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Left4Dead’s contextual storytelling and JRPGs

A few days ago, I read through Elan Ruskin’s excellent 2012 GDC presentation on how Valve handled character dialogue in Left4Dead and I felt like I understood about two thirds of it, which is pretty good.  (I read it instead of watching it because GDC doesn’t seem to have any videos on YouTube from that long ago, nor do they seem to upload videos that get this explicitly technical, but Ruskin put his slides and script online, which is a very awesome thing to do.)  Left4Dead’s dialogue system is a marvel and it’s my opinion that anyone interested in making character-driven games should make themselves familiar with how it works.

(Because Left4Dead and Left4Dead2 are basically the same game, I’ll be mostly referring to them as if they were just one title.)

In particular, I’ve been interested in how systems like this could apply to JRPGs, which are my main area of interest but have been developmentally stagnant since at least the PlayStation 1 era.  Other genres have thoroughly pilfered what were once considered to be RPG mechanics—variable statistics, unlockable abilities and so on—but RPGs haven’t done the same in return, and its most critical flaw, the strict segregation of storytelling and gameplay, going almost entirely unaddressed.   For a genre that sells itself on the strength of its writing, it’s not a great thing for plot and character development to come to a halt the moment a player starts navigating a dungeon or fighting trash mobs.

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I’m the guy with the car

A couple of months ago, I was thinking about those guys (they’re usually guys) who love old cars and stumble upon a great deal for a classic car that they love, but is in awful condition, and so they buy it, excited at the prospect of fixing it up and restoring it into the beautiful machine it’s supposed to be.  But then they don’t.  The car sits in their driveway or garage, hopefully covered by a tarp or cloth.  It’s in the way.  His family, when they notice it, just find it annoying and in the way.  When he remember it’s there, he feels a guilt that he isn’t working on his worthy project, if he ever even started it.  If he spent significant money acquiring the car in the first place, the guilt is doubled.  The dream becomes a weight around his neck.

It turns out restoring a car by yourself, learning as you go, is really, really, really hard.  The concept of the project is simple and exciting, and the fantasy of the final product even more so.  Step beyond the concept and the fantasy, and you discover a staggering amount of work ahead of you, demanding incredible time and commitment.  The more beautiful the dream, the more you have to sacrifice.  Give up your weekends.  You’re tired from work, but you don’t get to goof off tonight.  That’s a really weird problem you just ran into–time to hit the books.  Or you can wait and put it off, and in twenty years you can look back on this as the thing you never did.

A couple of months ago, I had the horrifying realization that I was the guy with the car.

For the last few years, I’ve been slowly working on a GameMaker project, and by “working on”, I mostly mean “feeling guilty about not working on”.  I could use the partial excuse of having been really sick for four years, but who am I trying to supplicate?  The only thing that matters is the dream.  In some respects, that dream began with this project.  In others, it date backs to concepts I’ve been slowly developing over the course of a decade.  All I have to show for that decade is a few design documents I drew up over the years, all of which are now very obsolete.

There’s good news, though!  I’m no longer okay with it.  For the last six weeks, I’ve been hustling like crazy on my project, and my progress has been incredible.  By the end of the weekend, I’ll have completed the guts of a module that six months ago I couldn’t imagine ever being finished.  At my current clip, I might have something worth showing as a work in progress as soon as the end of the year.

My project is a JRPG called Behemoth, which is shaping up to be a strange marriage between MegaTen/Persona and Puzzle and Dragons.  I’m building the whole thing from scratch in GameMaker because RPG Maker is terrible and can’t possibly do half of the weird garbage I’m planning.  I’m about to start working on the battle engine–hopefully next weekend or sooner–and I’m very excited.

It feels really good to move towards your dream.  This will be a beautiful machine.