[JRPG Idle] Dev Log #5 - The Web of Motivation
/Greetings, and welcome back to the Dev Log!
Thus far in our journey, we’ve mostly focused on the basic structure of JRPG Idle - whereabouts things are located, and how the player moves around the game. We’ve got a nice little loop set up for ourselves at this point, and our game is starting to feel like an actual world rather than just a series of menus.
We’ve got a handful of activities strewn about the game world set up for the player to engage with, but this brings us to the question of why? What is motivating the player to do any of this content? As a fusion of JRPG and Idle Game elements, we have a couple of different perspectives to consider.
In a JRPG, the impetus to advance through the game is very extrinsic, often coming from the narrative elements - defeat the antagonist, save the world, all that fun stuff. The game is telling you constantly that there are important things to do, often with a whole quest list so you don’t forget any objectives. The game is very invested in making sure you feel the drive to go experience the content, and even if it doesn’t outright tell you to do something, the game will probably let you know it’s there.
Leaf Blower Revolution is a very cool game and you should play it
But Idle games are typically more of a sandbox experience, leaning a lot moreso on intrinsic motivation. There’s generally a vague sense that you should be building yourself up and moving on to bigger challenges, but not much indication of how or why. You’re just building your cookie stand, or protecting your garden, or some other simple concept. The impetus is kind of on you to figure out the “right path”, but there are probably a lot of ways to progress.
Take a game like Leaf Blower Revolution - the goal is more or less in the name, and it doesn’t get a lot more complicated than that. Right from the start the player is implicitly driven to clean their lawn. The game doesn’t tell the player to upgrade their leaf blowing efficacy, but as players we want to do it anyways. A bigger leaf blower helps clean the lawn faster, and is just more fun to use! The motivation to upgrade comes from the player recognizing the value, and deciding for themselves to go for it.
To really harness this energy, most Idle games are structured like a web. There may be a central narrative or path through the game, but progressing down the main path requires also progressing down other side paths. Those side paths also intermingle in turn, and the game becomes about understanding how the different mechanics interact. Each path isn’t made equal, and if anything it becomes a puzzle to figure out where to best spend your time right now. Each progression path is going to be helpful for accomplishing some set of in-game goals, and so the player has the ability to choose what they value, and what they need right now.
Progression paths are all connected, and there are a lot of potential routes and shortcuts
Every game has both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, but I think the idea is to find the right balance for your game. It's generally more rewarding for the player to accomplish an intrinsic goal - which makes sense, since it’s a goal they set for themselves.
However, the player isn’t going to set any goals for themselves until they understand the game’s patterns, and are bought into the experience. Until then, we can lean more on extrinsic motivators to gently show the player how the game works, and introduce them to the content.
But beyond all of that, it’s also just fun to check things off a list - especially if there are rewards to be had!
The director of a project I recently worked on would frequently mention the idea of “long, medium, and short-term objectives” - the idea being that the player feels most fulfilled when they have all three. In an Idle game, doing the content isn’t as inherently satisfying as something like an action game, and so I think it’s all the more important to keep in mind for this type of game. For all intents and purposes, choosing what content to engage with is the gameplay, for an Idle Game!
As an example, think of it like this:
Long-term objective: I need to complete this quest and get the reward
Medium-term objective: I need to go discover that new area
Short-term objective: I need to go get that treasure chest
What long-term objectives could look like in JRPG Idl
By having multiple layers of objectives, the player is working towards multiple goals at the same time - and I think anyone who has played an RPG before knows how satisfying it is to work towards multiple goals at the same time. It’s a great feeling, and extrinsic goals can be an important part of filling out those layers of objectives.
As for what this means for JRPG Idle - there are many kinds of extrinsic motivation, but I think we can take a lot of queues from MMOs and their quest structure for this type of thing.
On one hand, we have static un-repeatable quests - we can basically think of these as our long-term goals.
While they’re mostly here to guide the player through the Main Quest, they also add to the game’s narrative, and remind the player what’s going on. If the player ever feels like they don’t have a direction or don’t know what to work towards, Main Quests are their guiding star. It doesn’t have to be just things that push the story forward - this type of quest would also be great for things like feature unlocks or progression benchmarks.
Repeatable quests presented in the format of a Quest Board
On the flip side, we have Repeatable Quests. The idea is to have semi-randomized rotating objectives to do small tasks elsewhere in the game, giving the player some more short-to-medium term objectives to work towards. Ideally these are things that will serve as that extra reason to go do some piece of content. Maybe I already kind of wanted to level up my crafting, so why not grab this quest to make 10 potions? Now we have multiple layers of payoff for the same activity.
In this way, Repeatable Quests almost become their own type of content, above and beyond just driving you to do other things. Repeatable Quests can be their own system that rewards the player for interacting with them, and we can even imagine having Main Quests tied to completing Repeatable Quests.
Creating a repeatable system to me kind of implies that it should have some way to scale up and stay relevant, so we will want a way to spawn higher level quests as the player progresses. I really like the idea of these Quests being requests posted on a Quest Board in town, and like we discussed last time, there are a lot of strengths to tying it to a physical location in the game world. If we think of completing these quests as being a way to “Level Up” the whole town, then suddenly there are a lot more reasons to specifically go fight Bandits, or whatever it may be.
With all of these elements playing together, the player should feel like there are a lot of reasons to engage with whatever content they want to engage with, and start building those intrinsic goals. Until then, there’s no lack of ways for the game to suggest to the player what they could be doing, until they learn to start judging for themselves. We have a nice feedback loop going on wherein doing one type of content creates reasons to do other types of content, and we’re starting to build that Web of Motivation!