Item Creation

Item Creation Process
This is the most complicated aspect of the game, so we really need to make sure what we’re dealing with. As the project designer, I’ve been cognizing this process in my mind repeatedly.

Ultimately, the item creation process is the means to the end of the game. Without an interesting item creation process, then playing from the beginning to the end of the game won’t be terribly interesting. This isn’t to say the story or world are dull, but a game is good or bad largely because of gameplay quality.

Another aspect of the item creation process is it shouldn’t be totally pre-scripted. Meaning, the way you win shouldn’t be like this:

“Monster A has X strength, so the player needs a sword with at least X strength or he can’t win.”

That’s how every game works. But not this one...ideally.

The way it works is that a monster will have some weaknesses and some strengths, all of which are initially unknown to the player. Through encountering each monster, the player can start to figure out what it would take to destroy each one. There isn’t just one way to destroy it, either. The player then needs to collect the proper materials, then forge an item that could exploit the monster’s weaknesses or downplay its strengths, whatever. In this way, the game is kind of a puzzle game.

There is no textbook given to the player regarding formulas for making items. The player character will have a journal which is filled out by responsible players.

The way a player comes to know what to do regarding item creation is by experimentation. “Hey, what happens if I make a sword out of A and mix A with some B?” You do so, and find out.

Over the course of the game, the player will come to accumulate more and more experience with a larger and larger variety of materials. The number of possible material combinations grows exceedingly.

Another aspect of item creation is your skill with them.

Instead of “levelling up” like in most RPGs, you simply improve in the areas you work in. There are two areas of the crafting skill that go up with use: 1. Materials used. 2. Items made.

So, let’s say your character is a Tinker and you as a player have extra fun creating clockwork robots from Mithril and Ground Dragon Scales. At first, the robots you create are low quality because your skill is low. They are prone to a number of randomized defects, such as weak armor, randomly exploding, wacky AI, or whatever. But you keep creating these Mithril/Dragon Scale bots and your skill improves as you do so, first in Mithril use and Dragon Scale use, second in bot creation. The adverse effects become less and less until they are non-existent, and the strengths of the bot are improved with time. As your character improves his skill with those materials, he also learns to optimize the amount of said materials that are required to craft the bot (to represent that less materials are wasted via trial and error in your character’s experimentations with materials). (David Boudreau): What about mentoring other players? Can a player level up a crafting ability faster if he is being mentored by another player or NPC with experience in that craft?

This causes your playing experience to be more varied, and the items you make to be more valuable on the online market because not just any old Tinker can make all the same stuff.

Party Item Creation
As if this weren’t enough awesomeness, there is another aspect to item creation that comes along in the game.

There will be the possibility of adding two additional characters to your party. These characters will be dwarfs you meet out in the game world. They are also craftsmen. The purpose of the party system is to collaborate on item creation with multiples class’ skill sets.

For example, let’s say your character is an Alchemist. You discover that by mixing two strange materials you’ve discovered, you make contact with an alternate dimension. However, the mixture is extremely unstable and needs to be contained in more fortified material or space than you as an alchemist can create. Fortunately, your party has an architect and a tinker. You use the architect to create a space or structure to contain the mixture you’ve made, and you have the tinker harness its power. With the skills of all three characters and some more experimentation, you use the strange mixture you came up with to create a teleportation machine!

But you’re new at item teleportation device creation, so you have to use a lot of materials, it’s expensive, and weird things happen. Maybe your destination is random every time you step through it. Maybe there’s a 5% chance that your top half will be teleported to one place and your bottom half to another, which results in an untimely death. (David Boudreau): Can we take death more seriously and test it on rats and monkeys before just going through on your own? Perhaps a teleportation device can be tested on a creature that you know how to summon to you, and maybe you can read its memories to know what happened to it. Any device could be tested this way.

As you continue to experiment with and build teleportation devices, they become better and better.

Let’s say you eventually replace the architect with an armorer - and with the armorer, you figure out how to develop a metal that is resistant to the instability of the mixture that allows teleportation - voila! You can now create a suit of armor with teleportation properties. I know this is all very complex. I don’t know how much of it we will be able to keep because I don’t know how much of this is possible. But this is the direction to shoot for and take as far as possible.

This all opens up the possibility of creating a game that is never the same twice. Online walkthroughs would be obsolete for a game like this - and that’s the ideal. In this game, one would have agency to choose and to learn and to solve problems his way.

That said, I don’t think ANY of this is actually necessary for the Kickstarter pitch. Here is what is necessary:

FORGING
We need the actual aesthetic aspect of the development of an item or two to be demonstrated in a forge. What would that entail?

One, we would need to show the player select the forge. This would open up a new screen, which would display 1. a list of all the materials the character has in his possession, 2. A list of all items that are possible to create with combinations of those materials, and 3. A grid for displaying the item the player chooses to craft. The player can then cycle through basic starting points for each of the key components of the item they are creating. Let’s say they are creating a hammer.

The player would be able to cycle through multiple starting shapes for the head of the hammer, and do the same for the handle (let’s say they have to decide between the head of the hammer being boxy or cylindrical).

After this point, the player can then drag points on the hammer’s head around the grid (the points on the hammer snap to points on the grid). The player does this until the head is the size and shape he desires it to be.

After deciding on the shape and size of the hammer, the player needs to determine what materials from his list he will use to create the hammer. Depending on the size of the hammer (determined by the grid), the player will have to use the necessary amount of the material.

After deciding the material the hammer is made of, he has to decide how he wants to embellish the hammer (if at all). For this he could place jewels or other precious/powerful things on the outside of the hammer (placement being limited by the grid?). Another feature in the game will be the use of a pattern creator, with which players can draw or create by some other means a pattern to be implemented on the item they are making. The pattern has to be implemented using a material/materials (such as gold).

The net worth of the item can then be calculated. WHEW! That’s all I have to say about item creation at this point. - Bryce

Initial Design
I've been thinking about the item creation design, and here's what I've come up with so far.

I like the idea of a grid (size of each unit is up for discussion at the moment, of course) both for programming purposes and to enable the user to be more precise. I'm thinking something along the lines of a grid view from each of the sides and from the top and bottom (six 2D views in total -- 4 sides, top, and bottom), with one or more of these views visible at a time. If we have time, we could throw a small "render view" off to the side that shows what the object will look like in 3D. For right now, do we let the user select the material he/she would like to use, and then place square by square on the grid? Or, do we have (movable) vertices that define the exterior shell of the object? Or both?

My other thoughts have been about the interactions of the materials, as well as their use as weapons. For example, what is the practical combat result of combining a dragon tooth with metal? How much more damage will that weapon do? Or, will making a sword out of metal with a golden hilt have a different effect in combat than a sword with a wooden hilt? I'm really just thinking about what effect putting different materials together will have. Do we need to define those effects ourselves, or will the physics engine take care of that? Also, how are we going to animate a user-made weapon? The only thing I can think of so far is pre-defined character actions (such as side-swipe, throw, spin, etc.) that the user will then choose for each created weapon.

This is just an initial hunch, but I suspect that UDK would be more difficult to customize for item creation than it would be to just write our own code. It doesn't mean we can't use UDK for other things (like terrains, for example, which it seems to do well), but it seems to be built more for character-to-character/character-to-environment gameplay than for artistic creation. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.

Those are all my thoughts for now. What do you think? - Matt

My UI Brainstorming - Ben