Quest Systems

I mentioned in my last blog post that I had started work on some of the exploration and quest systems in the game.  As I explained in that post, I have no idea of which systems I might need until I need them (aside from the combat system, naturally).  There's a lot of things that I can't work on until I see how they're all going to work together.

I suppose that means that I'm flying by the seat of my pants on the development of this game, but it's not much different than working on a piece of art anyway.

Since I'm working on the quest system, I figured it was time to go ahead and share some screenshots of what adventuring in "Lands of Adventure" might look like:

Interacting with someone in the town.

Obviously, a CRPG with story elements is going to need a way to talk to NPCs.  The above picture reflects what talking to an NPCs might look like.  Anyone who has played old-school CRPGs will recognize that this is pretty similar to how the Gold-Box games handled dialogue.

But, if I want the dialogue to be more than just straight narrative prose, I have to allow the player an option to roleplay and to make decisions.  So, enter the branching choices:

I'm picking the first answer, but that doesn't mean that I don't want to pick the third one.

CRPGs have evolved a lot over the past 25 or so years.  This game, I hope, will represent the best things about old-school adventuring while bringing in some of the modern ideas that make a game a little more interactive.  In older games, you didn't get as many branching options as you do in today's games.  I'd like to think that was due to limitations of memory and disk space, and less of a design decision.  It's my belief that the game can still be considered to follow the style of old-school and still include this kind of convenience.

Finally, plots aren't always advanced by talking to NPCs.  Sometimes, things happen, or the PCs see something.  Or, maybe they find important notes...like this one:

MMMmmmm....assassination....

There should be a lot of options for players to get involved in things, or to miss things completely.  For example, this note was found buried in the mud.  It's possible a player might miss it and never find out about it...or they might decide to do something besides get involved in whatever is going on.  And I think they should have that choice.

And who knows...maybe someone will ask them to clean some rats out of a basement somewhere...but at least it won't be their only choice.