Cranking A Full-Scale RPG Inside A Tiny iPhone

Arto Koistinen

Dicework Games

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Overview

• Introduction - What is Rimelands• Part 1 - Design

– Core Mechanics– Character Development– Balancing

• Part 2 - Production– Production per topic

• Design• Art• Code• Testing

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Introduction - What is Rimelands

• Turn-Based RPG for iPhone• Development time about 1 year

– Original schedule: 6 months• Extended with a month or two once, twice...

– 5 months for updates– Started out as a “simple puzzle-based” RPG

• What went right?– Combat system– It’s a full scale mobile RPG!

• What went wrong?– Too many bugs– Story would have needed a lot more work

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Introduction - Design Goals

• Transparency– The player should be able to understand how the

game system works– If you lose, you should have at least have some idea

why

• Variety– No single “best build”– No “outdated” talents

• Approachability– Suitable for mobile play– Playable by non-hardcore players

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Core Mechanics - Dice System

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Core Mechanics - Dice System

• Why dice?– Familiar to most players, even nostalgic to some

• Easy to visualize• Many digital RPGs use dice or dice-like systems under

the hood anyway

• Not just a visual gimmick– Early on, the dice were just a visualization– Re-rolls added to justify the dice rolling

• Did it work?– Yes! It was probably the most praised feature in the

game

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Core Mechanics - Dice System

• What is a Dice Pool?– Common in tabletop games– Characters skill is measured by number of dice– Each dice can either be a success or fail– The number of successes determines the outcome

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Core Mechanics - Dice System

• Benefits of the Dice Pool approach– Easy to visualize – Non-linear probability curve

• Problems with Dice Pool approach– Critical Hits (Piercing hits in Rimelands)

• Rewarding extraordinary success• “Traditional” criticals (hitting the highest number on a

die) not applicable to dice pools

– Takes a lot of screen estate• Limits the stat range

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Core Mechanics - Dice System

• Luck versus Strategy– Dice bring luck to the foreground– Harder to balance by “cheating”– Player can’t influence luck, but can affect the odds

• Complexity versus variety– You’ll need enough variables to be able to produce a

large amount of items...– But too complex mechanics will confuse the players– Rimelands was too complex!

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Core Mechanics - Character Development

• What is Character Development?– Possibly the defining feature of RPGs– If done well, adds depth and variety to the game– A good way of slowly introducing new mechanics– If done badly, the character will get better so that the

player doesn’t have to

• Character Development is often a hardcore feature, but it doesn’t have to be

• Levels are a good way to measure growth in character’s power

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Core Mechanics - Character Development

• Casual “levelling” is possible– Worked well in Rimelands– Simple decisions

• Don’t flood the player with too many choices

– No initial decisions• No character creation• Can’t expect the player to make meaningful choices

before playing the actual game

• What are the common expectations?– Choices should be visible

• Visible gear is mostly a must-have

– The system has to be non-linear in some way

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Talents

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Talent Overview

• 3 Talent trees– Each tree is split into two paths:

• Barbarian: Offensive - Defensive• Assassin: Stealth - Sniper• Shaman: Fast - Slow

• 38 Talents– All talents are unique, though there are similarities:

• Mana regeneration talents• Boost talents• Damage per turn talents

– Divided to skills (active) and boosts (passive)• Skills are active talents (attacks and so on)• Boosts can modify other talents

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Talents

• What makes a good talent?– Bring something new to the core gameplay

• Energizing Wind will give mana when making piercing attacks with magic - turned out to be a very essential part of the gameplay

– Talent should not outdate• Windstrike, Battle Charge and Crippling Shot remain

usable for the whole game

– Talent should speed up the combat• Battle Charge gets rid of the frustrating run to your

enemy• Stunning takes away an enemy turn, making for less

waiting

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Balancing

• Balancing is important and a great deal of work• You will need a spreadsheet to make it work• General balancing guidelines are good

– “Average enemy should die with 3 hits”

• Enemy balancing– Be careful with healing enemies, they can make a

battle long and boring• Player should be able to prevent healing

– Enemies with high HP but low damage are usually boring

• They don’t generally offer much of a challenge, they just feel like work

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Balancing

• Gear balancing– Dice vs Damage

• Which is more effective? And which seems more effective?

– Active gear is more important than passive gear• Players tend to favor offensive to defensive

– Gear needs variety• Sword +1 vs Sword +2 is not a choice• Sword of Magic Damage vs Sword of Physical Damage is

better, but it assumes that the player knows which is more effective in any given situation

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Casual Approach

• Can an RPG be a “casual” game?

• ... is Rimelands a casual game?

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Casual Approach

• Enjoyable by people not usually into turn-based games

• Easing the player in– Yes, we pretty much failed this one– Tutorials are important– Don’t choke the player

• Avoid a lot of obscure statistics– An RPG enthusiast may know that Strength equals

melee damage and Dexterity equals ranged skill, but not nearly everyone

– Did you include Charisma just because D&D has it?

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Production - Overview

• Two full-time developers– Arto: Code, story & design– Peter: Art & design– “Multiclassing” is essential!

• Two part-time developers– Jarkko: Level design– Nelli: Concept, web & cutscene art

• Outsourcing– Wolf model– Music & sounds

• Both tailored and bought from the web

– Animations

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Production - Unique Selling Fails

• No character classes, support for hybrid characters– Didn’t really work, too much work to balance

correctly– A “single class” character was nearly always the best

option

• Randomly generated levels– Ended up being a bit boring, a lot of work to iron out

all the bugs– Would need more variety (random non-combat

encounters, etc)

• Blueprint system– Was supposed to bring the community in (you could

trade blueprint codes), but was too confusing– Codes were leaked immediately

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Production - Design

• Very iterative design cycle– Easier when the designer is the same person as the

coder– Prototyping beats writing design documents

• Don’t panic!– Analyze feedback properly– Feedback often shows the symptom, not the cause

• What are the essential features?– Anyone can list a dozen things that an RPG must

have, but which ones are truly essential?

• What are the hidden features?– No one will list “spell effects” as an essential feature,

but it must be designed too

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Production - Code

• Don’t reinvent, use available tools as much as possible– There’s a lot of tools and plugins available for free– Most of the paid Unity plugins are quite cheap– With 3rd party plugins you’ll know the code has been

tested to work. That’s essential when your own QA resources are limited.

• Develop your own toolset early on– If you find yourself doing the same task often, it may

be worth your while to automate it– Coder needs to use the toolset too!

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Production - Code

• Plan testing early– An RPG is a QA nightmare - you’ll need to think how

to test things as quickly as possible– A “playground” level is a good way to test new

features

• Plan essential features early on– Spell effect system may not be vital for playing the

game, but it can be a pain to add in beta

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Production - Art

• Recycling Assets

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Production - Art

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Production - Art

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Production - Art

• Recycling– More content with less assets– Get repetitive in the long run - lack of unique bosses

was a definitive minus

• Even “non-essential” art should be done early on– It’s easy to leave things like spell effect to later parts

of the production– Visual effects are a part of the core experience, even

if they don’t affect the gameplay

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Production - Level Design

• WYSIWYG level editor

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Production - Testing

• You have to play your game. A lot. And then some more. This applies to every member of the team.

• Add tutorials early on, that’s the best way to know if your mechanics are clear enough

• Free testers are readily available– Unreliable– Only 10 - 20% of testers actually do anything

• Paid testers– Movie tickets or small money rewards to motivate

testers– Often not very professional either

• Hard to get good feedback

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Thank you!

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