I'm working on a video game. Specifically, a turn-based RPG, mostly along traditional lines so if you just think of your favorite 16-bit or 32-bit RPG, you'll probably be more right than wrong. It's too early to show anything yet, but I'm getting to a point where I need to make some decisions, and I would like some input. I'll not waste your time with rubbish questions like "should an RPG have a good story?" or "what consoles do you own?", these are pretty specific and direct questions I want answers to. If you're even kind of interested in RPGs, I'd appreciate you taking a minute to share your opinions.
First, some extra features need to be designed for from the beginning, even if they ultimately get released as a separate update. The singleplayer campaign is absolutely the main focus, I'm not going to let any other game modes make that worse, but stuff like modding support or online versus need to be built in pretty early on for best results.
https://www.strawpoll.me/17040634
Second, grinding seems to be a contentious issue. Some people think it's the whole point of an RPG. Some people think it's the worst part. I know what my personal tastes are, but even within my circle of IRL friends there's a lot of variance.
https://www.strawpoll.me/17040635
Last, I'm having some trouble coming up with a good quick pitch for the game. I already know what I'm going to make, I know where I'm changing the traditional formula and why, I just can't figure out how to condense that down into a tweet-sized pitch that gets people interested. The results of this poll won't change the end product, only how I end up talking about it, but marketing is kind of important to get right from day one.
https://www.strawpoll.me/17040637
And of course, if you have an idea or a question or even just an opinion that I didn't make a checkbox for, just post it. I'm not taking these numbers to any investors or anything, this is just me trying to figure out how to make the best game I can.
Thanks for reading, thanks in advance for answering, and I hope the forums are still around in a few months when I plan to start actually showing the thing.
Can't vote on the third as the box doesn't scroll and won't let me click vote.
It scrolls for me, might be a weird browser thing.
The options are
A game blending the best parts of old-school and modern-era design
An RPG with a great combat system, that rewards skill and keeps things challenging and interesting
A game telling a great story, with interesting characters and an intricate plot
An RPG with a lot of strategic depth, for character customization and party building
A game with no microtransactions, lootboxes, energy timers, or other bullshit, just pay money and buy the game
It's the Dark Souls of retro RPGs
I hate all of these
If you can't get it to work, just post, I'll add them in manually.
It sucks, but you can work around it
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/209687/a6ed0444-17f8-426d-8091-636024103d45/Untitled.png
Done. And I'll repeat here just for convenience:
Poll 1 - Additional elements
Poll 2 - Grinding
Poll 3 - Elevator Pitch
All the pitch are terrible
Don't sell the product, sell the WHY you and I should invest our passion in it. I'd not want to hear anything I can imagine hearing from any other thousands of games out there. It has to be specific.
You don't spin the game's strength into something it is not for marketing sake.
"A game with no microtransactions, lootboxes, energy timers, or other bullshit, just pay money and buy the game"
Sort of off-topic, but its sad that this is the second most popular pitch. It says nothing about the unique merit of this particular project, it just lists off trendy bullshit its gracious enough to avoid. "This game is not literal cancer 10/10"
Yeah, I gotta agree with the last question being sorta weird. I doubt it will give you any useful info. Really glad people on facepunch are non-insane and dislike grinding in their games, though. I wish you the best of luck with the project!
Turn based sucks
It almost always sucks. I thought I hated turn-based RPG combat until I played Persona 5. Turns out that the only additional thing that type of combat needs to hold my attention is enough sheer style and audiovisual flair to make doing things feel interesting. The fact that P5's UI is incredibly well designed and avoids scrolling menus helps a lot too.
It's much better to ask yourself what kind of game you want to play and then make that one. If you make games for other people you'll gloss over 100 details that they would have thought were obvious. If you make a game with yourself as the target audience you more intuitively know what makes it good.
My intent with the last question was to figure out what aspect I should focus on. I'm not an idiot, I'm designing the combat to be really fun and interesting, I'm trying to make a pretty deep and flexible game, and I'm trying to tell a great story, those are all things any successful RPG needs (unless you're installment twenty-something in a AAA franchise, where you can get away with just a famous title). But you can't just advertise a game as being "better than everyone else at everything", definitely not when you're a one-man studio on his first real game.
When it comes time to actually pitch the game, I will be more detailed. I won't just say it's a "good story", I'll talk about what's actually going on in the story. I won't just say it's a "fun combat system", I'll talk about what makes it fun and how and why I deviate from the standard formula. I'm keeping things under wraps in this thread to try to avoid contaminating the data.
I do suspect I wrote the question badly. "Good combat", "strategic depth" and "challenging but rewarding, like Dark Souls" all kind of appeal to the same player, while "good story" isn't split that way. And if I combine those three responses, they collectively reach the top spot. Ah well, that was the question I least needed a good answer to anyways, that's why I put it at the bottom, where the response rate is lower.
If I were to go with that as the main thrust of the pitch, I'd expand it into more nostalgia. It's not full of F2P micro bullshit, it's a game you buy and that's it, just like it used to be. It's a game that actually tries to be fun instead of locking you into forty hours of tutorials, just like games used to be. It's a game that focuses on a great single-player experience, just like games used to. (And from here, I'd go on to start talking about what the game is, probably in terms of which games I'm stealing little bits and pieces from.)
You're right, though, it's not really good marketing to focus entirely on what a game isn't, especially when indie PC RPGs aren't too full of those things to begin with. I'm actually surprised how well it's ranking. Perhaps if I do an Android/iOS port, I'll use that as the main marketing concept (it's a fucking plague on those platforms), but it can't carry the main PC version.
I will agree that the standard turn-based combat system formula is actually pretty boring. Even a lot of the big spinoffs are bad - Active Time Battle is just not fun. But, there are some that work really well.
UI design also plays a big, underappreciated role in making an RPG fun. I rank the Lufia games as some of the best SNES RPGs because their menu design is just so much better. I will naturally be paying very close attention to the UI design. I'd like to have zero scrolling menus in the entire combat UI, we'll see if I can make that stick.
Don't worry, I'm not designing this thing by committee. I have a very clear vision for the story, combat system, leveling system, and all the other important stuff, down to some pretty tiny details.
A follow-up question for those asking for co-op multiplayer: how do you see that working, in a turn-based game where you normally control 3-5 party members, all in a single party? I threw the option in on a whim (I had versus multiplayer, might as well do the complement), and I must confess I didn't have a good concept of how that would actually work. I'm guessing most of you were thinking the game would be more along the lines of Baldur's Gate, or another game where you primarily control a single character at a time. Co-op in that style of RPG works pretty seamlessly, but I'm not sure it can be done in a less tactical style of game.
....This is your first commercial game alone? You ponder too much ahead of hardship. Prove that you can create to the best of your ability before you try to meet others' expectations.
If you want some inspiration for good turn based combat, the original 2 sonny games did a good job with it. Sonny 2017 is kind of ass at it though.
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1891/dfb96666-3881-49b1-a9ed-b8b169376101/image.png
this question is more like something you should be asking yourself rather than the players, it's basically a question of "what can I realistically accomplish in a single lifetime"
as a player of course I want fucking everything
Most people realized the context of the question meant "what features being present in a game would make you specifically more interested in buying it?". And hey, maybe you're the sort who sees a feature and thinks it's cool. But most people don't. By the results, most people picked 2-3 features. Which makes sense, because most players don't play every single mode of every single game. Most people don't even play every single game they buy.
Some people actually have negative reaction to features. Some informal polling I did IRL had some people respond to multiplayer with distaste - assuming not just that it would be garbage, but would taint the actual singleplayer mode, demoting it to a tutorial for online. That's actually why I had the "don't add anything else" checkbox, to gauge just how many of that sort of player exist.
And this poll is part of the prioritization process. I have a near-endless list of things I could add. I'm trying to decide which ones to do, and when (most of these would be post-launch updates). I'm basing that decision on how many people like the idea, but also how much effort it would involve, how well it works with the rest of the game, how it can affect marketing (streamers are a small fraction of players but give you free publicity, wooing them with features might be worthwhile), and of course, how much I like the idea.
This poll was certainly useful. I liked the idea of modding, and it's not too hard to add a pretty good amount of it, but I thought not many people would care about it. Maybe I should have known Facepunch would love mods (I did post this elsewhere but FP responses way outnumber everyone else). And I thought versus multiplayer would be a really popular idea, though it turned out to be pretty close to the bottom, so I'm going to wait until after release to re-visit the idea.
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