![]() So the designer’s task is to create a story based on a chosen setting and build elements around it for people to react to during the playthrough. Although Cain recognizes that there are different approaches to creating stories, he personally believes taht a role-playing game shouldn’t assign a character or any role to the player.From this point, the main task is to make sure that the world and its stories will be interesting for players to explore in any direction and in any way they would want to.According to Cain, defining a setting like this can lead you to what the main story could be because it already contains the main conflicts and points that you can build upon moving forward.Some of the best examples of this approach are Fallout (post-apocalyptic world + the 50s aesthetics) and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (classic fantasy world + industrial revolution).Most of the settings I've ever made could be described as, 'Here's a thing that's very easy to explain, oh, but there's a twist.' I think that helps people understand what you're making and the twist makes them go, 'Oh, and this is why it's original!' Then the twist can be used and explored to see, with this difference, how the setting would be different than other settings that have come before. Cain cited titles made by Troika Games, which involved a lot of player agency and provided enough space for different actions and behaviors. The setting should grab people’s attention and be easy to create stories and quests for.So it should be more like an elevator pitch. ![]() Cain tries to describe the setting in a sentence or two because this document is one of the first things that a publisher or investor will see.He also noted that he goes through this process when creating the original IP from scratch, but this approach can also work for other games as well. “They’re not only very different documents, but they’re intended for different people and they’re written differently,” Cain said. Systems - game mechanics should support the things described in the first two documents because this is the only way to make them good and connected to the setting and story.Story - a very high-level description of what every player will experience, which will also help to find the main story quests.Setting - it defines the space in which the game will take place.One of the recent videos is dedicated to design documents.Ĭain always writes three documents in this very particular order: Dwarf Fortress! With tutorials! Someone check the sky for swine.In April, Cain started a YouTube channel where he regularly shares stories about games he has worked on and discusses various gamedev topics. It even chucks in some in-game tutorials that'll get you acquainted with the basics. ![]() It also adds the revolutionary feature of mouse support, dragging Dwarf Fortress' control scheme firmly into the rad new era of the late nineties. ![]() The Steam version replaces those inscrutable ASCII visuals with hand-drawn, sprite-based tiles designed by Bay 12's resident pixel artist Jacob Bowman. The primary goal of the Steam release is to address these long-running accessibility issues. It's also famously as impenetrable as its title suggests, mainly due to its ASCII visuals and unwieldy, keyboard-exclusive control scheme. Since then, it has been continually developed by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, who have added a truly wild amount of stuff over the last two decades. ![]() Bay 12 Games's hugely ambitious colony sim, which is notionally a game about building a fortress for small, bearded humanoids, but is really an engine for generating elaborate fantasy histories and player-driven stories within them, has been in active development since 2003, with an initial launch in 2006. Grab your pickaxe and secure your book of procedurally-generated poetry, because Dwarf Fortress is out on Steam right, flipping, now. ![]()
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