This is why people play video games. It explains why games like The Sims and RPGs (Role Playing Games) such as World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights are super popular.

For those unfamiliar with RPG systems, Experience Points (XP) are given to player for putting in their hard work. Whenever the player accomplishes a certain task -whether it be slaying a beast, convincing the old man to come with you, or saving the kitten in the tree- the player is given a certain amount of Experience Points. The amount of XP will vary based on the difficulty of the task. For example, convincing the old man will give you 10 XP, while slaying the evil beast will give you 100 XP.

When you collect enough XP, you will automatically gain a new Experience Level. With a new Experience Level, the player is rewarded with more Strength, Intelligence, Magic Spells, Weapons, Gold, etc. The Sims works on a similar level based on the amount of time you spend with your character. But I’ll stick with the RPG metaphor, it’s more fun. 🙂

Unfortunately, life doesn’t work according to Experience Points rules. Go with me on this:

The more time you put into a job, eventually, you should level up and make more money (not guaranteed, but pretty likely). And if you have more money, that allows you to buy a bigger car, house, etc. if you desire those things.

But leveling up at your job doesn’t necessarily make you any stronger or wiser (or give magic spells… unless you’re working in some crazy chemistry lab, which sounds like an awesome job!).

So basically, you have to play another game at the same time for your Personal Experience Level. You have to work on skill-sets (or hobbies) outside of your work life, such as painting, learning a language, playing music, creating a game, how to fix a car, really anything you wish you could do.

But how do you do them? Where do you find the time? Search me. I’m not a personal development guru. I won’t pretend to be one. Steve Pavlina has billions of articles on that kind of subject, go ask him. I don’t even believe in most of that stuff (all Personal Develop gurus are nuts). I personally develop myself all the time. I know what works for me. But it maybe completely different from what works for you.

For example, Steve Pavlina has some wonderful method for waking up refreshed every morning.

I actually did try that for 21 days (couldnt make it to 30), it didn’t work for me. I have never had a Circadian Rhythm at all. So… I currently use 3 alarm clocks to wake up in the too early in the morning so I can be tired on purpose. This way I can fall asleep at night and avoid insomnia.

What does this have to do with gaming systems? Well, in a good game, the Player is rewarded no matter what, and the game’s ruleset decides the reward for you. As long as the Player puts in the time and does what he is told, he gets the experience and the reward.

In real life, you can put in all sorts time and work, yet there is no guarantee you will be rewarded (ooh, scary, huh?). What’s worse, you have to tell yourself what to do and choose your own rewards, life won’t do it for you.

On that note, I gotta go level up.

This is continuing the series on Arvale Game Design from Part 2 here. If you missed Part 1, that’s here.

Welcome back! In the last chapter of this series on Arvale Game Designs,  I’m going to touch on topics such as Quest Design, Semi-Persistent worlds, Day and Night cycles, more Maps, and perhaps even a few bits of information on Arvale: III. And of course, you can still make fun of my uh, unique handwriting 😉 We’ll be using examples from:

Arvale: Short Tales

I didn’t want the game to be Arvale III, as I promised I would never do Arvale III unless the game was in 3D. I’m still keeping that promise.

Choosing Short Tales instead of Short Stories was an aesthetic one so that the acronym was AST instead of ASS. 😉

The idea behind Short Tales was to have 4 (+1) short adventures that the player could choose from. Each with unique characters and story lines, but set within the same semi-persistent world (it can’ be fully persistent if you’re playing one character at a time). I must admit that Saga Frontier for Playstation 1 actually inspired quite a bit of the idea. I also wanted to play more with lots of mini-quests that were all intertwined, similar to how Quests in Everquest, Knights of the Old Republic, and World of Warcraft are designed.

And having all of this happen in the same world, starting in the same town, was surprisingly…  actually, quite simple 🙂

You lose a bit with the grid paper, but if you zoom in on the pic, everything is clearly visible.

Having only one central town in the game meant that I could spend less time creating massive amounts of maps, NPCs, houses, and everything else that goes into a town. Given that all the NPCs would appear in each character’s story, this means that player’s would become more familiar with each character, so I was able to create a small back-story for each one (on another paper, that one is secret though), and I could give each NPC a unique name. You can see the names of most of the NPCs are already decided and written next to each beautiful stick figure or house already.

On the flip-side, because of the semi-persistent world, and unique characters, these same NPCs had to multiplied by 4. This was the easiest way for the NPCs to be able to interact with each player character with different texts, triggers, and Quests.

You may also notice letters ABCDEFGHIJK and roman numerals I-VIII. These were more or less unique IDs tied to Maestyl for buildings and NPCs which I could refer to throughout the design of the game.

Since there was only one central town in the game, this also meant that world surrounding it would have to be relatively small as well.

While nowhere as pretty as this map

It is a lot more informative during the design of how all the maps link together (including the map shortcuts which were essential during testing). I actually scrawled this map out for one of the other designers to help him with testing out the game. That’s why you’ll notice the different handwriting (no more legible at that, I’m telling you, designers…) written on the maps and to the side.

The ‘Day’ marks I imagine were the other designer trying to figure out how the Day/Night cycle I implemented worked 🙂 I implemented a Day/Night cycle into the game using a complicated set of triggers and flags which were more or less set based on how many times you switched maps and which maps you were switching to. The player could also switch the Day/Night by sleeping at the inn in the town.

Day/Night cycles led to an interesting choice for Quests. The NPC could tell the player that a certain task could only be performed at Night or during the Day. However, if the only way the player knew for sure to switch the Day cycle was by sleeping in the Inn, it could become a problem if they had traveled far from the town to tackle a Quest (only to find out it is the wrong time of day). Hence, I added a quirky, homeless NPC named Tanner who would let you sleep on his mat for certain maps where Day cycles were important to Quests.

You may also notice the note in Hungarian at the bottom saying ‘útjelzők?’ That means sign posts. My guess is, I still hadn’t added signposts to the maps yet 🙂 Speaking of maps…

Designing Dungeons in which more than one unique character can go required quite a bit of thought. Because of the Semi-Persistent world, if one character uses an item such as a Chest or Door, that item would still be affected when the player begins with the next character. Dungeons needed to be designed so that the unique characters could share maps, but not screw up each others puzzles.

(But to share a bit of familiarity, you would see the other character being lost in the same dungeon on a floor below, or similar, which I always thought was a nice touch). Varju (the shape-shifting Druid character) was an exception, as he could reach other characters puzzles while shape-shifted, but a shape-shifted character cannot perform any actions on puzzles or chests.

Using the unique powers or traits of each character was a logical way to do this. For example, in this dungeon there are blocks of Ice which need to be melted by the Mage character (Lotus) before being able to touch her puzzles or items, while Tabys (the Thief/Rogue/Ninja character) needed to have Cat Claws equipped to scale certain walls in order to reach his areas.

This actually sparked the idea of hard to reach Special Items on certain maps, which could only be reached once each characters unique powers were used at least once. For example: melt the ice (Mage), destroy the blocks (Warrior), then scale the wall (Thief). Meaning the player would have to play through three of those characters in that order to reach the chest. Not very easy to get to, which makes them special. Speaking of special…

Since Arvale: Short Tales takes place in the same world as Arvale I and II, the stories and backgrounds for each character needed to fit into the same world as well.

For Maestyl itself, this was no problem. I chose Maestyl on the Kytar continent on purpose, because of its location next to a large forest and in an area that couldn’t be explored in Arvale II. ArvaleST takes place long after the events in Arvale II, but before the events in Arvale I*.

However, for the characters in the story, I needed more places to exist. the only way to do this fairly (without messing with too much story) was to take the existing world from Arvale II and zooming out 🙂 For example:

Tabys (the Thief) is from the republic of Garga, which is a large continent which has similarities to ancient Greece or Rome (the giant duck-looking continent on the left).  Tabys’s enemy is from the Monster-ridden continent of Sytae just below.

Varju is from the land of Denizum on the (bottom right).

The wife of Koden (the Warrior) is from a small Kingdom called Lanthys (at the very top of the map).

Having these continents on the world map was essential for character dialogue and narration as characters needed to refer to where they came and make references to the different locales.

This world map is actually similar to what the world in Arvale III looks like. And many of the locales and characters in Arvale: Short Tales were born from the story and design I wrote for Arvale III. (and Garga makes a small appearance in the PDAmill game, Melonchi Minecarts)

So, as promised, there is your information on Arvale III, that world map. Pretty isn’t it? 😉

Well, that’s it for past Arvale Game Designs on Paper. I hope you enjoyed it! If I missed out on anything, or if you have any comments or requests, please let me know.

Perhaps I should focus more on present/future designs and release a new Arvale for you all 🙂

*While I have a definite timeline on paper of when Arvale II, I and ST happen, it is always best to leave these things approximate for storytelling purposes. this is why the maps in Arvale II say Future/Past/Present, and nothing like 1000AD.

This is continuing the series on Arvale Game Design from Part 1 here.

Welcome back! As promised, this time I’m going to spend a bit less time on the map designs themselves and a bit more time on other things such as designing the story outline, puzzles, the big problems with time/dimensional traveling, and even designs for the music and sound files. Don’t worry, you can still make fun of my terrible handwriting 🙂 We’ll be using examples from:

Arvale II: Ocean of Time

I should note that some thought actually went into the name of the game. While a few people made jabs about it being similar to Zelda: Ocarina of Time, that never once entered my mind (until the jabs, of course). The idea was to somehow combine that in Arvale II, you were now able to navigate across the entire overworld on a sea ship (something you couldn’t do in Arvale 1), and how the story had something to do with time travel. I thought Ocean of Time summed that up quite nicely.

This of course meant that we needed a coffee-stained, overall world map. While the scan doesn’t come out as great as I had hoped, you can still zoom in and make out most the lovely palm trees around ‘Stabilize A‘. This was quite early in the design, yet notice how most things already have names on the map. This is obviously in part due to many of the locations existed in Arvale 1. It is also nice to see how the continents are actually arrange on the world map now, since that wasn’t possible in the first game. It was even more fun to figure out how to arrange the extra continents needed for the story in Arvale: Short Tales and Arvale III. But that will have to wait until Part 3 of this series 😉

The seeds for Arvale II were already somewhat sown in Arvale: Journey of Illusion. You could see references to DeMenchev’s character as a prohpet in the Soneros Desert and great thinker of the past who invented a flying machine, in the town of Queous. I think he was mentioned in Invyl as well, I forget 🙂

The idea for DeMenchev was of course based on Leonardo DaVinci. But I thought it would be really interesting if DaVinci wasn’t actually an brainiac genius, but someone well-traveled, who studied and gained all of his knowledge about the world of Arvale by searching for lost artifacts and civilizations, which surely leads to the Indiana Jones influences.

Arvale II also gives the player an option on which path they would like to take (although a bit unwittingly, but that is by design of the story). Time travel is a bitch. Ask anyone who has done it. As far as story-telling goes, linear time travel is the only thing that is really entertaining. The game Chrono Trigger and the Back to the Future movies are great examples of this. But intellectually and scientifically it’s kinda boring and overdone (you can’t go back in time and kill your own grandfather, there I said it). So opening up the ideas of quantum time travel or dimensional travel seemed like a fun idea. Chrono Cross touched on this and was a great game, but not quite as entertaining as Chrono Trigger, maybe I should have learned their lesson? 🙂

Ironically, the latest Indiana Jones film touched on dimensional travel too (maybe they were playing Arvale?). Anyway, I opted for something in-between mixing linear time travel (the time pieces) and jumbling up different dimensions (the stabilizer idols), and well, it’s unique.

The outline above  tries to make sense of the three main paths (and two resulting semi-optional paths) the player can choose and the major events which will happen in the story. Such as: which temple the player will go to, what time period he will be in, and how the character will have to travel to the next temple in that time period. Which brings me to another problem with time travel: Maps.

The Arvale II marketing texts says the game contains over 325 maps (at my advice) which was a vast understatement looking back on it. Because many of the maps in the game needed to be multiplied by 3. I had to recreate many of the maps in each time period (Past, Present, and Future) to adjust the continents for what might happen to it over time (the Volcano on Aphote island, the River/Lake on Stygia, etc). This also means that all of the event triggers had to be recreated and check for where the player was at any time during the game. Since there are very few global flags in Arvale (integer values that keep track of everything in the game, no matter what), this was very tricky to accomplish. Even trickier to take the player from a Past Overworld map into a Dungeon (the only maps which were global and had no time status) and have them Exit the dungeon and still end up in the Past.

I wanted to add more puzzle-type things into Arvale II. Given the relatively limited engine, it took a lot of creativity to come up with puzzles bigger than: flip switch, open door. One of the first puzzles in the game was a spin-off of what I think was an old puzzle in Final Fantasy VI for Super Nintendo. This picture looks way more confusing that the original puzzle it was made for. It had to be setup using a triggers for each open/close of the chest, change the state of the other chests, and set a flag to 1 or 0 each time that was done (just in case, and to keep track of it). During the design of the puzzle, I was reminded of a lot of homework which I never thought would be important when I was in 7th grade. 🙂

A much neater puzzle was near the end of the game, in the final dungeon (I think). It had to do with redirecting a light source from the ceiling to hit a fountain in another room by using mirrors and moving blocks and stuff. Alas, I couldn’t find the documents for that one 🙁

I wanted a lot more music in Arvale II than in Arvale:JOI. But given the restrictions of the original platform, Windows Mobile, we had to make the music fit in a really small file size (and take up minimum processor usage). We were already using XM Fast Tracker II format, which is small and manageable for a few songs. However, XM files not only contain the note information (like a Midi file) but also contain all the samples for any instruments the song uses as well.

For example: if you have your first song with Strings, Horns, and Timpani, and a second song which has a Drum Kit, Distorted Guitar and Voices, they will have completely separate samples embedded into their files. But, if you write a third song which has Strings, Guitar, and a Drum kit, it might also have the same samples as the first two songs and you would be wasting space.

An XM file has a length advantage/disadvantage of being able to squeeze about  3-4 songs into one file  (music writers: it is limited to 256 patterns, similar to musical measures, which can be divided by 64, and adjusted by tempo to whatever subdivision you wish). With that in mind, I decided I could arrange the music so that songs with similar instrumentation could go into the same files.

On the above page, on the left side, you can see all of the music pieces (with the slashes) and the instruments I planned on using in their arrangements. On the right side, I divided out which actual files they would end up being shared into. I believe the game ended up with 8 total XM tracks with a total of 27 music tracks. With around 65 minutes of total music. The total uncompressed file size was less than 1.5 MB. Not bad for a Windows Mobile game 🙂

That’s it for Part 2. I hope that enlighted you or entertained you a bit on puzzles, music, outlines, and time travel 🙂

In Part 3, I’ll use examples from Arvale: Short Tales and touch on topics such as Quest Design, Semi-Persistent worlds, more Maps, and perhaps even a few bits of information on Arvale: III 🙂  If you have any other requests, leave something in the comments and I’ll do my best to fit it in the next installment.

Continue reading onto Arvale Game Designs on Paper, Part 3.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time now, but well, life happened.

I’ve kept a good majority of all the game designs I’ve worked on. I think it would be nice for budding game designers to see how some of the magic really works. And I figured it would be a hoot for some fans to see how Arvale originally looked on paper by my hands.

There’s far too much material to go into one post, so I’ll spread it out for you and divide it into the three Arvale games. That way there is some cohesion and I can touch on different topics throughout. So we’ll logically start with:

Arvale: Journey of Illusion.

Design note: While some big-name game designers may say they use all sort of really fancy programs to design their games. I’m pretty sure at the end of the day, everything starts and ends up scribbled on paper.

This is all from lots of sketches and notes that went into several notebooks over the course of the 5 or so years during the production of the Windows Mobile Arvale games.

I scanned them all at pretty high quality, so if you are curious, you can zoom in and try to decipher what the hell I was thinking at the time of the design. But, don’t laugh at my handwriting. Okay, go ahead and laugh at it, I already mentioned here that I have terrible handwriting.

This should be familiar to anyone who has played Arvale: JOI. This is the first castle in the game, it is pretty much the first map that was ever made in the engine, and it came out pretty close to this very rough sketch you see here.

At this point in development, no one on the team really knew what to expect, and I wrote a lot of extra information that I don’t really bother with (at the top of the map) anymore. Stuff like King, Ra, Guards X 2 at the door are a waste of space when I already have beautiful stick figures on the map itself. Later on, if the stick figure was important enough, I would scribble their name next to it.

There are also some strange notes like ‘Carpet‘ and ‘Garden E/W‘, which I imagine were put in because the map engine and all the tiles for the game were not even finished at the time when I started designing the game.

I have no idea what ‘Fresh‘ means in the Item Shop. I’m sure it was a funny joke at the time, but I don’t remember putting it in the game.

Here is a sketch of the first continent from the game, simply called Entoque Continent, named after its capital, I didn’t think it needed another name, and it stuck.

However, you’ll notice in the picture, it’s simply called Continent 1. Castle, Cave, Town, Monster Camp, Ancient Ruins, Town 2, Port Town, and Dragon Cave all make an appearance 🙂 Oh, and Magicorp Outpost, which was an early name for Sorcynth (Sorcery+Synthesis, which is way better).

Also notice the arrows/lines pointing from the locations with short notes about where the player will go and what they will do. Crazily enough, at the Magicorp Sorcynth Outpost at the bottom, you can kinda see: ‘Later, Can get ID Card‘.

This means either:

• I had thought the outline of the game that far ahead before even naming the first town;
• I had thought of the idea at some point that outpost will be used for an ID card quest later in the game; or possibly…
• I came back and wrote it in to make myself feel smarter. I don’t remember which.

This points towards the outline of the game was written without fleshed out names of areas, towns, continents, dungeons first. At the time it was essential to get the project moving. Now, I actually think of names as soon as I am outlining the story. Which you’ll see as the designs progress.

It feels like I’m playing the pencil and paper version of Arvale: JOI now. 🙂

This is the Heroes Cave. It was meant to be a really simple cave with two puzzles and only a few rooms. It didn’t change too much aside from the Hero’s Key being hard to find in that far right room. That’s a slight problem with the mapping engine and using a 3/4 top-down view: It’s really hard to show the player there is a door on the right/left side of the player, the same problem applied to the Armory and the Guards’ Room in the castle. We solved it with different tile-sets in future games.

You’ll see I jotted down some dialogue ideas for the Dungeon Boss and I believe the Bridge Guard near the top. It seemed appropriate place to put it. Asking the Boss, ‘Doesn’t this job get a little boring?‘ after winning the fight is still one of my favorite questions from Duncan. 🙂

Also notice how there is a Save Point, which was later taken out of the game for obvious reasons (it’s a mobile game, you can save wherever you want). This led to the question… well, what do we do with all the save points in the game then? The interesting solution was the Sorcynth Points which let you boost your stats for money; which would still give the players a visual cue that a boss is coming up, and make them save so they could try the boss with and without the boosting stuff (and waste a lot less time leveling up just for a boss battle, if they so desired). I still like the Sorcynth Points.

This ugly busy picture was of a later town, Klumet (see? it has a name now). Also notice the dialogue and quest notes next to any important buildings or characters.

A strange thing I just noticed while looking at this is some NPC talking about making sure to bring enough Fire Magic to the woods. I think this was with an older magic system we planned on implementing but which never materialized. So this guy got replaced with the Soap Quest (which people are still searching for the solution to 🙂 ).

Those stick figures are awesome.

Yes Stygia, like the underworld, like the river Styx and all that. I’m not sure if the name or the Ferryman came first. Either way, it was a good fit.

A lot more arrows and a lot more notes. This was a pretty busy continent with the traveling all the way to Idraces on the north end, through the Marsh, and then traveling back to Klumet to escape to the next continent. The Ferryman and the Ferry Ticket solved this traveling back issue and that was how it was planned (that’s why the river runs through the Forest, and there is a boat stop at Pike, Idraces and Klumet).

It looks like I still hadn’t decided to make the monster camp near Pike into the cave which hints at Blynt’s (Duncan’s ancestor) story of after he left Arhaeldem. Someday, I’ll explain it all, unless someone makes a really good guess at it first 😉

I have no idea what Entoque X+ 19 and Y+ 26 means 🙂

Here is an excellent example of an interestingly bad map design.

While I’m sure that Stygian Forest actually ended up something like this… I have no idea what any of these numbers, letters, or roman numerals mean today. It’s obvious that I was trying to divide up the map into screens somehow…

Ah, I see. Creative, but still messy. Since it wasn’t exactly on a grid, I needed someway to have the exits/entrances from each map organized by name somehow in the map editor. This gets confusing because even from space ‘A’, there are 5 exits, 2 of which are both on the top of the screen. Exits in the game were all handled by step-on triggers, with entry and exit points (where to place the character on the next map).

Therefore, just estimating by the looks of it, this map probably has about 50 exit triggers. This doesn’t include that a trigger had to be placed on one tile at a time (this changed in Arvale II engine, thankfully).

Anyway, if you’re designing some part of a game, and come across some problem and solve it with a weird, creative solution: write down WHY you did it, so you can read it later.

Strangely enough, this one:

Is a much more complicated map, yet a lot easier to read (even if the scanner didn’t pick everything up correctly). This seems to be much later in the game.

You may wonder why ABC,DEF,GHI and not use ABC horizontal and 123 vertical, something more like Chess or Battleship (I’m sure there is a more accurate word for this); e.g. A-2, or C-9. I’m sure there are a few good reasons I didn’t. Aside from only having 9 screens and adding numbers would be overkill, I would get confused sharing A with 0. 😉 Besides, this way I can say the Ice Scepter is simply on E (not B-2).

And for those still searching for the Hydrephyl Herbs, there they are, in G. 🙂

Okay one more:

Ah, memories. That blob on the left side was supposed to be another continent which never made it into the game. It was going to be a tie-in with another game (by another developer) called Medieval Blacksmith, which never saw the light of day.

When that fell through, I tied it in with an existing game by PDAmill Game Studios, GameBox Gems (and all of its Dwarves). This set the perfect stage for hunting for Mythril and well, it worked out even better. The Melonchi Mines in turn, had lots of gameplay in Arvale II, and even a spin-off game of its own called Melonchi Minecarts was created.

Kytar itself was another game (by another developer) which was supposed to be tied into Arvale. That other game was supposed to take place on the northern part of the continent. And that other game was slated to be released within a few months after Arvale 1. That’s why the guard is on the bridge there, and that is why the cryptic message he gives you about not being able to cross the bridge until months later.

Unfortunately, that project fell through too, but the developer was kind enough to let me keep the name and the resemblance to his Kytar continent. Unfortunately, this spurred a lot of player questions about what the guard means by ‘In a few months.’ I couldn’t imagine any player thinking that if he actually waited in-game for months to see if the guard would change his response.

Live and learn.

I decided to solve the Kytar dilemma in Arvale II.

In Arvale II, I allowed the player to visit that other side of the continent, but not the original side in Arvale 1. And this time, I put a visibly broken bridge and a readable sign saying ‘The bridge is broken and there is absolutely no way you are going to cross it or get to that side of the continent.’ 🙂

Arvale II fixed a lot of things, as far as design, gameplay, but also introduced a few new challenges. So…

In the next set, I’ll use Arvale II: OOT examples, and I’ll touch on topics such as designing the story outline, puzzles, the big problems with time/dimensional traveling, and even designs for the music and sound files. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, be sure to leave them at the end of this post and I’ll be sure to answer them or include them in future installments.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing!

Continue reading onto Arvale Game Designs on Paper, Part 2.

It’s been a few months since I released anything game related. So I figured I’d give you something new to play with 🙂

This is a short Neverwinter Nights Module I whipped up using the Aurora Engine, which is a fantastic engine and toolset.

You wake up in a Jail Cell of the Hellenvyrde Dungeons and have no idea how you ended up there, as you seem to have lost your memory. You’ll need to escape the dungeons. It’s relatively short and you should be able to run through it in about 15-30 minutes.

Install: Well, you’ll need to have the full version of Neverwinter Nights from Bioware. If you still don’t have it (you do like RPGs dont you?), I recently saw the Diamond Edition (with all sorts of everything in it) available for around $20.

From there, just download the module file and drop it into your Neverwinter Nights modules folder. Start the game and select other modules, then Escape from Hellenvyrde. (At least, that’s how it should work. Let me know if it doesn’t 😉 )

You can download the module: HERE

More screenshots on the Free Games page.

More info on Neverwinter Nights from Bioware: here

Everything related to Neverwinter Nights and Bioware is copyright and owned by them. I only created the Dialog, Scripts, and Level Design.

Happy 4th of July! 🙂

After playing any of the Arvale games, many people have asked me Why/How Wheelbarrows?

The honest answer is: it was funny.

I was editing the maps and adding all sorts of clickable things in the towns, things that people are usually doing in an RPG to search for hidden potions and whatnot; when I wondered…

What if instead of ‘You’ve found a Potion!’ or ‘You found 50 Gold!’, it actually said more interesting:

‘Your hands sift through the bag of rice (while the storekeeper isn’t looking, of course) and you disturbed the cockroaches sleeping inside… but you didn’t find anything worth taking.’

Then using that concept to make comments about the character’s current environment (similar to an old Graphic Adventure):

‘You peer off into the distance behind Highwatch Castle.’

‘It’s very dark, gloomy, and wicked looking.’

‘You smile and take some comfort knowing that the game won’t allow you to visit up there.’ (I still like that one 🙂 )

And the next logical step of course would be, Why on earth would someone click on a Wheelbarrow? Either they
a) are looking for hidden treasure (boring)
b) are crazy (interesting)
c) think their character is crazy and thinks he can talk to wheelbarrows (funny)
d) think their character might be crazy, and has a long standing rapport with wheelbarrows and actually interacts with them (damn funny) and somehow:

‘You vocalize your beliefs about the class structure in Kytar to the wheelbarrow.’
‘You exchange knowing glances with the wheelbarrow.’
‘You teach the wheelbarrow a few new tricks.’

Simple lines like these are hilarious even 15 hours into the game. 🙂

Oh and rooms like this:

Were a nightmare for me. 😉

Because they really can’t teach this stuff in school. Well maybe they try to at Berklee College of Music or some trade schools. But you’re not going to go there because you are wise (or cheap, or too young/old, etc). This can’t be contained in one article, as it’s way too broad a subject, but here’s a crash course:

First, you need a canvas to paint on. Get some DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. I won’t even bother going into the DAW war and just state I use Digital Performer 6 for a multitude of reasons that fit me (I’ve traveled a long road from Midisoft Studio 4 for Windows 3.0*). Others of note on my list are Logic and Pro Tools (Yes I use a Mac for music, stop whining). The Cakewalk stuff for PC is great too. It really doesn’t matter which one you choose, as long as it works for you (and it cost you more than 5$ from a shady shareware site).

Next, you need some paint to put on the canvas with; that is, instruments. You used to need a sampler and then instruments, but it seems that every instrument company has rolled their own software samplers. I still use NI Kontakt2 and MOTU Mach5 (because I still have some ancient and custom samples I like using). Anything from East-West and VSL is top notch. MOTU makes some other great stuff too (Ethno). Looking pricey? You can pick up Mach5 for around $200 nowadays which will include all your basic sounds and it includes a set of VSL instruments.

Now to put the pain, err paint on the canvas! Writing… you’re really on your own. I could give you all sorts of BS and Theory that was shoved down my throat in university, but it seriously just comes down to creativity and trial and error, and… I hate the word, but, ‘talent’**. Write a LOT! Write at least one hundred songs before you can really get a feel for what it is you are doing. The key to good music writing is to write a lot of bad music on purpose (and on accident). Don’t write for money or fame, just write to make interesting sounds. Experiment. You’ll know you are getting better when someone asks, ‘What is that weird crap coming out of your speakers?’ or alternatively someone asks, ‘What is that lovely music coming from your sound system?’

As far as Production tips (the frame for the canvas): save all your money and just use the plugins  that came with your DAW software, they are surprisingly good. Then when you have enough dough, get some Waves plugins, at least the Renaissance set, they sound incredible and they are expensive for a reason. The rest…go to tweakheadz for all the technical stuff you need to know (and I don’t care to write). His articles are mostly well written and can emit a good laugh or two.

Hope that gets you started in some direction.

*The picture at the beginning of the article is actually some old Atari sequencer. Midisoft Studio isn’t quite that bad. It actually works all the way up into XP (maybe Vista), but looks something like this when you do it (actual music from Flux Challenge).

**Talent I can only say is an innate skill-set that you didn’t have to build up through practice. Any talent you don’t have can always be replaced by lots and lots of practice in that area of skill. Practice enough of that skill, and you will eventually surpass a talented person who is too lazy to improve his innate skill set.

Arvale: Journey of Illusion sold a bunch of copies on Windows Mobile, a bunch more copies on iPhone, and a disgusting amount of copies were bundled on a bunch of GPS devices. But that has nothing to do with this article. Arvale is a great game and it was successful for many factors. It’s still relatively successful today because it is still an enjoyable experience (unlike Nintendo’s Smurfs game for Atari 2600). A large part of that is due to Duncan and his story.

Here is a brief explanation of why Duncan’s character worked so well: He’s a gardener, and kind of an idiot. Which makes him unfamiliar with the rest of the world. So when forced into a position where he is a Hero who is supposed to go on a Journey to save the world, he is completely unaware of what he is supposed to do, just like the Player who is playing the game. So the Player and Duncan have to figure out what to do together.

Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island 1 worked much in the same way, but without all the exposition and backstory needed in an RPG. Basically, Guybrush arrives on some unknown island (I think he washed up there?) and announces, ‘I wanna be a pirate!‘* ‘How do I do that?’ and that’s it. The player doesn’t need to know why he wants to be a pirate, he just knows that Guybrush wants to become one, and they both have to figure out how.

(And in both situations, the main character is forced into unfamiliar territories (Outside the Castle/Melee Island), so you don’t have to answer Player questions like: ‘Why doesn’t my character know where the toilet in his own house is?’)

These types of parallels in Game Design are not uncommon at all. When a bunch of things in the same field become common (usually from stealing borrowing inspiration), some expert will make up a term to tell everyone else what they already know. Like Game Design.

In fact, this type of thing is so common in story telling, that it’s not even called stealing anymore, a scholar sat around (Joseph Cambpell) and dubbed it the monomyth. Also known as the Hero’s Journey. He even wrote a really boring book called the The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I already read it for you, so don’t bother.

While the book looks short in comparison with a 1000 page Stephen King novel; it takes longer to read than the entire Lord of the Rings books, twice, and then watch the un-cut director’s edition of the movies. It’s boring and overly verbose. We should pay senators to read this kind of stuff. And it ruined my vacation in Croatia… but that’s another story.

The point is that the Hero’s Journey is something most good stories follow, not because of a road-map was laid out for them, but because that’s the pattern that emerged after studying hundreds of *good* myths and stories. Just like music theory or language grammar. Both are great examples, but I’ll do grammar this time.

Language grammar rules are created after the fact to try and explain how it works (which is why there are so many damn exceptions to the ‘rules’). You can’t learn a language by studying grammar rules and exceptions (kids don’t), but you can appreciate a languages grammar rules after you have learned it. If you apply those rules before learning the language, you’ll just suck and get confused all the time (highschool and university french/spanish/german students can feel me here).

Where am I going with this? Hollywood, of course! When you can’t be bothered to write good stories, just follow the monomyth and you will get a great story, right? Ah, but you can’t bother to read that boring book I mentioned, I know. Just get a Cliffs Notes version of it, like this diagram here.  Then you can follow it literally and everything will be awesome!

Like at step, uh, 4: Crossing the Threshold (also called Belly of the Beast)- Upon reaching the threshold of adventure, the hero must undergo some sort of ordeal in order to pass from the everyday world into the world of adventure. This trial may be as painless as entering a dark cave (*cough* Star Wars) or as violent as being swallowed up by a whale (Pinocchio).

Not to say I don’t love Star Wars, I do. Lucas used the Hero’s Journey sparingly and it only sticks out to people like me who are familiar with the formula.

But the entirety of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 through 3** was just too literal for me. You can precisely plot each node of the journey on the diagram I randomly found above without much thought. I mean, literally having Jack eaten by the Kraken? (I’ll forgive Pinocchio, it’s really old, Italian and involves a stupid puppet). It’s not a coincidence that no one else digs those two as much as the first one.

All of the above can be applied to videogames. I didn’t even know what the Hero’s Journey was when I wrote Arvale 1. I don’t think I can even find the  threshold, or crossing thereof, if I tried. But I’m sure a scholar could.

So stick to what you know, and just write a story that is interesting. Class dismissed. 🙂

*Or firefighter, and a few other things, which is still one of best joke conversation choices of all time.

**Pirates of the Caribbean 1 was a great film, and not formulaic at all. When the film did well and a trilogy was granted, they then had to write two screenplays in a minimum amount of time to cash-in, hence the suckage. This applies to lots of trilogies (I won’t mention the Matrix).

You read that right. The long awaited sequel to Arvale: Journey of Illusion, Arvale: Ocean of Time, is now available for iPhone!

Aside from dropping the II from the title (don’t blame me, blame marketing people), the game is completely intact; and in my opinion, super-improved from its original Windows Mobile incarnation. I’d go on, but I’ve pretty much covered most of the new features in my previous posts here and here.

Update: I’ve read a few reviews stating that the D-Pad is missing from the game (which also makes dialogue choices difficult). The last time I played it there was a D-pad, yet it had to be selected from the options in the main menu. I’m shocked that this wasn’t set as the default. I’ll try to get them to set it as the default with the next update.

For more official information on the game, check its PDAmill Game Studios page here.

Then head on over the the iTunes store and check it out, here.