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I have procrastinated for too long! I have constantly thought about this post yet never took time to finish it so here we go!

Bestiaries in Video Games

Now this is something I find criminally underused in video games. A section of the game to study your foes or review the encounters of your journey is such a beautiful thing to have for all kinds of games. RPGs (Role-playing games) can use a bestiary as a document of your adventure, showcasing your enemies and exploring their designs and habits. Why does this enemy exclusively use melee weapons when others use range? Well a bestiary can showcase some history and explain the reasoning behind it!

They don't even have to be super complex. A good bestiary could even be as simple as a list of enemies with their names and stats. Although truly memorable ones are the bestiaries that expand upon the lore of the game and either increase your curiosity or understanding of the creatures that exist within. Let's use Risk of Rain 2 as an example.

Risk of Rain 2 (RoR2) features a combo bestiary and collection book they call the Logbook, though for now we'll be focusing on the bestiary aspect. The game writes entries in this book as they are diary entries/reports from an old group of explorers on the planet. This leads to a very fun combination of curiosity and understanding being expanded. This is accomplished by the entries mostly being recounts of first encounters with these creatures. It builds your understanding by showing the nature of these creatures and how they act toward others, not just you. While that curiosity is ramped up by these being first encounters, they're not being studied, there aren't meticulous notes, sure you've learned something but there's still more that you could learn about them.

RoR2's Logbook also lends itself to gameplay related benefits in its bestiary entries. It lists the base stats of every creature as well as how they scale so, should you choose, you have the ability to calculate the exact stats of whatever you're fighting, when you fight it. In addition it has the number of times you've killed that enemy, the number of elite variants of it you've killed, and the number of times it killed you. Now that is an interesting one. You get to learn the creature's raw strength through its stats but what does that mean to you? Nothing really but you've killed 100 of them, and it has killed you 100 times back, now it means something. Now you feel that strength of the creature, that's a worthy foe to fight.

Another fantastic bestiary exists in Honkai: Star Rail (HSR), my recent obsession :). Through the Enemy Creatures tab of their Data Bank you can view all the enemies you've fought through your journey. It shows their 3D model, allowing you to rotate it horizontally, view their weaknesses and resistances, and a short blurb adding some detail to the enemy. Now this isn't a vastly expansive bestiary but as HSR spreads details throughout their whole game this is a great spot to be able to view them from a mostly combative viewpoint, understanding more of their function as an enemy and saving the majority of their story for elsewhere. It shows a good knowledge of their storytelling and preventing themselves from being too overbearing with the details.

Lastly I'd like to look at Terraria, which has one of my favourite bestiaries ever. It lists all NPCs in the game, friendly, wildlife, enemies, it's all right there. The more of something you kill the more of its entry you unlock! You can see all of a creature's stats, the amount you've killed, a small paragraph with some lore about them, all of the items that creature can drop with the exact chances of them dropping and lastly both a number and percentage telling you exactly how close you are to fully completing the bestiary. With an NPC who will reward you at certain percentages of completion. It touches upon every aspect of the game, showcases everyone you meet, friend or foe, and rewards you for that drive to encounter everyone and everything. A truly special bestiary that fits into its game perfectly.

Bestiaries are fantastic for expanding upon the lore of a world and some documentation of what you see but what about the things you as a player do? You can see the foes you've conquered but how did you do it? Where does your strength come from and what are the tools to your success? Enter: Collection Book. Which will unfortunately be a topic for another day, I honestly underestimated how much I have to say about both of these topics so they'll each be their own blog post now, rather than coupled together. Hopefully it won't take as long for the collection book one.

Also if you're interested in any of the games I mentioned today I highly recommend them.

Risk of Rain 2 is a third-person roguelike game that gets harder and harder as time passes by, with the unique ability of being able to stack multiples of one item to make them stronger

Honkai: Star Rail is a turn-based RPG gacha game (more F2P friendly than most but not mentioning this is a crime against humanity) that has plenty of interesting mechanics to shake up the turn-based format, with a heavy focus on world building and storytelling

Terraria is a 2D adventure RPG with the ability to create and destroy the world as you choose (in a similar way to Minecraft) you can take on terrifying bosses by night and build the NPCs a wonderful town to live in by day

That's all from me, enjoy your day!

Thank you for reading!

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I've decided this is going to be for game design topics (I'm not a designer but I'm heavily interested in the process of game design) and want to take this first opportunity to discuss something that really intrigues me:

Collectibles!

Many single player video games provide optional collectibles whether it's in the form of hidden objects, special notes/papers to read, or even just "collecting" certain random events.

My favourite example of a good collectibles system is the Korok Seeds in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild. For those who don't know in Breath of The Wild(BOTW) there are 900 Korok Seeds to collect, they are in widely varied locations on the map and each requiring one of a limited number of puzzle types in order to collect them.

To communicate to the player that these puzzles exist they are usually something slightly out of the ordinary or feature a small woodland creature (a Korok) in the area to hint at the puzzles existence. Additionally you can use Korok seeds to increase your inventory capacity.

So Korok seeds are a collectible spread throughout a vast open world, each with a small puzzle tied to it, that has a clear but not completely obvious indicator of its existence, and provides a gameplay QoL benefit.

A bad example of collectibles (in my opinion) is Five Night's at Freddy's: Security Breach (Security Breach). What Security Breach does wrong in my opinion is a couple of things. To start, the collectibles give very little gameplay incentive and don't communicate that well. The collectibles in Security Breach are in static locations (not a problem, Korok seeds are too), with static rewards every time. This would be perfectly okay if the way the rewards were given wasn't tied to specific collectibles.

Certain collectibles in Security Breach provide boosts like more stamina, a faster sprint speed, or more battery charge. These boost collectibles are always in the same location in every playthrough and there's only about 10-20 total out of 100 collectibles. This means that if you happen to find these boosts you will either: get excited and search for more boosts only to completely stop gaining them after a certain point OR you will get what you need and not be incentivised to collect any more. There is an achievement for gaining every collectible which is enough of a reward for most people, however being a single player story game many won't look at achievements beforehand so as to not spoil their experience.

Additionally, and this is admittedly a partial result of the poor save system, when you collect a collectible it is shown in your inventory in game. Each save file has its own unique inventory that is completely separate in every run. There's no way to display overall findings through multiple saves across your whole time playing without having every single collectible to get the achievement.

In my opinion a good solution to this would be a collectible tally system. It displays in the main menu and each time you collect a collectible in a playthrough, it adds +1 to a counter in the main menu. That way you can still collect them separately every time but there is a centralized, collective area to store all the collectibles you found, as well as showcasing your dedication to collecting them multiple times over with a save system that allows for that.

Ultimately, the way collectibles are implemented in a game heavily depends on the functionalities of the game but should overall have a sense of satisfaction tied to collecting them, whether it's a clear display of all that you've gathered or a noticeable gameplay reward for going out of your way.

No guarantees on what my next game design topic will be but I'm thinking maybe Bestiaries and collection books next as it's a similar vein to collectibles (still a form of collecting) but is usually way more connected directly to gameplay.

Also: this is my first post on Tumblr so if formatting is weird or anything like that I will be working on it in the future!

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Behold! The beginning of a new social media account!