#crpg dev

[lidsel]

I posted a silly sketch of this guy almost a year ago. My obsession with him has not waned since. Truly, I am a sucker for a grumpy man with a tragic backstory.

Here with his one true love - books - properly supported to avoid damaging the spine (many thanks to the librarians who suggested a book cradle!). Also yes, he's blond and not actually old (was going for just-been-through-absolute-hell look in that previous sketch and might've overdone it).

He's part of a cRPG project I've been working on. The setting is historically-grounded low fantasy, largely inspired by 17th century south/eastern Europe.

[eitherorcollective]

GIVE UP THE GHOST - a new mystery roleplaying game is now LIVE On KICKSTARTER!!

GIVE UP THE GHOST is a dialogue-based roleplaying game set in a strange city at the center of the world. Assume the role of Overseer Alhart, a one-eyed wanderer tasked to investigate a grim and prophetic fire. You’ll explore the weird, haunted corridors of the city Forde, and in your search for answers -- you will come to know the heart of the city as well as your own. 

Your character, the Overseer, was born in this city… but you have never returned until now. Upon your arrival, the tide of history comes flooding back, and you’ll have to stake your share of the waters. Choose how to immerse yourself in this place, this city at the center of the world -- do you remain forever a stranger? Or will you reclaim your name? 

Taking inspiration from legendary narrative games like Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium, GIVE UP THE GHOST is about choosing how to live at the end of all things. You’ll confront the city’s pain, and work to uncover the traces of beauty still there. 

If you’re into narrative roleplaying games about cities, liminal spaces, history, alienation, worldbuilding, apocalypse, and esoterica…. This is the game for you! 

Consider supporting us on KICKSTARTER, following us here, or sharing this post with anyone you think might be interested! Thank you for reading!!

[ghoulsteak]

design work for a small crpg project. hopefully should be finished by the end of next month

[godkillerbrigade]

The Steam page for THE LAST DAYS OF FRIENDSHIP VALLEY has new screenshots 👀

THE LAST DAYS OF FRIENDSHIP VALLEY is a deckbuilding combatless RPG about conflict negotiation, goats, and impending doom. Make your own goat character, navigate arguments with cards, uncover an ancient mystery, and try to save the world.

Check it out now!!

[maevesweirdart]

hello everyone, my secondary art blog (@maevesnormalart) was deleted for absolutely no reason.

it’s not healthy to hold onto my anger, though, so instead of stewing in my rage, i’m using this opportunity to replace my now-deleted art blog with a new official promotional blog for my in-development indie CRPG, Bestia3D. (i am still stewing tho.)

my new blog is @bestia3D !!

(they better not delete this one too >:/ )

[kunosoura]

reverse hot take emoji baldurs gate three

If I were the creative lead of the game, I would have cut the Tav option (and maybe also playing as the other origin characters) because the extent to which the game's narrative starts to really come together and be compelling on a Durge playthrough is wild. You have a lot more interesting hooks and a meatier narrative in the otherwise sort of lean act 2; you're forced out of that Median cRPG Player Character comfort zone that people fall into where they play this sort of bland character with a bit of sarcasm but a good heart differentiated only by like, their hairstyle, by virtue of the fact that you are playing a fucking freak who, at least in the early part of the game where the characters are getting established, frequently faces choices where every option is insane; and there's actually a hook to the dynamic your player character has with the party members other than "you are kind of the only normal one" - the PC's friendship with Jaheira which, even on a Tav run was a sleeper contender for most enjoyable part of the game's writing, really shines.

[broadsiderenegade]

Is this a weird RPG opinion?

In big RPGs, cRPGS, jRPGs, action adventure RPGs, I kind of love the parts where your just exploring, surviving and questing. I love the little stories and encounters, party banter and aimlessness of a good Act 1. BG3 comes to mind first, but across the board, I loathe when you reach the big city. My excitement wanes when you get "locked in" to where I assume most people get excited, when the main plot starts to overtake all the rest, and kicks into gear. I could probably play an endless amount of "lets check out that cave" and "that farms on fire from a bandit attack!" But I've left some games unfinished that I initially became obsessed with as somehow finding the deus ex machina and saving the world just doesn't compel me the same way as being nobodies surviving and trying to do a little good along the way. Obviously from a design perspective it makes sense without a Star Citizen budget that games must end, but I do wonder if there will ever be something that could meet that need longterm (without the kind of monetization that plagues the average live service, as that is what it would probably end up being).

[laurasbailey]

i'm interested to see how larian approaches dlc for bg3 given its popularity because i feel like other games in the genre (pathfinder, divinity, poe, solasta) all follow a similar formula when it comes to their dlc and with this release larian have broadened the crpg audience so much they could really do whatever they wanted with it

[birbycakes]

I guess I don't get the hesitance to add romance in crpg type games or that it's bad to do so. You go through life and death situations on an epic adventure with multiple attractive people and you're telling me it's far-fetched that at least one of them would catch feelings??? bs. Oh but you CAN go fuck prostitutes at the brothel. That's good enough right :///

[florthier-than-thou]

The spectrum of tumblr quizzes is insane

(Thank you to @sunshinemoonrx and @evelyn-art-05 respectively for your excellent quizzes)

[teethmafia]

A Modern CRPG fallout game that has the multiplayer co-op of baldurs gate 3 would be literal money. I don’t think bethesda will put in the narrative investment to make something akin to bg3 on their own, but I look forward to when a spiritual successor to og fallout gets its own multiplayer crpg gameplay loop and story structure.

[lidsel]

“Gee, child, I wonder why his handwriting might be so ugly...”

A silly drawing I did of a particular favorite from our cRPG project interacting with a lord’s child. She has no idea what’s in store for her for the next 5 years of having this dude around...

(I have a part 2 in the works - the man must have his revenge... and glorious hair!)

Hoping to be able to post more little things from the visual development for the game, but it’s still early so I’m concerned about oversharing underbaked concepts. The setting is historically-grounded low fantasy, largely inspired by 17th century south/eastern Europe.

[maevesweirdart]

(please reblog 🥺🥺🥺🥺)

finally made an environment that i think ill actually use in my rpg! i modeled it in Crocotile3D and then added the trees and stuff to the render in Krita. i think all the plants and trees and maybe other irregularly shaped objects in my game will be sprites rather than 3D, because i'm having a really hard time making that stuff in Crocotile lmao

anyway enjoy lol

[canmom]

It appears that today is the day of ZA/UM successors.

To begin with, we have this article, which mentions three projects by former Disco Elysium devs...

Dark Math - a 20-person team, half of them formerly from the Disco Elysium team, working on a detective RPG called XXX NIGHTSHIFT

Longdue Games - has the "leads" of the cancelled Disco Elysium sequel, now working on an as-yet unnamed RPG with a "psychogeographic" mechanic - it's a bit vague, but they do have funding

Kurvitz and Rostov are rumoured to be working on an unannounced game at a studio called Red Info, backed by chinese company NetEase. if so, we don't know anything about it yet!

Alongside these, we have senior writer Argo Tuulik and a number of other ZA/UMites, who've announced a plan for a new studio called Summer Eternal with a whole-ass manifesto for their company structure...

Lots of radical zeal but they haven't even made the company yet, so unclear if this will get off the ground, but they're also planning on making an RPG of some sort.

I'm very tempted to end with something cynical like 'release/implode, place your bets' but honestly? I really hope they all work out, and we enter a new era of literary CRPGs in which there will be more opportunity to work on arty shit in games. I don't wanna be that doomer about it all.

So best of luck to all involved, let a thousand za/ums bloom... (look, the summer eternal guys twisted mao's 'half the sky' quote to be about 'creatives', just let me have this one ok)

[violixir]

Now that my twitter is scrubbed, it's about time I started posting some of my old, possibly insane Psychonauts AUs here. I figured I should start with this one, mostly because I'm nearly positive I kept sneaking vampire Morrises into other sketch pages during streams. Long story short, I played one singular CRPG (HoMM3 my beloved...) as a kid, and what started as "lol what faction would they all play" became a long term AU with character arcs and lore dug up from that game, the game that game was a spinoff from, obscure dev interviews, and multiple wikis.

[devsgames]

As a dev who didn't really follow Baldur's Gate 3's development I was incredibly surprised at the number of people who have been making really sweeping and baseless claims about its success: stuff like "the game is made well by people who are passionate", or claim that other devs "just have to make good games", or that it's successful "because it doesn't have microtransactions". It's not that surprising I guess since Gamers tend to say these things about any product they happen to like and agree with, but I guess it was surprising to me how much people were saying it about this game specifically.

I'm sure the devs were passionate and I've sort of been enjoying my time with it, but frankly the success of BG3 absolutely does not feel like a design or development thing to me, but it's an obvious marketing and business one.

Having a good game obviously very much helps, but the fact of the matter is that rhetoric like this intentionally overlooks or downplays the real industry success factors: that BG3 is the third game in an already-popular and established legacy CRPG series that is built on an engine and mechanics by a studio which already made two other (unrelated) financially successful games on of the same genre, with all of it built on a back of a TTRPG franchise that has for the past few years been undergoing a huge resurgence in popularity and in no doubt funded through that partnership and licensing deals. Franchises like safe bets to make a profit, and this feels like the safest of bets. It really isn't successful because the game isn't adopting user-hostile monetization or because it's approach is radically different from any other game's development, it's successful because all these business factors.

To that end, whenever someone implies that other devs should just make games the same way...it's really funny! Like, the stars have aligned to make this product a hit and this doesn't implicitly make it a bastion or model for equitable game development just because it sold well and doesn't adopt hostile monetization schemes.

The fact of the matter is there's lots of games that are well-made by passionate devs and don't feature microtransactions or hostile monetization schemes, and they don't implicitly do well because of these design decisions alone; usually it's because they failed at marketing or didn't have the AAA budget to promote themselves like BG3. I'm also willing to bet that like every AAA studio, the devs at Larian likely weren't equitably compensated for this success, since most productions on a game of such a massive scale like this only really turn a profit because they undercut those working on it - huge profit and equitable compensation aren't often compatible concepts in game development. It's not like that would be any different here, so the "other devs should look to this game on how it should be made ethically" is a strange pull to me as well.

Basically this is all to say I think it's incredibly reductive to hold a product up on a pedestal by virtue of sales figures and choosing not to enact hostile monetization schemes. After all, I'm severely doubtful a product like BG3 would have done poorly assuming it had microtransactions in the first place. There's just way too many other factors that guided it alonge.

Do we need big budget games to move away from predatory business models that attempt to exploit the most vulnerable players? Absolutely yes I think we do, but I think people would also value from staying aware of real factors at play that define success in these sorts of situations, and not reduce development to "why don't developers simply make GOOD video games!" which I think is fairly baseless and confirmation-bias-y in its own way.