Sat Aug 17, 2013 3:53 pm
You know what, no. Double-posting here because I think we're totally on the wrong track. I don't care about the ideas I'm saying and I doubt anyone else does either. I started out deliberately trying to make the least interesting and most generic RPG of all time, a literal cash grab and I think I did a good job of it because I hate my fuckin guts for it.
For a project like this to succeed, which in all fairness is a long shot anyway, it has to be something that everyone involved has a reason to care about. For that reason, I'd like to talk to you all about the greatest game ever made, Final Fantasy 6.
One of the decisions they made early on was that they didn't want to have a "main character", they wanted to have a bunch of interesting characters and let the players choose who they liked the most. Let's notice how they didn't return to a Final Fantasy 1 "Pick Four Classes" system. They kept actual characters with motivations, relationships, goals and doubts who also had compelling gameplay variances. Sabin's Blitz techniques were a throwback to fighting games. Gogo the Mimic, and semi-reference to a boss from Final Fantasy 5. Setzer who literally had a slot machine of techniques. I mean hell, in the original Japanese each character was even assigned a class, just you could take the Thief, the Mage, the Machinist and the Monk if you were still that anal about classes.
I digress! The way they came up with these different but equally compelling characters was to outsource it across the team. No one person sat down and said "There should be a thief in love with a rune knight, and there's also a gambler who has an airship! Twin successors to a deadman's throne!" each of them was the brain child of a certain guy on the staff and then the rest of the staff worked and tweaked and ran with the ideas until they had something really good, then they figured out who needed to be where and what excuses they could use to get people to different places. You don't realize just how railroaded you were.
So, in the spirits of following in the footsteps of the greatest game ever made, maybe we should all try to suggest characters. By this I mean a general character archetype, some idea of personality and what their combat gimmick would be. Once we get a few characters we can start working out how they'd feel about each other and once we've worked that out we can figure out in roughly what order they need to run into each other to tell the most compelling story.
Everyone should draw their own suggestion to the best of their ability and if need be, later on better artists can work with the original dude to pretty it up while keeping it true to the original vision.
Now, this would give everyone a reason to care about the project and chip-in going forward. That isn't enough to guarantee success. To guarantee success, we need what's called a "Producer". Someone who has a vision they want to see completed and who needs help completing it. Vision is more than "Let's work together to make a game, guys! Like a bunch of hippies!".
I don't know whether or not Final Fantasy 6 had a visionary. It's amazing what you can do when you're trying to turn a profit. But I can tell you, the end result was an amazing game about the nature of loyalty, friendship, or on a more macro-scale, love. If that wasn't by design it was the greatest accident of all time.
I've been in the Random Collab Contest twice, okay? Some of you guys were there too. What makes or breaks a collaboration isn't the sum of the collaborators talents, it's someone having a vision that he feels strongly about, strong enough to convince other people to chip-in. I see a lot of people who want to chip-in, I see no one who wants to take charge. I'm not suggesting a dictatorship of course, there would still be suggestions, discussions, etc., but I am suggesting there be someone who is the final arbiter of all discussion, the guy who keeps us all on topic, who makes sure that every god damned pixel in the game is to express the sentiments that he feels are important. That's gonna be tough.
We need someone who has an idea for a game. Not a bunch of guidelines, but an actual fucking idea. Someone whose opinion we all respect, so when he lays down the law on something we can all listen and not be spiteful about it. Someone, who like Spoonweaver suggested in IRC last night, can finish the whole game by themselves if they needed to, but wants to get it done in less than ten years. This someone should not be Spoonweaver, even though he was right on that point. This someone should be able to answer questions regarding ANY detail in the game. No "Lets vote guys: What color should Locke's pants be?" bullshit here.
If we can find someone like that, and if we can get some good ideas for characters and get them both working towards the same end, and if we're smart enough to realize we're a bunch of fucking amateurs who're gonna put in about ten minutes a day and think we're working our asses off, and we keep it pretty short, we might have a chance. If we keep going like we currently are, we're inevitably doomed to failure.
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