Testing some ideas

Making great games is hard. Making great games that people want to throw their money at it is insanely hard. That's why I'm going to develop a series of games to test some Action RPG ideas i have in mind before continuing with Wildlands. What are some of these ideas you ask:

• Continuous experience system.
• Gesture based attacks.
• Group dynamics with warring and allied factions.
• Global economics the player can affect (pillaging caravans to make a product scarcer and force an NPC have cold turkeys, razing farms, etc).
• Complex relationships in between the NPCs and NPC-player.
• Simple politics between major factions (towns, cults, etc), including espionage, sabotage, slandering, blackmailing and other dirty practices.
• A lot of other minor ideas i'm gonna iron out later.

Here are some character and items sprites i'm going to use promptly on the first test game:

What do you think? is there any other idea you haven't seen in RPGs that you would like to see implemented?

Procedural story generation

I've been working lately on the procedural story generator, and i'm focusing right now on the scenario, not the one with props, bells and whistles, but the Point-Of-Interest scenarios and the NPCs. After coding a simple lexical generator, i've come up with a well balanced approach to the POIs and NPCs results. Check out this gist with a sample generation:


The lines starting with 'G>' are groups (possible associations of the NPCs that will drive their desires and the possible quests they'll give you). There are some TODOs (like trying not to fill quarries with NPCs to the point that they look like a small town).

Also, the NPCs (and the player) will have relations and opinions around the different groups inside the game, going from simpatizing to being a radical oppositor to a party or being an infiltrated leader of a church. Also, the opinion an NPC has about a certain group doesn't affect the relations with given group (creating cognitive dissonances in-game to spark the fire of controversy!).

Another interesting fact is that NPCs will have sexual orientations ranging an ample spectre of the real-life possibilities aside from the regular ones you see in every game out there (including homosexuality, fetishes, transgenderism, etc.)

All in all, it's looking good for now, gotta keep improving it for the time being.

I'm leaving this here...

Hi all, i'm starting a blog about the new game i'm developing in my free time, called tentatively Wildlands. I'm going to update it regularly with some info about what i'm doing and how i'm solving certain problems of the game.

Just to call out some points about the game:

• First person RPG, inspired by Delver and Fallout.
• Procedural Generation of almost everything.
• Replayability as a core value.

That's all... i'm just going to leave a screenshot of work in progress.

The dawn of a new game :-)

Follow me at G+ or on twitter @johnvillarz.