SRPG is divided into four sections:
- Prologue: The Black Box
- Act I
- Act II
- Act III
The prologue is the only part that exists right now. It acts as the test bed for the overall project, but over time it’s being refined into a playable introduction to the game. It’s currently called The Black Box, but it could accurately be referred to as a ‘vertical slice‘ just as easily (though it doesn’t sound as cool, unless we’re talking about a swordfighting game). It has (or will have) all the core components of the overall game:
- Moving around
- Scenery
- NPCs
- Talking to NPCs (dialogue trees!)
- Murdering NPCs
- Riddles and puzzles (so the game takes more than 30 minutes)
- Containers (which can be opened/closed/locked/unlocked)
- Darkness / light
- Scripted segments
- The GM being a bit of a dummy (more on that later)
- Two years of on-again, off-again development to make a from-scratch text adventure engine that could have been immediately reproduced at any time by an out-of-the-box system known as Inform 7
Engine development aside, the first part of a game is very important. It sets the tone, introduces key gameplay elements, and does a bunch of other stuff that game designers really value a lot. I have 3 goals for the SRPG prologue:
- The player is having fun
- The player is mildly confused
- The player is having fun
Why two funs? Well, you can’t spell confused without funs.
I also have two anti-goals for the SPRG prologue:
- The player should not feel like the experience is random nonsense
- The player should not not be having fun
The distinction between mild confusion and random nonsense is important. The game has rules, the world within the game has rules. The rules may not be entirely static, but in general the player can expect their actions to have an effect on the world that roughly corresponds to their intent. As in a procedurally generated world, true randomness is not the end goal. Interesting randomness is more appealing.