RPG ideas

Okay, for those of you who have read my other threads, I'm going to take on a simpler task: creating an RPG. I can't show you any screenshots, because I don't know how to take them in unity. All I have is a simple town map with no buildings, and all I know about the mechanics is that it's based around time travel. That's it - for now.

 

If you're on a Mac, you take a screen shot by pressing cmd-shift-3, or by using the Grab utility.

I don't know how to do it on Windows, but I believe this explains it.

Did you have a game design question? I think I must have missed it.

 

I'm more interested in your next project. Spore 2 and MC2 were fantastic! Skip the RPG and see what you can come up with next.

 

Now, I've taken the screenshot, but I don't know how to upload it to the fourms.

 

windows? get greenshot.. upload to imgur.com ... copy "direct link" .. in the forums press the image button, paste it there

 

Thanks! Here's the screenshot:

 

Looks brilliant. This is going to be a big hit.

(No seriously, where is the screenshot?)

 

As someone working on an Eastern RPG, I can offer you one piece of advice: it's simpler than a MMORPG, but hardly a good first project. Go simpler, and shorter - RPGs suck because of the amount of content you have to create. Fortunately for me, I've had three games to try, and find ways to screw up, the creation of content.

In pursuit of your RPG aspirations...why not try something really basic, like a card game? That'll get you closer to being able to produce a RPG, while still being manageable if you've not yet produced anything.

 

I second this. If you're looking for a starting project, I'd say it's unwise to attempt something as in depth as an RPG. They look simple on the surface but there's a lot of work to put in before you start seeing any results.

Like for a basic RPG- here's a few things I can think of that you'll need:

Player/party class. Players each with their own stats, moves, etc, to make up a party.
Enemy class. For enemy stats and moves for use in battles.
Move class. For describing each usable ability/move by enemies or players.
Battle Class. For handling battles between Party and enemies, using moves. This involves calculating damage and applying, and so on.
BattleGUI class- I like to keep things separate, so this should 'interface' between the battle and the player, sending commands back and forth to progress the battle.
Player controller- for moving the player about your game world.
Dialogue handler, for handling dialogue said by NPCs.
In my case, a Cutscene class, which progresses through a set of cutsceneNodes, which is a class containing information of each shot in the cutscene- where the camera is, animations to play, who is being animated, effects to apply, dialog to read out.
Transition controller- could be part of the player but this should handle moving between exterior and interior, into cutscene and out, into battle and out.
Inventory class- to handle storing and using items both in and out of battle.
Item class- which describe the type and effect of each item you can hold.
Save/load class- to handle how far the player has progressed through the story, what sidequests have been done and so on.
Sidequest class- maybe this could be an extension of the dialogue class, but with the extra property of checking whether a task has been completed.
Menu class for handling save load menus, inventory, and so on.
Music handler class for changing the music in different situations.

These are just a few I can think of- and in my attempt, many of these had to be built at the same time so that they all slotted together perfectly. It's hours and hours and hours of work- and then on top of this is asset creation- graphics, animation, sound, dialogue text, then there's story to write, and so on. So many things to consider.

Coming from someone in the process of this? Start smaller. And that's me after 5 years unity experience.

 

You've been reading through my GitHub repository haven't you?

 

I actually wrote down what I would want/need for RPG's recently

• PC's
  • controls
  • stats
    • progression
  • Items
    • Equipment
• NPC's
  • Scheduler/conditions
    • individual NPC to map look up
  • dialogue loader
• Combat
  • monster database
    • loader to map
  • skills
    • animation calls for humanoids
• UI
  • dialogue
  • menus
    • inventory
  • combat overlays

And this is more about considerations that I want rather than everything I need. Hell, this doesn't even go into what combat would actually be like.

 

Here's what you've forgotten (based on the current state of my Eastern RPG):

• PCs
  • Sprites/Models/Animations
  • Mechanics - Sure, everyone could spam auto-attack, but where's the fun in that?
• NPCs
  • Quest Log - Modern gamers tend to like it if you have a way for them to remind themselves what they were doing.
  • Conversation Events - This is actually giving me trouble at present. Every NPC could just give flat text, but what about in-game cutscenes, with fades, camera pans, NPCs and PCs walking about and running specific animations?
• Combat
  • Ability Effects - When you actually have to implement abilities, it's tempting to just make everything a part of the ability, but when I did this it actually drastically limited what mechanics I could pull off. A better idea, is to have an Ability, which has a resource cost, name, description, etc., but also has a number of Ability Effects that are applied by the Battle System to the targeted combat entity. Doing this not only allows for 'fire-and-forget' effects like HP damage, but also for buffs and debuffs.
  • Battle Events - Similarly to Conversation Events for NPCs, everything could be a 'straight' encounter, but you'll be able to make more interesting/memorable fights by having different, scriptable things. For instance, I want to recreate FFXIV's Odin fight in Sara the Shieldmage. Just watch a video of that fight, and you'll see that a few new events are in order for my combat system.
• UI
  • Shops - That money that everything drops, and that you can loot from chests? Where are you going to spend it? It'd be crazy not to give players some immediate opportunities to upgrade their stuff (which, in its own way is progression. In fact, in my game, I'm forgoing levelups altogether, so in my game gear is progression, just about period.)
  • Interactions - Not all map interaction is dialogue; sometimes you will need to walk over to a switch, and press it to cause something to happen on the map. Fortunately, in the last couple of weeks I've come up with a reasonable way to do this.
  • Dialogue - It's a good idea to have a dialogue presenter that's decoupled from your way of loading and storing actual dialogue content. That way, when you have to update your UI (for instance, from the legacy GUI to Unity UI, as I've done over the past couple of weeks) it's not nearly so painful.

 

Nah that was just based on what I've had to make to get my RPG in any kind of playable state. I'm assuming yours is similar?

Exactly my point. There's a hell of a lot of work before we even get that far. It's definitely worth planning this kind of thing, in depth, or in OP's case, go for something a little more reachable. I started this RPG a little over a year ago, and there is still masses to do before I can even look at content creation to a large extent.

 

A bit. (Assets/Framework/Asvarduil RPG Framework)

 

Your link doesn't work.

 

Most of this was going in the "probably needed, but I have no idea how it would look" category. Combat could just as easily go a Baldur's Gate/Chrono Trigger or a zelda/metroidvania route.

 

Le fixed. *.io != *.com.

 

Tried Screenpresso? Even though it's free, we use it professionally to share screen shots, both partial and full. As for an RPG being a simpler task, I'm not sure what to say.

Gigi

 

We are also working on an RPG. Most elements above are needed for pretty much all games, so they are not so much of a problem. It is just a question of organization and pretty linear. I mean i do not want to make it seem totally harmless, there is a lot of hours of work involved. So also the "lesser" tasks surely need a lot of grit to get through them.

However, what is the biggest challenge for us is to organize the different threads of the story depending on decisions, the dialogues and reactions of NPC's that need to take in account what already happened etc.

I generally agree with people here, it is not the simplest of all game classes to begin with, an RPG. If you are after a beginner task, I would surely not recommend an RPG.

 

I think this here raises a very important point. There's a lot of things that need to be taken into consideration in this respect- like how you're going to manage story advancement along with sidequests that can be done at any time- and not just theoretically. Are you going to have one constant scene that changes with each story update? Or a new version of the scene that reflects the next step in the story? And so on.

 

I'm encountering this sort of dilemma in some of my 'generic' scenes in my game.

Pretty much, there's two scenes that are reused across most of the game - the Church of the Goddess, which is in every city, and serves as a place to revive dead party members, or change out party members, and the Shops, because I don't feel like creating a whole bunch of duplicate shop scenes. What's more, these two maps are always 'leaves' on my tree of scenes - the Church and Shop scenes always lead back to the scene that you entered them from.

The Church scene is interesting, because in addition to loading a specific church's doodads, I also have to check certain sequence trigger states to see if a given party member is even available (alternatively, I could just ask my Party Manager, which seems like a better idea) - some characters, like Veronica, have certain other game objects tied to them as part of their schtick.

For instance, Veronica is a mage, but mechanically is a wildcard character (and, she's wild to boot. So, unintentional pun is unintentional, but still a pun.) By having her study her grimoires, you can load her with spells to customize her to a given situation. She'll easily be the most broken character in my game.

Shops are simpler; based on the scene that the player is coming from, set up all the props, including NPCs like the shopkeeper, and let the camera fade in and control be given to the player.