Telling Stories: Fueling the maze-builders
Two weeks ago, I put forth what I think is a fairly simple philosophy for getting storylines moving in games – I don’t build the story. I just lay out tools, and the other people involved happily build the maze themselves with a minimum of prompting from me. I’m proud of the article and think it’s pretty completely on-point. What I didn’t go into depth about was how you do that.
Sure, it’s all well and good to say you assemble tools, but I’m willing to bed that if you put some lumber and some tools in the yard and then hide, you will not find people coming by just to build you a shed.
A lot of it comes down to tricks that work during tabletop roleplaying and are easily ported to roleplaying arcs just as easily, with a few added tricks brought on by the nature of the beast. So once you’ve got a plan in mind, it’s time to start putting your tools in place and using them to let players assemble a maze you never even had to sculpt.
Challenge Accepted: Being better than you were
Not this kind of growth. This is different.
For the past decade or so, the term “RPG elements” has been thrown around frequently and with such fervor that you could be forgiven for assuming it’s the official brand of ball used by Major League Baseball. Really, what it means is that games have discovered and embraced character growth, the idea that the loser you’re playing in the first level will be able to flick battleships away with a minor hand gesture by the end of the game. Upgrade, improve, level up, get better stuff, leave the worst stuff behind.
Character growth is something that I could honestly spend months talking about, period, as well as discussing how growth ties into rewards (which I have talked about) and the many sorts of growth that are out there (which I haven’t, but I should in the future). But this is a feature all about challenges, and the fact of the matter is that character growth is kind of a bastard for challenges. Because you have to take it into account, and yet at the same time you can’t predict how players are going to use it in the slightest.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Tellah’s left the party, but in his place, we have Edward. You know, the character who has long been seen as so catastrophically useless that his very uselessness is seen as a punchline. In other words, the game continues to be Cecil and his Amazingly Unhelpful Companions, right down to the fact that Edward joins at a remarkably low level and is thus outpaced by a child in overall progression. Then again, it’s not like he was lining up for battle before his home was assaulted, so I suppose it’s not really his fault.
A bit of grinding is advisable, helped substantially by the fact that the ruins of the castle still contain HP and MP restoration springs for free. Despite that, the world map outside of the castle is home to enemies that shan’t help substantially; it’s better to try and get in a bit of level buffing via the Antlion’s Den. That means hopping on Edward’s complimentary royal hovercraft and taking a ride over rocks and shoals to the northeast. It’s a fairly short trip.
Demo Driver 8: Sleeping Dogs (#109)
I CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL
There are some genres that I’m inclined to be a little more harsh toward than others, and then there are genres where I’m more likely to be happy a game exists at all. Case in point: free-roaming destructive sandboxes a la Grand Theft Auto, which is a genre we really need better terminology for but one which you can instantly recognize. You’re walking around, you can hop in vehicles, for some reason there are remarkably light penalties for randomly belting someone on a busy street. You know the sort.
So I was predisposed to like Sleeping Dogs even before sitting down and playing it. The demo, unfortunately, only scratches the surface of what the game has to offer, which makes a certain amount of sense; loading the entirety of a digital Hong Kong into the game would probably be a bit too much. But what was there was pretty great even aside from that, and if the rest of the game is like what the demo has on offer, it now has my distinct attention.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
All right. So let’s go over this for just a minute. Assume you work as an innkeeper in a desert oasis town not too far from a major castle. One day, you see someone new strolling into town. Closer inspection reveals that he is a man in ominous black armor, carrying a young girl who has obviously been injured and weeping recently.
What I’m getting at here is that it’s a major miracle that the game’s lot didn’t end here, with Cecil being sent to every single possible jail. I mean, the explanation would just make it worse. “See, it’s because I killed her mom!”
Yes, after you’ve blown a village to hell, the only thing to really do is head for the nearest town in the hope that the girl you traumatized and almost killed isn’t actually dead. The innkeeper lets you take her to a bed to rest immediately, and said girl wakes up after about five seconds of bed rest. Despite Cecil’s eagerness, she’s a little reluctant to chat with him due to the whole dead mother thing, so Cecil also prepares to go to sleep. Until soldiers burst in, anyway.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 