Gameplay Mechanic Ideas?

[Zen Blood 70]

After months and months of slowly making my game, I've finally broken down, and I'm asking for help on ideas for gameplay mechanics.

 

The thing is, my game doesn't involve fighting, which really sucks because I'm an amateur scripter and one of the big features that RPGMVXA takes care of for you is having a game-ready battle script.

 

In my game I have such things as exploration and simple puzzles. But other than that, the interactivity feels kind of empty. Any ideas on other game mechanics I can use, that you can create with RPGMVXA?

 

Thank you for reading.

[RetroExcellent 369]

A good idea is social building. I don't mean in the way Persona does it, though. I mean more that make every npc important, make each one of them have a variable that determines how much the like and or trust you. Make each of them have a small side story that you can unwrap, a quest to complete or a puzzle to solve. This, I feel could easily replace combat.

[Rikifive 3,411]

 I have moved this thread to Theory and Development, because it's a question related to ideas, not the editor. ^^

[lonequeso 1,921]

What kind of game are you making? Is it a classic adventure game minus combat or more focused on skill and/or relationship building? What is the player trying to achieve? Is there a way to win?

[Zen Blood 70]

A good idea is social building. I don't mean in the way Persona does it, though. I mean more that make every npc important, make each one of them have a variable that determines how much the like and or trust you. Make each of them have a small side story that you can unwrap, a quest to complete or a puzzle to solve. This, I feel could easily replace combat.

 

I know it's been a while, but I just wanted to say, thank you for this idea! It's made me think of something similar, which I think I can utilize for my game.

What kind of game are you making? Is it a classic adventure game minus combat or more focused on skill and/or relationship building? What is the player trying to achieve? Is there a way to win?

 

I'd say it's a classic adventure game minus the combat, and focused more on story telling and puzzles. There's a way to complete the game, but I don't know if "win" in the right word.

[Rezanta 373]

Then you could learn some tips from playing dating games (I Kid you not) or puzzle games like Toad's treasure Quest. (There's a Tetris one and a gem game that would mention, but I would kill myself trying to remember their names. The Tetris one had a guy you had to get to a door, before these spikes killed him, and the GE!s deal with the creature s that you interact with and actually "fight" to collect more jewels via matches, which is a Sega game.) Another interesting pick could be Dr.Robotinik's Mean Bean Machine.

[lonequeso 1,921]

I can see a lot of potential for little mini-games like Rezanta is talking about. There's an endless supply of puzzles and mini games you can add. Other ideas would to have some sort of relationship system. It doesn't necessarily have to be elaborate. You do tasks or help someone with something (which either results in exploring to find something, a mini-game or both).

 

World building and customizations are two huge things to look into. It can be something as simple as letting the player rearrange and change the look of their house or more complex where they help construct a town. Certain pieces could possible be unlocked from solving puzzles or finding them hidden n the map. 

 

Crafting is another idea. It would be interesting in a non-combat game. Look at all the non-combat things you can craft in Minecraft. You can get insanely deep with that if you wanted. It could also tie into the world building. It also promotes exploration. The player wants to scour the world for rare crafting ingredients.

 

The last thing I can think of are items that change the character's appearance. Costumes, outfits, etc. Like everything else I mentioned, they can be rewards or something you have to craft. Combining several gameplay elements to create quests and objectives will give the game a lot of depth.

[Tarq 746]

Crafting's fun but it seems like just about every game throws it in on the side these days so I would recommend something that is functionally the same but more specific. So, to give some examples, how about building and populating a town like in the Dark Cloud series? Or collecting items to craft and sell like in Recetear? Both of these require a sort of 'base' so maybe it wont suit your particular game but its a lot less vanilla than a traditional crafting system.

[Kayzee 4,032]

Interesting gameplay mechanics are always welcome, but I always thought "adventure" games were kind of obnoxious in the way they worked. Trying to primarily tell a linear story and throwing in gameplay distractions every once and a while doesn't strike me as a very good use of the medium of games (then again the same can be said for a lot of RPGs). The questions I think you have to ask yourself are: What is the core experience you want to convey through your game? Is it an experience that actually involves the player at all? What will make the player actually want to play the game as opposed to just watching it on youtube? I don't think designing the world and story first and adding gameplay interaction in later works very well if you are just trying to give the player "something to do". Games should be, in my opinion, designed around a strong central mechanic or set of mechanics in the first place.

 

Don't get me wrong though, having a central mechanic does not mean combat. But combat has been traditionally very easy to abstract into a game system, hence why most games involve it. Most games that try to abstract something else usually end up as some kind of simulation game or as basic arcadey games. There are not a lot of games that really attempt to model social interactions, for example, without being really really abstract (like the sims) or really really brute forced (like dialogue trees with pre-scripted choices and results). 

 

On the other hand, if there is one thing Yume Nikki has taught me is that you don't really need that many gameplay mechanics if you have a large, engaging, and detailed world to explore. Yume Nikki mostly gets away with having such minimal mechanics as a game because of the way it is structured as an open ended experience rather then a linear story. But then, Yume Nikki has shallow interactions as part of it's alienating and dream-like central experience, It isn't the only game to do that sort of thing of course, but it's one of the best examples of pure exploration I can think of. The other example that comes to mind may be Myst actually, though Myst is primarily puzzle focused. Either way, settings like this are usually of the "Beautiful Void" style (Warning: Blah blah TV Tropes blah), and probably don't work without that sort of all-consuming immersion.

 

So yeah. Just some things to think about I guess. It probably wasn't helpful but there ya go.