I’d say “a lot’s happened over the last week” but that would be a goddamn lie. But I do need to catch some people up with what’s been happening and where I’m gonna go from here.

So, over a week ago now, I ventured to Blitz Games in Leamington Spa for an Open Day. I was joined by my partner in crime Daniel O’brien and my friend Shaun Spalding, whom are also aspiring to work in the Video Games industry.

I’ll try and keep what happened pretty brief else it’ll end up sounding like a “What I did on my Summer Holidays” essay that someone in Primary School would write. But suffice to say, the day was incredibly valuable – I learnt a huge amounth about what’s required of me to get into the Industry as a Designer, what I need to be doing and how I should be doing it. I got feedback on my Portfolio by a few members of their team, including a games designer by the name of Mike Bithell who’d attended a Blitz Open day three years earlier! Which, I might add, was incredibly refreshing to hear considering – as a games design student – I keep getting told it’ll be almost 100% impossible to get a job in the industry (I mean, I know it’ll be hard – but at least I know it’s possible now!)
The day was amazing and I strongly urge any students – present or future – to try and attend the next one or whenever because it’s a real eye opener. 

So, we all should know by now I was toying with a Puzzle RPG idea aimed at the Nintendo DS. I got linked to a video a few weeks back that seemed similar to my idea except it was a Platformer and not an RPG game. But it came out sooner than I thought. So I gave it a go, and it really helped me visualise what I was going for:

For starters, to play a puzzle element, the top screen has to pause – you can’t do the two at the same time (though the puzzle continues to build up throughout the game whether the bottom screen is active or not). It also has a very nice visual-style that works well to it’s favour, which is something to consider.
I could write more but I’ll be rambling.

I recently purchased Game Maker Pro and am looking to start building something with it – I’d like to do a Platform game as there are a multitude of Platform Game engines pre-made for it so there’d be very little programming on my end. But the problem with a Platformer in this day and age is trying to keep it unique. Games like Eversion and – though some may disagree – Don’t Look Back do interesting things with the Platform genre. I guess the only thing I can do for now is play different Platformers and see what sparks my imagination, right?

Check back later this week, around wednesday, I’ll have something by then I’m sure. I’ll also have refined my Portfolio a little bit for post-Blitz critique.

- Chris Out
Oh and if you’re on Twitter – add me! chriswalter89

Just quickly updated my Portfolio page again, check it! It looks like I do work!

- Chris Out

So Blitz Games is now 2 days away, so I’m refining a fair few things this week. This post isn’t really an idea for a new games idea, but more for what I’m planning to do over the next few months and how this blog/portfolio fits into it.

Oh, and FYI: though sparce – there are now things in my Sketchbook and Portfolio

I’m thinking of setting myself a couple of challenges. You see, I’m aware of a small number of programs that require little programming knowledge and allow people to make games. I’ve dabbled in these programs before and in a couple (RPG Maker XP specifically) I have a decent understanding of how these programs work. But I lacked motivation.
Well, that’s changed, but I need boundaries to keep to else I won’t get anywhere.
So I’m proposing to myself a short development cycle, from Concept to Demo/Game in 1 month. I just need to get the bulk of this university work out of the way.

I’m also going to start drawing and uploading them on here a lot more. You see, I have a decent tablet that I never use. But I really should. So I’m going to strive to upload more things into my sketchbook for everyone to see and so I can improve.

Start talking about games (lol, I know right?) that I’m playing – I read a lot of articles and books about getting into the Games Industry and you’d be surprised how many of them suggest blogging intelligently about games you’re playing, so I’m going to do that. Not so much “Yeah this games great! 10/10!” but more analysis what I felt works particularly well in a game and what doesn’t.

Why am I post this at all? I’m aware it seems like quite an irrelevant post to most people – it’s not an idea or concept. Well, now that it’s written down, I’m obliged to stick to it.

Look out for a couple more updates before the week is out!

With the Blitz Games open day only a few days a way I’m consolidating my Puzzle RPG Idea into an easy to digest format so I can stick it in a Portfolio to show off. I’ll also be writing about a few other ideas in there, too!

After the “break” there’s a simplified version of the Puzzle RPG Idea that will go in my portfolio (the full version will hopefully be added later this week into the “Portfolio” section)

Title: Puzzle Blade: Tales of Veron
Platform: Nintendo DS
High Concept: Story Based Tactical RPG. Blockbreaker meets Final Fantasy Tactics/Advance Wars with Turnbased Combat relying on Puzzle System for Action.
Aims: Combine Puzzle and RPG elements into a cohesive Tactics games, introduce a simple narrative to keep the game flowing.
Story: Centuries ago, in the land of Veron, a dark Lord ruled over the lands – using the powers of a Magic sword he kept the people under his grasp. One day a Wizard – desperate to rid the lands of the dark Lord and usher in an era of peace – crafted an equally powerful Sword using all the Magic he could muster. Unfortunately the crafting of the Sword cost the Wizard his life, with his last breath he gave the sword to a brave Knight who went to do battle with the dark Lord. The battle raged on for days but finally the brave Knight was victorious and Veron was saved.
No one ever saw the Knight or the Sword again.
The game’s story begins several hundred years later, where the player controls Korus, a young orphan adventurer who, whilst exploring one day, stumbles upon an old Sword deep within a forest. The old Sword speaks to him and warns him that dark forces are gathering and he – along with the Puzzle Blade – must fight them off.
Puzzle Blade: Tales of Veron has a large focus on it’s combat system. As it’s aimed at the Nintendo DS the combat system utilises both of the screens: The bottom screen is a Blockbreaker-esque puzzle game that controls the flow of the combat and the top screen is the combat movement screen.
Elaborating on each screen; The bottom screen contains the main puzzle window as well as character stats, the action pool and the character’s experience bar.

A Mock-Up of the Bottom Screen

The main Puzzle Window contains a Block Breaker-esque puzzle that controls the main flow of the game; the player is presented with a 12×12 grid that has 4 different types of blocks, the aim is to break the block by tapping them [with the stylus], blocks may only be broken in numbers of 2 or greater.

When the blocks are broken they are added to the “Pool”, the pool contains all the blocks that are broken and can be used for actions in the top screen, these actions include movement, attacking, magic and special abilities.
As the game progresses, the experience bar at the bottom fills up and the player character advances in level gaining new stats and abilities which are shown in the “Stats” window.

The top screen contains the battlefield. The combat is turnbased with actions requiring certain numbers of points in your “Pool”. Using the d-pad, the player can move/attack/cast spell and use abilities of a selected character, once the player is unable to perform any actions, the turn is ended and the computer controlled opponents have their turn. The battlefield can vary on size depending on environments and number of opponents.

I’ve been thinking a lot about customisation in RTS games, Dawn of War 2 is to thank for this. The idea that you can take a unit (or squad) and pimp them out to do change their offsensive/defensive capabilities.

I’m a sucker for it. I loved it in Warzone 2100, loved it in Dawn of War. But I’d really like to see it developed in a fantasy world, rather than Sci-fi.
For those of you not familiar with this gameplay mechanic, allow me to briefly explain:
(I’m assuming everyone understands what a RTS game plays like and what I mean when I use certain words)
So you’ve just got your Barracks up and your Armoury is complete, too. You train your first squad – a group of 5 Infantrymen. For basic function, each Soldier is equipped with a standard machine gun with a bayonet for close range.
Selecting the unit squad brings up the unit panel – this has move, attack, defend, patrol, attack move and all the other basic functions that the standard Infantryman has. Next to that panel is a smaller panel with 6 small icons of guns. The icons are:

1. Flamethrower
2. Bazooka
3. Heavy Machine Gun
4. Shotgun
5. Sniper Rifle
6. Dual Pistols
   (These could of course be any other kind of weaponry, this is just for example sake)

These icons equip a member of the squad with the selected weapon. Meaning you can have a limit of 5 (or however many there is in the squad) different weapons or a squad using all of the same kind of weapon.
This system allows the player to customise their squad, to change it from bog-standard infantry to a long range anti-infantry or anti-vehicle squad or whatever the chosen weapons increase your effectiveness to.

To another extreme, this can be done with tanks or vehicles (as it was done in Warzone 2100) wherein the player selects to build a tank or number of tanks and a small gui pops up, allowing the player to choose what types of weaponry/wheels/hull etc to put on which increases defense/speed/offense based on the selection and the price that the vehicle costs.

That’s pretty much the system. Now, what I’d like to see, is this equipment system pulled over to a Fantasy RTS. When it comes to genre, Fantasy is by far my choice for RTS/RPG games so I have a bit of a hard-on for the worlds and gameplay they bring.
So, let’s say you have a Beastmen race (this is just a broad example because it offers lots of choices) and you have 3 types of unit regiments:

• Beastmen – Standard Half-man Half-beast infantry
• Minotaurs – Heavy Infantry
• Dryads – Light Infantry

Each type is capable of equipping 2 Melee Offensive weapons, 2 Range Offensive weapons or 2 Defensive Items. Because most Fantasy RTS games are in line with RPG elements, each type of unit has specific stats (strength, dexterity etc) and therefore are suited to different types of weaponry but are able to equip anything respectively. But since we have fast light infantry, slow heavy infantry and standard infantry, it’s down to the player to decide whether he wants to create a quick offensive lineup to effectively zerg their opponent with melee or have some heavy infantry capable of dealing a lot of damage and taking a lot of damage but slower – or to flip it, a large amount of fast light ranged units or a few heavy ranged units with less accuracy but dealing large aoe damage. Or a mix of all 3.

I honestly believe that this type of gameplay is far more tactful than most current RTS games as it comes down to personal preference as well as logical thinking for statistics and also how the opponents army is set out.

Perhaps this post is completely irrelevant, but we’ll see. Check back tomorrow for more on my Puzzle RPG idea and anything else I have to say.

So I have what’s called an Idea Mine – this is essentially my Sketch Book, on Thursdays I’m left with over an hour before heading do a room with the necessary software to catch up with assignments in which I sit in the cantine with my Sketch Book just doodling any ideas that come into my head. It’s a useful process and anyone who’s reading this that’s on a Games Design course should give it a go – most of my ideas on this particular idea have come to me in that small window.

In any case, I was Mining for Ideas (I know, right!?) just now and I got to thinking about a few things. I settled last week on developing this idea with the Nintendo DS in mind so I had to think of the gameplay for the top screen – having already decided that the bottom screen would likely be a puzzle game.

I looked at the video that Dan O’Brien (holla!) linked in a comment back in Part 2 and I was originally planning something in a similar vein but it hit me – it wouldn’t be an RPG! It’d be a Puzzle Platformer which isn’t what I’m going for.
So I started doodling out little thumbnails (also useful) for gameplay concepts and I stumbled across a simple yet brilliant idea:

What if it were turnbased and controlled by the puzzle?

Uh oh, this is falling into Puzzle Quest territory, right? Not quite, the top screen would play like a Tactics RPG or similar to it – the Bejewelledesque puzzle on the bottom screen would provide the player with actions depending on how many blocks or whatever were broken (so you break 4 movement blocks you can move 2 spaces or some such) and you’d have a “pool” where you can stock up on attacks or movements or whatever. The idea would be to get your character from A to B and probably attack anything that gets in the way.

I know it’s a simple idea and I’ll probably think of a better one soon and react the same way, but I had to get it down!

I was also thinking about Characters and Story – you see, I’ve been part of a little community for the RPG Maker series of programs for around 9 years now and I’ve always tried to start a “project” with it, but I always started with the characters and when it came to getting the story work done I got lazy, thus the projects never got off the ground. This time I’m brainstorming strictly gameplay mechanics but once that’s done – wouldn’t I need a story to put into the gameplay to make it interesting? I certainly would.

Check back later this week, for you see my Idea Mine struck gold and there’s not enough Gnomes (World of Warcraft Gnomes are the Miners in my brain. I know, I know) on staff to filter all the Ideas through efficiently at the moment.

Not a colossal update today, I’ll be doing a sizeable discussion post tomorrow – this is more a general musing today. I’ve had a couple of people asking if it’s okay to post comments and such on this blog so I’ll clear that up here:

Yes! Please post comments here, I know that a fair few people who read this are also aspiring to work in Games so some healthy discussion will help us all. I’m using this blog to develop ideas and show my thought processes (as well as just to write ideas down so I don’t forget them), any finished or concrete ideas that come out of this blog will be put in my Portfolio so feel free to chuck in your 2 cents (pence?) if you want to!

Anyway…

On Friday I was brainstorming how combat would work for my Puzzle RPG idea and I came with two ideas that did some changes to the gameplay. I was linked, by my good friend Daniel O’brien, to a Side Scroller for the DS which has a puzzle game on the touch screen which got me thinking about platform.

We all know that the game a platform is released on can alter parts of the game itself, be it graphics or gameplay, so I started thinking about my little idea and what platform it would be on, initially I thought it would be a sort of PC or flash based title. But the previously mentioned video made me think about possibly changing this idea up for the DS, but how would that influence the game play of it?

Well, one thing would be the controls, because the DS is gifted with a touch screen it would be possible to have two control schemes, the possible element could be stylus’d on the bottom screen, with the top screen containing battles or a side scrolling world which could be done with the D-pad and the A,B,X,Y buttons. This is, of  course, obvious but it changes the game considerabely. Initially only one portion of the game would have been active at any one time but with two screens and two methods of controlling the game now has both the core gameplay mechanics active.
Such a change should make the gameplay more fluid (I’d envisioned that shifting between the two screens would constantly make it very stop-start) but it also runs the risk of what I like to call “The controls ending with you” (for those of you who have never played The World Ends with You on Nintendo DS; when in combat the player must fight using 2 different characters on 2 different screens at the same time one using the touch screen and the other using the d-pad) which can be very daunting at the start of the game.

Well, that’s wrapping it up today, only a small post as I said. But check back later this weekend for a meaty update!

-Chris out

Glad to see that I’ve, in turn, inspired someone else.

So yesterday I began brainstorming an idea for a Puzzle RPG game an how I came to such an idea. Two boundaries kept me from developing this idea further; combat and statistics. However, I was playing Ninjatown last night and I had a minor epiphony about how to traverse these particular issues.

So I’ll start with Combat. This is the potential game breaker, because the two solutions I came up with drastically change the way I initially thought the game would be played (though one more than the other) but I think that were it to be thoroughly thought it, the game would maintain a simplistic approach.

The first Idea

 
So the first idea, the gameplay is the initial Blockbreaker idea that I had, you break the blocks to uncover parts of the map, by clicking or directing to a location the character inside the box will automatically move to the uncovered location provided there are no bricks in the way. Enemies are seen roaming on the board as well, when an enemy comes into contact with the player a battle screen will appear on the bottom window, this battle plays like a typical RPG turn based battle (a la Final Fantasy) and all movement and gameplay on the main board is halted for the duration of the battle.
This idea, in theory, works pretty well but it may get a bit too complex later on in the game (RPG conduct dictates that enemies and bosses are harder later on in the game, after all) but by halting the main gameplay the player’s focus is kept on the battle screen until the fight is over.
The second idea changes the core puzzle element of gameplay a bit and fuses two screens together, the basis uses the same windows that the first idea would use, but it uses them in parallel. The puzzle element in this one is Bejewelled rather than Blockbreaker. As the player plays the puzzle game, the bottom window shows a graphic representation of an RPG, you see a character moving on a 2d plane throughout an environment, but the player is not in control.
Instead, actions are dictated through what jewels are broken in the puzzle game, for example; if the player breaks movement gems, the little character in the RPG window will begin moving forward (how far it moves is dictated by the gems broken), if the player comes into contact with an enemy and, say, an attack – or magic? – gem is broken the little character will slash with it’s sword or shoot or fireball or some such.
This makes the goal of the game to make your little character get from one end of the 2d level to the other, which effectively makes it a puzzle platformer rather than a puzzle rpg which shifts the genre a bit.

I’m not sure which idea I like more at this point in time. I’m trying to flesh out both. Look out for a few more mockups and things in my Sketchbook later on today and hopefully you’ll understand what I mean.

- Chris out

So I got inspired by someone to start a blog of my own to help get my ideas and whatnots down somewhere.

I figured to inaugurate this here blog I’d post up an idea I’d been musing on since Animex last week. On the Tuesday there was a presentation by Blitz Games about Codachain, a music based puzzle-arcade game involving collecting large chains of people and collecting musical notes. It got me thinking about how we look at different genres of games – when one thinks of music games they typically think of Guitar Hero or DDR, but Coda Chain can also, technically, be seen as a music based game.

So this lead on to the question about what other games do unique things with genres and how things could work. Over the summer I was addicted to Puzzle Quest (XBLA) which took an RPG and put a Puzzle element inside the game itself (the combat – for those who are unaware – is essentailly bejewelled). Now, puzzles in RPGs are hardly a new concept, anyone who has every played a Final Fantasy game or, indeed, any other RPGs will have encountered a puzzle at one point in the game.

So this leads to a development where we have:

• RPGs
• RPGs with Puzzles inside
• Puzzle RPGs (Puzzlequest, etc)

Is the next development in the chain an RPG Puzzle game?

Which brings me nicely onto my idea:

A puzzle game with an RPG inside it. It sounds a bit confusing, I know, but hear me out.
So you have a Puzzle game – let’s say Block Breaker or a similar Puzzle game – which acts as the map, within the puzzle box you have your character inside and each block broken reveals more of the map. Your character needs to get from A to B or whatever and you unlock parts of the map as you break blocks.

I don’t think I’ve explained that as well as I could have, I’ll get working on a mock up.

Of course, there are certain things to consider – how would combat work? RPGs centralise themselves around character development so how would that work? 

Addressing combat, one idea could be to have a secondary window within the game that could have a turnbased combat system inside it when necessary? Combat would need to be kept simple enough to not make the game confusing.

Statistics is another matter. Perhaps adjusting standard RPG statistics (Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Agility etc) to a more puzzle-ised theme would work? In addition to the obvious combat enhancements, I mean. Strength would allow you to break more blocks, agility speeds up the rate inwhich blocks can be broken and your character would move and so on. Magic could be used in combat and out to adjust the flow (changing colours, area of effects and such) of the game.

I think I’ve only hit the tip of iceberg on this idea, so I’ll refine it and post back soon – maybe get some mockups and whatnot. Feel free to comment on this.

- Chris out