Keep it Short, Slime

If you're making a RPG, most of us tend to think like Final Fantasy VII, a linear tale that spans 3 discs, me included.  But perhaps I've been thinking about RPGs wrong, and I probably need to take a wider approach rather than a longer approach.




Right, let's take FF7 for a moment.  The key objective is to defeat the big bad, which becomes Sephiroth.  I'll try not to spoil this, but to stop Sephiroth from destroying the planet, we need to stop Sephiroth from getting the thing that destroys planets, and to do that, we need to get an airship that can reach the place where the thing is, and to get there, we at least need to get onto the continent where the airship builder is, and the only boats are owned by a SHINRA port on the opposite side of a mountain which is behind a desert that is home to a snake so fast that we need a faster bird to cross it.  In short, Sephiroth is step Z.

My first actual project, The Fates We Weave, took this kind of thinking.  After you defeat the first boss if it was a full game, you have to defeat the second boss to recruit your next team member, then defeat the 3rd boss to unlock her dual-wielding, and you would need defeat the 4th boss to unlock "invasions" on previous places.  In short, I thought a good RPG would need to be long, and that had been my initial design for this ABS.  Then I stopped to think because I just played West of Loathing.

West of Loathing is a short Wild West RPG, and it's short because if you ignore all side quests, there are 3 objectives to get to the final area.  The first objective requires you to get enough Dynamite to blow a way up, and two ways I know is to either buy a supply or to grab it from a goblin town.  The second objective requires you to build a bridge which can be done in 3 ways, and the first way that comes naturally requires you to clear about 5 quests out of 8-9 from a nearby town.  Despite this, there are many small areas that aren't related to the main objectives but can reward you with lots of money, equipment, or EXP.

Perhaps to make my point clear, I should also point out other "small" games.  Esthe Hunter comes to mind because you could technically escape the Esthe world with luck and level, but to get the default "good" ending requires money which you can get from either earning a lot of it or hunting down special foes for their bounty.  Alternatively, the special ending comes from winning a fight that only becomes active with a high stat, which comes from leveling up a lot or using the Spa Treatments to increase your stats.  Then there is also Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where it's said that the final boss can be defeated the moment Link wakes up.  And technically, you don't need to visit 3/4ths of the towns in Final Fantasy XV, though I did spend more time in the world before moving on with revenge.

So yeah, my first idea for the ABS was Start-Key-Lock-Key-Lock-Key-Lock-Final, but perhaps I should make the game more like Start-Final, and instead of thinking of each map as a required town to gas up, they should be tourist traps.  By this way, instead of saying you must fight snakes before you can fight spiders, I could say you can fight whatever you want (if you can get there).

...Because of this, there are two things I should do.  First, I should probably get that demo out soon.  That's because the second thing is that the demo is designed to promote a long storyline, but I may have to redesign the game different.  I may go this way because a long game would have me pace certain mechanics here and there, but making a sandbox type of game should let me place stuff wherever I want at any pace.  Well, let's get to it then.