Diary of a Hare

Friends

This post is about friends.

Each major NPC has a hidden love score. Until I come up with a better name, that is what it will be called. This is essentially their disposition towards you, and it changes throughout the game. Love plays the most important part for the characters of Tex, Ilana, and Juan Carlos, who just happen to be the three followers that are available for you to recruit, should you be awesome enough. The scores can range from 0% – 100%. Obviously, anything under 30% is pretty damn bad. I’ll also briefly mention how each follower works.

Tex Boone:
– Extremely hard to win. Extremely easy to lose.
– Starting score depends on your initial meeting.
– With Tex, I want to make a true rival PC character. He’s Player 2 in American Hare, to put it simply. He is harder to completely ignore than the other two followers, but he has the biggest impact on the story. To call Tex a follower isn’t exactly the truth, since he will only join you on a very few occasions, and to get even get on your side you really have to play your cards right. Most likely he’ll turn into some kind of nemesis, or a reluctant ally who takes pity in your darkest hour. Similar to Juan Carlos (below), he can attempt to kill you if he feels the situation warrants it. Unlike Juan Carlos, who has to be pushed off the edge of sanity before he pulls the trigger, Tex’s natural programming is nothing short of “kill da wabbit!”

Ilana:
– If you start out bad, she’ll be hard to win over. If you start out good, her love is only moderately difficult to gain.
– Starting score depends on if you perform the “show” with her or not.
– She’s quick to stick by you and quick to run away when things get dicey. While Juan Carlos (below) won’t be much of a talker during discussions with other people, Ilana will frequently interject, for better or worse.

Juan Carlos:
– Score will remain mostly neutral at 40% – 60%.
– You can lose it completely by performing a horrible act of immorality. You either have to do this in front of him, or he has to find out about it. He can have suspicions due to your actions, but won’t confront you unless there’s overwhelming evidence.
– He performs a great service by means of travel and connections. You can bring him on a few quests, but depending on how open ended they are, he might just go off and do his own thing and catch up with you later.

Each of these people has their own backstory, friends, relatives, enemies, and personal thoughts. As for how they tie into the main quest story… that’s for you to find out. However, while they are with you, they will have some kind of input during situations, even if only a little. The goal is to make you feel that they are integrated into the story as well as having a logical effect on it.

Skills, glorious skills!

I’ve been thinking about skills. The post below is cut and pasted from what I wrote at the rpgcodex.

The three main skills are mind, body, and focus. Each has 10 different levels it can be raised to, with some levels bringing additional “perks” (not Fallout perks), but mostly just increasing your chances at performing an action successfully. They also tie into each other, which is an idea I’ve wanted from the very start (ex. Body + Focus = Coercion).

The whole skills helping skills system is a central focus of Hare and tough to balance out. Obviously, 8 focus and 1 body shouldn’t net you the same level of coercion as 4 focus and 5 body. However, I really want to avoid creating a situation where you’re micro managing your stats, because it would take away from what this game is really about.

*intermission*

Just taking a breather before things really get wild.

*end intermission*

Welcome back.

Most of the game is based on percentages. Now, keep in mind that these are not normal percentages. If you fail to pick a lock the game doesn’t persuade you to reload. Instead, you are forced to find an alternate, yet interesting, route. There is no level grinding to raise these percentages, such as success at picking locks. Instead, there are experience points.

Let me elaborate. These are not your normal every day experience points. In fact, you don’t need to raise a single level in anything to finish the game. It will be extremely fucking difficult, but you can go through the entire game with both skills at level 1. This is because the world is filled with hundreds of skill checks, and you can’t join any job outside of migrant farming without some skill. Jobs are a huge part, and so is travel (migrant farming is the slowest form of travel). If, however, you want to make the game more interesting, and pursue some unique challenges outside of “how can I avoid dying?”, then you’ll want to seek out EXP.

EXP is hidden.

That’s right. EXP is hidden. You don’t magically get it for talking to someone or delivering a box. You have to solve puzzles and find the right connections to increase your skills.

That’s another reason why stat balancing is particularly difficult. How much experience should be awarded? How much should be required to raise a level? How should the areas and quests be balanced to make use of this?

Anyways, I’ve rambled. Back to coercion and that mess. The simplest method (note I didn’t say “best”) would be to base your success on your lowest sill. For a wonderful example, let’s look at… coercion. 8 focus and 1 body gives you the percentage for coercion success that 1 focus and 1 body would. 4 focus and 5 body would give you the percentage that 4 focus and 4 body would. Of course, the problem there is that coercion would obviously be more influenced by focus than body, and the game would be forcing you to develop both sills equally, which would suck and completely ruin all my intentions of c&c.

One way through this problem would be that each “sub skill” has it’s own requirements. In the coercion example, focus could count for double when calculating. However, as you can probably surmise, doing it like this would easily lead to percentages way over 100. So, I thought, focus could still count double, but each point would be worth 0.5 instead of 1 in the behind-the-scenes calculation. That, however, would make the chance of success way too low. So, I’ll add on 25% to each.

Example (Coercion):
10F + 10B = (10.0 + 5.0)/2.0 = (7.50 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 100.00%
8F + 1B = (8.0 + 0.5)/2.0 = (4.25 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 67.50%
1F + 8B = (1.0 + 4.0)/2.0 = (2.50 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 50.00%
4F + 5B = (4.0 + 2.5)/2.0 = (3.25 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 57.50%
5F + 4B = (5.0 + 2.0)/2.0 = (3.50 + 2.5) x 0.10 = 60.00%

As you can see, 8F and 1B will net you a 17% greater chance than vice versa, but you are still rewarded for developing your body skill so damn high instead of being severely punished for not developing your focus skill (which would totally ignore the fact that body is an important part of this coercion sub-skill). Meanwhile, keeping both F and B around the same number (4 and 5) will lead to only a moderate difference.

The problem with using percentages, of course, is that someone could just have bad luck and no matter how much they raise their skills, they always get the bad roll of the die. In that regard, I think there should be some kind of check to determine whether your last chance was successful or not, and then add on a random percentage to your next chance that increases it.

Example:
You have 4F and 5B. Your chance at coercion is 57.50%. You attempt to coerce, and you fail. A ten-sided die is rolled (all done behind the scenes of course, so you can’t actually see a skill increase on your character sheet after a failed attempt) and it lands on 6. On your next attempt, you will have a 63.5% chance. If you succeed, your chance will drop back to your regular 57.5% If you fail, the dice is rolled again. Of course, if you have a perfect 10 in each, your chance is 100 and will never fail. If you have 9’s in each, then if you miss the first attempt, you can be pretty damn sure you’ll get the next one.

Dialog Class System

The dialog class system is the most defining feature I want to implement in American Hare. It forms the basis for everything, while still retaining a similarity to past RPGs, and is quite unique I think. As you are familiar, most RPGs give you some kind of morality meter that varies as you perform good or bad actions. This usually amounts to followers and NPCs doing an “alignment check” when you talk to them, and whether you get the “good” ending, the “bad” ending, or the “boring” ending where you’re persuaded to play a little more extreme with your morality next time.

Sometimes, you’re allowed to pick your ending at the very end of the game in spite of what your character has done for the past 40 hours or so. Your baby eating anarchist anti-hero can suddenly decide to save the universe, restore harmony, and return the king to the throne in the final level. This approach is most apparent in Bioware titles.

American Hare is different. If you play through the game as an abusive megalomaniac, your character will not be able to convince the people of the final area that true happiness in life is found through generosity and maintaining a balance with nature. Likewise, the main characters will grow along with you, and if they have been suspicious for most of the adventure, they will not suddenly place their life in your hands.

I believe the most beneficial way to maintain this is to present the dialog in what I like to call “arcs”. You won’t choose a response and have your alignment suddenly change. The game will calculate what happened during the conversation at the end of it, and you are adjusted accordingly. Good, bad, or crazy points will be awarded at the end of each arc. This is a hidden, behind-the-scenes, stat which is reflected in your dialog “class”.

Personalities are organized into several subgroups, each representing a combination of good, bad, and crazy. Each rank of every personality (the dialog class itself) requires a certain number of good, bad, or crazy points to achieve. Sometimes you can change classes between personality lines, sometimes you cannot. For example, it is entirely possible to go from being a Hustler to an Unsung Hero, or start out as a Good Boy and end up a Psychopath, but you cannot go from being a Martyr to the Devil Incarnate (yes, evil people can be martyrs, even your character, but every possible combination can be made from any personality type, and there has to be physical limitations somewhere).

There are over a hundred class names you can be awarded, indicating which direction your are taking, but only 18 are “milestones”. Only 18 have a profound impact on the way you perceive the world and the way the world perceives you. Different options become available, and are lost, when you reach a milestone. The four classes labeled in the below chart as “Beginning” set you off on an initial path during the very first part of the game when you are attempting to escape the priest’s house. Despite paving this first road, no matter which class you start out with, all are still open to you at the beginning point.

Do note that you will not be able to do really insane stuff, really evil stuff, or really heroic stuff until you reach the extremes of your personality types. There will, however, be those special moments where a certain special action can net you a massive amount of class points… or cause you to lose them…

Class Milestones:
Beginning: Bully, Ambivalent, Mad, Helpful
Good: Good Boy, Unsung Hero, Saint
Good/Bad: Vigilante, Ego Maniac, Anti Hero
Good/Crazy: Maverick, Martyr, Chosen One
Bad: Hustler, Cold Blooded, Devil Incarnate
Bad/Crazy: Miscreant, Maniacal, Psychopath
Crazy: Looney, Basket Case, Stark Raving Mad

Hello world!

It’s back, baby. Now with a blog to track progress, maybe I won’t get off track this time. First rule, is that there are no rules, except no set date. This project may or may not see the light of day, but for now, represents the ultimate roleplaying experience in my eyes, and what RPG developers with money and talent should try to achieve regarding dialog, characters, and choices and consequences.

I’ve been feverishly reworking the entire thing. It’s now more coherent, and contains some actual gameplay mechanics. This first post, however, does not feature any of that.

Any input, reasonable or otherwise, is welcome. If you have godly talent in programming or art, and are interested in American Hare, then thank you for your interest.

Word to the wise: The black-tailed jackrabbit is actually a hare. Hares are not rabbits, but the words will be used interchangeably, because it adds diversity. This species of rab… er… hare are native to the southwestern portion of the United States, can also be found in Mexico, and in both places are regarded as pests. Rabbits and their kin were never worshipped in any religion, but do feature prominently in African folk tales, where they usually take on the guise of a troublesome trickster. ~ The more you know… ~

American Hare
Aequitas, dolus et insania.

“Quite possibly the ultimate game of choices and consequences!” – PCGamer, circa 2045

You play as a humanoid black-tailed jackrabbit (Lepus californicus), waking up in the small Mexican town of Santa Rosalía on the peninsula of Baja California. You don’t know who you are, what you are, why you are here, and how you came to be. What you do know is that you are trapped in the house of a Mexican priest and his family. They think you’re a demon. Your first mission is to escape.

Your main quest in American Hare is to discover why you are a talking rabbit. You’ll traverse large parts of Central America, mingle with the locals, get work in various fields, and make connections that will link you to the source of how you came into existence.

You can take many different paths towards this ultimate goal, and enjoy a level of freedom never before experienced in a role-playing game. No paths are set in stone. They will twist and turn as you progress through the story. Be good, bad, crazy, or a combination of any. Take things to the extreme, or try not to stray far from the main road. It’s all up to you.

The dialog class system assigns you points for most dialog choices in either the good, bad, or crazy territories. These determine what kind of character you are and drastically shape the way you can interact with the game world. Your greedy bandito might discover that the most beneficial way is the most moral, or your Good Samaritan could become a religious extremist before you realize it. There is no turning back, and no last minute morality changes. This is a game of extremes.

The odd mysteries of the ancient Maya and Aztec animal men, along with 23rd century bio-engineering, await you, intrepid traveler.