Our Yin & Yang: Making the arena vs Playing the arena

The concept for this game came about when I was lamenting the lack of big RPGs coming out in the near future. Sure, there are always a Persona game, Tales game, and Final Fantasy game on the next 1-3 year horizon from any given point... but what else? Back in the NES/SNES days, a lot of turn-based RPGs were created partially because it was a way to handle the technical restrictions.

So I could certainly make an Arena game where a player takes a small party through a premade set of levels. Finish the levels? You win! Fail to finish them? Aww... try again!
And don't get me wrong: I am making that game. :-)

But part of the fun of an arena is the me-versus-you mentality; it's hard to recreate that 100% when it's just you versus the AI. So the Arena Builder must be part of the game. I have many friends who thrive on the creation/builders of various games. Some of them spent hours (and hours and hours...) creating the most perfect, customized costumes in City of Heroes; others build anything and everything in Minecraft.



Arena Builder Tool: Automated Party Explorer (APE)

One of the first tools I'd like to talk about is the APE (Automated Party Explorer). Basically, the tool is for people building an arena and want to try it out first to make sure it is the right difficulty.

You can send a computer/AI party through your arena and get their results!
Oh and you can do it from 1 - 100 times and get lots of statistics!

A few examples of messages you might get from running APE:
2% of parties completed your arena.
WARNING: May be too difficult for level range

85% of parties completed your arena without triggering traps
NOTE: Your trap placement might need revised. Alternately, consider adding more traps

0% of parties had any fatalities when attempting your arena.
WARNING: Level difficulty looks too low for level range.


Nope, it's too early for screenshots, even on an iterative blog. Hopefully in a few weeks, though. For now text and stock photos will have to suffice!



APE is just one of the tools I'm working on for building out the Arena builder.
Next week I'll talk about another tool, as well as probably write about the convention I'm speaking at.

I'll be attending GaymerX this weekend in San Francisco.
I will be one of the panelists on a panel entitled "Coming Out in the Game Industry."
Here's a link: http://gaymerx22014a.sched.org/event/d685eed7197550384498060405ccfa19

It will be at 3 pm on Friday, July 11th, so if you are going to GaymerX, please stop by!

Until next week.

-- Chris

Let's talk about our enormous monolith

So a blog about creating a game would be a bit strange if we didn't talk about what kind of game we're making, right?  So let's get that out of the way:

It's an arena/RPG game*.

I added the star because that's one of the best things about creating a game, at least on an indie scale; your start and finish are often quite different! So for now it is probably simplest to say an arena game is the goal.


Arena the First

When I say "arena", I mean something spectacular like our Greek and Roman ancestors might see in their Coliseum: something open, massive, and tricky. Traps would be welcome and combat should be expected.

There will be an AI for playing against the computer, but I think the Coliseum or arena deserves a human versus human mode. In a Player versus Player(PvP) type game mode, I see one player creating the arena and the other plays through it. Sort of like a Dungeon Master of a D&D game, except applied to the RPG/Arena-builder concept. So it would entail everything from setting traps to designing the monsters and their abilities.

There are thousands of directions that the game can be taken from here, so I'm looking forward to investigating a number of them in the course of creating this game. I'll talk about a few of them on Thursday. And hopefully readers will suggest features they would like to see in a game like this, as well! :-)

-- Chris