Design docs overview⚓︎

About the design doc⚓︎

Game design overview⚓︎

Gameplay⚓︎

Lore and setting⚓︎

Story and narrative overview⚓︎

Technology⚓︎

Background⚓︎

Factions⚓︎

Contract with the user: as in, what I promise to do and not to do in the game. Stuff like: making the game 100% completable without having to restart or not gating content in weird ways. Or… in general what they can be sure to get (or not to get) from the game.

(Add Draco’s spirit)

Dialogue between spirits, without the player's intervention. Maybe when player character sleeps or something?

The spirits and powers can be arranged and used like in a game of Core wars or something similar. The player has a certain amount of spiritural energy, resources, slots. The spirits and powers can be put into slots, be combined or synergized together.

Places where important characters show up from time to time, like a dimensional tavern where every now and then all sorts of people show up, even powerful entities.

Reverse well: water outside, full of... some super-heavy gas or substance.

The ability to build services and form a small village depends on external factors. For example: a very basic inn and tavern (level 1) can be built immediately, but to increase the quality of the tavern some fresh water is needed, then a source of food, etc. Some of these may require completing quests. For example a spring may need to be purified in order for wells to start providing clean water.

Lots of games allow you to create characters and add/remove them from the party... only at the beginning of a playthrough! Having lots of characters you can swap in and out of your party regularly during the game will make for a lot more interesting gameplay. Sort of like CoC2.

System to show the player character's awareness of the location of entities around: using something similar to the label/sign system used in many games to indicate where an objective is, with labels moving across the edges of the screen when the target is off-screen. The label could be a generic "noise" label (multiple types of noise labels?), to indicate the character heard an unidentified noise, or the icon of the entity if the character is aware of what it is exactly.

About lockpicking: remember Daggerfall Unity's mod "Locked Loot Containers" and Wizardry 8's lockpicking system.

Random idea about weapon ergonomics: if a weapon has a bad grip you may randomly get less accuracy (to simulate discomfort) and using it for long periods of time can use more stamina. Something similar could be about weight balance for melee weapons.

Important dead characters (kings?) may give you difficult trials to overcome. If you're successful their spirits will join you and you can use their powers. Their powers are from different "schools" or "elements" or whatever. Some will be compatible. Either because their powers are, or because they like each other, so they will amplify the power you are currently asking for. Others dislike each other and will not help.
Each one will offer multiple powers, possibly from different schools/elements.

A component/module system (like Tinkers Construct or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly weapon repair) can be used for a lot of other items. For example, a hacksaw could have replaceable blades that are consumables, or a hammer could have a replacement handle.
This way different parts can be made of different materials. A plastic handle would get damaged easily by combat or eventually by ultraviolet or heat exposure; a wooden handle could rot over time if not treated, a metal handle could rust. Etc, etc.

When talking to NPCs, you have a list of subjects to talk about. Some of them are rumors, some of them the NPC may not know anything about. However, the NPC may be interested in some of those rumors, so if you tell them they may reward you in some way or become friendlier.

NPCs who become friendly may occasionally visit you in your house/room, chat a bit, comment on recent stuff or things that changed around the house, bring you gifts, ask you to help them with something, etc...

You don't have a physical body after piercing through the dream barrier, so you need to possess bodies. This means you can create a body any way you like or at least possess a body you can then modify.

Matilde's dream glitched because she was told to stay still without knowing what would happen next or what to do and then the dream stopped/glitched. It could be an interesting idea for stuff in the Dreamverse. Addendum: you can only dream stuff you know about, so to solve some puzzles you may have to find or learn about some stuff to create them inside the bubble and continue.

Random idea for biomes (while playing Terraria): have "biomes" be more like overlaying planes of existence, so when you travel between these biome/planes, the landscape is roughly the same but the features, creatures, plants, etc change based on that specific biome/plane.

Assuming you create all assets with a voxel editor, different clothes may have different sizes so they may not fit every body type. The player may tweak, crop and customize the item to fit the character and the item would be "customized" if it's a one-off, or can be changed into a template.

Have furniture blueprints/patterns like in MySims for the Wii. Like an outline with anchor points.

Generate local areas/dynamic adventures based on the people you have with you. For example, if you have a pathfinder/ranger in your party, when you explore a forest generate trails and other interesting stuff to do for that class. Treat classes like archetypes.

When casting a spell you can hold it, using some mana for maintenance and using your "spell concurrency points", which are determined by INT + concentration or something like that. You can cast a spell with the help of other people, in a ritual for example, which means their "spell concurrency points" will pool with yours, but not at a 100% efficiency rate. You can bond with a magical spirit and that will give you 100% efficiency rate if the bond is full and successful. That also means you can cast spell concurrently if they are easy, but the harder the spell, the more "spell concurrency points" it requires. How does that apply to scrolls, wands, staves, etc?

To achieve a sort of dreamy/fading effect for transitions, maybe do something like this: Start with the initial frame, then add the next interpolated frame with low transparency. Then add the next and increase the transparency of the previous one. Continue doing this until the final frame is drawn, then start fading out the previous ones in order. Needs a bit of tweaking with the order, the amount of transparency, etc. If done properly, it would be a cool effect to transition between portrait expressions when talking, for example. In this case it will have to be shorter compared to the same effect when walking or moving.

About "scenes" in the game engine: the main menu itself is an overlay like for the UI, the debug stuff, the editor, etc. However it can also be its own "scene" in the sense that it could play a demo in the background, or just have an animation or even a static background. The scene in that case refers to the content behind it, not the main menu itself. By doing that, the main menu can easily be overlayed on top of any running game scene, with a transparency effect or something.

Mechanic in which the enemies AI decides what to do also based on their willingness to fight. An enemy who doesn't really want to fight you will choose very different moves from one that's fighting to the death. This has lots of potential, for example the PC can affect the willingness to fight by intimidating or threatening the enemy in some way, or may taunting them to increase their willingness to fight. This will also give more importance to "scout/analyze" type skills which may tell you with more or less accuracy the willingness to fight of an enemy and other useful information about its behaviour.

MDA⚓︎

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework

According to the MDA (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics) framework, there are different kinds of fun (aesthetics) that people are looking for in a game, and each person favors different aesthetics differently.

These aesthetics are:

Sensation
Fantasy
Narrative
Challenge
Fellowship
Discovery
Expression
Submission

Note that these aren't the only aesthetics. They're simply the ones defined in the MDA framework.

Sensation These are games that please the senses, usually using graphics and sounds. Rhythm games rely heavily on this. Note that the graphics and/or sounds don't need to be realistic, only pleasing. Some people tend to like Anime-style games because they like Anime-style graphics better. That is also "Sensation".

Fantasy Also known as "game as make-believe". Don't mistake this for the genre, which implies mythical beasts and the supernatural. There are plenty of realistic games that thrive on this. For example, Call of Duty makes you feel like you're a soldier; that's "Fantasy".

Narrative Any game that tells a story, either explicitly (using dialogues) or implicitly (using the setting or other background elements), has this. If the game makes you want to understand what happened to this world or its inhabitants, that's "Narrative".

Challenge Often mistaken for "Difficulty", this aesthetic is about putting obstacles in the players' way, so they can overcome them. If a player can just fly straight from A to B, it's much less interesting than if they have to somehow cross a huge chasm to do so. That's "Challenge".

Fellowship This is where you meet other (real) people and play together with them. Any multiplayer game has this, and there are even people who believe the MDA framework should be expanded with "Competition" so they can have "play against" in contrast to the "play together with" aspect of "Fellowship".

Discovery When the game gives you a whole world, and you just have to see it all. This is not limited to only the world as an environment, but also extends to anything you can "find" in the game. New weapons, new skills, even new ways to combine weapons and/or skills to defeat enemies or move around. When people try to set everything on fire to see what happens, when people have to cut every bush and lift every stone and visit every cave, or even when they simply have to choose "No" after they chose "Yes" just to see what happens next, that's all "Discovery".

Expression This is where people express themselves. Spending hours in the character editor to create the perfect player character, building the perfect machine/bridge/factory, or even ignoring the game's objective to paint your next masterwork in Splatoon, if the player can say "Look at what I've made", then you have "Expression".

Submission Sometimes referred to as "Abnegation" or "game as pastime", this aesthetic is all about making the player waste time. Grinding hundreds of monsters to reach the next level, mining for hundreds of iron ores to craft your next armor, or simply playing the game over and over and over again, are all signs of "Submission".