08 April 2008
Motivation and Background
)Published on April 8th, 2008 @ 05:38:09 am, using 1642 words, 198 views
Q : When is a branching dialogue system not a branching dialogue system?
A : When it is a character background creation process!
AhahahahAHHHahahaHAHahahahahahHAHAHahaha…aherm…yes. Be warned kids, game development can weaken your grip on sanity.
Oh who am I fooling, it was never that strong to begin with.
Tomfoolery aside, let me discuss what SoW development I did this weekend. In a fortuitous turn of events Scorpia has provided the perfect lead in piece, checkit here :
The gist of it being that we, as the player characters, need motivation in RPGs. But generally RPGs do a shite job of providing this motivation.
In fairness, it’s a bit of a tough problem. You see, players will come up with a character concept they want to play, along with a set of motivations and the like. Whether it is the loner mercenary looking to make a quick buck, the holy man seeking to spread the faith or the scholarly mage searching for ancient arcane secrets, this process of making up an imaginary persona to become in the game is an enjoyable, often integral part of (western) RPGs. The hitch comes when you actually play the game. You see the code and the designer has no way of knowing your made up character concept. In fact it is a bit of a tricky issue, trying to design a game and storyline around every possible character type/motivation.
The general method taken to solve this tricky problem is to try to create a background generic enough to cover all possibilities. One player is the noble knight, the other a cold blooded killer? Hmmmm, how does one motivate both of them to go off and save the world? I know, family! Even mobsters love their mothers, right? Right! So we’ll kill off/kidnap their mother/sister/dog. That way the good character will be motivated to save their family and the evil one will seek revenge…
Well, that’s the logic that goes through a lot of designers minds, mainly beacuse they don’t really have any grounding in a writing background, or they just don’t think it through very clearly. Lets ignore the “If you try and satisfy everyone you end up satisfying no one” issue for a moment. The primary mistake made here is to depend on the player caring about a character they only meet for 5 minutes, enough so that they swear to save them/bloody vengence when the villain kidnaps/murders them. This is not going to work.
Now, if you tried to make the player care about a character that they had had time to connect to over the entire game, cool. That’s a well known literary trick. But otherwise the player simply doesn’t have the time to bond with the character.
So how do we do it better? Well, I quite like the feature the guys at Iron Tower Studios have implemented for Age of Decadence : opening viginettes. The idea being that each type of character sees a different side of the opening sequence, providing different reasons for persuing the main questline, ie using the map to find the temple. The Loremaster archetype gets to play a seqeunce where they are called in to examine and identify the map, the Assassin is attempting to assassinate the current owner of the map, etc etc. All of them end up owning this map which interests a number of powerful factions. Nice. I like that.
But I didn’t quite take that route. There won’t be a viginette in SoW. Maybe in future games, but for now, nope. Instead I am going to let the player generate their backgrounds via a series of introductary screens. You will get a sequence of “life stages” where you will have the option of picking what you were/did during that time.
To elaborate : First you get to pick your childhood background. Under what circumstances were you born. Were you a simple peasants son, working in the field? Or perhaps you were a gutter rat, an orphan surviving by his wits on the cruel streets of a big city. Maybe you were the offspring of a famed scholar and explorer, well educated but spending little time with a parent who was always away exploring foreign lands? Anyway, you choose an option, and that represents your childhood. Each option will provide different character customisation effects. A peasant may have grown strong and hardy through long hours of hard work, but lack much in the way of education/knowledge related skills. The Gutter Rat knows how to steal and stay hidden, how to bluff his way out of trouble, but isn’t particularly fit (malnourishment has that effect). I also want to provide roleplaying attached to these. The scholars son might be known amoungst academics, the Peasant might recieve bonuses/different dialogues when talking to other farmers, etc etc
Next stage you choose your military career, what you did after you were drafted to fight in the war. One problem I have had with SoW is whenever I mention the premise people go “oh, so you have to be a fighter?". No. You were in the military. There are many roles within any military force. Sure you could have been a front line infantryman. But you could also have been a field medic. A requisitions cleark. A scout. A siege engineer. And so on.
This way I can kill two birds with one stone, as it were, I can give you some nice background and drive home the point that you don’t have to just play as a warrior.
The other type of background “element” I am adding is scenarios. These describe an event in your past where you get to choose how you responded. A simple example of a scenario is :
“During your early childhood, as you are walking home you come across a group of children laghing and throwing stones at a dog. What do you do?
1) Go try find an adult to intervene.
2) Charge at the kids, yelling, attempting to get them to stop.
3) Join in! Hooray, great fun.”
Now these are less about giving your character bonuses and more about me tracking your choices for later roleplaying purposes. I can build up a sense of what type of person your character is and adjust dialouge/events to more properly provide motivation and the like in game. Hopefully this system will allow me to alleviate, at least to a degree, the problems Scorpia talks about. I am giving the player a mechanism to describe their character concept to the game and me the designer. Sure, I won’t be able to cover all the options a player could think of. But hopefully the added roleplay opportunities the backgrounds will present will compensate for the lack of complete freedom.
After this process the player will then be given a chance to distribute development points. So your character isn’t totally limited by the backgrounds provided, but they lay a framework, add flavour and a sense of history/context to your character. You want to play a street urchin who discovers a calling to help people and becomes a field medic during the war…cool, I want to provide exciting roleplaying for you. I want to try motivate people to pick backgrounds not just because of the stat modificiations but because of the different gameplay they can experience.
So I was working on this on the weekend, and here is where the joke comes from. I started to think, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the scenarios had a couple of steps? Say the kid decides to charge at the other children (2), maybe most of the kids back off but one large kid grabs a stick and stands his ground. Do you fight or backdown? Etc etc. Make a mini-story out of it.
Additionally, I started to think, wouldn’t it be cool if the scenarios were customised based on the character background choices made? So a Gutter Rat might get the dog scenario but the son of the absent scholar might get something completely different?
So I looked at the code, what it would take to implement this kind of branching logic, concluded glumly that it would take quite a bit of effort…then gleefully realised I didn’t need to. I already have a branching text-response structure. My dialogue system! Hoorah.
Looking at it, all it needed was a few tweaks and it would work as is. The main thing was adding a special field, “Mode", to the dialogue set structure. If the mode is “Normal", cool, it acts as a normal NPC dialogue. If the mode is “Movie", it instead uses a fullscreen gui with space to display images (I picture a picture slideshow playing as you navigate the background creation system). These and a few other small changes were all that was required to retrofit it for for my purposes. And now I have a nice background creation system, sweet.
I’ll post up some pics when I have the content a bit snazzier, stand-in text and images don’t make for good screenshots. 
But the framework is there, with little effort. I’m well chuffed, hopefully players will find it adds depth to the experience.
Additionally I think I can use my new movie mode dialogues for more than just the background process. End game sequence slide-shows are one option. Also, creating a custom cut-scene using animations and the like is a pain. Way too expensive for an indie. I could replace it with a branching dialouge/slideshow and get a similar effect “for cheap".
I think I really need to look into getting a 2D artist. I’d love to be able to do it myself but my art isn’t quite up to scratch and I’m already spread thin. Sigh, more money, whooosh, there it goes, flying out my wallet.
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