Convention and Originality

One of the difficulties I've been having with working on my RPG, Dragonfaith, is that when I originally began visualizing it in my head, a lot of its features were designed as a response to many of the cliches and conventions of the RPG genre. The basic plot, for example - nature rising up against man - serves the purpose of giving the player a reason and an excuse to go out into the wild slaughtering beasts left and right. And the entirety of the Hunters Guild wasn't even part of the original story, but an invention designed to provide the possibility for alternatives to the usual random enemy encounter system which is so critical to the genre, and yet frequently frustrating to players.

The reason this is a problem is that, now that I've sat down and begun building an RPG for real, while I may be a veteran RPG player, I am a total n00b when it comes to actually putting together a game like this. My ideas are, in a sense, far more advanced than my technical abilities. And I feel like - in the vein of learning to walk before you can run - I should focus on learning how to actually make a conventional RPG first, before I decide to try circumventing all the usual rules; especially since I'm building my game with a program that's essentially designed to replicate all the conventions of typical RPGs, where learning how to code around the expectations of its users is an additional skill above and beyond learning the program to create RPGs in the first place.

So it's a constant struggle to decide between trying to be fancy and bring my vision to life the way it was intended, and scaling back my ambitions and just trying to put together a game that works, while telling the story I want to tell (which doesn't rely on doing it in a totally original way). And it's a problem when you can't decide what you actually want to create, because, as I've discovered before, having a clear goal in mind makes the creative process flow much more smoothly (which means better focus and more progress). Indecisiveness, on the other hand, halts progress and inspires the mind to distract itself and wander elsewhere.

In any case, I've been working on the game a lot these past few weeks, since my schedule opened up following October's month-long movie marathon. I'm not giving you a date on any future releases, because it'll be ready when it's ready. But I've been polishing up everything that I've worked on so far, paring some of the complexity back, with an eye toward the great, largely blank space that constitutes the rest of the game I haven't clearly visualized yet. And I've been playing a particularly classic RPG for inspiration as well (with others in the queue), which I should have a few words to say about here on this blog in the very near future.