Hi.
Since a significant amount of my time is spent explaining how things work again and again and... again, I decided to make a bit of a devblog.
For those who don't know, I am currently developing for the Serfdom and Sorcery game. However, this devblog is not much of an advertisement, it is rather meant to give a bit of insight into my development considerations and sort of a documentary.
So lets finally start. The challenge of a text-based discord game is interaction. World-building is relatively straight-forward, I mean, write a ton of text right? It is about interaction with the world that matters. The two extremes are a disconnected collection of commands and a too detailed "go south, go north" game where you feel like "why am I not playing a proper game that does that"?
So how am I attempting to do a better job than that? Zones.
When you experience a world in a traditional MMO you generally don't care about every single step and only really go from a to b, right? So why have a grid that you clumsily navigate? Instead collect everything that happens in an area of the world into a zone. You can explore this zone, discover events, secrets, monsters, quests, challenges, all that fun stuff. A discord adaption of a traditional MMO world can easily do that by simply having all the above be things that happen while you explore a specific zone.
But one zone is not enough, so how do you move between zones. Well you could have a location in which your character is. But if we think about it, how much fun do you really have traveling between zones? There is a reason portals and hearthstones and all these things speeding up travel exist, because traveling is generally not interesting. So with moveTo, moveTo, moveTo out the window, lets have a look how other games do it.
Think action RPG, Diablo being probably the most well known. You don't run from the base to the boss and walk all the way back when you want to sell or stash something. You use waypoints to navigate the world. Waypoints, instant change between locations through unlock of said locations. This is something that fits perfectly in a discord game. You don't even need to be in a location, you can just interact with a known location. A very simple solution to travel the world in a text-based game. Instead of being in an actual location you just interact with parts of the world.
So that's it for the first episode. In the next one I will talk about how zone exploration can work and how you can put traditional exploration elements into a discord game.
So until next time and challenge, name the game:
"To build... or to bash?"