Email: RPGs

Hey there. Which is better, sendings two emails, or sending one with two
topics? Sorry for choosing the latter! I just wanted to send something and
decided to throw in another question I had from a while back.
Just wanted to say, good luck with E3! Your mailbox will probably be
blasted to the moon. It’s all in good fun and curiosity, though. I think
it’s a good thing. Anyway:

Separate and shorter emails are better. It is much harder to respond to a longer email that goes through ten different topics.

RPGs

To this day, I still don’t quite understand what an RPG is (of course, I
mean the computer RPG, not the board game). I can recognize an RPG when I see one, but what are the limits of an RPG? When does it become action?

When does it become a simple board game? When does it stop being an RPG
and instead becomes Adventure? When you create an RPG yourself (which I
want to do), how far can you stretch it?

It is easier to define what an RPG is not. We know that an RPG is not an arcade game. You would never find RPGs in the arcades. The cradle of RPGs, in video game form, were the home computers.

Say I want to make an action-RPG hybrid. This would be impossible without understanding what an RPG is. Is it finding items? Exploring a world? Being able to revisit “levels”? All these could be in an Adventure game and it won’t count as an RPG. Turn-based fighting? Character classes?

These are not mandatory, either.

An action-RPG would be something like Diablo. An arcade-RPG, what I consider the early Zelda games to be (and so did Nintendo of America through how they marketed the first Zelda games), is the marriage of the arcade game and the CRPG. Both Zelda I and II are very arcade-like (meaning it is a game that would work in the arcades) yet had the depth of the world that a CRPG did.

Games like Mega Man and Metroid were very sophisticated themselves, but they never had a world. One mark of every RPG seems to be an overworld of some sort. A game that is RPGish without an overworld is referred to as a dungeon crawler.

Is a CRPG just a normal computerized RPG after all? Can we flawlessly
emulate a board game RPG into a computer, and it’ll be a CRPG? I don’t
believe that. It’ll still be a board game RPG. CRPGs are different.

If you are serious about making a game, this is what I would do.

Game design should come from your hands, not from your mind. There is a Human trait where when we are working with our hands, ideas and things come to us. For example, a writer working on a novel does not need to know what the novel is about. All the writer really needs to do is shut up, stop thinking, and sit down and write anything. What will occur is that the process of writing will generate the novel itself. In other words, the writer thinks best when writing. If the writer thinks when not writing, often bad ideas come. And this is true for every other field. An orator thinks best in the middle of speaking.

A game developer thinks best during the process of developing. It is his hands that are thinking instead of silly visions he concocted earlier. It is important to keep the earlier ideas flexible and feel free to disregard them as you will come up with better ideas.

This is why, for example, writers despise outlines. Publishers demand them. But they suck. The writer doesn’t really know how the novel will end. Often, the manuscript ends up being completely different than the original outline. The editor doesn’t complain because the final draft is so much better than the earlier ideas.

So if I were you, I’d stop thinking and just make a simple prototype. Play it. If it is fun, you will know. And ideas will come flooding in. You’ll be like, “Hmm, what if I add this ability? That would be very cool!” And as time passes, your game develops in a manner that couldn’t be predicted before. You become as surprised at the twists and turns as the game develops.

When the people made the original RPG games, they never sat around asking, “What is an RPG?” They just began making a prototype, to see if they could get the computer to do something, and then got excited when they could do it. Then they added more and more and more.

I always liked your posts about old games and game design the most (and
among those, the post about Mazes is the best), so I’d love for you to
write some more about RPGs, rather than Nintendo’s recent business
ventures.

Requests for more old games and game design stuff? OK. Nintendo isn’t doing anything interesting on the business front anyway.