Author's notes
My goal after last week, the goal had been to simplify. I tried to think of ideas for drungeon quawlers simpler than last week's sketch, but nothing excited me. I decided to make a boat game instead.
In some ways this is still a simplification. I don't have to deal with combat or design enemies. The math I do have to do is a lot simpler. On the flip side, I had to implement custom mechanics (per-step HP depletion that can kill you and doesn't flash the whole screen), write a lot of text (most of it with gameplay consequences), and draw an enormous map (200x200, the largest any sketch has had yet). As simple as the game feels, it was a pretty ambitious sketch for the hour.
This one came out a little too difficult for my liking. Some of the trips with the thinnest margins of error are really early on, and the HP-restoring item that was supposed to be optional ended up being, I think, basically mandatory. I wanted there to be more room to explore and experiment with going off-path, but the math keeps you on a pretty tight leash. If I did it again now, I would put most locations a little closer together, and probably make refueling free.
Then again, there's not much to explore anyway, so maybe the limited exploration is no big loss. I would have loved to spend more time decorating the world, ideally painting dry land with terrain besides just mountains, but also, more importantly, just adding more islands and coastal textures. Weird things to stumble on in the remote corners of the world. More chances to go off track and get lost. I was dreaming if I ever thought any of that would fit in the hour. But that's the ideal, anyway.
A tight leash is kind of its own texture, anyway, right? Most RPGs let you explore everything eventually. A huge world that you only get to see a tiny slice of, too perilous to stray from the sliver-thin path of relative safety... I think that's a somewhat less usual shape of experience. So I'm embracing it, even if it's not quite what I aimed for.
Mostly, embracing it means that I mercifully chose not to disable saving after my hour finished and I realized I'd forgotten to. It's such a quick, tiny change, and I almost always do it during my hour, when I remember to... I was also tempted to change the world map theme to something less dramatic. I thought I already had! But I changed the wrong setting by mistake. So this game ended up feeling a little too self-serious.
(I did make one post-deadline change: I moved Soraion closer to Mezuris because it was too far to actually sail to. Eyeballing distances is tough! I didn't test anything until after my time, so it's a wonder that I got as many of the distances right as I did.)
But even embracing the tight leash, I have a couple level design gripes. In fact, these are probably the ones that frustrate me most. The span of time between having the idea for this sketch and starting work was very short, so I didn't get to think through many design possibilities in advance. Some of my favorite ideas came to me only after finishing.
One is to put a town on an island in the direct path between Mezuris and the Cyclops Continent. If you're not paying attention to names, you might think it's Hetra Bheb, or maybe they give you directions to someplace else non-critical and you forget you were headed to the continent before that. The interesting thing about following directions is that it's a mode of play that means interpreting human language, a famously fault-prone procedure. There's a lot more room in this environemnt to explore levels that contradict the expectations that form when you read directons, from sights that only partially match and prompt you to ask "is this what they meant, or something else?", to sights that don't match at all and make you wonder "am I in the wrong place, or did they just lie to me?"
The other idea I wish I'd had sooner is to have the directions from Luwoll to route you to Valdivia not by way of the skinny southern continent, but instead to direct you back to Nouf, and from there to the Mezuris continent in the east (which extends much farther south than Mezuris!), and use landmarks there to get to Valdivia. Asking the player to backtrack is really interesting to me in a navigation game like this. Did you ever go to Nouf? Do you know how to get to Nouf from here? Did you understand that it's basically due east from Balbalap? Can you infer that that puts it northeast of Luwoll? Do you even recall where you got directions to Nouf? It was in Hetra Bheb, so you'd have to go two towns back to get a refresher, wasting time and HP compared to the direct path. If you did go to Nouf previously, backtracking there from Luwoll recontextualizes a dead end as a pathway to further lands. That's really cool! I wish I had gotten to do that.
Plus it would have let me delete the skinny southern continent with precious open sea. The world map doesn't need more open sea from a gameplay perspective. I just don't like looking at that ugly ass slug of land.
I've decided that it's good if the hour leaves me frustrated. All my ideas are a little too big for the time limit and I'm having fun figuring out how to cram them in there on the fly. It's good for me to have the practice putting out work I have issues with. I want it to be better soooo bad. It's killing me as I write this to not be revising the level structure and prettying up these islands. Every time I finish a sketch I wonder if it would be better if I had given myself 2 hours, or a full day, to make them every week. Wouldn't better designed work be more fun, get me more attention, and make me look more accomplished? These kinds of optimization anxieties have been hacking away at my mental health for my entire adult life. I want to learn to trust that what I'm doing is enough, even when I could theoretically do better.
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
I also naturally went from Soraion->Treasure->Soarion->Balbalap, just by deciding to explore a bit.
It’s just barely reachable. I died but saw the port the first time, made it the second.
So, I didn’t visit hetra bheb, grunita, the southern lighthouse, or nouf! I went straight from balbalap to luwoll, and was able to guess at ‘just go east’ from the directions at luwoll. Just barely made it, but on the first try.
This one was fun. I’m thinking now how to combine this with something a bit like Uncharted Waters, but keep the ‘arcade game’ feel of this one without the safety of a friendly, full sim like Uncharted Waters.
(this is in reply to some comments on the author's notes for rpg sketch 9, but it's about valdivia so i'm putting it here)
i think that if i were to try to play valdivia, starting with zero knowledge, with the stipulation that i must not die (that is, if i were a smart sailor who fears death and not a brave or desperate sailor who does not), then that would mean that every time i set out from a port and hit 50hp remaining, i would need to turn around and return to the port. i'm not sure if the map as it exists could be completed that way, but i think it couldn't. i think you need blind faith that the instructions the port inhabitants give you can be completed in less than 100 steps, if you want to assume you won't die, but not turn around at 50hp. that blind faith could maybe be thematic, since i do think the sailor is seeking valdivia as a matter of pilgrimage? but also in the end it wouldn't be proven correct - the final instruction to get to valdivia can't be completed as written within 100 steps - you need to either triangulate a different path, or you need to use a jerky
but also, if i were to play cautiously, returning to port at 50hp, i would almost certainly run out of money before reaching valdivia. i'd have to retire to thelife of a fisherman in yustepa or mezuris, and end the game there. (i do think that's a narratively interesting conclusion)
i think, if you wanted to encourage the player to value their life to that degree, the game would need to make death have a high cost. that means it would need to be longer, and it would need to have saving turned off, so that death means having to reinvest time from the beginning. (i think there are other ways to do it, but that's the most straightforward for an rpgmaker game). i think that the game would also have to have an act i in which you really could effectively with a 50 steps then turn around, strategy, and you would have to not be able to break out of that act one with a 100 steps death-defying strategy while still near the beginning, when death still has a low cost. if you want the game to require the player to make leaps of faith anyway, or run out of money, there would then need to be a wider-ranging act ii, further-flung ports requiring hops of greater than 50 steps (perhaps the first required one would have to have a landmark like the lighthouse at the 50 step mark, to reassure the player that they're on the right path). i think act ii would then have to take away assurances and guarantees one by one. the next big leap wouldn't have a landmark. at some point the path given would be greater than 100, but there might be a port one could escape to at the last moment. and eventually there would be something like that final path to valdivia, where the given path is greater than 100 steps, and there is no escape except for a healing item
healing items would need to either be factored in to what's considered the maximum distance (and therefore not be usable as escape or insurance on the longest path), or they would need to be so expensive that the player considers them almost as dear as the sailor's life. they'd need to ve at least as limited-use as bombs in an stg, if they're to be an escape and not a requirement. and they'd be difficult to balance as a requirement, because they can be chained - the player could spend all of them at once to make a single very long trip all the way across the map
and of course i don't think the game i'm imagining here would be achievable in an hour. i just started thinking about what it would mean to play in a death-fearing way and what would get me to do it, and what an interesting game could look like that's built around it
(i should say that like, earlier in the day i had played both paleburg and sacrifice, each of which took me multiple tries to beat, and each of those tries involved trying something i wasn't certain of with the knowledge that death was at least as likely an outcome as success - so of course when i got to valdivia i played it with the same mindset. i never did just strike out into the open sea to see what i could see, expecting to die, but i did trust the port inhabitants' guidance even when it required more than 50 steps. when i died it was usually from being inefficient in my navigation of a coast line, or just from not paying attention. i assumed saving was turned off, so i just optimized the beginning of my route and repeated it with each death. at the game's current size, that never made me afraid enough of death to play truly cautiously)
i do want to say - i'm really enjoying these, and the fact that this one made me think this much about it is a success in itself, i would think. i do think it's my favorite of them after dalig the ghost killer
i think that's a super solid analysis. that's more or less how i would've liked to do it if i had more time. to be honest i hadn't really thought abut the 50 steps thing, which is a pretty big oversight. you can almost picture two different games because of it... i do like that as a texture, but having two concepts available to contrast with each other now, i can appreciate what valdivia turned into a little more.
if i had WAY more time i probably would've had a more complex economy and diverse range of items to buy, and designed distances around investment calculus, and as i type this i'm realizing the 1-hour limit is the only thing stopping this from spiraling into a full-blown maritime trading sim. probably for the best!
This was a fun navigation puzzle. I love when RPGs give simple directions like "west" or "southeast" and the journey turns out to be longer and more complex than that implies. This gave me a similar feeling. At first it felt like the game was just leading me from town to town, but it was exciting when I reached Soraion after Mezuris and Soraion didn't have a pointer to a new place.
My route was: Faules, Yustepa, Mezuris, Soraion, Balbalap (this seemed just barely possible to reach), Luwoll, Valdivia. Maybe the intent was to go back to Mezuris and sail to Hetra Bheb, but instead I wanted to just go off on my own and see if I could find anything east of Soraion.
I feel like I solved the "final puzzle" by accident. If you follow the directions from Luwoll to the letter, you drown before reaching Valdivia. I guess the intent was to think about what those directions are telling you, and realize that you can take a shortcut by going directly east. I didn't realize this, and just decided to go east on whim, and stumbled on Valdivia, which made things a bit anticlimactic.
I also didn't find any kind of HP-restoring item....
Grunita sells a 40HP restore for 1GP, which is definitely the "intended" solution.
That said that's a wild shortcut to have found, from Soraion to Balbalap. After reading that I went back in and managed a win with 10GP left, so thanks for pointing it out!
I actually thought that backtracking idea was what was going to happen, but I couldn't find Nouf despite trying so I wound up just getting to Valdivia from Luwoll.
I love the idea of a game like this with trading between ports and such. I wanted to make one for a jam a while back that was on a huge landlocked sea but after a couple of days the evil kraken queen would start tormenting you or w/e, putting your smooth sailing on a time limit. One day, one day...