Game-Hopping Characters!
I had a very interesting conversation with Craig last night. We talked
about many things, one of which he posted about. I want to discuss
something that I brought up during our conversation, related to his
idea, but probably a little more pragmatic.
I love how old games like Quest for Glory let you import your
character from sequel to sequel. It makes the whole series feel like
one long game, as opposed to you starting over every sequel.
Wouldn't it be neat if you could import characters between lots of
different games? Maybe there could be some kind of universal but
flexible specification for characters. Hell, I'll lay out a first pass
method right here.
Let's do something really easy. Say you're an indie developer. You
have released two games. One's a typical fantasy dungeon crawler,
called OrcKiller. The other is a game where tanks shoot at each other
in the future, called GeneriTank.
For the sake of argument, let's say that a character for OrcKiller
looks like this:
Name: Joe
Class: Fighter
Total HP: 100
Strength: 8
Agility: 4
Brains: 5
And let's say that a tank in GeneriTank looks like this:
Model: RX-510
Speed: 40 mph
Armor: 5mm
Weapons: Laser Cannon, Machine Gun
You can import characters and tanks back and forth between these two
games. Let's take Joe the Fighter and import him into the tank game.
You get:
Model: Joe-1209
Speed: 30 mph
Armor: 7mm
Weapons: Machine Gun, Portable Nuke
How did I come up with those figures? Well, agility maps to speed. In
OrcKiller, the maximum agility score is 10, and it's a linear number
of character points to advance in (you spend 1 CP to get 1 point of
agility). Well, in GeneriTank, the top speed of a tank is 100 mph. But
a 4/10 in agility maps to 30/100 mph because in GeneriTank, you spend
an exponentially increasing amount of money to upgrade tank points. I
would spend a lot of time to make a simple formula that says 1 CP =
$10,000, and all of a sudden I can convert hero agility to tank speed
really easily. Same thing with HP --> armor.
What about weapons? How did I derive those? Well, I didn't. I just
subtracted the cost of the parts that I created on import from the
total starting cash at the tank shop, and I let the player spend the
remaining money on weapons. Similarly, I completely ignored the
brains, strength, and class from the OrcKiller character.
The Benefits
The main advantage, in my mind, is that if I get bored of leveling my
fighter in OrcKiller, I can import him into GeneriTank. Then when I
get bored of blowing up tanks, I take my upgraded tank and import him
back into the original game. Now the fighter has upgraded a subset of
his stats, and I feel like I've made progress in the first game!
Furthermore, the sense of continuity you get between disparate games
would feel enormously good. You could become extremely attached to
what is essentially a single character that you've played in 10
different games.
The Drawbacks
Obviously there's huge balance issues here. I wouldn't recommend this
for games with online play, as the opportunity to exploit is ripe.
However, I think for single player games balance doesn't matter so
much, especially since in this case it's unbalanced in the player's
favor, rather than unfairly hard.
Furthermore, conversion between various game systems will not always
be simple. In fact, it'll probably always be a really tricky math
problem. It will almost never be as easy as 1 CP = $10,000. You'll
probably need a set of linear equations to handle all the
transformation--not hard math in and of itself, but setting the
coefficients intelligently could be a nightmare.
But Also...
The balance issue might not be so terrible. You could design many
different games that look at different stats. Your players would say
things like, "Oh, man. If you want to really increase your character's
jump height in Game A, you should import her into Game B as a hacker
character and put lots of points into network manipulation!"
While this might not be the most balanced system in the world, I
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