you the opportunity to step into an imaginary character’s shoes and live out a life in another world.  The only problem is that typically most of your character choices boil down to how you’re going to kill people.  Are you going to play a sneaky character that stabs people in the back, or are you an agile character that kills from a distance, or a brute that kills up close and personal?  It’s all about killing, which can be fun, honestly.

But I often find that I want to do more than just kill things.  This is more or less glaring depending on the game.  A game like System Shock 2, I hardly notice the lack of social interaction, because there aren’t any people to interact with and the setting perfectly explains why.  Where I really notice it is in Bethesda’s RPGs, Fallout, Oblivion, Morrowind.  You’re running around in this incredibly immersing environment, with tons of stuff to do.  But after forty hours or so of dungeon exploring, I begin to realize that all of my interactions with humans are either killing or getting instructions on who to kill next.  I find that after visiting a merchant for the hundredth time, I wish he would acknowledge it, or when I walk into town in black armor festooned with skulls, I wish people would notice. It begins to feel that the only way you can really interact with the world is with a weapon.

So, what do you do about it?  This really isn’t an insignificant challenge, emulating proper reactions for NPCs to player activities is hard.  Giving additional ways for the player to interact with NPCs is hard.  Providing different non-violent approaches to solving problems is hard.  Making it as interesting as combat is hard.  Typically any non-violent approaches to problems have to be scripted, which is more expensive and less open than the organic resolution of combat simulation.

So, my hope is to create a game wrapped around a system that allows for non-violent approaches to solving problems, specifically conversational approaches.  Next post I’ll talk about the high level overview of the game, and start getting into how I hope to accomplish my lofty goal.