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Depression Spike; AFC Remake, kind of?

3 years ago2,197 words

I've been very bad mentally these past few days! I want to distract myself by writing out another possible side project idea: a remake of sorts of Alora Fane: Creation, in which you can build your own little quests for others to play...

I had a surprising spike of depression over the weekend; my mood's been far worse than it has been in months. I was going to write about the reasons why... but I'll just vaguely describe it as 'family stuff'; some embarrassingly little thing that set off an avalanche of negative thoughts, a trauma trigger, something like that. I spent almost all yesterday in bed feeling like a corpse (though I did manage to get in a couple of hours of Atonal Dreams work in the morning), and only ate a few mouthfuls of food all day (for which I've been suffering today). I haven't been that bad in a long time, maybe since the brain surgery. And it came seemingly out of nowhere.

It's strange, watching myself enact these terrible behaviours - lying there unmoving, barely even breathing - and thinking "I could get up if I wanted to, I should!" and then just... not. Like I have two minds, one which wants the misery to continue, gets some sick pleasure out of wallowing in it, while another, weaker one knows it's bad for me, believes the whole thing might even be pretending, an act, but can't actually muster up the energy to snap out of it. Hard to put into words. Would not recommend.

I'll be having a phone call with my cancer doctor (or her lackey, which it was last time) on Friday about the results of my scan. If the cancer's not come back, I'll mention the mental health issues and see if they could fast-track me seeing a therapist or something... though I've done this before and it didn't lead anywhere. If they can't clearly help, I'll contact my GP next week. Finding a good and useful therapist isn't a trivial thing, but I need to try to at least do something since even when I feel I'm making progress by myself, I always find myself falling back into a pit again... (If the cancer has come back, then my life's pretty much over probably and none of this will matter. Hopefully I won't be told that.)

Anyway. Instead of writing about that miserable mess (I should keep posts about this separate from those about game ideas, but... eh), I've chosen instead to write about another, different game idea I could work on as a side project (since I've been too depressed to work all morning but I want to do something worthwhile with this time).



In case you're reading this but don't know about my past projects, I worked on something called Alora Fane: Creation a few years back, which was less a game and more a tool for making short 'quests', inspired by the 'toolset' of the game Neverwinter Nights with which I spent many an after-school evening bringing my own stories to life. I made it in Flash, but never finished it to the point of a proper release because of - surprise, surprise - mental health issues. Flash was dying at that point anyway, though.



The aim of the project was to allow people to make short, simple adventures rather than sweeping epics or entire games, which they should ideally be able to share. It was set in Alora Fane, presented as a generic fantasy world, and allowed you to create short stories where you talked to and/or battled fantasy races and monsters; little bite-sized familiar RPG experiences.



What I found interesting though was how the people who made quests with it tended not to bother with including pointless obstacle battles, instead preferring to focus on the far more customisable character interactions. Battles tended to be used to aid these interactions and further the story.



I've been experimenting for a few years with 'combat' systems that use familiar mechanics, but different metaphors for what all the number-juggling represents: eg social interactions rather than physical fighting. Taming Dreams blended that with typical fantasy RPG stuff in that you conjured up fireballs but ~with your mind~ etc, but I embraced the social angle fully most recently with Belief, which I worked on briefly around the end of 2019.

I still like that a lot! I return to the brief bit of gameplay I made every so often, and I ended up incorporating its primary side-swapping mechanic into Atonal Dreams. But AD is more like TD in that it combines the mental stuff with general fantasy combat, so it doesn't really scratch the same 'silly social encounters' itch.

For a while I've been brainstorming various ideas for something that'd combine these silly social 'battles' with gameplay that involves short runs rather than commitment to a linear story. One that I worked on just a few months ago - and must have written about at some point, though if I did I can't remember when - involved trying to spread a religion of your naming across a procedural world; the aim was to convince everyone socially to believe what you believe and not what they believe.



I got as far as beginning work on a prototype, in which I experimented with a card-based battle system, where the cards represented what came to the character's mind at the time rather than a free and deliberate choice. Each card/skill had a 'topic', allowing you to steer the conversation. For example, using a 'Lore'-topic skill would increase the multiplier for other Lore skills and make them more likely to appear in your hand next turn, while reducing the multiplier for other topics.

It felt clunkier in practice than it did in my mind, though, unfortunately.

I feel that with some refining, something like this could work better for a resurrection of Alora Fane: Creation than a standard violence-based fantasy battle system. Here are some thoughts about how that might work:

The Field

It was important that AFC quests be kept short, because I knew that when I was given complete freedom about the scope of my creations - as I was in Neverwinter Nights' editor - my mind conjured up vast epics that I had no hope of ever actually completing. Conversely, the game Spore had fairly strict limits on the degree of complexity for your creations - most notably for the planet quests you could make with one of the expansions - which I feel as a developer keeps things from getting out of hand.

That's why I chose to limit each AFC quest to a maximum of 36 screen-sized 'rooms', arranged in a 6x6 grid. That's more than enough to tell a short story that won't overstay its welcome.

I'd intend to do essentially the same thing with this, but in 3D - there are many benefits to using 3D over 2D now that I actually have the option - with the same 6x6 grid of 'rooms'.



During the early days of what became Atonal Dreams, I experimented with these room dioramas, which dissolved in and out as you moved between them. I remember the reaction to these being less than ecstatic, but I personally like them a whole lot, and feel that they'd work well for something like this. I could make them fairly quickly and easily too. They're not too dissimilar to Minecraft chunks, which a lot of people would have at least some familiarity with.

The Dialogue Arena

I don't really enjoy - and tend to put off - making the battle backgrounds/arenas for Atonal Dreams. But I do like how the game presents conversations, as can be seen in this outdated video from the main page (because I can't find any screenshots in my usual folders, bizarrely, and can't be bothered loading up the game to take one):



For this, I'm thinking that there should be no distinction between dialogue and 'battle' scenes. Whenever you talk to anyone, it opens up a 'dialogue arena', which fills the screen.




The characters would stand on a round bit of ground representing the current room's tileset, and the background would show some kind of abstract visual effect not too dissimilar to Earthbound/Mother 3 battles. I'm thinking that the quest creator could specify the background effect for each character, meaning each one would have their own unique 'battle space', furthering the move away from battles being purely physical fights. Plus it'd just be easier to make since I can see full 3D battle arenas being too much of an investment.

So this arena would show up for every person you talked to, regardless of their importance. You'd have up to three characters, and characters on the map could have a 'party' of up to three specified too (with only the 'leader' appearing on the field). All characters would of course show on the battle arena.

Drawing on how I've set up Atonal Dreams behind the scenes, perhaps each conversation would be made up of several blocks, each with conditions for appearing and a list of dialogue lines. Each line would have an associated speaker, plus you could set up emotes - that is, changes to facial expression and pose - for as many characters as you wanted, using a system similar to what I'm using in Atonal Dreams.

Lines could also be used to execute commands, one of which would start the 'battle' mode. This would involve trading 'attacks' - actually silly social actions - to alter 'willpower' or 'conviction' or something.

Triggers for blocks could include things like 'Bobbert HP < 10%', meaning at the start of any turn, if Bobbert's HP was sufficiently low, that dialogue would play (once; it wouldn't repeat). Or 'Bobbert used Annoy on Trebbob', meaning the dialogue bit would trigger after that action had been used on that target. This is what I'm doing with Atonal Dreams' important story battles, and it should allow for more interesting scenarios than just silently fighting until defeat.

Battle Mechanics

I'd want to keep these 'battles' simple, with no character statistical growth like levels since the quests would be so short that there wouldn't be any point (though I'd like to hear thoughts about this).

I'd want to use the sentiments that I was intending to use in Belief, which come in three opposing pairs: Amity-Enmity, Joy-Sorrow, and Fear-Desire.

Characters might have three simple statistics corresponding to their ability to use and resist skills of these pairs, plus an HP equivalent stat.

I could also use the runes I'm using in Atonal Dreams since they're tied to and representative of personality and work well for social 'battles', though I know opinions of those haven't exactly been highly positive, and they might seem too arcane (even though they're not) to players with a casual investment.

I also like the idea of moods, which I had in Belief. They correspond to the sentiments, and characters can have up to three at a time; I like the comedy of causing someone to become simultaneously Angry, Crying, and Aroused as a result of your actions. They'd affect the effectiveness of sentiments, and I feel they're more interesting than status effects like poison etc.

Characters could equip a limited number (3, 4, or 6) of actions, each of which has a name, sentiment, rune, animation, particle effect, and list of effects like damage, rune shifts, etc. There'd be a bunch of these in the game for quest creators to use, but they could also make their own by combining the animations and status effects in amusing ways. They'd probably be acquired like spells were in the original AFC, as books.

No basic attacks though, so no need for weapons... though I feel there's a strong appeal in finding and equipping weapons, so maybe some equivalent? I'd definitely have equipment bits that show on character models; maybe I'd just increase the number of slots for those instead of adding a weapon equivalent? And since it's 3D there's a lot more potential to how different I could make characters look and behave.

One concern is that AFC had a bunch of monster types you could use, since they were mostly meant as battle fodder, though this might work better with just humans? If each battle action could have its own animation, then every model I added would have to have all those animations, which would be a lot of work if I added a bunch of different models. But just humans means no goblins, and I could see how that'd be unappealing.

I'm aware there's no consideration of speed here! That's something I'd need to think about.



There are many other details that I'd need to work out if I continued with the concept, but as a vague outline of how the game would generally work, does this seem interesting to you?

Oh, and this'd be something I'd put on Steam, probably, not a mobile game like the Figmon idea.