[JRPG Idle] Dev Log #2 - Prototyping from Scratch

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Hello, greetings, and welcome back to the Dev Log! Last time we kicked things off with some discussion about when to start prototyping a game idea. We talked about the importance of establishing your game’s identity and Design Pillars, even if these will change with time.

I want to make an Idle Game in the style of a JRPG, and so the pillars I’ve established are:

  • 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

So now the task begins of creating mechanics and a game loop that serves those pillars, trying to stay focused on “finding the fun” for now. 

A high-level visualization of how each game mechanic could serve our established Design Pillars

At this point we want to keep things very simple, so we think about a small set of game mechanics we’ll need to satisfy our established Design Pillars. These are the building blocks we can use to create a simple gameplay loop. For now we can keep things very high level -  we just want to start getting our hands dirty, and finding the potential pitfalls with the design.

We’ll expand each topic more as we go, but for now, we can move forward with these mechanics:

  • Fighting enemies

  • Crafting Items

  • Managing Equipment

  • Shopping

  • World Traversal

Now we know what to build, but we still need to figure out how it all connects, so we shift perspective a bit to look at the game loop. At this point we’re looking at things from the perspective of the player’s in-game actions, and how they move us through the game:

It’s starting to look like an actual game loop!

Broadly speaking, the concept I’m starting from is that the player has two parallel progression paths: “Crafting” and “Combat”. The player has to push both paths forward in order to advance through the game, and overcome progressively larger obstacles. Progressing one path grants tangential bonuses to the other, and their combined effort is what pushes the player past difficult challenges.

And so with this considering, if we slap together the mechanics we decided on earlier, we have ourselves a burgeoning gameplay loop! It’s a pretty basic flow that could describe practically any RPG, but we want to start simple. We’re going to try and build the most basic possible version of this gameplay loop, and then we can add complexity where we need it. 

For now we’re just trying to get the feeling of moving around the game and completing basic objectives, and so those objectives don’t need to be very complex. For example, “Strategic Combat” might be one of our Design Pillars, but it’s just one part of the game’s ecosystem. So with that in mind, we don’t really need a fully fledged combat system yet - we can probably get away with a progress bar that says “Fighting Bad Guys” for now:

The very first prototype elements, it’s a baby video game!

And that’s how it all begins! Apply the same logic across our other basic mechanics, and suddenly we have ourselves a prototype. 

We’ll talk more about the actual development methodology in the next Dev Log, but for now we’ve taken our first steps towards creating a cohesive gameplay experience. Thanks to our planning, we can move forward feeling confident that we know how our systems interact, and how they are helping us accomplish our design goals.

The hardest part is always building something from scratch, but now we have a solid direction, and we have a solid plan. With our Design Pillars serving as our foundation, we can start building the pieces our game needs. Once we start assembling those building blocks, we can begin moving them around and shaping them into a more appealing form.

For now though, we have the skeleton of an Idle Game, sweet!