Game Mechanics and Compositing, pt. 1

So, I was plowing through some Lagoon yesterday (pic related), and playing through parts of it again reminded me of a couple of things that come to mind when I'm thinking through FaeSaga.

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One of the things Brian really seems to enjoy when it comes to hack-and-slash games is pretty much Zelda.  TLoZ, LTTP, and all the other ones of its ilk are what seems to me to be his primary inspiration for FaeSaga, and for certain, TLoZ certainly set a bar for many other games in the genre.  On the other hand, I also grew up with a lot of hack-and-slash games which some younger gamers might find a bit more obscure these days.  Lagoon happens to be one of them.  These types of games were often grindfests where they gave you a really undersized (and underpowered) sword, or often no attack button at all (Looking at you, Ys series!).  That stuff probably owes itself to the PC background of many games in that genre.

One thing I really want to avoid when making FaeSaga is to avoid turning off any potential gamers to the sort of difficulties and frustrations that plagued the old genre, while still providing a rewarding experience throughout the game for doing the minor tasks we want players to do in order to progress.  Zelda-type games, unlike many others in the genre, got around the normal level grinding mechanic by providing many opportunities for the player to upgrade his repertoire.  The overhead enemies were usually fairly basic, but almost everything outside of dungeons was a big game of hide-and-go-seek.  There are far more opportunities for this in TLoZ games than there typically are in the old PC hack-and-slash.

So, to balance the extremes, what will likely be the case in FaeSaga is that we will be giving the player plenty of opportunities to find goodies (both in and out of dungeons, and many optional ones), while probably at the same time having a weak leveling mechanic which will allow the game's difficulty and learning curve to be tolerable for even casual gamers.  Basically, what I'm looking to do is that if FaeSaga does have any grinding in it, the user will have a positive reinforcement to grind for certain things (making money), rather than having a straight negative reinforcement of kicking your ass the second you step food into a new area (as games like Lagoon, Ys, and others did much more fiercely than say, games like Crystalis;  LTTP barely did this at all).

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Lagoon's Nasir and Crystalis hero

 Another game mechanic which should be well familiar to any of you who have played a game in this genre is the character's outfits.  Usually done via palette shifts, back in the day you could track a gamer's progress by seeing what his character was wearing.  It was always cool to go to a friend's or load up a rental save and see their guy all decked out in fancy stuff you've never seen before;  almost a forbidden kind of allure, considering many times you'd have far to go before you would ever reach that level.

These days, blinging out a character is as much a social form of communication as it is another sense of atmospherics.  That is why one of the game mechanics important to FaeSaga is a good character compositor.  The compositor will do exactly what it sounds like it should do -- create the hero's basic appearance in the player's own image, with extra goodies to be doled out to the player over time as rewards for achievements in-game, or through our online community, or even as DLC.

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 This crude sketch served as a concept for some of the artists we initially hired to explain how they should prep their assets for incorporation into FaeSaga's compositor.  Because creating assets has a significant investment cost, certain aspects of this concept were made with cost-cutting in mind.  Depending on the cost and complexity of creating additional assets, it is possible that while the player might be able to choose the complexion and appearance of the main character, he or she might not be able to change most of the basic clothing.  Instead, like the classic games in this genre, appearance may change via palette shifts for things like armor and boots.

Here are a few other examples which utilize sprite compositing to create original characters.

Gaia Online avatars

LaTale avatars

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