Yora

The idea of making a game with a Baldur's Gate II style look and controls, that takes heavy influences from games like Fallout or Albion is certainly an appealing one. You can do pretty amazing things with this type of game, and I believe that it is on the more technologically simple end of how videogames go. But there are also a number of inherent traits of this kind of RPGs that could be considered downsides for the kind of things that I would really like to see and express in a game of my own. The first thing is that they are either very heavy in combat or dialogs to make up the bulk of the gameplay, often both. A big combat game is something that I explicitly don't want to make. While the degree of violence in most RPGs is pretty tame, the sheer amount of it is almost always staggering. Your average 16-year old RPG protagonist has killed more people with his hands in his two weeks of adventure than the most brutal warlords in all of history. I find violence to be an extremely interesting topic with incredible depth and complexity. But that depth is not…

Not even a week ago, I decided that I want to try my hand at learning to make a simple 2D isometric RPG. But thinking about what I would want to do different from the games from the 90s that I am familiar with immediately led to my original plan getting completely overwhelmed by feature creep. Which this early in the concept phase isn't really a problem, as there isn't any existing work that becomes obsolete or needs to be completely redone because of it. But the list of features that I would ultimately want to have in a finished game has grown considerably over the last five days. This is a list of things that I want the game to do, from the perspective of a gameplay designer. How the game would actually make these things happen is a programming task, which at this point I know only very little about. But I am already trying to define the features in a way that I can conceptualize as "if-then" statements and that would require the smallest number of calculations to produce a resulting value. I don't have the slightest clue yet. But I think the worldbuilding for the setting…

Years ago, I played a little bit of Fallout 2, which gave me a basic understanding of the game's gemeplay, but I didn't really enjoy it and I stopped playing after something like two or three hours. But I had watched several in-depth videos on the first Fallout in particular over the last year, that widely praised it for its accomplishments and dove deeper into its gameplay mechanics. So when I started thinking about what kind of game I would want to make, and zeroing in on some kind of isometric RPG, Fallout was one of the main references for how I want to approach things. Though I'm not really that much interested in the series, having played Fallout at least once will surely be hugely valuable in the future. This really is part of the necessary homework to get into developing this kind of game. Having now played some 10-12 hours of Fallout, I have to say my most objective assessment would be "I am not enjoying the game. To phrase my overall perception in the most positive way, I think that looking at Fallout side to side with Baldur's Gate is like looking at Nosferatu and Casablanca. Nosferatu…

I may not have a lot of experience making videogames, but I do know RPG-systems! And it seems rather odd to me that so many CRPGs that have been developed over the decades very clearly attempt to emulate the mechanics used by pen and paper games to determine if an attack hits or a skill checks succeeds. Sure, it works. But those kinds of mechanics are designed around the necessity to introduce randomness by rolling dice and the ability to make all the calculations involved in your head in a second or two. These are limitations inherent to the medium, but in a videogame there really is no need to abide by them. You are needlessly restricting your own design. When the very first CRPGs were being made, and it was still completely unknown what form such games would actually take, I do see some wisdom in those early developers choosing to use a rules system that they already knew does work, and concentrating their work on the technical aspects of having it run in software. And of course, Baldur's Gate is a licensed D&D game, so obviously it had to mirror the game mechanics of D&D. But overall, as…

I've seen a couple of presentations on game design over the years, and one very common piece of sensible advice is to aim making the kind of game you would want to play yourself. You won't be able to compete with the big publishers by trying to emulate that they are selling in the millions, so instead try to make something that you think would be fun to play but doesn't exist yet. If you think an idea is cool, there will be other people who also think it's cool. You won't directly be competing with anyone else's games, and you'll also have much more fun making it. But let's be honest. Make the game you'd want to play. ...and you might plausibly be able to actually make. I can think of some really amazing games I would love to play, but don't have even the slightest clue about how any of the technologies that might be involved in making them actually work. Instead, I think I should try my hand at doing a low-resolution 2D isometric RPG first. No 3D modelling, no animating, no particle effects, no physics. I don't know anything about how any of those things are…

I am Yora. I work as a gardener, I'm 39, I have ADHD, and I keep having fanciful dreams about amazing creative works that I want to make that never actually go anywhere. And I always want to tell people about it. I first encountered computer RPGs in 1999 when I played Baldur's Gate, which I bought entirely on the grounds that I was really bored one day and wanted something new to play that might keep me occupied for two or three days, and this one was near the top of the rating lists for recently released games in the videogame magazines I was reading. I literally had no clue what RPGs even were, and I had no prior encounters with medieval fantasy other than having read The Lord of the Rings once some years before because the books looked interesting on my parents bookshelves, but didn't think much about it after that. Obviously, it turned out to be more than two or three days that Baldur's Gate continued to keep me occupied. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons as a gamemaster when the 3rd edition came out in 2000, and then was quite active as an area designer…