Inspiration

Some of my friends are doing blogs now! I love this so much, reading about what people I care about are doing and thinking is so cool. I'm working on a design update to this site, which will include linking to them probably. A/N: See my personal blog for this.

One thing a couple of them have done is write a bunch about the various inspirations for their projects, so that's a bit of what I want to write about today.

Inspiration

There are a few different pieces of media that have been in my head while thinking about Blacksmith (Title Pending), and they affect the shape of the game in my head in different ways. I know the person I am working with has a completely different set of media in mind for this kind of thing, so I am interested to see how our different influences shape things as we go on.

Tinker’s Construct is a Minecraft mod that has influenced the way I think about the core of this game from the very start. It’s a mod about using different materials to build cool bespoke tools that do different things, and trying to find the exact combination that fits your needs, and it is genuinely my favourite Minecraft mod that I have ever used (which, in case it isn’t obvious from who I present myself to be as a person, puts it at the top of quite a long list). So, obviously, when we started talking about a game about making tools and weapons to fit a person’s specific needs, I went straight to that.

TC is very strongly about every part being important, which I think pushes me a lot in both “puzzle” and tool design–it makes me care more about meaningfully different options for things like weapon grips, handguards, different materials for spear shafts, that kind of thing. It also has a lot of really cool ideas for materials to make things out of, and different qualities that those things have. If I eventually get around to writing the idea in my head for an adventurer who comes to you for a weapon to hunt lightning monsters, and they die because you gave them a sword that didn’t have a specially insulated handle, please know that this mod is indirectly the reason why that happened.

In equal part, though, Blacksmith is a narrative game, and in that sense Open Sorcery is a strong source of inspiration, because it is exactly and precisely the kind of writing I hope to one day create. OS is a short (~2 hours) text based game about an elemental fire spirit charged with network security, and it packs a crazy amount of character and heart and emotion into the time it has. The inexperienced, fundamentally inhuman perspective of the protagonist, BEL/S, gives an interesting… perspective, I guess, on the struggles of the characters. BEL/S’ own character, her evolution into becoming her own person through the influences of those around her, is told simply and beautifully, and I hope to capture some small part of that in our own character writing.

The structure of Open Sorcery is also interesting to me. In our considerations of narratives and the importance of branching storylines, one common concern was that… simply, we (the two conceptual writers of this game) are two people, who are also doing a lot of other things to work on this game. There is a maximum amount of good, polished, well written content that two people can write in a year or so, and our cap is distinctly below that, and any work we put into a complex branching storyline is reducing the amount of content that exists along any one path. There are a lot of games where the story looks like this...

Fig 1: A highly branching narrative structure. Any one path from start to an ending will, by necessity, miss most of the available content.

… but if a person can only see one of those paths in a game run, and they put the game down after that, then the other paths and all of their content may as well not exist. I’m the kind of person who will play a game, or at least reload from saves, a dozen times to see every bit of content, but we can’t rely on most people doing that, or even necessarily any people.

Open Sorcery, on the other hand, looks more like this…

Fig 2: The approximate narrative structure of Open Sorcery. While a number of side branches exist, most of the content in the game is common to every possible path to the main ending section.

… you still have a lot of the branching, you still have meaningful choices (a lot of the side branches give you bonuses or tools that will be very useful at the climax of the game), but you have the core trunk of the game around which everything rotates, so missing a side branch doesn’t remove a huge chunk of the writing investment from the end experience. Of course, there are some players who DO go back and make sure they’ve found everything, and honestly? If that’s you, know that I see and appreciate you <3

Hades is a strong influence in my head on this game, and also separately on my last project, for different reasons. It’s just a good game, okay? Here, it’s about the way every character talks a little differently, everyone has their own little habits and mannerisms and a unique voice (not just voice actor, but the way they speak and phrase things), and that is so powerful as a way of building a character through a collection of what are, ultimately, a lot of really short exchanges. And our game will have lots of really short exchanges, so the specific voice of each character is something I care about a lot.

The Wheel of Time is my general insert “fantasy template” that things get given, like a layer of simple watercolour onto which all of the actual details are drawn. For a lot of people this is something like Lord of the Rings instead, but I never read LotR for various reasons, so I have WoT instead. It’s also significant here because one of the main characters is a blacksmith; without going into too much detail, because I plan to bully at least one of my readers into reading the series, that character’s arc is a lot about the internal conflict of their nature, and the work of creation that they would like to be doing and the work of violent destruction they are increasingly forced into by their circumstances. This probably isn’t a theme that will come into Blacksmith directly, but the conflict is one that I think relates quite well, and it’s one that I would like to work into the game in time. The other Generic Fantasy Template I have been reading lately is Malazan: Book of the Fallen, which I think will have its own more cynical influence on the ways in which I write fantasy content, especially conflict; Erikson has a distinctly harsh view on the nature of war and the ways in which it affects people, compared to many other fantasy writers at least, and this is something I find myself tending towards in kind.

What I’ve Been Working On

Last week, I finished my modifications to our dialogue system–I’m happy to call that done, now, at least for the moment. Like everything else I do, it’s very visually basic, but it’ll do for testing. I was going to have a bit here where I wrote about that, but I ended up running a bit long on inspiration, so that will have to wait until next week.

This week, I am working on the core game screen of our game. Which sounds like a really big project, but it shouldn’t go too poorly, and I have been doing a LOT of thinking about design for THAT, so I will have lots of fun things to write about then.