Iniquity and Vindication

There were a couple minor bugs and one major one in the demo - the major one was that if you flipped the switch in the room with the acid vats, and then left the room before lowering the ladder, it would become stuck and unable to be lowered. This was fixed through the magic of using scripts instead of stupid events to modify when things are shootable.

In between working on UOSSMUD and pretending to work on UOSSMUD while I'm actually playing World of Warcraft, I've been working on outlining the third dungeon, the prison transport ship. I had a general idea in my head, but sketching out the general flow of the rooms and puzzles before I start mapping is becoming more and more important as the dungeons get more complex. I ended up moving a couple of the puzzles around after I'd placed them, so I'm glad that was just a matter of dragging an MS Paint picture of a switch around instead of redoing the puzzle events and scripts. At this point in the planning, the third dungeon looks something like this:



Forgive the terrible, terrible quality. I promise the actual dungeon will look a little nicer than that image. Like, it might be that image plus three fog overlays and a lightmap. ;) No, but seriously. You can see the first two rooms of this dungeon at the end of the demo!

Puzzles in an RPG? Not that big a deal.

The idea of adding puzzles in RPG dungeons is as old as RPGs. It's not exactly a novel gameplay system, but it's also not one that all RPGs do - especially not in a major, pervasive way. Most RPGs have a puzzle every few dungeons. Because the puzzles are rare, there's no need to build a gameplay system for them - each one can just involve interacting with the environment in a way that you can't do anywhere else.

I chose to fill my game with puzzles, and even go so far as to give the player "tools" - abilities, essentially - that he collects over the game to interact with environments in more and more ways. The fact that you use each tool many times helps its role get established in your mind, which lets me make more complex puzzles without having to teach you new controls for each puzzle. Puzzles here aren't just an occasional chance of pace to break the monotony, like in most RPGs - they're something you're engaged in constantly.

I didn't go the heavy puzzle route in I&V this just because it was "neat." I also didn't do it just because I liked Zelda and wanted to mimic it, or because I felt like puzzles were expected in RPGs. I did it because there was a hole in the gameplay without the puzzles, and this was the best way to fill it.


Let me explain my thought process a little.

Iniquity & Vindication is pretty linear. You can't go backwards - or at least, there's no reason to. You can't re-fight enemies to train and earn experience points. There aren't a bunch of quests you can go do. There's basically going to be no exploration at all. I'm going to try to add some optional side-zones and some places where you can pick what order to do things in, but by and large the game is going to keep you moving forward, with pacing more like an action game than a traditional RPG.

All of these things are being done for good reasons, but when you add them together you get a feeling, like in Final Fantasy 13, of being pushed down a tube by the game designer. And I know people don't want that feeling, for the most part, even people who prefer linear games. Maybe for specific segments, but not for more than 90% of the game. Plus, though I tried to make the combat really engaging, and I think I succeeded, you can still only fight so many sharks in a row before you start wanting something more. So I wanted to add something to make the player feel like he was in control, just a little.

But making the player feel like he's in control and giving the player control don't actually have to always be the same thing. A big part of game design is psychology - which I'm mostly incompetent at, but I've picked up a few tricks along the way. So instead of giving the player multiple paths, I give him one path, but make him work to reach it. If you feel clever for figuring out how to progress forward, you won't want to go other ways anyway - you'll want to go the way that you earned by being clever. By adding a puzzle before it, the trio of battles against acid sharks feels like a reward for your problem-solving skills, instead of layer 9 out of 382 of an endless wall of battles.

A railroaded game with puzzles is also just inherently less linear than one without puzzles, because even if you know you're going to go to room 12 after room 11, you're still making choices. You're choosing between a right choice and a lot of wrong choices, but that's still very different than just holding the control stick forward to move forward. No one ever complained that Portal was too linear, right? (No one I care about, anyway.)


You're unlocking the exit, not finding the entrance.

I've said this before on the forums: I don't like a lot of adventure-whatever hybrid games, because I don't like feeling like I have to search for the gameplay before I can play it.

Zelda does this a lot. Metroid does this a lot. They give you a whole world to explore, and you can unlock more and more of it as you go. A major part of Zelda and Metroid is discovering secrets and finding places you can go. Some of the things you find are immediate rewards, while at other points you actually have to spent time searching the world for the dungeons you're supposed to enter. There's a lot of memory involved, too: "Now that I just got the bombs, where have I seen bombable walls? I should go back to all those walls and bomb them." There's nothing specifically wrong with that type of gameplay, but it's not the type of gameplay I want to make in this game. So in I&V, you won't spend ten minutes looking for the path, but you might spend ten minutes thinking about it. Is that better? In a way, I think it is. You're more likely to get frustrated, but you're less likely to get bored. A trade-off, but in my mind a good thing overall. Overcoming my frustration makes me feel like a winner - overcoming my boredom just makes me feel like I can finally get back to playing.

I'd say the tools I give the player probably have more in common with Lufia 2 or Wild ARMs than with Zelda or Metroid. You use old tools on new environments, but you never use new tools on old environments. You never have to remember where you've been, or figure out where to go. You know exactly where to go: the door right in front of you. You just have to figure out how to open it.

This is the first half of the second dungeon, a modern naval base.



I posted this in the forums already, but I'm fishing for feedback, and not everyone is willing to subject themselves to the hellhole that is the screenshot topic, so I figure it's worth a blog post.

Some things obviously aren't done yet. Most notably, there's no animation yet for the walls exploding, there's no animation for the Analyze skill, and the battle menu covers up the battlers during the last battle. I'm honestly not sure how I'm going to fix the last problem. I hate where that battle menu is, but I also don't want it to cover up the character status at the bottom. I might do what VX does and leave about 150px to the right of the character status for the command menu. I kind of hate everything about all of my game's interfaces and menus and status screens right now, except for the window skin and the font. I guess I probably just need to start from scratch on interface stuff instead of doing the bare minimum to edit stuff to my needs. (Ugh.)

Other things are worth improving, though. I'm definitely interested in feedback regarding the graphics, gameplay, writing, and anything else. I know some issues I have with it, but I want to know what stands out to other people as being something that could be improved.

Thought I'd upload a video of what I've been working on. This footage includes a cut scene that takes place at James's house, introducing a new character: his daughter Castille. A battle starts at the end of the video, but battle animations for the enemies are not yet completed, so right now as you can see the battle is quite buggy (the enemies look like James) and I cut the video right after it starts.



The character you're playing as during this scene, Veris, is a private detective who helps James out. He's snarky, analytical, and confrontational. This will be the first battle you fight as him. His observational skills are my excuse to make him into a blue mage. Also, as is revealed in this scene, he's crippled and can't use weapons. The notes in my design sheet about him literally just read "Dr. Gregory House, blue mage".

His style of learning blue magic is a little unusual, and I might make another blog post about it later if people are interested.

Grinding. For the sake of this article, I'm using the term to mean "repetition for the sake of some reward", not "stuff you don't like to do."

You could easily call this kind of repetition the definition of an RPG, as the most basic forms of rewards - experience points, money, and random drops - are the heart of the genre. You could easily say that if you remove the ability to accumulate strength via repetition from an RPG, it's not an RPG any more; it's just an adventure game with menu-based combat.

And you can say that if you want. I don't care what terminology you use. The fact remains that the primary feature I enjoy about RPGs (and what I consider the defining feature of the genre) is tactical, menu-based combat that forces me to think about my actions and gives me time to do so. And the primary feature I despise about RPGs is repetition.

There are two reasons I am on a crusade against repetition in Iniquity and Vindication. The first one is that it's simply not challenging, and thus not satisfying, and thus not fun. When you've already proven to the game that you can overcome a specific challenge, it should not force you to overcome the exact same challenge again. What's the point? You literally have a 0% chance of losing. You can, and almost always should, do exactly the same thing as you did last time. It's not just a matter of being too easy - there's literally no challenge to overcome at all. This type of repetition barely even qualifies as gameplay.

Granted, if the player has limited resources, then a few identical battles are more justifiable. In such a case, each individual battle is not the challenge - the challenge is being able to conserve your resources to last through the string of battles. I don't mind this type of challenge and will most likely include a few of them in Iniquity and Vindication. But I don't think it should make up 95% of a game. And many RPGs don't really have limited resources anyway - you can freely head back to town and restock, and save points probably heal you to full HP/MP. So the repeated battles are utterly pointless.

The second reason I dislike repetition is the reward scheme for it. Being extremely bored for several hours and then essentially skipping the next several challenges should not be presented as an acceptable alternative to playing the game the way it's meant to be played. Who ever decided that this was good game design? What's the point of including challenges, and then giving the player all sorts of encouragement and incentive to not tackle them? Shouldn't you be encouraging the player to have more fun, not less? Are you working on the assumption that your challenges aren't fun? If so, why are you making games?

You would think the only reason anyone would willingly grind up their power would be if they can't overcome your challenge, but that's not the case - many people (called completionists) simply like to experience everything a game has to offer. Other people are drawn in to the grind by story-driven side-quests, or by game mechanics like synthesis shops and monster hunts. And in the process of simply trying to play the game that's presented to them, they actually become so strong that they are prevented from being able to experience the game's challenges. They can still experience the battles, sure. But the challenges are taken away from them. You can tell me, "Oh, you can just not equip that new armor; you can just not use the new skill you learned; then it's the same challenge as before." But the human brain doesn't work like that. The game is less satisfying. You're not beating the game, you're beating your own game you made up because the real game isn't fun enough.

Grinding has its uses, for sure; it's not without benefits. It gives people goals to strive for, it makes every victory feel valuable. I can't argue with anyone who feels like these benefits outweigh the problems. But I want to see a game without grinding; with no repetition, but with RPG style battles. And so that's the game I'm making. Vindication had a somewhat unusual approach to preventing grinding, at least on hard mode, which was that it was impossible to obtain gold from random battles, and there were no sources of unlimited free healing. This made it feel almost like a kind of survival horror game at times. (On normal difficulty, obtaining gold was still difficult, but not impossible.) But I want to take it a step further this time. I'm not removing normal battles from Iniquity and Vindication, but each one will be different - at least diferent enough that you have to think a little bit about what to change in your strategy. None of them will be repeatable. And every third or fourth battle will be a boss. If you're like me, which hopefully some of you are, this will keep every single battle in the game interesting.