Paradise

.....and a lot has changed!

I'll start off by saying I didn't work on this for the rest of 2023 and a good chunk of 2024. When I came back to the game, I realized a few things.

1. Combat was not fun

The D&D method of rolling a 20-sided dice (or inputting rand.20, in this case) and adding modifiers seemed cool in practice, but struggled in execution. Combat was heavily biased against the player and encouraged an approach of grinding a bunch of small sidequests to hit level 2 or 3 just to survive combat with enemies that were supposed to be tackled at level 1.

Rolling dice works well in an environment with a human managing the game. If the party is dying, the GM can pull back and adjust future battles, switch up rewards, etc. That doesn't work here, where someone could choose to play as Lawrence and spend an hour without anyone in the party who has more than 4 HP.

The solution?

Make combat more biased in the player's favor. This wasn't setting out to be Fear & Hunger; the difficulty was from a stunted design cycle. Rather than this godawful mess:

author=dumb game
v=a.atk; v=a.atk / 2+rand(20); v >= b.def ? c=v : c=0; c;

There's nothing wrong with:

author=smarter game
6 + (a.atk/2) - (b.def/2)

The first takes actor attack (or strength), divides by 2 to get their bonus (someone with 10 strength has a +5 to hit), then rolls a D20 and adds their bonus to that result, then compares the result to enemy defense. If it is higher, it is a hit. But this makes enemies with even a defense of 10 a 50/50 shot for the average character, so combat turns into a lot of misses.

Adding more skills also makes a big difference. Magic that is guaranteed to hit (and isn't horribly expensive to cast) makes casters more viable. Giving squishy characters extra abilities shifts things in player favor too. In the past, Lawrence had 4 HP and a dream. Now he has 4 HP, a dream, and the Shield spell, which nullifies physical damage for 2 turns at a reasonable cost. It turns out that giving the player more options early on makes combat smoother. And tweaking the numbers helps too.

2. Player agency is fun

Maybe I'm biased, but I think the height of the initial version was the missing ring in Verham. It is absurdly simple. There is a guard in the chapel who has lost his wedding ring. An orc has stolen it and is hiding in the nearby well. You can lie to the orc and tell them it's your ring, you can kill the orc, you can persuade them by telling them it belongs to a friend who lost it, or you can just offer to buy it from them. Now, due to the truncated nature of the first release, nothing comes of this long term. Your morality takes a hit if you kill the orc, but you give the ring back to the guard and get a reward.

But the option to tackle a simple task in 4 different ways is a lot of fun.

That's what I focused on more and more as I came back to this game and refined everything. Room is locked? You can pick the door and kick it down in the current download. In the updated version? Pick it, kick it, buy skeleton keys from a secret merchant, cast a spell to unlock it, or never mind any of that shit because there are two other entrances into the room. Take the hidden passage or go back to the city, where you can find a secret tunnel in the basement leading into the dungeon.

This approach goes for quests too. Taking any solo project and looking at something like Disco Elysium or Baldur's Gate 3 or Dragon Age Origins and saying 'I want that level of reactivity and choice' is frankly insane, unless the game is a puddle wide and a mile deep. That's the focus here.

3. Deep, but not too wide

I went back to Morrowind for the first time in a while last year. The influence briefly bled into making this game in the worst possible way: lengthy dialog options and an abundance of sidequests.

I began to implement guilds for the player to join, which would have had 5-6 quests per location (and at least 2 locations), which would have necessitated more dungeons, more dialog, more reactivity, more skill checks - you get the idea.


Seriously, do not do this.

And then, in the pursuit of reactivity, I began to build out a comprehensive system of dialog trees. Yes, branching and looping dialog with every NPC in a VX Ace game. You could learn new topics by speaking with people and then ask almost everyone about said topics. I think a conservative estimate is that this would have tripled my dev time.


Don't do this either.

In hindsight, this wasn't a terrible design decision. It was in line with reactivity and player agency, both of which were a key focus of mine as I developed the game. But it would make actually making the game an insane lift. I was leaning too far towards a game that was both wide and deep, which is unrealistic for a solo developer who wants to make something in less than 10 years while staying active, holding a day job, touching grass - you get the idea.

Moving forward, the aim is a game that is deep, but self-contained. I'm imagining 5 total dungeons (2 are done, 1 is halfway there) and maybe 2-3 additional cities and towns with a couple of sidequests in each. I would love to drop a fresh download, but, due to the adjustments to combat (and adjustments to leveling and out of battle skills that I didn't mention) most gameplay is a little borked right now. A fresh update with massively rebalanced systems will hit at some time in the near future. I hope you all look forward to playing it.