[JRPG Idle] Dev Log #1 - Where do I even start?

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If you’re anything like me, you’ve started and stopped at least half a dozen projects over the years. You have lots of ideas, but they never really come together, or the enthusiasm just kind of fizzles out. For me, the problem is pretty much always the same:

Where do I even start? 

Conventional wisdom dictates that once you have your game idea, you need to build a prototype and “find the fun.” Then, once you’ve proven your concept, it’s time to start building the game for real!

Ok… but what does that actually mean? Ideas are often the easy part; but, how do you know when your idea has enough meat to it to begin prototyping?

Well, there isn’t really a “wrong” time to start, but I think the value of a prototype looks something like a bell curve:

The trap I usually fall into is firing up my engine of choice before I really know what I’m building. I end up focusing on unimportant details, and generally spin my wheels working on things that aren’t actually testing the idea. I don’t know what my game’s identity is yet, so I end up just rebuilding the games that I’m taking inspiration from.

On the flip side, if you come in with a fully specced out design, your prototype is going to be bloated and hard to learn from. The more complex and interwoven the systems are, the more things need to change when you inevitably iterate on the design. Plus, this is an easy way to stumble down the pit of scope creep.

So it can be a bit of a catch-22; but I think the idea is that you should build a prototype when you have something specific that you want to test. 

I’ve known for a long time that I want to make an idle game, but it only felt like the idea turned into something real once I figured out what I wanted to do with it. I was very inspired by the way that Melvor Idle was able to encapsulate the world of Runescape into an idle game experience, and make something that still feels like a genuine adventure (despite the game being mostly progress bars). 

After a few thousand hours of Melvor, I realized I wanted to capture the feeling of an idle game that feels like the player is progressing through an RPG landscape. If Melvor can be the idle game incarnation of Runescape, then maybe I can pull from my own experiences and make the idle game version of a JRPG. 

You could say that I found my game’s Identity.

But is this a clear enough vision to start prototyping? Where does it put us on the curve? I would say it puts us somewhere around here: maybe enough to get started, but we could stand to figure out a bit more before we really begin to strike at the heart of the matter.

What do we need to really put it over the top, then? Well, we need ways to evaluate success. We need to know what we’re trying to do with this game, and ways in which we can measure whether or not we’re hitting those goals. 

In order to know if what we’re doing is working, we need to start thinking about our Design Pillars.

What is the game really about? What am I trying to do with it? What does the game do to set itself apart? What is the player focusing on? What does the game need in order to service those gameplay goals? We need to think about initial answers to all of these questions - in fact, we’ve already started identifying some of them above!

Of course our answers are going to change over time, but in order for the game to go anywhere, it needs something to inform its direction - and the Design Pillars help us with this.

I think a useful analogy is to think of our prototype like a science experiment:

Thinking back to high school, I can (somehow) recall that an important part of the scientific method is to pose a hypothesis. You don’t know what the end result of the experiment is going to be, but you need to start somewhere, so you start with some predictions. You make an informed hypothesis based on the knowledge that you already posess, and then the experiments test those predictions. If the question still feels un-answered, then you update your hypothesis and go right back in.

Of course we think the prototype is going to be fun, but the point is to test those predictions. We aren’t just trying to make a mini version of the game, we’re trying to figure out what the game needs to be successful. Our goal isn’t to get everything perfect, it’s to determine if this will work in the long run. 

Maybe our Design Pillars aren’t even good - we want to find out if the hypothesis sucks before investing a lot of effort into it.

We need to know the foundation is stable before we build on it.

So if we want to push our game into that sweet spot on the prototype value curve, it seems to me that we need to know what the game’s Identity is, and we need to know what our Design Pillars are.

If we’ve identified “Melvor-style Idle JRPG” as our game’s identity, then what are its Pillars?

In my opinion, the essence of a JRPG can be distilled down to the following:

  • Strategic turn-based combat in evocative locales

  • In-depth party customization and inventory management

  • The feeling of progressing through and exploring a lived-in world

There’s certainly more to a JRPG than those points, but these are the elements that feel foundational to me and the kind of game that I want to make.

And if we consider these our Design Pillars, we can almost immediately start to see what mechanics we will need to service them, and what the interplay between them might be like. Now, suddenly it feels like the kind of idea that I want to get my hands on and play around with.

Sounds like it’s time for a prototype.