REAPER Game Vision

For more details about my ideas for the game, please refer to the content below.

Overview and Objective:

Reaper is an interactive RPG meant to immerse you into the shoes of a peasant who has to rise up, free the land of evil and rise up to meet his true destiny.

With this game, I am hoping to revive the RPGs of the mid 1990’s where heros are made from those whose destiny demand it.

User Description:

My prime target audience are the narrative driven RPG goers. Such individuals are usually fans of other RPGs such as Never Winter Nights and Baulder’s Gate and table top RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons and GURPS. This game is also meant to minimalists (you are fighting as a peasant after all) and to those that are into the story more than into power gaming.

Prototype:

I was able to prototype my story. I had six users take a survey a while reading my story. The results were encouraging. The results are summarized in the previous post.

Features and Functionalities:

If it is possible, I want to make this game from the first person point of view, like in Half-life. I am hoping this will maximize my users immersive experience. The best engine for this that I can think of is the Halflife 2 engine. With the engine, it places us in the first person perspective and gives us a 3D environment to wander around in. When the player needs to rescue NPCs, Halflife 2 makes it easy for them to follow. Plus it makes it simpler to make a single or multiplayer application.

Justification:

The reason I want to use the Halflife 2 engine is for one reason only: immersion. I want the user to stop thinking about the real world and put themselves in the place of the heroic peasant. The perspective, graphics range and immersive experience of this story is perfect for the Halflife 2 engine.

User Testing:

The individuals I tested with my survey I have played Dungeons and Dragons with before. Some are power gamers, some are munchkins, but most of all, they all enjoy story. With these individuals, they told me they liked being able to do as they with in an adventure and did not like straightforward tactics (such as simply press A to attack). They also tend to be curious and like to explore around everywhere.

Short Comings:

There are several problems associated with Reaper. The first is that the narrative specific market is very niche oriented. It is usually the more hard core narrative goers that prefer this genre of game.

The story also had a few problems. As said before, only 50% of the users liked the story. The other half thought it was only decent.

One problem with the Halflife 2 engine is that I believe it is difficult to make sprites work in party with you. Because of this, the hero of Reaper may have to do his questing alone.

Finally, one of the biggest problems is in getting people to follow the story line without putting in huge game barriers (such as making them always walk on a single path). This not only restricts the market even more but it takes away from letting people be curious to explore the space they are in.

Expansion Ideas:

The most logical idea for expansion for this game is to make it a multiplayer game. After all, having one peasant is a hero is not nearly as cool as a village defending their town from an invasion.

If I can too, I want to expand on the story and character development. Even during the testing process, the story was rather vague and did need some work.

Other ideas I have had for expanding is fighting some kind of unique super boss or even when winning the game, there can be alternate endings.

Next Step:

The biggest step is to further develop the story or even redevelop the story so that it can be more immersive. Also, I will need to soon start on the prototype development process such as designing and building weapons, equipment, sound, scenes, and sprites. Finally after the demo is finished or even partially finished, I can do user testing.