What do you love/hate in RPGs?

What I mean by this are features.  Gameplay or game mechanics.  Not narrative events or characters specific to certain RPGs.

So, as a starter for ten I'd suggest co op is a great feature for an RPG. 

For me I always harken back to the best times of my pen & paper roleplaying games.  And that was almost always about co op.  Even when the party was divisive and split down the middle and one half waged war with the other.  (Which reminds me of a story I might share in a later post) - it was always about players discussing their next moves and then embarking on a quest together.  So co op is something we aim for here.

Another great feature was Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system.  This provided some truly memorable moments for me, playing that game:

          "Oi!  Man filth!  I killed you before...."

And then the intense satisfaction of besting an opponent which has killed you repeatedly. Nothing quite like it.  And they say genius steals, so we've wholesale borrowed this system, massaged it to suit our purposes, and Underland will present its equivalent - which we call the Bane system.  Except, obviously, we do things a little differently.  And virtually any creature can become a Bane of the protagonist in our game.  Because we want to capture those moments that engage a player.  When an enemy slips through your fingers, learns from your mistakes, and ambushes you later.  Taunts you.  Steals from you.  And then you eventually out smart that sonofa, and crush its skull beneath your boots.

For years, as a games designer, I used to think that game play was the pinnacle of game design.  It's what you allowed your player to do that was important.  How you extended and evolved a genre by applying a new feature.  But it is not that.

Don't  get me wrong.  All that is important.  But it's emotional engagement that is the pinnacle of game design.  If you can get your player to love, hate, be furious in (temporary) defeat, bring tears to their eyes and fist pump the air when they ultimately succeed. These are the moments that define a game.  These are the moments that stay with you as a player.

Gameplay and game mechanics support them.  But it is emotional engagement which captures the heart and mind and rewards the player.  It is for these reasons gamers invest time and money.  And this is what we strive for with Underland.  We want you to tell stories around the water-cooler and down the pub, and salivate for the next time you log on.

So what features in other RPGs have you loved and/or hated?

What's made a game for you, and what's broken a game for you.

I could fill pages with this stuff.  But I want to hear from you.

Please.

There, I said please!  :-)

So what's this all about?

Underland is a 2D physics-based, procedurally generated platform RPG.  

The game takes the player's real world geo-location, time and weather to create the landscape.  So in effect players wander a land which is a twisted simulacrum of the RL physical world.

It works like this:  The game will determine approximately where you are, based on your IP. From there it will take openmaps.org's assessment of the streets and parks etc. around you and turn that into a 2D dungeon environment.  North becomes up, South becomes down, East and West, right and left respectively.

But it doesn't end there.  Openmaps.org provides a huge amount of data about the environment, and we use that data to populate those passageways, catacombs and chambers.

Beyond that, the actual weather going on outside your window also modifies the game.  If it's raining, passageways become flooded. The weather also influences what creatures spawn. When it snows, the game spawns cold-weather creatures - you catch my drift.

Time of day is also important.  The idea of the game is the environment through which you travel is a nightmarish landscape - and nightmares are always worse at night.  So we have a day / night cycle. Some creatures during daylight hours may not be aggressive at all.  But everything mutates in the darkness, so at night, creatures become more aggressive, more hostile, more dangerous.

What we want to achieve is a sense of real trepidation as night begins to fall, and you realise things are going to become a whole lot harder - but with commensurately bigger rewards.

So, you start your adventure in a labyrinth of catacombs roughly equivalent to the streets around you - but of course your journey will take you far further afield.  After playing for a few days, or weeks, you'll be wandering around dungeons on the other side of the country.

We'll also be providing you with a companion app for your mobile device.  So wherever you go in the real world, you can drop a marker and use that as alternative starting location. What this means is, you go to New York on holiday, drop a marker, and when you get back home you can continue playing as if you're in New York.

What we want to do is provide a game which has all the richness of a AAA title in terms of content and complexity.  But in a 2D, physics-based environment so we can keep the costs down and make it affordable to build.

Additionally, we're also exploring using RSS feeds from local and national news sources to procedurally generate content.  So what's happening in the real world again influences the content of the game.

So if there's a murder in RL - there may well be a serial killer in the game.  I know that sounds grim.  I might need to work out a better way of describing that.  But you take my point.

Anyway, that's the idea.  

The purpose of this blog is to communicate our objectives and let you know how we're getting on.  Our immediate objective is to get as many people following and supporting the project as we can, so when we initiate our Kickstarter campaign we have the backing to make it a success.

There are a number of funds available to support indie game design.  I'm quite well connected to several of them.  But they all need a prototype, and recognition of support from a fan-base.  So that's what we're doing now.

The UK Games Fund provides £25k for new games.  But in reality that is essentially match funding - you need to have the money to spend first, spend it, and then claim it back.

So what we need to do to qualify for that £25k - is to raise that money ourselves first, hence Kickstarter.

For that we need your support.  We need to grow an audience, we need to develop a fan-base, and we need that fan-base to help spread the word.

So if you like RPGs, and you like indie games, and you like what you've read here... we'd really appreciate your support.

And for now that's just about liking and sharing.  Following this blog.  Asking questions, getting involved.

Are you with us?