Jeremy's Blog

I covered a few of my goals for Journey of Souls in my previous post. Dutch and I actually kept our plans to book club this evening and it brought about some discussion on a few game mechanics that we’d like to see in Journey of Souls. First of all, there’s a huge disparity between people who spend way too much time playing games and people who play casually. We want to make some enhancements to try to reduce that disparity and try to keep it fair to the players who do invest their time. Second, we’ve identified ways to enhance our use of the spirit realm to give it a few “eerie” but what we believe to be very cool effects. We’ve also discussed ways to clearly communicate what’s in the spirit realm versus what’s in the physical realm and different “affinities” to different areas in the spirit realm. Finally, we want to make it clear that we’re going to try to make in-game (or in character) consequences to as much “bad” behavior as possible. We don’t want to write code to prevent people from doing logical things, no matter how screwed up their logic might be. Instead, we want there to be in-game consequences to all of your actions.

Offline Training

I’ll start with Offline Training. In order to try to reduce the disparity between “hardcore” gamers and “casual” gamers, we’re going to use a system of offline training so that you can put together set training sets for your character to perform while you’re not logged into the game. Any character can do this and, while it won’t raise your skills as quickly as you actually being in the game and performing the actions yourself, it’ll be a huge benefit to people who can’t be inside the game all the time. You won’t have to feel quite so behind. There will be limitations, though. We don’t want the system to be abused.

1. You will only be able to perform one training set at a time while offline. This means that you’ll only be able to increase skills that the training set touches.
2. Your training will not be performed indefinitely. After a certain period of inactivity (think days, not hours), your character will eventually “go to sleep” and stop training.
3. The speed in which you learn things will be directly inverse to how much time you spend in the game + how many total skill points you already have.

More Uses for the Spirit Realm

The Spirit Realm is a huge part of Journey of Souls. We want to make as much use of it as possible and not in just a “you died, now make your way back to the physical realm” sort of way. We want it to be just as alive as the physical realm and make it useful for solving certain challenges. Those of you who are familiar with the “spectral realm” from Soul Reaver will experience the same types of puzzles and challenges, but probably on a much smaller scale. Not every character or race will be spiritually in tune enough to be able to take advantage of those types of activities, so we don’t want to alienate these races.

Another thing we want to do with the spirit realm is allow people who are spiritually in tune (and even those who aren’t) to occasionally see things in the spirit realm even when they’re in the physical realm. An example Dutch used was a room that may have a chair, a lamp, and a rocking chair that could only be seen by people who could see objects in the spirit realm. The neat thing here is that people who are right on that edge of having their spiritual awareness cross that threshold of being able to see things more often will oftentimes see things in the spirit realm and then look again to see that they’re not there.

One more thing we discussed was an area’s “spiritual power” being able to fluctuate based on things that happen in that area. For example, a death releases the soul from the physical body into the spirit realm. That release of spiritual power will raise the rating of the room so that actions in the spirit realm will bleed through to the physical realm more often. The big item here is death. One of the “cool” things we’d like to do is have the spirit realm of an area retain the finishing blow of a battle. Those with the spiritual awareness to see this from the physical realm, or those who just happened to be in the spirit realm at this location, will occassionally see the deaths of others replayed before them for a set amount of time. Truly spiritually aware players entering the site of a large conflict may get a sensory overload from all of the death that occurred there and “freak out” which will require outside assistance to get them back to a safe location.

In-Game Consequences

Lastly, we want to put a very firm focus on in-game consequences for actions. We want to encourage or discourage appropriate behavior strictly by using the mechanics of the game. We want this to be a living, breathing world of its own. One with few “external” rules, but plenty of consequence for each action. Some of the examples we used this evening were characters taking advantage of offline players’ training locations in order to attack them or somehow harm them while they’re offline. Rather than come up with a way to just say this can’t happen, we eventually settled on another use for the spiritual creatures that can cross back and forth between the spirit and physical realms along with guards for the training grounds.

We do want to make it perfectly clear that dangerous lands will be dangerous. Venturing into these sorts of areas will mean that there is no protection, and it will be possible for you to be killed. That’s perfectly reasonable and we won’t do anything to prevent that. We’re hoping that we can leave it to the players to enact justice where it is needed through the appropriate in-game systems. In the absence of that, we’ll probably do so ourselves through careful working of NPCs.

I’ll post more updates as we have more discussions about game mechanics and make more progress with the development of the game.