Ask a Game Dev

You should start with whatever you feel like you’re best at finishing. Not everybody can keep motivated while working on different and broad tasks, and RPG character mechanics are sufficiently separated from environments that you can feasibly work on them independent of each other without ill effects.

I will warn you - procedural content generation of any kind tends to be a very big feature. For procedural environments, you’ve got to consider the set of rules for creating terrain. Will the entire world be traversible, or will there be areas players can’t walk on like mountains, trees, oceans, rivers, etc.?How will you guarantee that important locations aren’t impossible to reach? Will the entire world be procedurally generated, or will you need to create set locations like a starting point? How will the generator decide where the map ends? Will you be able to go from one map to another? When creating any procedural system, it’s critical that you strongly define the rules for creating the content.

One popular method for procedural environments is to create “puzzle pieces”. When building puzzle pieces, the environment is divided up into a grid and the generator randomly populates the grid with pieces marked as “corners”, “edges”, and “centers” - individually designed chunks of terrain that are hand-authored, that are then assembled by the procedural generator into a randomized grid. This way, you can guarantee the boundaries and general shape of an environment at large while retaining the randomized nature of procedural generation. It’s “controlled” randomness.

Just remember, any prototype should just be the MVP - the Minimum Viable Product. It doesn’t need to be the final product, it just needs to prove the concept. This means you need the minimum number of characters, the minimum amount of content, the minimum environment, etc. to show it working. You don’t even need it to be the [vertical slice] of the game; a prototype just has to prove out the one gameplay element it’s prototyping. One quest with a default character. One enemy to fight. One environment that’s procedurally generated and traversible. Your design will almost certainly change as you proceed, so it’s important to keep things as lean as possible until you really lock down the design. Once you figure out what is and isn’t feasible, then you build out your [vertical slice] and bring the disparate pieces together.

The FANTa Project has chosen its concept! We’re making a Skyrim Dungeon!

TODAY IS THE FINAL DAY OF VOTING 

[Vote for the visual concept for the FANTa dungeon!]

[What is the FANTa project?]

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The issue primarily stems from using a voiced protagonist. Because the player character speaks, it causes several implementation issues that can be either logistical or cognitive. These issues vary in scope, some being bigger than others. Localization and screen space, for example, are problematic. The biggest issue is probably the subvocalization element to it, however. That just doesn’t play well with a lot of players.

Here’s an example of a line from Fallout 4. If you choose “Sarcastic” as a response in one case, you get the line “I’m here to pick up an order. Two large pepperoni and a calzone. Name is ‘Fuck you’.” As you can see, it takes up a lot more screen space if you replace the ‘Sarcastic’ keyword. If you replace all of the shorthand options on screen with the full line, you’re going to overwhelm the player with too many words. Furthermore, you can also lose the clarity in purpose - the words “Tell me more” could be used in a sarcastic or affirmative way, just because of tone. This still doesn’t take into account issues with localization, like translating to other languages. Making the same line fit in the same screen space in other languages like German or Spanish can prove difficult. 

However, the biggest problem is cognitive. There’s a documented term in cognitive science called “subvocalization” - when humans read, they actually say the words to themselves in order to understand what they are reading. Researchers have actually observed tiny motions in the human larynx while subjects read silently. Thus, when we present the entire line to the player, the vast majority of them will literally say it to themselves first, and then the character on screen will immediately say the same line aloud, repeating it twice. This gets annoying very, very quickly. Have you ever had a situation where a child imitates somebody else by repeating every word said? It’s a lot like that, except it applies to the protagonist (who has the most lines out of every character in the game), so it happens constantly. It absolutely kills any humor and timing that’s dependent on delivery. We’ve tested it out. It was not well received.

I will admit that games have had problems with paraphrasing not matching the actual intent of the line. It’s a bug, and those happen. It is a major problem for some of the fans, and I know Bioware has recognized it. However, the paraphrasing deals a lot better with localization and the subvocalization problem. There might be a better way overall to represent dialogue options in game that we haven’t thought of yet, but showing the entire line is not it. Really.

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