Project Questing

It's the new year. It's time for a new year's resolution! I will release something this year! Perhaps in the near future. I hope I won't be saying the same thing next year, but with RPG Maker, you never know when you get hit with inspiration or when you get lulled to sleep.

Right now, I've been looking into adding more game play into the first chapter. It's not a complex battle system or puzzle galore, but simple diversions to add incentive to explore.

In my last post, which was far too long ago, I was working on adding fields as a means to get the player to the city. I felt that simply tossing a player from town to town doesn't flow well. I'm not switching perspectives so it made me feel uneasy leaving it as is.



As you can see in that screen shot, there is a fork. There is the "correct" path and there is another path that will distract the player. Now, a distraction is not a bad thing. These fields aren't dungeons that punish a player for choosing the wrong path. These fields offer a player to prep up for a dungeon. Finding treasures, grinding monsters for exp, etc.

Diverging from the path towards the town is encouraged in this case. If you head south through the grass and flowers, awaits a mini quest to complete. It's nothing spectacular. It's a fetch quest for a poor fellow that needs mushrooms. As a reward, I'm thinking of using gear and money. The gear will be no better than store-bought stuff. In most cases I want to keep them the same. The difference will probably these weapons will have funny names and jokes. I don't want these rewards to go out of control. Combat becomes a nightmare to balance when a player gets too much cool crap off some elementary quest.

I'm still chugging away at this field. Overall, I'd like to have at least three or four mini quests to grab the player's attention. After I finish this, I become ever so close to releasing the first chapter.