These are some game ideas I've worked on that never turned into full games
Ideas & Designs
Grow your guild of adventurers
Guild Leader
I had an idea for a sandbox tycoon-game about running an inn for adventurers. The idea was to improve the inn's facilities and reputation to attract wealthier and wealthier adventurers, allowing for ever greater expansion. However, this felt conceptually incomplete.
Iterating on it, I changed the narrative to instead be about running a guild for adventurers. The guildmaster chooses members to send on mission contracts which net experience for the participants and resources to expand the guild
Inspiration
The game is inspired by the base-management portions of games like X-COM and would have the aesthetic and building mechanics of games like Project Highrise. It also takes inspiration from the contract system and tycoon aspects from Game Dev Tycoon.
The gameplay loop consists of recruiting adventurers to fulfill contracts from some of the game's available factions. To complete a contract, a party must be assembled that satisfies the skill requirements of the mission. Completing said contracts level ups adventurers, gains the guild resource rewards and affects the reputation score with the faction.
This allows the guildmaster to continue expanding the guild with more facilities such as barracks to house more adventurers, rooms that train a certain attributes or that produce research to unlock new features in a tech tree.
In order to keep the game loop fresh, there is design space that can be expanded upon based on the mechanics explained above. These are some of the ideas I've had.
The reputation system can be used to unlock factions with more complex contracts, thereby increasing the complexity of each mission but also improving the rewards offered. In addition to this, high reputation with one faction can cause "enemy" factions to become dissatisfied. This can cause other factions to interfere with contracts, to raid the guild, and other adverse effects.
Beyond working for others, the guild can eventually establish a strong enough membership where it can invest in sending parties of adventurers exploring to uncover secret missions (e.g. forgotten tombs, evil cult headquarters, so on). The rewards for these missions can be unlocking rare factions or guild facilities, uncovering the location of other secret locations or great rewards in experience and/or loot.
The contracts can initially provide specific skill requirements but these can become vaguer as the contracts become more complex. In addition to this, some contracts might provide additional (or rare rewards) if an optional skill requirement was met.
As the needs of your adventurers are not met and they grow in level, other guilds might make offers to your adventurers causing them to leave.
This could leave you without valuable members of your adventuring team but it might also feel too punishing to players, so this idea would have to be implemented carefully.
In addition to the escalating mission requirements, the adventurers who are residents of the guild have needs that need to be met for them to function effectively.
The guildmaster is in charge of building the facilities that meet said needs.
This serves to keep players engaged as there is more that requires their attention in moment-to-moment gameplay.
Project Highrise
Game Dev Tycoon
Game Loop
Mockup of Adventurer Screen
Contract Mockup
Faction Mockup
Residents & needs
Design space
Reputation
Exploration
Contracts
Rival Guilds
From 2014 to 2016, some friends and I formed a group to try to develop a tactics RPG. We were all fans of Final Fantasy Tactics and also very naïve about what it took to develop games. Although the game didn't get made, we did spend a lot of time designing the systems for it and the narrative. We also really liked hexes.
When we started making the game, most tactics RPGs we had played (X-COM, FFT, D&D, Fire Emblem) used a square grid for the playing field, which we collectively felt was something that could be improved.
I proposed we instead use hexes, as they made level designs feel more organic and gave the player a more natural way of thinking about positioning and how it affects their characters.
Beyond leveling up to increase stats, the main way characters would increase in strength was through the use of a class-based system that was associated with a progression tree.
This tree was divided into three categories based on their tactical gameplay function - movement denial (Warriors), mobility (Rogues) and combat support (Mages). Every tree ended with specialized classes and hybrid classes. Referencing the class tree diagram, hybrid classes shared the background colors of the trees they bridge. Purple classes bridge functionality between Warriors and Mages, for instance.
Characters (except for the main protagonist) would begin in the base class of a tree path. In other words, every character would begin either as a Fighter, an Adept or a Thief. The protagonist was the only one allowed to chose where to start, to afford players choice in their avatar. Characters could change tree but only using a rare consumable, to ensure all players would have some balance of classes in their roster.
The other benefit of the class system was its ability to gate access to equipment. Higher tier classes would have access to more advanced weapon types, which have better stats. It also would've us as developers to provide long term reward expectations for players as the system would allow us to drop very advanced gear in the early game from bosses, giving the players something to look forward to later in the game. This motivates the player to advance up the class tree and remain engaged.
Given the nature of the game, random encounters felt like a reasonable mechanic to include. However, free roam in an open world felt difficult to portray when abstracting away the fact the heroes move as a large group of units.
I proposed we take inspiration from Final Fantasy Tactics again and streamline travel between points of interest as movement between nodes on the map. Minor (or "wilderness") nodes could contain random encounters. Major (or "settlement") nodes would only contain encounters when the story dictated it.
Units on your team would've been able to help in this overworld screen as well. Classes specialized in mobility could gain passives that emulate having scouts in your army. These abilities would range from reducing surprise attacks, to having a chance of avoiding random encounters entirely.
Lore was one aspect we focused extensively on. To contribute to the themes of the burden of destiny and the cyclic nature of history our narrative wanted to tell, we needed to establish a past that would inform the present.
Concretely we established early on that the world had been ruined by magic in its ancient history. An event called The Shattering split a Pangaea-like landmass into the four continents that presently exist. This event was brought about by the abuse of magic-fueled technology which gave rise to the birth of the Great Dragon that now rests under the Eastern Continent. The battle against the Great Dragon culminated in the use of weapons ancient civilizations didn't fully comprehend which in turn, brought about The Shattering.
The catastrophe created great distance between the people of the four continents. This caused their respective cultures to diverge and specialize.
The people of the Northern Continent, known as Kataphractys, grew harsh and grim as their summers shortened by their drift northwards. Their culture prized preparation and combat, and so they grew to be more militaristic. In time, their warriors were prized throughout the lands so many took ventures to other continents as mercenaries.
Close to the present, the powerful clans of the north overthrew their king and sought to eliminate the royal family. This fundamentally restructured the power dynamic of the clans whilst the survivors of this plot hid to avoid further persecution.
To the west, Erengardt instead embraced feudalism and established seven counties in the land to distribute amongst the lords. Ever do they plot against each other, however, which is why they consistently hire mercenaries from the Northern Continent to carry out sabotage, espionage and other hostilities that lie just short of open war.
Given its ample and bountiful land, the people of Erengardt are mostly pastoral. They congregate in farming and ranching towns which are governed by minor vassals that report to their lords. Because of this feudal hierarchy, tradition and decorum are very valued traits culturally.
The people of the Southern Continent happened to share the part of land where the original capital of the ancient empire was founded. As a consequence, they've kept its name: Irethka.
To their fortune, the Shattering left them with a bounty of technology which they excavate and refurbish to the best of their knowledge and ability. Without magic to energize the original devices however, most technology is repurposed and adapted to be more mechanically powered.
Irethkai people value ingenuity and innovation highly but also enforce a strict social hierarchy which stifles social mobility. This has created a strong divide between a wealthy aristocracy and a resourceful but downtrodden general populace.
Lastly, the people of Armathys, the Eastern Continent, are reclusive and enigmatic.
The land they inhabit is a dangerous jungle, filled with terrible beasts they've learned to hunt and coexist with. Due to this, they have a deep respect for the spirits that reside within the jungle - the remnants of the magic that caused the Shattering.
The wooded domain of Armathys can be chaotic but, in comparison to the scheming nations of the other continents, there is peace amidst the savagery.
Unnamed Tactics game
A Hex-based tactics RPG
The group had loosely defined roles but I was mostly involved in designing the gameplay mechanics and world-building. I also composed some music:
The concept art presented in this section was done by Sebastian Beltran, the artist in our group.
Hex-based combat
Main Gameplay Design Concepts
The 9 elements
For combat, we originally started with a system of six elements (deriving from the hex as the core design concept). These elements, when arranged in a circle, would inform the cycle of which element bested which.As we finished establishing the plot for the later half of the game, we thought it would be appropriate to present the player with new challenges at that stage. To this end, three new elements were proposed which also used a rock-paper-scissor system of weaknesses but that would have advantage over the basic six elements of the game