The silver bullets to making my perfect game.

These days I've been thinking about games, about the legendary games I've played, about my attempts at making games and about what should a game contain in order to be truly epic; the things a game should have to be the next big hit. 

In the middle of all these thoughts I stumbled upon this contest hosted by our archdruid gaming community about our dream games and I thought, why not? I was planning to write it anyways, so I might as well give it some extra nice formatting and put my thoughts on paper sooner than later.

I've been playing videogames all my life, according to my father the first word I said was: "mando"; that’s controller in Spanish. I've played over 2000 games of all kinds and genres and as a result these days I'm focused more on "unique" games like undertale or NSFW games. At this point mainstream games like FFXV or The legend of Zelda: Breath of the wild are just more stripes in my tiger’s fur; so my dream game will be very influenced by these thoughts.

Image source: https://www.threeifbyspace.net/

My dream game is a pretty obvious choice for many, it’s a VMMORPG based on a Cyberpunk universe. I would lie in my bed, put some helmet or other BCI interface and connect to a virtual world where I could potentially do anything… kinda like Gun Gale Online, but with a more cyberpunk style, with androids, enterprises and more player freedom in general. In this game I would also earn currency to pay my bills so I could pretty much live in that world… 

Back to Reality

I really don’t see that game happening anytime in the present or early future so I decided to put my feet on the ground and think of a realistic game, something that CAN be done by a group of game developers and that many people can enjoy. 

Let’s think together what would be the best game that could be made, the first question that needs to be asked is the platform, where can it be played? 

I want to play anytime and anywhere, so that leaves Nintendo Switch and Mobile. I’m poor so I’m sticking to a mobile game, but in Switch it could be done just as easily. 

 

Image source: Nintendo.com

The graphics and sound should be engaging, and there is a trick here that many people forget; it’s not graphic quality, it’s ANIMATION quality and variety; same with sounds. Even games with poor graphic quality that have good animations and nice fluidity are better than games that have awesome models that do the same animation for everything that happens in the world. The sound is a difficult matter indeed, it’s not about variety or overall quality, it’s about immersion, and most games use some kind of orchestra for the background music in order to allow the players to focus on the game.  

In order to reach the maximum amount of users the game should use soft cartoon-like sprites, instead of using hardcore ultra-realistic graphics. Why is this a fact? Beats me, but I think it’s related to the fact that game worlds aren’t real, and a real-like approach works with some games focused on reality like Heavy Rain but otherwise just feels off. Even the ever popular Sims use a non-realistic approach despite being a life simulator. 

Gameplay rules

So far we’ve covered the general basics: platform, controls, interface, graphics, animations, sound… so we’re only left with the gameplay rules, the things that make a game… well, a “game”. Anything that isn’t specified in the gameplay rules can’t be done in the game, in our videogames the rules can’t be broken, and they’re made of code and can’t be modified without considerable effort or mod support. Mod support is cool, but it makes fairness a complicated issue to deal with and can make users become separated in the same game; visual mods are 100% ok. 

I want to start with the gameplay possibilities in itself, I said above that the game should be able to be played anytime, everywhere; so that forces the creation of an offline, single player mode. And while good single player games are fun, truly epic stuff happens when players interact with each other, so the game should support cooperative play and competitive play; like borderlands, for example. 

The game should be engaging as well, something that hooks me and keeps me coming back for more, something that becomes a personal issue and that I could chat for hours. Some games fail miserably at this by making some sort of freemium service where you’ll need to pay to keep playing or make some sort of lame story that is boring as hell. So how can we become addicted to a game? What can be the pieces that makes a game better than its peers? 

Everyone has different tastes so I’m sure we won’t agree here on what’s engaging and what isn’t, but there are some guidelines that I use: 

• Engaging story. A story that makes you curious on what happens next, that keeps you coming back for more. Skyrim is a great example of a story I couldn’t care less about while FFXV’s main story and DLC stories are just plain epic. A good story reaches to you in a personal level, it stirs emotions inside and makes you think about it.
• Game Progression. This refers to both character progression in character-focused games and to achievements or milestones in other games. I would play for hundred hours perfecting my characters, raising my stats to the max, building the greatest cities, farming the perfect legendary equipment… On gran turismo I would try to attain the hardest licenses to get the best cars and tune them up to the max. 
• Challenges. A game that isn’t challenging (not unfair) is just plain boring. A game needs to provide challenges and rewards for all kinds of players, difficulty levels, optional bosses, achievements, milestones… When there is something that requires my focus and using my full skillset it’s a lot easier to get lost inside the game. 
• Depth. This point can be easily confused with complexity, but a simple game can have a great depth, games like Yugioh or Pokemon can be played very easily by anyone but have tons and tons of elements that give it a hidden depth, tons of strategies and formulas with no clear winner between them. 
• Variety of combinable elements. Citing again the example of Yugioh, the game itself is easy to understand and master, it won’t take more than a week; but the amount of different cards and effects allows players to create and combine, making new strategies every day. Having a huge amount of elements that can be freely combined is what allows players to be really creative and it’s a KEY element that exist in ALL legendary games (see Dota, Tekken, Grand theft auto, The Sims...) 

So far so good, we have a nice amount of elements that make games interesting and engaging, we have offline and online game modes and we’re only missing the genre and theme of the game to define the specific rules and formulas to be used, but before falling into that let’s take a look at the financial side, how would the company (and the players) profit from this game. 

A feasible approach

Of all the approaches a freemium approach is probably the best one, making the game free-to-play and adding secondary paid elements with premium currency, often real-life money. We could easily destroy our game by making a pay-to-win game, that’s not the answer, premium currency should only buy boosters or things that don’t affect directly the gameplay or, at the very least, doesn’t affect player interaction. We can see the legendary DoTA marketplace, were players purchase “visual” benefits to the game but no player can purchase an advantage against other players in the game. 

While this approach is really good, and I mean, REALLY good, we might want to obtain extra revenue and the best way is to make players engaged with the game so they purchase additional premium stuff. A typical approach is to create paid tournaments, where the winning players receive prizes; this usually boils down to some PVP tournament but we could also give prizes to the first players to reach certain milestones or make some achievements. 

What about players? How can players earn money while the company also earns money? I would make three offers to players: 

• Market offers. Players could sell things for money and the company takes a 0.1% fee from the sale. We could sell in-game things or other offline things like “visual” mods as in DoTA. 
• Player hosted tournament. Instead of the company hosting the tournament, the company could allow the players to create a tournament for other players and define the rules and the prize pool from a preset amount of options. The player hosting the tournament would then receive a part from the sales of the company regarding players who enrolled in that tournament, depending on the size and prize pool of the tournament. If I, player X enroll in a tournament hosted by player Y and purchase some premium offer by the company worth 3$, player Y would then receive a part of that, say 0.3$ until the tournament is complete. 
• PvP betting. Players could compete in a PvP fashion under some defined rules and they could bet a fixed amount of dollars, say 5$. Both players send the money to a specific account serving as escrow, then the winning player receive the full 10$ (minus a fee for transaction costs). 

Defining the theme and the genre

Using all the things mentioned above we’re only missing the specific pieces of the game beyond formulas: theme and genre. These are highly personal and there isn’t a single right answer. Some interesting themes that have been barely touched in the right way are music, fashion, folklore and mystery while some really common ones are fantasy, exploration, warfare, history, futuristic… 

I’m going to pick a really interesting one in my opinion: modern fantasy. I’ve seen this on Persona games and it’s really good, the theme is about reality mixing with fantasy and how real life things change when affected by fantastic creatures or legends. 

As for the genre… I’d like to play something that is a mix of exploration, survival, tactical, city building action RPG. That’s a lot of things, how can we even make something like that? 

It’s simpler than it seems, we first create a world to explore, things to be seen, enemies to be defeated, items to be found, quests to be made, etc… And as the game grows, we had new zones to explore and more content to the game, so the exploration part isn’t hard. 

Survival kicks in here, during exploration we’d need to take care of our characters or else we lose them or lose what they have obtained. I’d like to make it so higher level dungeons with more risks offer higher rewards. A simple example would be an lvl1 dungeon that we can add challenges to increase the difficulty of the dungeon and as a result our drop rates, gold drops or experience obtained would increase in proportion. The default dungeon exploration would make us lose all items obtained but keep our gold and experience, while other options could include the permanent death of our characters, temporary crippling, loss of items equipped, etc…

Our city would be a fantastic city built in a neighborhood. Keeping in line with the modern theme we would start with a city with buildings, shops, etc… that are overrun with fantastic demons like imps. We would then cleanse our city and hire “workers” (like gnomes, for example) to build extra features to our town, adding a firearm shop or a black market; the NPC would react in a non-aggressive way to these changes, since they shouldn’t be conscious of the existence of these creatures and their memories would accommodate the new changes. In our offline play we could spend resources to clean the town and build new things that would take some time to be built and could happen while our smartphones are offline. Features of the town could include automatic resource generation, an expansion of our market features, blacksmith, fusions, more places to explore, more features for our explorers and so forth… most of the things in the city would require playing the game and exploring the dungeons to obtain unique resources for developing. 

The fun part comes from the dungeon exploration and PVP features, we would make a party of three highly customized adventurers and set forth to explore the wonders of the world. Our three adventurers would have equipment with effects and both attributes and skills. The skills are developed through achievements instead of the classical experience points. A few examples: 

• Fireblast. Hurls a ball of fire dealing damage to your foes. Lvl 1: Acquire from hell’s sanctuary fire keeper. Lvl 2: Kill 20 enemies weak to fire using Fireblast (Increases dmg and adds an area of effect). Lvl 3: Defeat 5 groups of two enemies at the same time (Increases the chance to burn your enemies). Lvl 4: Defeat a fire golem using this skill (Increases the penetration of the skill, melting resistances of the enemy). Lvl 5: Complete the quest “Ignition of the blue flame” (Reduces mana costs and increases the damage drastically and changes the appearance of the skill). 
• Berserker. Deals increased damage with your offensive skills, control becomes more difficult. Lvl 1: Acquire upon defeating 5 rabid dogs. Lvl 2: Kill 10 enemies who are less than 4 levels below you with only ONE attack (Increase damage multiplier of berserker). Lvl 3: Kill an enraged giant while in berserker state (Adds a stun probability to your berserker attacks). Lvl 4: Make 5 critical attacks while in berserker (Makes controlling berserker easier). Lvl 5: Win 50 PVP matches using berserker (Allows stopping berserker state, control is easier, stun chance increased, damage resistance increased)

While exploring we can find treasures or enemies, and combat would take place in a turn based fashion. I would love to add a tactical board map for more in depth to the game, but many players would shy away from this and would prefer a more direct approach. During the first turn of combat players would do a paper, rock, scissors game to define the battlefield bonus: easier control, better probability chances, more fire resistances, easier status effects, etc… these would affect BOTH players, so it’s a very tactical choice, and the bonus choices are generated at random from a group and the player would only be able to select one from the 5 randomed. 

Once the bonus is defined the players take turns depending on the initiative of their adventurers (or monsters in the case of NPC enemies). An adventurer can use skills from a selected pool, and certain skills can disappear from the pool and become unusable for the duration of the fight. The pool has a size depending on the passive skills and equipment of the adventurers, and while you can select more active skills than the pool size, you can’t use all of them at the same time. If you have more skills than your skill pool, during combat each turn your skills will be chosen at random and you will need to choose from those. Skills have requisites too and equipment could grant special effect to those skills or add new skills. Players can use as many skills as action points they have, and the action points they get are variable. Skills also have different action points cost and they have an associated pattern for execution. When executing an skill you’ll need to make a pattern in your screen, or hit different points, or tap, etc… something simple, but fun, if you make the pattern perfectly then you’ll execute a critical; utter failure would be considered a miss. Skills like berserker would make the pattern painting a lot harder while skills like focus could make it easier. At some points we’ll need to leave things to chance, and the best way to do this is to make a roulette with the chance effects and leave players to stop the roulette, no one would blame RNG in these cases, would they? Of course, the option to automatically calculate RNG should be allowed as well. 

Final words

The contest allowed only for texts less than 3000 words and I’m already near that limit. I could keep going for hours, but this represents the core points and I believe it would be pretty damn fun to play something like this and the company could make quite a profit, though ultimately it would be very dependent on the character customization options. 

If these ideas sound interesting and you want to share or improve, leave a comment, resteem (if you like), vote (if you like) and join us on the archdruid gaming community here: https://discord.gg/jAMmTAW

You can also make your own dream game for the contest, the rules are here:
https://steemit.com/archdruidcontest/@enjar/contest-describe-your-dream-game

Kind regards 

Eilder Jorge  

Proud supporter of gaming communities

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