Pequeño update de Joe Granato del proyecto .....
FROM THE MYSTIC SEARCHES THINK TANK...
So here is a stumper. Mystic Searches is and has always been rooted in the idea of exploration, and in that, an open world to explore. Some important ideas that have continued to pervade the development have been:
• No linear paths through the game; an open world to explore
• Reward the player for exploration
• Actions have consequences / repercussions on the game world...not everything will be attainable, sometimes the player will have to make choices.
Yet on the other hand, it is very much an adventure story, just as surely rooted in a hero's journey narrative.
There is a little bit of a potential contradiction there. For instance, let's say we have AreaB and AreaX (no spoilers yet!). If this game is to progress like the hero's journey, it's almost implicative that AreaX is more challenging than AreaB, or that the player will need a skill or collectable from AreaB to succeed or advance in AreaX. If AreaB and AreaX can be attempted in any order, that would imply that they're likely the same level of difficulty and that there is no prerequisite attained from either to successfully play through the other.
But that leads to a bit of stagnation. If the levels don't get progressively more difficult, or the player doesn't feel that he is progressing and that the character is growing 'stronger', it feels much less like a true hero's journey narrative, and leaves this type of game feeling rather flat.
We considered making monsters increase in difficulty as the player increases in ability, that way the order in which the player played wouldn't matter, but it would still get progressively more difficult, but that seemed wonky too. For two reasons...
One...I mean come on, could you imagine if you've leveled up to some unthinkable god-like exp level in Dragon Warrior, and when you run into a Slime, it has the potential to actually go toe to toe with you? Of course not. As your player navigates the game, he *should* feel more powerful, both because he's become more comfortable with the controls and is better at playing the game (as experienced in most platform games and such), AND because the character has become a stronger character (as in RPGs and adventure games).
Two...that doesn't solve the problem of escalating threat anyway. All that it does is keep the threat on par with the character's strength. Again, that leads to a sort of stagnation.
A game series that I really studied to find a potential answer to this conundrum was, believe it or not, the early Mega Man series. It's a strange fit because, aesthetically, it is very different from the game we are creating in most ways. However, think about how advancement in Mega Man works. You can play the stages in any order. Each stage is fundamentally rather simple and escalates in difficulty by the end, where there is a boss fight. The boss fight yields a power up that may help make some levels easier to traverse, making the character feel as if he's grown stronger.
So what would happen if we extrapolated that basic idea into an adventure game? While Mystic Searches doesn't have a 'stage select', it does have areas. What if we used a time or screens-entered sort of metric to assess the difficulty level of the area? The longer spent in an area, the more dangerous monsters or adversaries seek you out? It makes sense from a narrative perspective, since there are forces trying to stop you, and being in one place for a long time would make the character easier to hunt down by all malevolent things. It allows for every area to have that sort of escalating threat while still allowing the hero to blaze through once he's all 'powered up', the length of 'ease' determined by just how powered up he is.
Anyhow, consider this a quick glimpse into the minds of a bunch of current NES developers who are figuring it out as they go.
Thank you all for your support. Some big news coming very soon.
![[oki]](/images/smilies/net_thumbsup.gif "Ok!")
