So I'm someone who believes ideas are either amalgamated from smaller ideas or form due to what we perceive from our senses. By extension, innovations are what result of taking a group of ideas, and adding/subtracting from them to make one new idea. Just about every game has innovations with some being more notable than others. Paper Soul Theater is no exception.
Before I talk about our own game, I'll briefly examine Hylics to illustrate my concept of innovation. Hylics is a game that does not innovate by altering the RPG genre, but it breaks new ground with it's art design. It dares to have NPCs with randomly generated dialogue, and most of all, it finds a way to be abstract/postmodern while also sticking to silent in-universe logic. The game feels extremely coherent yet extremely far-removed from reality; it took me to a far away place incredibly well. You would be surprised by the percent of games that can't because of a lack of logic. In contrast to Hylics, there is hardly any logic in a Kirby game. In each, locations and character designs have no rhyme or reason. Kirby games feel hollow to me.
I would like to think Paper Soul Theater holds a melting pot of many ideas from many games. You already know that we're deeply inspired by The Thousand Year Door but PST is far removed from being simply a fan game.
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Paper Mario and TTYD have great battle systems and we want to add to 'em rather than "fix 'em" through our battle system. I already talked about the innovations in battles but I wanted to elaborate on the tactic "Stepping." Distance from foe, elevation relative to the foe, and the stability of the ground all affect the battle, so standing on the right place at the right time is important.
The catch? You can only step on turns with an even number; compared to Paper Mario, you now have another reason to plan the next move in advance. Pretend you are fighting in a forest. You are currently standing on a mushroom tile. You decide to step closer to the enemy to avoid inhaling poisonous spores. Now that you are closer to the enemy, they feel slightly intimidated, but the faster timing for action commands might through you off. Remember how I said foes are smart? Well they can also move closer or father from you.
CONSTRUCTION RATHER THAN DESTRUCTION:
In many games, the player can interact with the world by doing things like break through walls, blow things up, break boxes, hit things, body-slam on things, flip switches, cut down plants, etc but it is less common for a game to allow the player to put things together, help things grow, and repair things to advance through an area. Being a prophet and a healer, Aponi can use her staff to undo destruction, bring life into dead plants, repair small man-made objects. Will you use this power to help other people?
Two different variables determine how and when a battle ends: Health Points and Willpower. A foe's want to run from battle is affected by both. Because HP is shown as a bar or fraction while Will is shown as the color of a face icon, the player can use that information to their advantage.
Speaking of the face icon, Emotions and Will are strongly tied to each other. Everyone in battle can feel a range of emotions, such as fear, confidence, worry, rage, sorrow, and confusion. The color of the face gives you a vague idea of Will while the face shown communicates the emotion. Emotions have minor effects on battle. Fear may cause a person to cower for a turn, rage could limit a person to offensive moves, confidence might have a chance to boost damage.
Statuses are a lot like status effects in Pokemon games. Statuses and emotions are mostly caused by being hit with an offensive move, but can be caused by the tile being stood on. A tile that has no shade in a warm place has a chance to cause the "sweaty" status. Standing on a tall grass tile would give them the "hidden" status. A character can have more than one status at a time. Aponi could be "cold," "hidden," "poisoned," and "bleeding" all at once.
I dare you to name 10 good games that have religion play a big role. That's not an easy list to think up, but when you look around and see how influential religion is in reality, the avoidance of the subject in video games feels odd. In some situations it makes sense to not have a game that proclaim one religion is truth, since not everyone would agree. However, our game takes place is a separate reality, so something like that isn't an issue. Religion has a lot of potential for video games. They can help develop characters, provide explanation for the fantastic, add spice to a story, and even be inspiration for mechanics.
Our game unabashedly stars a religious prophet of a fictional religion. She talks to with the dead, sees visions in her dreams, prays for the aid of her deities, and even limits her possessions to humble herself before the holy. If you think about it, most RPGs encourage the player to horde things and empowers them by suggesting they are the source of their awesomeness.
The different deities sadly fragment the world; many nations of her world are theocracies. Often, if a character likes or doesn't like a certain deity, it can cause them to gain or lose relations with a group or nation. Paper Soul Theater his white magic tied to deities as well as gray and black magic. Black magic brings about negative change when used, gray can do either or both depending on the circumstance, and white magic causes positive change. That said, it is left for interpretation which deities are actually evil and which are good. Even most animals and monsters have ties too a certain deity and therefore posses magic power.
When a battle takes place outdoors, the weather has a small chance of changing at the start of any turn. Weather on Aponi's planet overlaps with Earth; both have: sunny, partially cloudy, sandstorm, overcast, light rain, wind, strong rain, fog, moon light, thunder & lightning storm, snow/hail, and freezing rain. You can expect most of these to randomly happen during a battle. These all have their minor and specific effects during battle; rain creates puddles, lightning can strike at random places and timing, etc.
Aponi's planet also has additional weather not found on Earth. To understand them, you first need to know that Aponi's planet has floating islands upheld by holy magic, and two moons. The additional weather types are dimcast, updraft, rockfall, upheaval, and bloodlight. Bloodlight occurs when both moons have enough light shining off them at night to cause the black sky to turn gray. Bloodlight empowers night creatures with moon origins and those who pledge allegiance to the moon deity.
The abiotic solid material on Aponi's planet is subject to the ebb and flow of the atmosphere causing the rise and fall of the ground in a similar fashion to the water cycle. As a result, rockfall (ground material raining from the sky), and upheaval (the rising of loose ground into the sky) can sometimes occur. Likewise, updraft is when water droplets are pulled up into the sky causing a reverse rain. If and when major, rare events happen in battle, like upheaval, rockfall, earthquakes, bloodlight, and whirlwinds, npcs outside of battle will remember the drastic events and will mention them in conversation despite not being on screen when the events happened.
Weather effects have prerequisites. A thunderstorm can only occur when the weather is not snowing or sunny, but are more likely to be seen following rain or overcast weather. Bloodlight can only happen at night, sunny weather can only happen during the day, etc. Temperature also goes hand and hand with weather. A sunny day can mean two different things depending on the temperature, and snow can't occur during a warm day.
I've said this before, but enemies that have human level intelligence will be programmed to have some freewill and individuality rather than act like robots with identical programming. Two non-beast foe could be the same "type" but have different stats, look different, and make decisions that seem to come from their own head, which comes in contrast to Paper Mario, where all enemies of the same appearance feel like carbon copies of each other. Beast foe have AI closer to Paper Mario's style.
In Paper Mario 64, Super, and TTYD, one member in Mario's party follows behind him as though a baby duckling. This is weird because it makes you wonder where the others are, and the partners never feel very lifelike due to them only being able to follow him and do their one command. In Paper Soul Theater, a text log, sorta like the one in Sunless Seas, will fill the role of representing the partners that move along with Aponi (only outside of battle). Our game will have a dedicated box for non-intrusive text notifications. This text log will describe Aponi's observations (what her five senses discover), provide meta messages to the player, display dialog, and will describe the actions of the party members who follow Aponi when outside of battle. This system is inspired by D.O.S. Western RPGs, M.U.D.s, and interactive fiction/text adv. games. Because out budget is small, we are using this innovation to help fill in the gaps of our inexperience with advanced AI as well as help reduce the time needed for content design.
This feature will likely be seen as controversial because it means we expect the player to frequently read text in place of seeing certain things. However, I believe text is a wonderful medium to express details, a person's observations (in a 3rd person pov), naturally warn and provide fourth-wall-breaking information to the player, and convey the complexity of a person's behavior.
Another reason this is a positive change, is because we are tapping into a person's imagination to fill in the gaps where we dev.s can't. One of the big appeals to text adventure games was and is the trust they have in the player to create his or her own interpretation of what's told. Closing your eyes and imagining something will always be more real than video game graphics made on a low budget, so having to forge your own interpretation of things will make the experience more personal and more real. To compromise, text will be color coded to make constant information manageable.
In many RPGs, especially in the olden days or in a pokemon game, NPCs stand still and spit out information when you walked by. That was their meaningless life and they seemed to feel indifferent about it. Still other NPCs walked around aimlessly. It doesn't take a psychologist to know how unrealistic that is. People have goals, the ability to move, and a willpower to accomplish their goals through their ability to move.
This is not unheard-of, but our NPCs go about their lives independently of the player. Granted, each NPC does not have a complex or infinite destiny, but they are doing tasks and they can change tasks. One female howloon NPC might be putting clothing on a low tree branch to dry, then afterwards will decide to sit down for a few minutes. After that, this Howloon might talk with her son about the day they each had and then they'll walk inside their wigwam just as the sun sets. A butterfly might flap from the 3rd flower down to the 5th flower down and stay there a while, regardless of what you decide to do. Likewise, NPCs talk to you as though you're just another person.
Furthermore, friendly NPCs can be found in time-based encounters. For example, it is possible to run into a warrior on horseback; he might stop and chat, he might keep riding as though busy. If you are in the right place at the right time, you will run into certain people and events. This can be used to your advantage on a second play-through.
NPCs that talk to you out of battle almost always have more than one thing to say and can be asked questions. Other RPGs make dialogue-choice conversations feel like interrogations, so we will innovate on this by allowing the player to have conversations that feel more natural.
When you level up in Paper Mario 64 and TTYD, you get three option on what you can upgrade, but in Paper Soul Theater, you get four: personality skills. Mario is a character set in stone; he smashes blocks and jumps around to get to Princess Peach and Nintendo doesn't want you tinkering with that in their RPGs. But who is Aponi? In many ways, I want you to decide. What's great about tabletop RPGs, is the freedom players have to define their character which creates unique angles in a story. Does Aponi have a silver tongue? What deities is she affiliated with? Is luck on her side? Is she intelligent? How is her reflexes? Can she play a musical instrument? What personality skills you take aids Aponi in unique ways and helps her find an identity as she comes of age.
Naturally, Aponi is born with one or two negative traits that are randomly selected each new play-through. Is she frightened easy? Does she lack patience? Does she distrust Dixinche? Does she suffer from home sickness?
PRECISE EXPERIENCE:
We want to do things in our game that, with our small budget and man power, can best be done by making the game's length very short. You hear all the time of RPGs with 20 hours of gameplay; some more, some less. It has gotten to the point where RPGs are associated with long play-throughs. Paper Soul Theater had side quests, but is fairly linear. We are doing this so that the experience you have is handcrafted by us. Each shrub is carefully placed by a developer; a huge percent of battles are set up certain ways and tweaked to avoid any lazy one-size-fits-all battles you might expect from massive RPGs.
Yet at the same time, we are setting up the game to be very replayable because of how intention we are in design. For the many things that are random, they are quasi-random, meaning they are restriction to cause a better experience. I intend for the game to be played twice but be independent enough for only a single play-through. The two game modes (Normal and Survival) are radically different versions of the story and very different experiences with different difficulty. In only survival mode, Aponi can die in battle. When Aponi dies, a drastic event occurs not found in the normal mode, and dying enough times leads to perma-death. Survival mode changes many things around and even alters the story.
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There are even more innovations in Paper Soul Theater but I can't think of any others that aren't major spoilers. Thank you every much for reading the entire thing and continuing to give a crud about our game. I hope you all will be patient enough to continue to wait for us to slowly get the game made; we are sorry for how slow progress is going and I promise to provide footage of early gameplay when the time is right.
So Tell Us: What innovation are you most excited about? Do you want us to explain anything further?