Mørpheus

In this game you will be a traveler in a strange land, like everyone, your goal is to survive one day at a time. If you want something more meaningful than that you must find it for yourself.

The experience will be deeply focused on the interaction with people who inhabit the place. They are not welcoming to strangers so you must pay attention to your behavior and what you carry with yourself when approaching them. It can affect directly on the way they react to you. Because of that, there’s not an easy way to know the results of an encounter, but sometimes it can be worth the risk.

The items you carry are crucial parts of the experience because interacting with them is the main way to express yourself. For example, if you draw your weapon while approaching someone may be understood as a threat but if you come showing your empty hands, it can be seen as a gesture of peace or if you go to a danger place disarmed people can see you as an easy prey.

Let’s analyze the image. I believe you have already realized that in this scene you are the guy coming down the road, you're cold, hungry, hurt and you ran out supplies one day ago.

Those two fellows could be hunters, thieves or maybe murderers, you don’t know. Walk away is a reasonable choice, but in your state maybe you’ll not survive until you find the next place to get some help. Try to hide and watch them a little more before making a decision is a clever move, but you need to have enough time. You are carrying a bow, shoot them in the back and loot for supplies is an option too. In the end it's a matter of life and death... alright?

Who are you? What do you believe? Answer it by your acts not with empty words.

In most of the games you don’t have to discern the npc(non-player character) intentions because the game makes it clear, giving you too much information. They put an icon above the head indicating that the npc is an enemy, or in more obvious ways, the level of the threat with a number below the screen. Hold information is essential to create unpredictable situations, letting just enough for the player to make plans but not have sure of the results, and in that way you force the player to be aware of his surroundings and immerse in the experience.

You can’t change the npcs roles with your actions, maybe if you attack an ally one hundred times he can become hostile, but you can slaughter a whole army but no one will consider run or surrender, sometimes you can’t even kill them, indicating that he’s an ally or a merchant but it’s something that only few games do, with take the player out of the experience, because of the lack of feedback and agency.

There are few games that tried to make responsive AI, but I’ll focus on the one I think did the best job, “I am Alive”, a game published by Ubisoft that you probably never hear about, because it’s just a “ok” game, but with a lot of innovative ideas. In the video below, this guy explains exactly what I’m talking about, so please watch at least the first three minutes and you can jump the first 34s.

I’m using the gameplay loop methodology to help guide my design process, so first of all, what is a gameplay loop? In the article The Gameplay Loop: a Player Activity Model for Game Design and Analysis, Emmanuel Guardiola describes it as 

the potential states of the player in the game system. 

Then after analyzing the gameplay experience that I want to convey in my game, I was able to establish three core gameplay loops: Move, Maintenance and Encounters.

I am still working on the loops so I think it doesn't make sense I show you it right now. I intend to divide this post in at least two parts, so for now I’ll give you a preview of the possible activities and states of each one of the three loops.

The activities related to the Move Core Gameplay Loop are, as the name says, executed while the player moves around the world. The Maintenance is constituted by the activities performed when he stops in the way.The player enters the Encounters loop always when he encounters a NPC, either when it crosses his path or the reverse.

I won’t say I didn't have time to write something decent to you but the truth is that I was a little down and I didn’t want to do something of questionable quality, so I hope you can understand the situation.

He was supposed to take care of the prototypes, but now it became one more task for me to do. I don't blame him, he had his reasons and we still being friends.

I realized that some of the people who read my posts aren’t users of tumblr so I decided to create a discord server to notify about the updates and to have a space to interact with each other I also want to know who is interested in what I’m doing. If you join it, it will be a pleasure to talk to you.

Sometimes we’re so focused in seek majestic moments of our lives, we start to do everything to achieve it, things become blur around, you stop to care about the difficulties, the opposition, the tiredness, you think that it will worthwhile when you reach your goal, finally you’ll be able to breathe again and enjoy this delightful moment... but the truth is: you don’t know what will happen tomorrow, so why risk to live an “almost life”? because as a wise Mexican man once said:

“a life of almost is a life of never.”