Notes by Austin Pocus

The New Style

Adventure Kit needs something to stand out. Now, I have something: macro party management. But what is it? Read on!

Macro party management takes the traditional RPG concept, and flips it on its head.

See, I was going to make a game creation toolkit where you make a traditional game, full stop. You might be able to play around with the party configuration, to make games like Pokemon. You might be able to script quests and pixel-level "cutscenes" ala Final Fantasy VI.

But beyond that, the result would've been a pretty standard SNES-level RPG.

Instead...what if there were multiple characters or parties of characters, whose behavior you could manage at a high level? Where you can tell the fighter characters to go one place and make physical attacks, and you can tell the mage character to hang back and heal the others, but their granular behavior is automated?

Imagine you're the ruler of a kingdom. The queen, king, emperor, grand pubaa, etc. You seek a mystical item, or to destroy your enemy's nation -- the details of the story will be provided by the game creator.

What matters is, there's an overarching purpose to the story, the "main quest". There should be subquests the user defines, some depending on others, and some being side quests entirely...this has been defined in previous dev journals.

You should be able to send different parties on different quests. You should be able to manage resources that the party has. You should be able to define the user's behavior...you get the idea.

More than just a simple resource management game, this could be an entire feudal system in a game. You can have lords below the queen or king, dukes, serfs, or different governmental structures...maybe there's a peasant revolution! Or someone ascends to the throne with an iron fist, and robs the treasury to wage war!

It would be especially cool, if players could start out as an individual fighter and work their way up to being ruler of a kingdom!

This could only happen if there's multiplayer, along with ascension (or descension) of ranks...which gets into a whole web of complexity.

Even so, it's really fun to think about how multiplayer may work in this environment...that's another post, though.

What's happening next is getting into more of the generation of quests, along with management of resources. I'm thinking about splitting up the management of certain resources like parties, gold, items, quests, etc. and making it so you can automate away management of certain aspects...still a lot to think about here.

Mainly, I wanted to record this idea after talking with my friend Dane, and wanted to develop on it a bit and get my thoughts sorted. I'll probably have more to write on the topic later -- for now, check out Dane's latest project, Rasterly!